No difference

The folklore that matches turn wild under a full moon

Moon folklore reaches the stadium too. A full moon stirs the players up, the game runs harder and wilder than usual — it's the same family as the folklore about crime and accidents, with the easy follow-on that a wild match means goals pour in. And the heart of moon folklore is always the full-moon night. Most football is played at night, so if the moon does anything, this is where it should show. So do goals really rise on full-moon days? This page checks it every day across Europe's big five leagues — the European counterpart to baseball's home runs.

How this verdict is calculated

• The data is goals (both teams) for every match in Europe's big five leagues: the Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, and Ligue 1
• Goals per match vary a little by year and season. So we use goals per match for the same year and month as the expected baseline, and compare the observed-to-expected index
• Using the moon's age at noon (Europe) on each match day, we mark full-moon days (within ±24h of the exact moment) and new-moon days, and compare each group's average index against normal (1.00)

See the methodology for the full criteria.

Reading the data

• Goals depend heavily on the league, the fixtures, home and away, and how each game unfolds. This page levels those out by comparing within the same year and month, and looks only at the single question of the full moon
• This page asks one thing: whether goals per match visibly rise on the calendar's full-moon days

What we can't see yet

This result doesn't mean "the moon has nothing to do with it." Here is what the current method can't see:

• Wildness isn't only goals: a "wild" match may show up in fouls and cards instead
• Night matches only: for now, afternoon kick-offs are counted too

What we want to check next

• Test yellow and red card counts
• Use kick-off times to compare night matches only

Perhaps the stadium saying holds something we haven't yet turned into numbers. We'd like to find it in the data one day.

Data sources

• openfootball / football.json (CC0 / public domain; date and score for every match)
• The moon's age and the exact syzygy moments are computed in-house using the algorithms in Jean Meeus, "Astronomical Algorithms" (UTC basis)