“Seven of the nine matches in Ligue 1 last weekend finished 1-0,” notes Liam Togher. “That’s 78% of the games. Has there ever been a more common instance of one specific scoreline in a single gameweek?”
This is a question that George Graham would love, and Chris Roe has done the hard yards to find an example that can beat the above though, alas, it doesn’t involve the Arsenal team of the late 1980s who made 1-0 scorelines famous.
“I’ve considered this from the point of view of rounds of matches (e.g each teams Nth match in the season). In this case, the most common 1-0 group in English league football is from the 14th round of Championship matches in the 2016-17 season (21 and 22 October 2016) when eight of the 12 matches ended with a 1-0 scoreline.
“We can find so much more heading into Europe, and specifically to the 2012-13 Turkish Süper Lig. In the 29th round of matches (played between the 12th and 15th April 2013) there were nine matches, and eight of these ended with a 1-0 scoreline (88.89%). The only one that got away ended with a 1-1 draw!”
A near-miss of 1-0 perfection. Chris continues: “In my dataset I could find a total of 12 gameweeks from the various European leagues with higher than 78% being 1-0, with 10 of them being from Scottish leagues where four of the five matches ended 1-0. Generalising to any specific scoreline – within the data in my set I could find no other scoreline that occurred more times in a single gameweek than the 1-0 examples outlined above.”
Long title droughts in capital cities
“With Hearts now making noises about winning the Scottish Premiership, I notice it’s actually 65 years since this last happened (1960). With Hibs it’s even longer at 73 years (1952),” writes Paul White. “Is there any other country where a club from its capital city have failed to win its domestic league for so long?”
Chris Blackburn gets the ball rolling on this one. “A team from Berlin has never won the Bundesliga in its current form, although that only started in 1963. Hertha BSC last won the German title in 1931, 29 years before Hearts’ last title. Although as an answer to the above question, it’s further complicated by the fact that Berlin wasn’t a capital city between 1949 and 1990. So potentially Hertha not winning their national title in 96 years is the answer, albeit with several caveats.”
Darren Jalland has this to add. “Obviously East Germany had many champions from East Berlin, but as Fifa and Uefa both regard the current German system as a continuation of the West German one I think we can ignore the DDR Oberliga. In fact, a team from Austria (Rapid Vienna in 1941, during the Anschluß) have been champions more recently than a side from the capital.”
A meeting of (very) young minds
“My uncle and I recently watched Will Still (32) and Fabian Hürzeler (32) do battle in pre-season,” notes Joe Strawson. “Both younger than me, and with a combined age younger than my uncle, are there examples of managers with a lower combined age facing each other?”
You might think that any example to beat the above would be a modern one, with coaches seemingly getting younger. But nope, regular contributor Stijn winds the clock back 95 years to unearth this gem. “Both coaches in the 1930 World Cup final were extremely young. Alberto Suppici (Uruguay) was 31 years, eight months and 11 days on the day of the final and Juan José Tramutola (Argentina) was even younger: 27 years, nine months and 10 days. That makes for a combined age of approximately 59 and a-half year olds.”
Ultimate pass master
“Curtis Jones completed 53 out of 53 passes in the Community Shield. Against Southampton in 2024 he enjoyed a 100% completion rate with 58 passes,” writes Gregg Bakowski. “What is the record number of passes completed by a player with a 100% record in a match? Surely someone has completed more.”
They have, and by quite some margin. Here’s Tom Solan: “Phillip Lahm can beat Curtis Jones’ 53/53 successful passes with 134 against Hertha Berlin, which also clinched the title for Bayern.” We’ve taken a deep dive into clubs with incredible statistics for completed passes in a match in a previous edition of a Knowledge. It’s well worth another look, given Lahm’s record came in a match in which Bayern completed over 1,000 passes.
Knowledge archive
“Just been looking back at 1958 to see how Wales progressed to the quarter-final of that World Cup,” wrote Jez Orbell in July 2016. “To say they had a sprinkling of good fortune is to put it mildly. To be clear this is not a bitter England fan but someone intrigued as to the most unlikely progression of a club or country in a competition. How many withdrawals, play-offs or obscure goal average advances has a team benefitted from and what is the furthest in the competition that they went? The ultimate beneficiary would have to be Denmark at Euro 1992 but what other notable examples are there?”
“My vote goes to North Korea for their famous 1966 World Cup endeavours,” writes Simon Atkinson. “They qualified for the tournament initially as the only Asian association not to boycott the tournament (due to a dispute about allocation of places across the federations). African nations obligingly followed suit, to leave only a two-leg play-off against Oceania representatives Australia in, of all places, Cambodia. The Aussies didn’t really bother to train, and got trounced 6-1 and 3-1 for their troubles, opening the way for the North Koreans to embark on their journey to Ayresome Park and ultimately Goodison Park, where they succumbed to Portugal in the quarter-final having won one of their four World Cup finals games.” Ah, but it was a good one to win. This piece is also worth revisiting on North Korea’s 1966 World Cup memories.
Can you help?
“Aldershot Town of the National League have lost their three opening games of the season 2-3,” writes John Morris. “This must be notable for the number of goals involved over the 3 games but what’s the longest run of games where a team has won or lost each game by an identical score line?”
“I seem to remember reading (possibly in this column) that it’s some time since a Premier League gameweek passed without at least one English goalscorer,” begins Matt Davison. “Maybe it’s never happened. However there were no English scorers on the opening week of this season. (Some were born and have played all their football in England but play international football for another nation). How rare is this?”
“When Reinildo Mandava started for Sunderland in their 3-0 win over West Ham, he became the first Mozambican to play in the Premier League, which has now hosted players from 125 different countries, stretching from the Seychelles to the Faroe Islands. That only dates from 1992 though – are there any nationalities that played in “the old First Division” (as my Mum still calls it) that haven’t yet been represented in the Premier League?” asks Owen Collins.
