  On the occasion of the last FIFA World Cup in Brazil, The Economist published
a plot depicting how many goals have been scored in all World Cup competitions
until present, minute by minute. The plot was followed by a naive and poorly
grounded qualitative analysis. In the present article we use The Economist
dataset to check its conclusions, update previous results from literature and
offer a new model. In particular, it will be shown that first and second half
game have different scoring rates. In the first half the scoring rate can be
considered constant. In the second it increases linearly with time.
