What is the most common score in football? 50,064 matches from Europe's top five leagues

Ask a fan for the most common score in football and most will say 1-0 or 2-1. We counted instead. Across 50,064 league matches in the Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga and Ligue 1, from 1998-99 to 2025-26, the most common scoreline is 1-1, which makes up 12.0% of all results. It is the most common score in each of the five leagues.

The rest of the scoreboard is just as tight. Draws and one-goal wins together are 63.6% of all matches, nearly two in three. Blowouts are rare: only 5.5% of matches were won by four goals or more. And over the 28 seasons the scoreboard has changed in one clear way: 0-0 is fading, from 8.4% of matches in 1998-2004 to 6.4% in 2019-2025.

The method

The study covers every league match from 1998-99 to 2025-26 in the five leagues: 10,640 in the Premier League, 10,640 in La Liga, 10,196 in Serie A, 10,020 in Ligue 1 and 8,568 in the Bundesliga (18 clubs, 34 rounds). Scores come from the public results archives we used for our other studies. We checked every season's goal total against our goals-per-match studies; they match except in the few seasons where an official ruling changed the record, because this study uses the score as played and counts awarded results at the score on the pitch. The checking also led us to correct three published season totals in our Serie A and La Liga goals studies. One match is left out: Bastia–Lyon in 2016-17, which was abandoned at half-time and awarded to Lyon. Ligue 1's 2019-20 season is included as far as it was played (279 matches).

Scorelines are shown home goals first (1-0 is a home win, 0-1 an away win), unless a chart says otherwise. Where we compare periods, we use four blocks of seven seasons: 1998-99 to 2004-05, 2005-06 to 2011-12, 2012-13 to 2018-19 and 2019-20 to 2025-26. This part of the study uses all five leagues pooled together, with each league also checked on its own.

The eight most common scores

Counted by result, rather than by who was at home, 1-0 is the most common win, followed by 2-1 and 2-0. The three together cover 45.2% of all matches. Add 1-1 and 0-0 and just five scorelines account for 64.9% of everything that happens in these leagues. No scoreline with five or more goals in total reaches 5%.

The leagues have different personalities. In Ligue 1, 0-0 is the third most common score at 9.2%, behind 1-1 and 1-0, and 1-1 reaches 13.0%. The Bundesliga is the only league where 2-1 is more common than 1-0 (8.7% against 7.7%), and its 0-0 rate of 6.3% is the lowest of the five.

Home advantage, in scorelines

The scoreboard shows home advantage in a way a simple win rate doesn't. A 1-0 home win happened 5,174 times; a 0-1 away win, 3,539 times. For 2-0 the ratio is 3,980 to 2,322, and for 3-0 it is 2,162 to 1,003. The home team failed to score in 22.6% of matches, the away team in 33.2%.

Nearly two matches in three are close

Exactly one goal separates the sides in 37.6% of matches, more than any other margin (draws are 26.0%, two-goal wins 21.4%, three-goal wins 9.6%). The Bundesliga is the outlier: only 33.7% of its matches are one-goal games, against 39.4% in La Liga, and it has the most big wins, with 7.1% of matches won by four goals or more, against 4.3% in Serie A.

Fewer 0-0s, more goals

The numbers move together: more goals per match (2.62 to 2.81), fewer draws and fewer 0-0s, more matches with five or more goals (12.7% to 15.3%) and more matches won by four goals or more (4.8% to 6.1%). What has not moved is the close game. The share of one-goal matches is 37.7% in the first block and 37.7% in the last.

The pattern differs by league. The Premier League's 0-0 rate fell from 8.5% to 5.6%, and Ligue 1's from 10.2% in 1998-2004 (11.3% in 2005-2011) to 6.9%. In the Bundesliga, 4+ goal margins rose from 6.1% to 9.6%, and in 2019-20 they reached 13.4% of matches, the highest of any season in the data. La Liga went the other way: 7.7% in 2012-2018, 4.2% in 2019-2025.

Clean sheets

At least one side failed to score in 48.0% of matches, and 27.9% of team performances ended without a goal. Ligue 1 has the most clean sheets, in 51.2% of its matches, and the Bundesliga the fewest, 43.9%. In Ligue 1 the share has fallen from 54.7% in 1998-2004 to 45.8% in 2019-2025. The highest single season was Ligue 1 in 2002-03 (60.5% of matches) and the lowest Serie A in 2019-20 (37.9%).

Extremes in the data

• Most 0-0s in a season: Ligue 1 in 2007-08, 14.7% of matches. Fewest: the Premier League in 2023-24, 2.9%.
• Most draws in a season: Ligue 1 in 2004-05, 34.7%. Fewest: the Premier League in 2018-19, 18.7%.
• Most one-goal games: La Liga in 2024-25, 46.3%. Fewest: the Bundesliga in 2018-19, 27.8%.
• Highest-scoring match: Real Madrid 10-2 Rayo Vallecano (December 2015), 12 goals. Three more matches had 11: Portsmouth 7-4 Reading (September 2007), Schalke 7-4 Leverkusen (February 2006) and Bayern Munich 9-2 Hamburg (March 2013).
• Biggest margin: nine goals, five times. Southampton 0-9 Leicester City (October 2019), Manchester United 9-0 Southampton (February 2021) and Liverpool 9-0 Bournemouth (August 2022) in England; Troyes 0-9 Paris Saint-Germain (March 2016) and Paris Saint-Germain 9-0 Guingamp (January 2019) in France.
• Margins of eight goals or more happened 27 times: 10 in the Premier League, 6 each in La Liga and the Bundesliga, 5 in Ligue 1 and never in Serie A, whose biggest margin in this window is seven.

How this fits with the rest of our work

Our draws and home-wins studies each looked at a single outcome. This one looks at the whole scoreboard, and it fits with our goals-per-match studies: scoring has been rising since the mid-2000s in most of these leagues, and the scorelines show where the extra goals went, into more 3-1s, 4-0s and 5-goal matches, and out of 0-0s.

What this doesn't mean

A scoreline is the end of a match, not its story: it says nothing about when the goals came, who led, or how a result changed in the last minutes. The pooled trends mix five leagues of different sizes and styles, which is why we checked each league on its own, and a league's single season can move by several points. Differences between leagues of a point or two (a 0-0 rate of 7.5% against 7.9%) are within what chance can produce over a few thousand matches. And percentages describe the past 28 seasons, not any match this weekend.