The group stage of the Russia 2018 World Cup is over. It has included dramatic threats to football giants, VAR controversies and England scoring the most goals in a single game. It's been a wild few weeks.

With 48 matches played we can start to analyse how the tournament is shaping up in comparison to other tournaments and garner clues about how it might progress from here.

We've picked out 13 key stats from the group stages that showcase our findings.

1. This is the most competitive first round ever

We may not have be seeing the same volume of goals at this World Cup compared to previous tournaments, but that doesn't seem to have dampened anybody's enjoyment.

Barring a few big wins, the games so far in Russia have generally been very competitive affairs with single goal winning-margins extremely prevalent.

In fact 61.5 per cent of victories were by a one-goal margin in the group stages - the second highest proportion for any previous tournament behind only South Africa in 2010.