Goalscorers Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Comparing football players of the same era playing in the same position is quite easy. ¿But what about players playing in different eras? With this work, I wanted to make an extended comparison between strikers of all the eras since after World War II. Taking into account the five best seasons at club level and international goals. The difficulty is the differences between eras and leagues. It was obviously easier to make a goal before the 60s (1.7 goals per team) than since from the 70s (1.3 goals per team) in the main leagues at club level. And it was the same story at international levels where it even reached a record high of 2.69 goals per team at the World Cup 1954, compared to the record low of 1.10 goals per team at the World Cup 1990. There are differences between national leagues too. Making goals in the relatively weak Swiss, Scottish, Portuguese, Austrian, Hungarian or Dutch leagues don't have the same value as making goals in the Italian Serie A of the catenaccio era (60s, 70s, 80s).

Dividing the number of goals by the number of games for a given striker would be too simple, and wouldn't be fair for the strikers playing in the hardest eras and the most difficult and defensive national leagues, if the aim of this study is to compare them being fair. I had to use coefficients to “correct” these differences the most accurately that I could. Of course, the final results are still imperfect, but there are still much better than the results before corrections. So now, let's go to the study part. I'll explain with examples how I get to the final results with representative players.