Fooled by bursts. A Goal per Minute model for the World Cup

Abstract

On the occasion of the last FIFA World Cup in Brazil, The Economist published a plot depicting how many goals have been scored in all World Cup competitions until present, minute by minute. The plot was followed by a naive and poorly grounded qualitative analysis. In the present article we use The Economist dataset to check its conclusions, update previous results from literature and offer a new model. In particular, it will be shown that first and second half game have different scoring rates. In the first half the scoring rate can be considered constant. In the second it increases linearly with time