Hypothesis Testing with Men's and Women's Soccer Matches

Image Caption: A packed international soccer stadium under the lights, with a scoreboard subtly emphasizing high goal counts in a women’s World Cup match — raising the question: do women’s international matches see more goals?

Context: As a soccer journalist with years of experience watching both men's and women's international matches, I had a gut feeling: women's FIFA World Cup matches tend to have more goals than men's. This intuition sparked a deeper investigation—could I statistically prove it? To answer this question, I created an analysis based on all official FIFA World Cup matches since 2002, intentionally omitting qualifiers to ensure consistency across competitive levels. Using datasets scraped from a reputable online source, I compared total goals scored per match using a rigorous statistical hypothesis test. I assumed independence between matches and tested at a 10% significance level.

Normality Test Results: Both the men’s and women’s goal datasets failed the Shapiro-Wilk test for normality, with p-values far below 0.05, indicating non-normal distributions and prompting the use of a non-parametric test.

Hypothesis Testing Approach: A Mann-Whitney U test was used to determine if women’s matches saw statistically higher goal counts.

P-Value Outcome: The resulting p-value was 0.0051, well below the 10% significance threshold.

Conclusion: The test result was “reject”—meaning there’s strong statistical evidence that more goals are scored in women’s international FIFA World Cup matches than in men’s.

Key Message: There is compelling statistical evidence that women's FIFA World Cup matches feature significantly more goals than men's. This insight, validated through a Mann-Whitney U test and clean, tournament-level data, breaks assumptions and offers a valuable narrative for analysts, fans, and media alike.

Why This Project Matters: This project highlights how data can challenge deeply held assumptions in sports, opening the door for more nuanced coverage and discussion around men’s and women’s football. It also emphasizes the value of women’s matches as high-scoring, high-entertainment spectacles, which can help shift public interest, funding, and media attention toward the women’s game. Additionally, it sets a precedent for evidence-based storytelling in sports journalism—something the industry increasingly demands.