blog » How Many Goals Are Scored In A Premier League Match

How many goals are scored in a Premier League match?

Sep 8th, 2011 - Posted by Andrew in Football

BettingExpert Blog editor. Always taking the alternative route to finding the value.

Email: andrew at bettingexpert.com

How many goals are scored in an English Premier League match? Can we expect different totals depending upon the expected outcome of a match? Andrew digs into 10 seasons on goals to come up with the answers, to help you with your goal total bets.

In recent weeks I've had a few requests from my Twitter followers and emailers. One that has come up more than once is for me to present some form of charting for goal totals in the Premier League.

In particular, a couple of people wanted to see goal totals categorised by the full range of head to head betting odds.

And as I am nothing if not a pleaser, today I bring to you the Premier League Goal Total charts. The charts display goal total frequency over the last 10 seasons, dating back to 2001-2002, broken down into 6 odds ranges:

Home club of odds 1.25 or below
Home club of odds 1.26 to 1.50
Home club of odds 1.51 to 2.00
Home club of odds 2.01 to 2.75
Home club of odds 2.76 to 4.00
Home club of odds 4.01 and above

So let's get into it.

Home Club of odds 1.25 and below

Let's start by looking at matches where home clubs were a short-priced favourites.

Immediately we can see that the highest frequency in these matches was for the goal total be of 5 goals or higher. Matches of this kind ended with 5 goals or greater almost 25% of the time as the highly fancied home club made a mess of their inferior vistors.

Interestingly though, we see that goal totals of 4, were of less frequency than both 2 or 3 goals. We can also see that the Over/Under 2.5 goals percentage has been 60% in favour of the Over.

This is also the odds range with the lowest occurence of scoreless, single goal and 2 goal matches, with just under 5% of these games ending with no goal the last 10 seasons, around 14% ending with just one goal and just under 20% ending with 2 scores.

Home club of odds 1.26 to 1.50

When we move to the next category, we see that both 4 and 5+ goal totals are virtually equal, both occuring just over 15% of the time the last 10 seasons.

We also see that the Over/Under 2.5 goals percentage has dropped to around 55%.

Home club off odds 1.51 to 2.00

When we consider this odds range, we see that the large bulk of matches end between the 1 to 3 goals range, with about 65% of matches ending this way.

We also see a significant drop in the occurence of matches ending Over 2.5 goals, with around 48% of matches ending with 3 goals or more the last 10 seasons.

Home club 2.01 to 2.75

Here we see that the occurrence of 1 goal matches remains the same as the 1.51-2.00 range. We also see the occurrence of 2 and 3 goal matches increase, with 3 goal matches increasing to around 22%.

Similarly, we see 4 goal and 5 goal plus matches diminish from a combined 27% to 23%. We also see that the Over/Under 2.5 goal percentage remain constant at around 48%.

Home club 2.76 to 4.00

The occurrence of 4+ goal matches here remains constant at around 23%. And we also see that 2 goal matches soars to an occurrence of around 28%, the highest percentage of 2 goal games in any odds range.

The occurence of matches ending over 2.5 goals dips to around 45% in this odds range also.

This is also the odds range with the highest occurence of scoreless matches, with just under 11% of matches in the last 10 seasons ending without a goal.

Additionaly, while the occurence of 1 goal matches remained virtually constant in matches where the home club was favoured between the odds of 1.51 to 2.75 and odds of 4.01 and above at just under 20%, we see the rate of single goal games dropping to around 16% in this range.

Home club 4.01 and above

Both 2 and 3 goal matches diminish when we start to look at matches involving genuine home underdogs, from around 49% in the previous category, to 43%.

While we see an expected increase in matches ending with 4 or more goals, we also see a significant drop in 3 goal matches, with around 17% of matches in this range ending with a 3 goal total. This was the lowest occurrence of 3 goal matches in within any range of odds.

We also see the occurrence of matches ending over 2.5 goals, drifting upwards, to around 49%.

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