How Often Do Football Matches End in a Draw?

Everyone who has ever watched football will know that the two teams involved can play for more than an hour and a half and still have nothing to show for it, with the draw being an oh-too-common occurrence. Yet most people rarely bet on a draw, thinking that it’s too boring and unlikely an occurrence. Is that true? That’s the question I’m exploring on this page, looking at how often the whistle goes at the end of ninety minutes with honours even.

When you’re passionately involved in watching a football match then a draw can sometimes be an infuriating result. You can watch your team smash the ball against the post, see it rebound out off the crossbar and witness the opposition goalkeeper have the game of his life whilst the rest of his team fails to register a single shot on target, but it can all be for nought. From a betting point of view a draw can be exactly what you want to see, so here I’ll take a look at how often it happens and the various bets that you might want to place to account for it.

What Counts as a Draw

For the avoidance of any doubt, a draw is a match in which both teams score the same number of goals at the end of ninety minutes – or don’t score at all. For most of you that will be obvious, yet some of you will either be new to football or else won’t have placed bets on it before and will therefore be glad of the clarification. The key words in that initial sentence are ‘at the end of ninety minutes’, of course. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the 90 Minutes Only rule in football, so I’m not going to go over the same ground here. Just remember, though, that a bet on a football match is usually based on the ninety minutes of the main game unless otherwise specified.

If you place a bet on the Correct Score of a game then you’ll need it to finish with the scoreline mirroring exactly what you opted for. That means that you obviously won’t get paid out if a game finishes 3-3 and you bet on 2-2. If, however, you chose to bet on the Draw, which is normally indicated by an ‘X’ in the 1X2 betting format, then it doesn’t matter whether the match finishes up 0-0 or 25-25. It’s also irrelevant who scores the goals, so the game could feature thirty-six own goals and as long as they’re split 18-18 for both teams your bet will be a winner. The only important thing is that the game finishes level between both sides taking part in it.

Looking at the Different Leagues

The most intriguing thing for me is how often the various football leagues reflect each other in terms of how they break down across the course of the season. That’s not just between divisions in the same country, but also across a continent. For example, when I had a look at the most common scoreline across the Premier League, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, La Liga and Serie A matches finished 1-1 more often than pretty much any other scoreline in all five divisions. It’s only right to explore that again, this time looking at how many times matches finished in a draw in those leagues, as well as the Championship, during the 2016-2017 season.

Premier League

Let’s start with the English top-flight league, given that it’s the most popular for British audiences to bet on. In this table you’ll see how many times a given scoreline occurred across the course of the season that we’ve got the most recent data for:

Over a three-hundred and eighty game campaign, then, eighty-four games ended in a draw. That’s the equivalent of 22.1%, or a little over one-in-five games. That might surprise a few people, given how often we contemplate the idea of a match ending in a draw when we look to place an accumulator bet or similar. If, therefore, you’re weighing up a ten match acca on the Premier League then it’s worth remembering that the odds suggest only two of those games will finish in a draw. The stats are drawn out over the course of a season so it will never be that simple, of course, but it’s still an important point to bear in mind.

The Championship

That’s how things pan out in the top-flight in England, but what about once you drop down a division? Theoretically the teams in the Championship aren’t as good as in the Premier League, but does that result in more draws or fewer?

The Championship features more games than the Premier League – five-hundred and fifty-two to be exact. Little wonder, then that the sheer number of draws is more common in England’s second-tier. The number of 0-0s and 1-1s alone outnumbered all of the draws in the top-flight put together. In total there were one-hundred and thirty draws in the Championship in 2016-2017, which is the equivalent of 23.55% of matches ending in draws. When you look at it that way, therefore, you can see that it’s not all that more common to get a draw than in the Premier League. It veers slightly closer to one-in-four rather than one-in-five, but only just. For the record, that doesn’t include the Play-Offs.

The Bundesliga

How about elsewhere in Europe? Is there a massive change to proceedings in Germany as compared to England’s top two divisions?

Even the most casual glance at the Bundesliga compared to the Premier League reveals that scorelines were similar across both leagues. Indeed, the German division only had one less 1-1 draw than its English equivalent, for example. This time the league features fewer teams and therefore fewer goals than in England, with seventy-four out of three-hundred and six games ending with honours even. That’s 24.1%, or roughly one-in-four matches ending in a draw of some description.

La Liga

Spain is famed as being a country that loves attacking football, so you would imagine that there would be far fewer draws there than elsewhere. Yet is that actually the case?

Intriguingly, a nation that apparently loves attacking football witnessed the same number of 0-0 draws as the Premier League during the 2016-2017 campaign. That might have something to do with the two divisions featuring the same number of matches, meaning that the eighty-nine out of three-hundred and eighty games that ended in a draw in Spain works out as 23.4%, or only a little over the percentage of English games finishing the same way.

Ligue 1

When it comes to European football, France is often the forgotten man. Lacking the reputation of any of the other nations on the continent and only really featuring one or two teams that can compete on a global scale. The league features the same number of sides as the Premier League and La Liga, though, so do the figures look similar overall?

