Across 68 matches tracked worldwide in the past day and a half, defences have had the upper hand. Forty of those fixtures ended with at least one team keeping a clean sheet, a rate of 58.8% that points to a clear trend: goals are harder to come by than the calendar might suggest.
The 189 goals scored work out to 2.78 per game, a respectable figure on the surface but one that masks the frequency with which attacks are being snuffed out. When well over half of all contests involve a shutout, the balance between defensive discipline and offensive output tilts noticeably toward the back line.
The outlier
Venezia's 8-0 demolition of Vis Pesaro in a club friendly stands as the week's anomaly, both the widest margin and the highest-scoring match in the sample. Strip that out and the average goals per game drops further still. The Italian side's romp skews the numbers but also underlines how rare such free-scoring affairs have been.
Whether the clean-sheet wave reflects pre-season rustiness in attack, tactical caution, or simply strong goalkeeping and organisation is open to interpretation. What the data makes clear is that nearly six in every ten matches are being settled, or at least shaped, by a team's ability to keep the ball out of the net. In a sport often defined by what happens at one end, the other end is doing most of the talking right now.