Football Goal Distributions and Statistical Mechanics

With the advent of complex network science and its allied approaches in the last decade or so with the data driven research, using statistical mechanical techniques out side of materials or atomic physics becomes a standard and quite a popular practice. One of the most interesting of this usage was in football (or soccer for Americans). This is probably because of mass football-mania in the UK and rest of the Europe and the new-world of course. However, using statistics is not a new thing at all but finding similarities with the atomic systems. Specially quantitative approach to sports is very well known, a recent film featuring Brad Pitt, Moneyball, shows this. Every major sports club (merchandise in the US) is now running a statistics division, considering the sky high salaries of players. There are interesting works in the goal statistics, being non-Gaussian [link] [link] [link] and passing network for football strategies [link] among other works. This kind of research is classified as econophysics.