It’s interesting to note that ten more games ended in a draw in France than those of England. The ninety-four out of three-hundred and eighty matches that weren’t able to witness a winner resulted in 24.7% of all games during the Ligue 1 season ending up with both teams taking a share of the points. That’s much closer to one-in-four matches ending in a draw than any other league I’ve looked at – something to remember if you’re betting on matches in France.

Serie A

Last but not least comes the Italian league, with Italy being a nation well-known for applauding good defending. Surely that would mean a whole host of 0-0 games across the course of a campaign, wouldn’t it?

The short answer to that question is ‘no’. Serie A saw exactly the same number of 0-0s as the Premier League and the Bundesliga, perhaps demonstrating that Italian football isn’t quite as defensive as everyone makes out. In fact, Ligue 1 saw ten more 0-0s than all three of them. Italy’s eighty draws out of three-hundred and eighty matches puts their draw percentage at 21.05%, or lower than any other league in Europe’s Big Five and the Championship. Your instinct might well be to bet on the draw in Italy, but that stats suggests you’d be mistaken to do so in a hurry.

What About in Knockout Tournaments?

League games are always slightly more likely to end up in a draw on account of the fact that teams can live to fight another day. Oftentimes during less competitive matches you can even sense that two teams have metaphorically ‘shaken hands’ on the draw, with both happy to settle for a point.

Yet do things change when the games are part of a knockout tournament, with teams needing to get a win in order to progress? I’ve decided to take a look at two different competitions to get a sense of how common the draw is: the FA Cup and the Champions League. In both cases I’m only looking at the score after ninety minutes, so no extra-time is taken into account.

The FA Cup

One of the oldest cup competitions in world football and the most prestigious in England, the FA Cup is a trophy every team wants to win – even if the Football Association has devalued it in recent years with daft kick-off times and weird sponsorship. Here’s a look at all of those scorelines once more, again looking at the 2016-2017 season’s iteration of the tournament It includes matches from the First Round Proper through to the final:

Including replays, the FA Cup featured one-hundred and fifty-six matches in the 2016-2017 season, with forty-four of them ending in a draw after ninety minutes. That is the equivalent of 28.2% of games ending the ninety without a clear a clear winner, or as close to one-in-three games as we’ve seen so far. It seems that when there’s more riding on it – that is, elimination from the competition – teams are far less willing to take risks than they would be in a league game.

The Champions League

The fact that the FA Cup starts as early as the First Round Proper means that some of the teams playing in it are perhaps not quite as talented as those that make it all the way to the latter rounds. That’s not to say that they’re more likely to settle for a draw, of course, but it’s interesting to compare and contrast the numbers of games that finish without a winner in that tournament to the Champions League. Formerly known as the European Cup, this is the competition that should theoretically feature the elite from across Europe. Here’s how the numbers work out, stating at the First Qualifying Round:

Out of one-hundred and twenty-five matches that were played across the course of the competition, sixty-two of them ended in a draw when the full-time whistle blew. It’s important to note that doesn’t include matches that ended even after extra-time and therefore went to penalties, nor does it include ties that finishes in a draw overall. A first-leg could’ve finished 1-1, say, with the second-leg ending 2-2 and the overall tie resulting in a 3-3 draw, but that hasn’t been included in my calculations.

As you’ll no doubt have figured out, that’s nearly fifty percent of all of the games played finishing without a winner; 49.6%, to be exact. There are loads of reasons why that might be the case, but the most obvious is that teams don’t necessarily need to win a match in order to progress thanks to the away goals rule. A side could draw 0-0 at home and 1-1 away and then qualify for the next round. The Champions League is also an interesting tournament to look at because it’s a combination of group stages and knockout football, making it different from both the FA Cup and the standard league format.

Are International Tournaments Any Different?

Last but not least, I’ll have a quick look at the biggest international tournament on the planet to see if games there tend to end with honours even more often than league campaigns and club competitions.

The European Championships

The 2016 European Championship, known as Euro 2016 to most people, involved the playing of fifty-one matches across ten venues in France. Unlike with the FA Cup and Champions League, I’m not going to bother looking at the earlier rounds of the competition and will instead focus on the tournament proper, which got underway on the 10th of June and lasted until the 10th of July. As with the other tournaments, I’m only interested in the score after ninety minutes.

Out of those fifty-one matches that took place across the course of a month, seventeen of them ended in a draw at the full-time whistle. That’s 33.3%, or one-third of all of the games exactly. You can work out for yourself why that might be the case, though the fact that it’s the best players from all European countries playing against each other and no matches can be solved by away goals means that teams are happier to enter the lottery of extra-time and penalties than they might otherwise be.

The World Cup

In terms of international football, no competition has the same grab as the World Cup. It involves the best teams from around the entire globe competing against each other and in 2014 it lasted from the 12th of June until the 13th of July. Thirty-two teams from five federations played sixty-four games across twelve locations in Brazil. I’ve had a look at how many draws there were in total, only looking at the result at the end of ninety minutes and ignoring the qualifying rounds.

