For years now, the number of goals scored in football games at the highest level – on average – has been on the rise. Well, that looks set to come to a crashing halt in the 2025/26 season, with a remarkable number of goalless draws adding to an overall decrease in goals being scored. After 22 rounds of action in the English Premier League, three or more goals had been witnessed in 54% of games and both teams had scored in 55%, with an average goal-per-game tally of 2.74.
That’s the lowest ratio since the 2020/21 campaign, while the number of goalless draws has also increased to the highest since that same season. So have the EPL’s strikers lost their shooting boots? Are teams playing more defensively this season? And are other key European leagues seeing a similar pattern?
Going for Goalless
After those 22 rounds of Premier League games had been played, some 8% of them had ended in a 0-0 draw. That equates to 17 goalless stalemates, which is already more than the 2024/25 season with 14 weeks of action still left to be played and higher than the long term average (which is 7.05% for those of you who are curious).
Going back to the start of the 2017/18 campaign, only one season – the aforementioned 2020/21 – ended with a higher count of goalless draws. And that could partly be attributed to the disruption of the pandemic.
The nadir came on New Year’s Day, 2026. A new year, new start for the Premier League? Nope, the opposite in fact: 75% of the four games played ended goalless, including Liverpool’s contest with Leeds United and Manchester City’s trip to Sunderland.
Of course, it’s not all bad – some of the Premier League seasons of the 1990s were downright dire. In the 1998/99 campaign, a staggering 12.9% of games finished goalless – and you thought modern day fans were getting poor value for money.
Understanding exactly why this is the case is another challenge altogether, although some subtle changes to the standard playing style in the Premier League may just be a factor. More on that later….
But first: are other European leagues witnessing a similar drop-off in the number of goals being score… and thus an increase in 0-0 draws?
The European View
So let’s check in on the rest of Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues – the Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A and French Ligue 1 – to see if they’re witnessing a similar pattern of goalless activity.
| Football Association | 0-0 % | Goals per Game |
|---|---|---|
| La Liga | 5% | 2.58 |
| Bundesliga | 6% | 3.26 |
| Serie A | 10% | 2.32 |
| Ligue 1 | 5% | 2.88 |
As you can see, the Premier League’s ratio of 8% of games ending 0-0 is higher than their counterparts in Spain, Germany and France, while Ligue 1 and the German Bundesliga both have a higher goal-per-game count, too. So is the downturn in the number of goals being scored a European issue, or something that is exclusive to the Premier League?
In La Liga, a curious trend observed is that while the number of goals-per-game has remained relatively similar over the past five seasons, the goalless draw count has fallen considerably – in 2021/22, some 43 games ended 0-0, which is a whopping 11%.
The German Bundesliga is one of the most goal-friendly leagues on the continent, with no great variance in the number of goals being notched – around 3.20 per game for the past five seasons, with an average goalless ratio per campaign of approximately 5%.
The Italian Serie A is renowned for its conservative style, which is perhaps no surprise given that this was the nation that invented the catenaccio system of defence. The 10% ratio of 0-0 draws in 2025/26 looks high on paper, but that was also the percentage in 2024/25.
However, the average in the four prior campaigns was 6%, so the Italian Serie A – like the Premier League – is witnessing more goalless draws now than in recent memory. In Ligue 1, the number of goals being scored per game is still on the rise, peaking at 2.98 per game in 2024/25 and a goalless draw count of 5%. These ratios are higher than in years gone by, suggesting that French football is experiencing the polar opposite effect to England’s top flight.
Why So Many Goalless Draws in the Premier League?
There are other stats which support the notion that a more balanced style of play, as opposed to full throttle attacking, has overcome Premier League head coaches. The 2025/26 season has witnessed the lowest ratio of open play goals since 2009/10 – which has placed a greater emphasis on low outcome ‘moments’ in games, such as set pieces. The Observer’s Rory Smith writes:
Now you’ve got teams cancelling each other out, so they’re moving to small margin stuff like set-pieces to say: ‘Look, basically we’re all as good as each other, so it comes down to who takes the better corners’.
The 2025/26 Premier League season has witnessed fewer shots per game – 24.4 is the second-lowest figure of the past 20 years – and the lowest shots on target count since 2003/04. Teams are also going longer in their passing than in recent times, looking for territory as much as they are control through possession.
A supporting data point is that the EPL is currently witnessing a trend for the ball not being in play. After Gameweek 22, only one of the Premier League’s 20 teams had a higher ball-in-play time than in 2024/25 – Nottingham Forest, if you were wondering.
If teams aren’t shooting, if they aren’t keeping possession and if the ball isn’t in play as often, it’s only natural that fewer goals are being scored. As for the lower number of total goals being scored, are we seeing a rebirth of an old tactic in which a winning team sits back after going a goal ahead?
Field tilt is a metric that measures what percentage of a game a team spends in the final third of the pitch. The idea is that the higher the field tilt percentage, the more dominant a side is. As expected, only one team – Liverpool – has a higher field tilt when winning games than when losing. In most cases, sides are retreating into their shells after goaling a goal ahead. For example, when Enzo Maresca was in charge of Chelsea, their field tilt was 74.3% when losing and just 36.9% when winning.
Which Premier League teams see their field tilt change the most when leading compared to when losing?
This graph shows the difference between a team’s field tilt when in a winning game state vs when in a losing game state
Chelsea’s play changes the most pic.twitter.com/fDg6GutUrf
— Ben Griffis (@BeGriffis) April 22, 2024
That tactical upheaval is yielding fewer high-scoring games… which goes hand in hand with the current fashion trend for 0-0 bore draws.
