What’s The Goal Difference: Why a level goal difference is baffling

I’ve loved football pretty much my whole life. The World Cups and wondergoals, the transfer sagas and narratives. Historic stadiums, age-old rivalries. Title battles and relegation scraps. Hot sunny cup final days in May and cold, wet Tuesday nights in Stoke (okay, I’ll cop to never having experienced this, but I’ve had a few drizzly away days in Motherwell in bleak midwinter evenings). Basically, I live and breathe this sport, it is a sport that just has endless bounds of fascination. With all that said, what I am about to write may just be the most bland, boring, Ready Salted crossed with vanilla thing you have ever read. 

This isn’t an article about goals; this is about something far more… insert shrugging shoulder emoji here. Goal difference, or rather, one very specifically unspecific element of goal difference. A 0-goal difference a good chunk into the season.  

Well, I didn’t lie, did I? If you have some paint to go watch dry or some grass that could do with another pair of eyeballs on it whilst it grows then be my guest, but I find it genuinely wonderful. In a beautiful sport so often blighted by atrocities like VAR, TikTok trends or actual hate crimes, there’s something so simple in it. 

Take Crystal Palace (this is such a Palace thing to happen…) This Premier League season, matchday 1. They face newly promoted Sheffield United and defeat The Blades 1-0. One game played, one goal scored and three points on the board. Matchday two and they’re up against title-challengers Arsenal. A plucky effort and they are defeated 0-1. Two games played. One goal scored. Three points on the board and a goal difference of… 0. But wait, matchday three… It’s Brentford. It’s a 1-1 fulltime score. It’s three games played, two goals scored, two goals conceded and that goal difference… Zero. Zilch. Nada. The big Hawaii Five-O. Okay, that is confusing, nobody lost 5-0… 

This is the start of the season though. Two, three, four games in. A couple of close games and a draw or two and it isn’t unreasonable to see this happen. I’m fascinated but now. We’re in the middle of January. We’ve had about half a season. We have teams that already look resigned to relegation, and we know who is circling the league title. But there’s a lot of teams in the middle just trying to stay afloat, to stay relevant. 

There are teams that have played around 20 games, who have won and lost a chunk, some big wins, some heartbreaking last second losses and some draws that could have gone either way. It feels unfathomable then that a team can have a zero-goal difference this far into the season. Or is it just me that finds this staggering. 

A quick glance at some league tables right now shows several teams that have this bizarre anomaly. Bristol City and Plymouth Argyle in the Championship. Lincoln City in League One. Dunfermline Athletic and East Fife up in Scotland. Even in the top European Leagues this is a thing. Real Betis, Torino and Sparta Rotterdam are sitting with big zeros next to their GD stats. 

Last season, French outfit Reims finished the season with 45 goals scored and 45 conceded. I find it baffling with a small sample size but with 38 matches played… What the what? And let us not forget Manchester United for a couple of years ago. 38 played, 57 scored and 57 conceded. Cristiano Ronaldo may be a prolific scorer, but with Harry Maguire at the back things weren’t too rosy. 

It’s a balance, and unfortunately rarely a good one. It means you are scoring as many as you are letting in. Typically, it means you have a mean defence but a woeful striker, or it means you have a free-flowing attacking team with holes in defence. One option is certainly more fun for the fans that the other, but they both end up the same way, mid to low table. Never bad enough to be relegated, but hardly good enough to threaten the big boys. 

Reims finished 11^th of 20 last year. Sparta Rotterdam are 8^th of 18. Torino currently 10^th of 20. East Fife 6^th of 10, as are Dunfermline, two divisions above them. Lincoln are 12^th of 24. Bristol City and Plymouth are 13^th and 15^th of 24. Sparta Rotterdam are the only side with this feat in the top half of their league. These sides all have different variations of the same problem, but if things keep up as they are they will likely not deviate by more than a couple places up or down for the rest of the season. 

Of course, this is a very specific set of circumstances for a very general problem. There are a ton of teams across the globe on +/- 1, 2, 3 etc who are in a similarly precarious position. There are sides with strong defences who have good strikers, but an injury or suspension can flip the script in a second. Those free-flowing teams with leaky back lines may be one player away from stopping the gap (think Van Dijk to Liverpool). 

Was there a point to this article? Not really, other than I was looking at a league table and thought “hey, this is cool”. 900 words later and I’ve successfully explained a situation that isn’t groundbreaking, nor complex. I don’t really know why you’re still reading this, but I do appreciate it. 

If I’m being too harsh and you also find the concept of a team playing 20+ matches and having as many goals scored as conceded vaguely interesting, then let me know. Similarly, if you have any obscure view on this oh-so beautiful game then hit me up in the comments. 

This article was written on the afternoon of January 24^th, 2024, so apologies if any of the specified 0-GD club have tipped the scales for or against since the time of writing.