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The History Behind Global Goals...

Football, unlike other team sports such as Cricket or American Football does not easily lend itself to individual rankings. In reality the only area of football that can be quantified is the area of goalscoring and whilst there are goalscoring charts, these are used purely as a matter of record. Goalscoring records are naturally compared between players not only from the same country but also different continents. For example a player may have scored 30 goals from 50 matches for Brazil, while another player might have netted 15 goals from 60 games for Italy, obviously at first glance the South American's ratio is infinitely superior. However look at the statistics more closely and the Brazilian's record could have been bolstered by a number of penalties and countless goals at home in friendlies against some of the weaker countries when the game was at a purely academic stage. Conversely the European's career may look moderate but perhaps the majority of his fifteen goals might have been crucial to the outcome of the game against high quality opponents away from home in tense qualifying matches. But by just looking at their records you would not know this,all you could be certain of is that the Brazilian has 30 international goals and the Italian 15.

So the purpose behind Global Goals was to establish a formula that can be applied to all goals scored in the world of international football. This would encompass the quality of oppostion, the importance of the goal in the match, whether it was a competitive fixture or friendly, if the goal was scored at home, away or a neutral venue and so on.

I hope you find the website interesting, please feel free to contact us if you have any comments to make. Obviously some countries will play a number of games before other countries have even played one enabling players to gain an early advantage, for example Saudi Arabia will play 3 matches in August 2006 while Argentina will not play at all, but over a period of time the rankings will provide a useful guide to who is scoring not only the most goals but crucially the really important goals in International Football.

The Global Goals System...

The Global Goals idea and ratings were devised by Mark Baugh and came into effect on 9th June 2006. Each player who scored a goal in International Football from that date earned a rating for that goal, at the end of each month, starting on August 31st 2006 the Top 30 of the highest rated players will be published on this website.

Ratings will then be published on a monthly basis. Every player who is still active in international football and has ever scored a goal has had his international goalscoring record analysed, each player has then been awarded a starting rating. This is a one off rating and uses the same formula that is applied in Global Goals, ie quality of opposition, importance of the goal in the match etc. The starting rating is then added to the points the player scores from the 9th of June to give his total Global Goal rating.

Ratings will be on a rolling two year cycle, so a player who scores a goal in June 2006 will still keep a portion of that rating in June 2007 but will have lost it all by July 2008.

Any player who retires from international football will be immediately removed from the list, a player who has been dropped or suspended from his international team will be retained in the list but obviously he will not score any points during this time and his rating will steadily decrease.