Are draws disappearing from Europe's top five leagues? 24 seasons say: only a little

A familiar complaint says modern football has turned cautious, and that cautious football means more 0-0s and 1-1s. We counted. Across 24 seasons, from 2002-03 to 2025-26, of the five biggest European leagues, 11,132 of 43,074 matches ended level — 25.8%. And the trend runs the other way from the complaint: draws have become slightly rarer, not more common.

But the fall is smaller and lumpier than a glance suggests. France drove most of it, Spain went the opposite direction, Germany barely moved — and nearly all of it happened before 2014. Since then, the five-league draw rate has gone nowhere.

The method

For every season we added up the draws column (D) of each league's final table and divided by two, because each drawn match appears once for each of its two clubs. The same goes for matches played (Pld). The draw rate is draws divided by matches, recomputed by us for every row rather than copied from anywhere.

Every season was read from two independent sources: ESPN's final standings and the English Wikipedia page for that season. They agree on matches, draws and goals in 118 of the 120 league-seasons. The two exceptions are La Liga 2006-07, where they differ by one goal but give identical matches and draws, and Ligue 1 2025-26, explained below. We start in 2002-03 because that is as far back as ESPN's standings go; older seasons exist on Wikipedia, but a single source is not enough for a study about counting.

Three things in the data needed a decision. Serie A played with 18 clubs (306 matches) in 2002-03 and 2003-04 and with 20 since, and Ligue 1 moved from 20 clubs to 18 in 2023-24; because we compare rates, not counts, the changes do not distort the series, though they are worth keeping in mind. Ligue 1 2019-20 was stopped by COVID-19 after 279 of 380 matches: it appears in the full table, but is left out of every average and of the five-league figure for that season, as in our Ligue 1 goals study. And Ligue 1 2025-26 includes a match that was not finished: Nantes v Toulouse was abandoned in the 22nd minute at 0-0 after Nantes supporters invaded the pitch, and the league's disciplinary commission later upheld the 0-0 score. Wikipedia's table counts it as a draw (75 draws in 306 matches); ESPN's table leaves it out (74 in 305). We use the first. The difference is 24.5% against 24.3% for that season and changes no conclusion below. More broadly, counts follow the official final tables, so a result the league awarded after the fact is counted as awarded: in Ligue 1 2006-07, Nantes v Toulouse was stopped at 0-0 by a pitch invasion and the win was given to Toulouse, so it is not one of that season's 116 draws (on the pitch it would have made 117, or 30.8% instead of 30.5%).

Season by season, all five leagues together

The shape is a high plateau, a step down, then a flat stretch. The early seasons were the drawiest: 2004-05 is the peak, with 532 draws in 1,826 matches (29.1%). From 2002-03 to 2012-13 no season fell below 25.2%. Then 2013-14 dropped to 23.3% and, since 2014-15, every season has sat between 23.1% (2016-17, the pooled low, 421 draws) and 26.4% (2023-24).

Cut into four six-season blocks, the story is easy to see. The first block is well above the rest; the last three are within seven-tenths of a point of one another, and the most recent is slightly higher than the one before it.

A straight line through all 24 pooled seasons slopes down by about 0.11 points a season. But that slope is almost entirely the early fall: run the same line through only the 12 seasons from 2014-15 on and it rises by 0.03 points a season, which is flat for any practical purpose. The honest summary is that draws fell and then stopped falling.

The fall was not shared equally

Ligue 1 carries most of the pooled decline. It went from 29.6% to 25.3%, a drop of 4.3 points, and it produced five of the ten league-seasons in the whole data set at 30% or more, including the series high of 34.7% in 2004-05 (132 draws in 380 matches) and 34.2% in 2010-11. At the other end, 2024-25 is its lowest in the window: 62 draws in 306 matches, 20.3%. Since the cut to 18 clubs the three seasons average 23.7% (218 of 918), against 28.1% across the 20-club seasons (2,135 of 7,600). That is a tempting story, but three seasons is a small sample, and the decline was already visible in the 20-club years, so we would not credit the smaller league with it.

Serie A fell 2.0 points, from 27.9% to 26.0%. It still holds the third-highest single season in the data, 32.9% in 2004-05 (125 draws in 380 matches), and the highest draw rate of any league since 2015-16: 29.5% in 2023-24 (112 draws). The Premier League fell 1.8 points, from 25.6% to 23.8%, and also holds the lowest season of all 119: 18.7% in 2018-19, just 71 draws in 380 matches. Seven seasons later, in 2025-26, it recorded 104 — 27.4%, the Premier League's highest rate since 2015-16.

La Liga went the other way, up 1.5 points from 24.4% to 25.9%. For eleven seasons, from 2007-08 to 2017-18, it never went above 25.0%; then from 2018-19 to 2021-22 it drew between 27.6% and 29.2% of its matches four years running. The Bundesliga is the steady one: 24.8% before 2014, 24.9% after, a change of 0.1 points.

Draws and goals move in opposite directions

Is a league with fewer draws simply a league with more goals? Partly. Across the 119 complete league-seasons, the correlation between the draw rate and goals per match is −0.55: a clear link, but far from a perfect one, with roughly three-tenths of the variation shared. Over these 24 seasons the Bundesliga scored 2.96 goals per match and drew 24.8%; Ligue 1 scored 2.50 and drew 27.6%. The Premier League is the exception that keeps the link honest: 2.73 goals per match, the second most, and the fewest draws of all five at 24.7%. (These goal rates cover only this 24-season window, so they differ from the long-run averages in our goals-per-match studies.)

The extremes of the series

• Highest draw rate: Ligue 1, 2004-05, 34.7% (132 draws in 380 matches).
• Lowest draw rate: Premier League, 2018-19, 18.7% (71 draws in 380 matches).
• Ten of the 119 league-seasons reached 30%: four in Serie A, five in Ligue 1 and one in the Bundesliga. The last was Serie A in 2014-15 (31.6%); none has done it since.
• Closest since then: Serie A 2023-24 (29.5%) and La Liga 2021-22 (29.2%).

The full season-by-season data

What this doesn't mean

A draw rate says nothing about how cautious teams are, and we have not tested why it moved. Tactics, competitive balance, officiating and rule changes could each play a part, and these counts cannot separate them. A single league-season is also a small sample: 380 matches means that ten extra draws move the rate by 2.6 points, which is the size of several of the swings above. And the window is a choice. It starts in 2002-03, in the high-draw years of the early 2000s, so the downward trend is partly a product of where we began counting. What the data does support is narrower than the complaint it started from: there is no sign that the top five leagues are drawing more, and no sign that they are drawing much less since 2014.