Why Are So Many Premier League Games Being Drawn?

So far in 2024-25, more games are ending in draws than in any Premier League season in the past 25 years. Here, we try to explain why this might be happening.

There’s plenty in football that can be explained.

At least, as a website that prides itself on using data to give reasons for all sorts of phenomena – great and small, interesting and (admittedly, sometimes rather more) dull – we think that’s very much the case.

But even we can sometimes get a little stumped.

The 2024-25 Premier League season is producing more drawn matches than any other in the past 25 years. With 21 draws from 70 so far, 30% of all games have ended in stalemate.

That’s the fourth-highest rate in Premier League history. No season has seen more than 31.3% of games drawn, so this season isn’t far behind the record.

The three seasons that have produced a greater proportion of draws than 2024-25 all occurred before the turn of the century, with 31.3% in 1996-97, 30.7% in 1993-94 and 30.3% in 1998-99.

Meanwhile, eight of the last 10 seasons have seen a draw rate of under 25%, with six of the eight lowest such rates in Premier League history having come since 2016. Last season saw just 21.6% of games drawn, while in 2018-19 an all-time low of 18.7% of games ended in draws.

While it’s worth remembering how early in the season we are, with 70 out of 380 games played, and remembering that things may not continue at the current rate of draws for the entire campaign, it’s still an intriguing quirk of the season.

But it isn’t at all simple to find reasons to explain why there have been more draws.

It’s not like there are obvious reasons that games are drawn, or obvious reasons to assume teams will draw against any particular opponent. Even when teams are evenly matched, a game ending in a draw still feels fairly random. You rarely get games heading for a draw when both teams would be content with a point.

Looking at games played between teams that finished next to one another in last season’s Premier League, nine of the 40 such matches ended in a draw, or 22.5% – almost exactly the same rate as the entire season (21.6%).

In other words, games between teams that the final league table suggests were of near-equal strength were drawn roughly as often as games between teams that were of less-equal strength.

What’s more, if you remove games between the top three (Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool) and bottom three (Luton, Burnley and Sheffield United) from the equation – matches that might feasibly have been cagier with so much on the line – the rate of draws between teams one place apart in the final table drops to 18.8%.

Following a trend of recent years, goals are being scored at a faster rate this season (2.87 per game) than in any other Premier League season apart from 2023-24 (3.30), which suggests we aren’t seeing cagey games. Teams aren’t being more cautious this season, leading to more goalless draws.

In fact, just 5.7% of games this season have ended 0-0, the fourth-lowest rate of any season in Premier League history. Of the 21 draws, just four have been goalless (19.0%), the second-lowest such rate after 2023-24.

A significant reason more goals have been scored in the last couple of years is that matches are longer. More time is being added on as a result of new directives to combat time-wasting, and those extra minutes alongside five substitutes being permitted – and so fresher players being on the pitch in those added late minutes – have led to more goals than ever.

And while an increase in the number of drawn matches isn’t quite as obvious a consequence of longer games and more substitutes being allowed, it may be that those changes have had an impact on the number of draws.

Leads are less daunting these days. When the clock reads 89:00, no longer are you looking at between one and five more minutes of game time; five minutes is likely the minimum, and games are fairly frequently going past 100 minutes. That gives teams, often full of fresh legs with so many substitutions now permitted, plenty of time to find a way back into the game.

Equalisers are being scored later than ever before, too. Five equalisers have been scored in second-half stoppage time already this season, accounting for 11.1% of all equalisers (five of 45), which is the highest rate of match-levelling goals being scored after the 90th minute in any Premier League season.

Clearly, teams are crumbling under late pressure to concede equalisers more often than ever before.

Red cards have played a part, too. There have been eight red cards this season, and four of them have come in games that were eventually drawn. There have been four red cards in 21 draws (19.0% of games), compared to four reds in the 49 games that weren’t drawn (8.2% of games).

A red card makes chasing the win much more difficult for one side, and that problem is exacerbated in the modern game, when facing more fresh substitutes late on might further encourage a team who are a player down to drop right back and protect their own goal.

There is also the possibility that more teams are happy to settle for draws at this early stage in the season given how tight the margins are in the Premier League and how damaging a narrow defeat can feel compared to a hard-earned draw, particularly in the lower half of the table.

Look at the two teams who have drawn the most games in the Premier League this season: Ipswich Town and Nottingham Forest, who have four draws apiece. Ipswich could be overtaken this weekend by fellow promoted side Southampton, whom they are three points ahead of, but the feeling around Kieran McKenna’s side is far more positive than that which surrounds Saints.

Besides them actually having three more points than Southampton, Ipswich will have far more confidence that they can make a proper go of survival right now, while plenty of people will be considering Russell Martin’s side too weak and just too easy to beat. There has been a great deal of discussion recently about whether Martin is being naïve in trying to play possession football straight after promotion from the Championship. It’s a topic we discussed in depth here.

Forest, meanwhile, are in mid-table, level on 10 points with Brentford having lost only one game all season. Manager Nuno Espiríto Santo is rightly being praised for making his team so difficult to beat. Thomas Frank’s Brentford, on the other hand, have as many points as Forest, but appear to have been a little too inconsistent, flitting between wins and defeats. Their longest unbeaten streak this season is just two games; Forest went five games without defeat at the start of the season before a 1-0 defeat to Fulham.

In truth, though, while all of these elements might have contributed, the most convincing explanation for the increased number of draws is chance. We might see the rate of drawn games drop down to the lower rates seen in recent years as the season goes on, and we might see it skyrocket.

And there is unlikely to be a conclusive explanation either way. That’ll just have to be something we at Opta Analyst accept… albeit begrudgingly.

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