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This year’s European Football Championship is over with the group stage. In 36 matches, spectators saw almost 900 shots, which resulted in 81 goals. If this trend does not change, the championship played in Germany will be among those where spectators have seen rather fewer goals.
Spectators most often saw goals in the second fifteen minutes of the match, and the period just after the teams ran out of the booths was also quite prominent in the statistics. Ten times the goalkeeper caught the ball from the net just before the end of the match. Overall, teams took an average of 40 minutes to beat the opposing goalkeeper.
On the other hand – 23 seconds were enough for Albania against Italy to cheer up their fans. The fastest goal in Euro history was scored by Nedim Bajrami.
The home team of Germany has scored the most goals so far, they secured the statistics in the very first match, when they gave the famous “boomer” to the selection of Scotland. The first round of elimination matches will then offer a duel between the second and third highest scoring teams. Each selection scored at least once in the tournament.
In the box for the best scorer of the tournament, “own goal” could easily shine in the first place. This term was used in six cases. As for individual players, the Georgian forward Georges Mikautadze has the best adjusted goal score. He beat the opponent’s goalkeeper three times, and thanks to him, he is also a newcomer to major tournaments in the playoffs.
Jamal Musiala, who plays for Germany, finished in second place. It is the home team that leads the shot statistics, sending 57 of them at the opponent.
The Germans also dominated in passes, exchanging more than 2,000 of them with an accuracy of 93%. For comparison, our selection with less than half the number of attempts found the addressee 76.3 percent of the time.
If we go back to the scorers – Cristiano Ronaldo is scoring most often, but less than half of his twelve shots went on goal and the Portuguese veteran is still waiting for a goal. Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku is in a similar situation. He sent the ball towards the opponent’s goal ten times, seven times the shot went between the posts.
She even ended up in the net three times. But Lukaku always celebrated prematurely. The video assistant referee (VAR) called off all his goals. Lukaku has an average of one disallowed goal per game and is waiting for his first recognized strike.
The tournament has already set several records. For example, Cristiano Ronaldo started at the sixth Euro, with fourteen hits he is the best scorer in the history of the tournament. Theoretically, this year he could also surpass the first place that was only a few days old, which Luka Modrić claimed in his – probably the last – match for the national team.
With a goal at the age of 38 years and 289 days, he became the oldest scorer at the Euros. The same Euro where the youngest player in history played against him. Spanish super-talent Lamine Yamal was 16 years and 338 days old on the day of his debut against Croatia.
If the Spaniards and the Portuguese were to meet again at the tournament, it would be a battle of the generations. In the semi-finals, there would be a situation where the Spanish youngster could be defended by the oldest player who ever took the field at the Euros. This is Pepé, a forty-one-year-old Portuguese.
