Premier League goals per match, season by season: up or down since 1992?

Every few years, the same argument resurfaces: the Premier League isn't what it used to be, teams don't defend anymore, or conversely, it's gotten too cagey and tactical. We wanted an answer that didn't depend on which season happens to be fresh in memory, so we pulled the goals and matches played for every Premier League season since it replaced the old First Division in 1992-93, worked out the goals-per-match rate for each one ourselves, and looked at the whole 34-season run at once.

The short answer: for most of the competition's history, there hasn't been a clear long-run trend in either direction. What there has been is one season that broke the pattern completely.

A narrow band for three decades

From 1992-93 through 2022-23 — 31 seasons — the goals-per-match rate stayed inside a surprisingly tight range: never below 2.45, never above 2.85. Seasons drift up and down inside that band from year to year, but there's no sustained climb or decline across it. A viewer who thinks the league has gotten more open, or more defensive, over any given five- or ten-year stretch inside that window is usually reacting to a handful of memorable matches, not a real shift in the underlying rate.

That band held even through a structural change: the league played with 22 clubs and 462 matches a season for its first three years (1992-93 to 1994-95), before dropping to the 20 clubs and 380 matches it has used ever since. Total goals scored in a 22-club season naturally look larger than a 20-club one, but the rate per match — which is what actually measures how open or closed a season was — sat at 2.59-2.65 in all three 22-club seasons, squarely inside the range the 20-club era would go on to occupy for decades. The band isn't an artefact of league size.

The mid-2000s dip

The closest thing to a real trend inside that 31-season window is a soft dip through the mid-2000s. 2005-06 (2.48), 2006-07 (2.45, the all-time low) and 2008-09 (2.48) form the three lowest-scoring seasons in Premier League history, all within a four-year span. It's a real cluster, not a single outlier — but it's also a modest one: the difference between the competition's driest patch and its long-run average is about a fifth of a goal per match, not the kind of gap that would have been obvious while it was happening.

2023-24: the outlier that actually is one

Then 2023-24 happened. The league produced 1,246 goals in its 380 matches — a rate of 3.28 goals per match, comfortably clear of anything else in the data set and, going by the competition's own records, the highest top-flight scoring rate in England since 1964-65. It beat the previous Premier League record — 1,222 goals, set in the league's very first season, 1992-93 — outright, despite that record having stood for three decades and having been set with two extra clubs and 82 extra matches to accumulate goals in.

It's too early to call that a new normal rather than a one-off. The two seasons since have pulled back toward the historical band without fully returning to it: 2024-25 settled at 2.93, and 2025-26 came in at 2.75 — both above the pre-2023-24 long-run average, but neither close to repeating the spike. Whether that's the start of a gentle upward drift or just 2023-24's shockwave settling out is a question only a few more seasons of data can answer, and the current 2026-27 campaign is still too early in its own schedule to weigh in reliably.

The full season-by-season data

What we didn't include, and why

The 2026-27 season is deliberately left out of the chart and table above. It's still in progress, its goals-per-match figure moves every weekend, and including a partial season next to 34 completed ones would compare two different kinds of numbers under one heading. We'll fold it into an update once it's finished.

Every figure above was checked against the Premier League's own season records and recomputed by hand from goals and matches played — none of the per-match averages were copied pre-rounded from a third party. Where two sources disagreed on a season's total (2004-05 was the one case here), we went with the official record over the aggregator.