In 2017 the old scoreboard from the Bökelbergstadion in Mönchengladbach went into retirement, but certainly not because of overloading with high results
When the 58th Bundesliga season starts on Friday, the happy arithmetic and speculation on the basis of goal relationships, standings and other statistics will start. An old law of nature will continue to apply: If a goalless tie is in prospect, the hope of three victory points will lure a few teams out of their defensive tactics. The keepers of the grail of football wanted to counteract this tactical despondency when they intervened in the rules of the game and determined that from 1995 onwards, the Bundesliga would also apply: There are three points for a win instead of only two as before.
The English had discovered the novelty for their everyday league since the early 80s. Countries like Israel, New Zealand, Turkey and Norway also found this good for their footballers in the domestic leagues and immediately imitated the “three-point”. It was not until 1994 that the additional victory point was made compulsory for the next season by the world football association Fifa international, combined with the expectation of stimulating the offensive spirit and ensuring more goals and more attractiveness of the game. From then on, lovers of the “catenaccio” should have nothing more to laugh about. Such an extreme form of defense, called “door bolt tactics” in German, as it was once practiced by Inter Milan, should, if you please, no longer have any success.
However, the desire for more hits was opposed by the fact that with increasingly faster, more athletic, more physical and more mature football, the offensive spaces became narrower and thus the great chances of scoring did not increase. The simple logic of “more points, more goals” did not work. The first Bundesliga match day of the new era saw three games on August 11, 1995 – three draws and four celebrations. Statisticians had to wait almost 20 years for an average of more goals to be scored in a Bundesliga season than in the two-point mode: in 2013/14, a total of 967 goals were scored, or 3.1601 per game. The season with the most goals after the reform so far was the 2019/2020 season with 982 goals, an average of 3.2092 goals per game. That is just 20th place in the ranking of the highest-scoring seasons since the first Bundesliga season in 1963/64.
But the rule change had completely different effects. There is hardly a real midfield left in the classification, instead half the league is involved in the relegation battle, which has recently been far more exciting than the title race. According to the old rule, the Bundesliga was last scored in 1994/95. As the German “two-point champion”, Borussia Dortmund had 49 points 25 years ago, ahead of Werder Bremen (48 points) and SC Freiburg (46 points). In the previous season, Bayern Munich won the title with just 44 points, ahead of 1. FC Kaiserslautern (43) and Leverkusen. Bayer had 39 points for third place. A yield with which afterwards in the three-point era never again beckoned a place so far ahead, rather trembling in the relegation battle.
After the first season with the new rule, Dortmund celebrated the championship in 1996 with 68 points ahead of Bayern (62). From the turn of the millennium, the title (with the exception of VfL Wolfsburg 2009) no longer went below the 70 mark, Borussia Dortmund broke the next sound barrier as champion with 81 points in the 2011/12 season. For Bayern back then, 73 points were only worth second place. An experience that immediately motivated her to two new records and eight titles in a row. With the following point balances: 91, 90, 79, 88, 82, 84, 78 and 82. In doing so, they outclassed the »Vice« by up to 25 counters, who in turn produced distances of up to 18 counters to the third.
What’s happening? The little ones get less on their account because the big ones get more and more points and money in nice interaction. Or to put it another way: the front can afford more and more three-point victories. Since the start of the new calculation, the Bundesliga table has become increasingly eccentric. It is a mirror of the unhealthy conditions, relentlessly shows the widening gap between the winners and the vanquished, with inevitably increasing crowds in the rest of the field. Even without studying higher mathematics, it is noticeable that on the downside there are fewer and fewer points – and thus point bonuses for the players – and more and more for the few in the sun. With the help of points and distances, economic distortions become visible. Fifa regulators did not think of these side effects 25 years ago when they wanted to make football more attractive.
Fifa is just thinking about how to make the game more goalscoring. This time a slight modification of the offside should help. Perhaps one would do well to crank up more energetically. If not bigger goals, then maybe a three point reward only if you win with at least two goals difference?