Sufficed to say, there were fewer high-scoring matches in the World Cup than any other tournament I’ve looked at in this piece. Admittedly, Germany did beat the hosts Brazil 7-1 in the semi-finals, but you take my point. There were also just seventeen draws after ninety minutes out of the sixty-four games played, including the third-place / fourth-place play-off. That’s a draw percentage of 26.5%, so far closer to the European leagues than the Euros or the Champions League. It’s still more than one-in-four games that ends in a draw during normal time, which is worth bearing in mind when you go to make your bets the next time the World Cup rolls around.

Things to Remember

There are a couple of things that are important to remember when you’re looking at the above statistics. For starters, whilst it’s useful to know the average draw percentage of every league and competition out there, it can be slightly misleading. The nature of a league campaign that features three-hundred and eighty games, for example, is that the draws that are are achieved across the course of it won’t necessarily be nicely spaced out. It’s entirely possible that all ten games could end in a draw one week, followed by no draws whatsoever during the following set of fixtures. Don’t bet on two draws out of ten during a Premier League weekend, therefore, and be annoyed if it doesn’t happen just because the draw percentage is 22.1%.

Equally, it’s worth remembering that all of my league research above is based on the 2016-2017 season. If you looked at all of the Big Five leagues across ten seasons you might find that that campaign was something of an anomaly in terms of draws, with most games ending in wins on another year. Likewise I’ve only looked at one Champions League, FA Cup, World Cup and European Championship tournament, so don’t assume that the same figures apply to every single one. Always do your own research to see what you can come up with. There’s plenty of open-source material out there that can inform you on the details of matches during any given tournament in a specific year of your choosing.

How to Use the Information for Betting

Forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes, so you may well now be wondering what you can do with all of that information. You’re here because you’re interested in betting, so how might you think about taking the above knowledge and applying it to your bets over the course of a weekend?

There a countless bets you can make with bookmakers that involve benefiting from matches ending in draws. Obviously the Match Result market that I mentioned earlier is a place to look, so have a think about which games are the most likely to end in a draw and then select the ‘X’ option on the 1X2 list accordingly. If you wanted to be really clever then you could wait for the final game of a weekend and see how many matches before it had finished in a draw. If none have, do you think that increases the chance of that one finishing up honours even?

The hardest market to get exactly right is that of Correct Score, but you’re now armed with the knowledge of how many games finish by each scoreline in terms of the draw. Playing the odds can see you narrow down your options when you consider the matches that you’re still to watch. Again, if you wanted to take your research to the next level then you might want to think about whether draws tend to come earlier in a season or later. Are they more common when players are tired or when teams are only just getting into their rhythm? That’s the sort of thing you’ll want to find out if you want to progress from being a decent punter to being an exceptional one, but remember that there are no short-cuts in football betting.

The Football Pools

It’s worth giving a quick mention to the Football Pools here. For those that don’t know, the Pools is a competition that requires players to select ten matches that they think will end in a score draw. Players receive three points for a score draw, two points for a no-score draw and one point if the match doesn’t end in a draw. Your best eight scores are then added together and the highest scoring competitors win cash prizes.

Obviously you could potentially use the information that you’ve learnt here to help you out with the Pools, though it’s worth bearing in mind that they tend to look across all divisions and I’ve only done the research on the Premier League and the Championship in terms of English leagues. Of the eighty-four games that ended in a draw in the 2016-2017 Premier League season, fifty-seven of them resulted in score draws. That means that 15% of games across the course of the campaign ended in a score draw, or a little over one in six. If you wanted to play the odds, therefore, you’d do well to pick two of every twelve games in the Pools to end in a score draw, rather than concentrating on one league in particular.

Famous Draws

The last thing I wanted to mentioned here are some famous draws that have occurred in football over the years. The most obvious one involves my own team, Liverpool, who were 3-0 down at half-time in the final of the Champions League in 2005 against an AC Milan side known for its ability to defend. The Reds scored three goals in six minutes in the second-half, taking the game to extra-time and penalties before winning it thanks to an Andriy Schevchenko missed spot-kick. It remains the greatest comeback in the history of the competition and is unlikely to be surpassed.

There have been a number of massive 0-0 matches, such as England’s away draw with Italy that saw them qualify for the 1998 World Cup, but they’re not as much fun to talk about. It’s perhaps a touch daft to talk about a fictional football match in an article about betting, but it says something that the best match to compare Liverpool’s defeat of AC Milan to is the one between the Allies and Germany in the move Escape To Victory. If anything, Liverpool’s job was harder when you consider that the Allied team had already scored in the first-half when they went 4-1 down to Germany, meaning they knew they had weaknesses. Sylvester Stallone even saved a last-minute penalty, just as Jerzy Dudek would do years later at the Attaturk Stadium.

They’re not the only draws worthy of a mention, however. In May 2010 a match between Motherwell and Hibernian looked as though it was going to be a white-wash, with the home side losing 6-2 before romping back into it with four goals to tie the game 6-6. It is the joint-highest scoring game in football, matching the opening game of the 1999-2000 Belgium league season when the defending champions Genk drew by the same scoreline with Westerlo. In the Scottish match, the equalising goal came in the third of four minutes stoppage time at the end of the ninety. Can you imagine a more dramatic way for a game to finish?