Sample size matters—so World Cup stats aren’t always as impressive as they sound

You may have heard it said that England’s 3-2 victory over Mexico at the Azteca was their greatest World Cup win since 1966. And for once, while “greatness” is a matter of opinion more than fact, we’re not here to dispute that. (Although we did point out before the match that England’s excellent away record should not be overlooked.)

But it’s useful to remember, when you hear these kinds of claims and statistics, just how few World Cup matches there have been. Even though the men’s tournament is nearly 100 years old, it comes round just once every four years, and not every team qualifies every time, and lots of teams only play three matches.

So in this case, yes, England’s victory at the Azteca may well be their greatest since the final in 1966—but it’s also their 28th World Cup win since 1966 (not including the 2018 victory over Colombia on penalties, given the game itself finished as a draw).

Indeed England have only played 79 World Cup tournament matches ever, which is slightly more than two Premier League seasons. Only Brazil and Germany (including West Germany) have played more than 100. Scotland have played 26, Northern Ireland 13, and Wales eight.

You can explore the entire history of the World Cup in the table below. We compiled it using this open source data set (which has previously been used by academic researchers).

And the more precise a statistic gets, the smaller the sample is likely to be. Jude Bellingham has every right to feel proud to be the first player to score two goals in a World Cup game at the Azteca since Diego Maradona. But when you hear that stat it’s probably worth a footnote that he was playing in only the sixth World Cup tournament game at the Azteca since Mr Maradona scored his brace against Belgium in 1986.

Conversely, the current World Cup includes 48 teams for the first time, and therefore provides an unusually large sample of matches—104 by the time the tournament ends—which is creating plenty of “most ever” stats.

On Monday, for example, Switzerland and Colombia drew 0-0 (before Switzerland won on penalties), making this the tournament with the most goalless games.

But is that surprising? Switzerland and Colombia’s 0-0 draw was the 96th match in this World Cup. The last tournament, like all previous tournaments since 1998, only had 64 matches, and the tournaments before that were even smaller. So this stat on its own doesn’t necessarily tell us that 0-0 draws have been unusually common—just that more matches have been played.