1 chance, 1 goal - that always happens

It always seems to be the case, you have 4-1 chances and lose 1-0, and the opposition ALWAYS scores from their only chance. I checked through approx 700 matches and charted how many chances equated how many goals.

I restricted the data to matches between teams playing 451, 442, 541 & 352 so it's more mainstream formations and with just 1 or 2 forwards. Here's the raw data for goals/chances for the home side:

	Chances ->	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Goals
0		56	53	27	18	2	3	4			1
1		22	41	37	37	29	23	14	1
2			5	25	31	19	28	19	18	5	5
3				1	16	20	20	16	16	10	13
4						3	6	13	6	8	3
5									4	2	7
6									2	1	1
7											1
Tot Games		78	99	90	102	73	80	66	47	26	31

The chart shows how many games with a given number of chances resulted in a specified number of goals. EG for games with 4 chances 18 ended with 0 goals, 37 games ended with 1 goal scored etc.

Reworking the table to see the percentage of games ending in any given result it looks like the following:

	Chances	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Goals
0		72%	54%	30%	18%	3%	4%	6%			3%
1		28%	41%	41%	36%	40%	29%	21%	2%
2			5%	28%	30%	26%	35%	29%	38%	19%	16%
3				1%	16%	27%	25%	24%	34%	38%	42%
4						4%	8%	20%	13%	31%	10%
5									9%	8%	23%
6									4%	4%	3%

One last chart - what about goal conversion, are they more likely to score from the only chance?

	Chances	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Tot Goals		22	51	90	147	139	163	152	141	88	109
Conversion		28%	26%	33%	36%	38%	34%	33%	38%	38%	35%

The reality is no, when teams have fewer chances they convert less - I guess this is related to teams with fewer chances usually having weaker players.

I guess the reality is most of the time a team has 1 chance they score no goals, it just seems really lucky when they do.