Scoring goals in the FIFA World Cup: Why are records being broken at such rapid rates?

I began following football (or soccer) seriously when I was 9 years old, having been influenced by a friend of mine who was deeply passionate about the sport. In fact, my interest in it had grown so much that I even began playing FIFA 23, an incredibly popular video game at the time, which further deepened my understanding and appreciation for the intricacies of the sport. Subsequently, I chose to apply data science concepts to analyse football from a mathematical perspective, which is exactly what this independent project entails.

While watching the opening matches of the FIFA World Cup in 2026, a truly fascinating observation struck me: numerous active players in the tournament were on the brink of overtaking, or had already surpassed, the goal-scoring milestones established by past legends towards the end of their careers! This phenomenon was particularly striking, given that many of these legends, like Miroslav Klose, had played in multiple tournaments to accumulate their records. This prompted a compelling question: why were these records being broken so rapidly?

Hence, I decided to create a program to provide a data-driven explanation for this phenomenon. I downloaded the necessary Python libraries, including pandas for data manipulation and matplotlib and seaborn for visualisation, and then began writing the code. Shockingly, the initial analyses revealed little data to suggest a massive, unprecedented increase in overall player skill across the board over the years. Instead, the phenomenon was a compelling combination of two key factors: players demonstrating greater consistency and longevity in their elite performances, and, perhaps more significantly, them taking strategic advantage of the expanded match schedule in modern tournaments, which gave them more opportunities to score and accumulate goals.

Indeed, Figure 1 clearly shows a substantial increase in the number of games over time, escalating from 18 matches in early editions like 1930 and 1938 to 63-64 matches in recent tournaments. This expansion is directly correlated with Figure 2, which illustrates a rise from 11-16 teams in the earlier years to a consistent 32 teams since 1998, with plans for further expansion. 

Figure 1 - A graph of the total matches played per World Cup

Figure 2 - The number of participating teams per World Cup over time

More teams inevitably lead to more matches, and consequently, more goals scored in total, as evidenced by the Figure 3, which shows overall goal tallies increasing from around 70-80 goals to well over 160 in recent World Cups. 

Figure 3 - Total goals scored per World Cup

Crucially, while the total numbers have surged, Figure 4 shows that the average scoring rate per game has not increased dramatically; in fact, it has often trended downward from historical highs (e.g., 5.38 goals per match in 1954 compared to around 2.5-3.0 in recent editions). This suggests that the breaking of records is not primarily due to a sudden leap in individual scoring efficiency per game, but rather the increased opportunities provided by more matches in expanded tournaments.

Figure 4 - Average goals per match per World Cup

The full, working program has been published on GitHub under the profile "Theno1gitty"