When it comes to football betting, one of the wagers that you might think about placing is on the Over/Under market for goals scored. There are numerous different options on that front, with one of the most common being Over/Under 2.5 goals. Determining the frequency of football matches with over/under 2.5 goals can vary depending on various factors such as the specific league, teams, playing style and other contextual elements. In many football leagues worldwide, the average occurrence of matches with over/under 2.5 goals tends to be relatively balanced.
Typically, bookmakers set the Over/Under 2.5 goals line as a benchmark to gauge whether a particular match will have more or fewer than 2.5 goals combined from both teams. If the match has three or more goals, the Over bet wins, whilst if it has two or fewer goals, the Under bet will win. The manner in which the goals are scored is irrelevant. That is to say, it doesn’t matter whether it is 7-0 or 3-1, if you’ve bet on the Under then your wager is losing. Equally, it can be 2-0, 0-0 or 1-1 and the Over bet will end up as a losing one. If you’re thinking of placing it as a bet, it’s hard to know how likely it is to happen.
Quick Answer: How Many Football Matches Finish With Over and Under 2.5 Goals?
In the five Premier League seasons between 2017-18 and 2021-22, 902 games finished with under 2.5 goals (47.47%) compared to 998 games with over 2.5 goals (52.53%).
In the same five seasons in the EFL Championship, 53.08% of games finished with under 2.5 goals (1465) compared to 46.92% with over 2.5 goals (1295).
When we look at Spain’s La Liga across this time period, they saw 53.68% of games finish with under 2.5 goals (1020) and 46.32% finish with over 2.5 goals (880).
Looking At The Premier League
Statistically, it is estimated that approximately 50% of football matches tend to have over 2.5 goals, while the other 50% fall under the 2.5 goals threshold. However, it’s crucial to keep in mind that this figure is an average and can vary significantly across leagues and seasons. Certain leagues or teams may have a higher propensity for high-scoring matches, while others may exhibit a more defensive or low-scoring style of play. For example, leagues known for their attacking prowess, such as the English Premier League or the German Bundesliga, may have a higher occurrence of matches with over 2.5 goals than more defensive leagues.
In order to get a sense of what to expect from matches, we’ve taken a look at the goals scored in five Premier League seasons. One of them was mostly played behind-closed-doors due to the global health situation at the time, so it is worth bearing that in mind when looking at how things panned out across the five seasons in question:
We can see that across 1,900 football matches in the five Premier League seasons that we’re looking at, there were 902 games that finished with a scoreline that would’ve seen a bet on the Under 2.5 Goals market end up as a winning wager. Conversely, there were 998 games that would’ve seen the bet lost and any bets placed on the Over 2.5 Goals market result in winning bets. In other words, if you were to place a bet on every single match played during the Premier League season having Under 2.5 Goals then you would lose more of them than if you’d placed the same wager on Over 2.5 Goals.
Under 2.5 Goals
If you want to increase your possible returns then a bet on the Over/Under alone might not do it. In order to improve your odds, it could be worth considering either adding in something to your bet or else betting on something different entirely. With that in mind, here is a look at how many times each of the scorelines that would win if you were betting on the unders came in across our five seasons:
You can see that the most common Under 2.5 goal scoreline in Premier League matches is 1-1, whilst the least common score when it comes to the Under is a 0-2 win for the away side.
Over 2.5 Goals
Knowing what the most common scoreline in the Premier League is for the Under market is really helpful in terms of adding something to your bet, by what about the Over market? There are obviously loads of possible scorelines that would see a bet on the Over be successful, given that it’s anything in which the goals combine to be three or more. Rather than look at every possible scoreline, we’ll look at the five most common scorelines that are on the Overs for each season:
Premier League’s Most Common Scores with Over 2.5 Goals
| Season | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | 2-1 (25) | 1-2 (25) | 2-2 (20) | 3-0 (18) | 3-1 (18) |
| 2020-21 | 1-2 (33) | 2-1 (27) | 1-3 (18) | 3-0 (14) | 0-3 (14) |
| 2019-20 | 2-1 (37) | 1-2 (25) | 2-2 (20) | 3-0 (19) | 3-1 (16) |
| 2018-19 | 1-2 (33) | 2-1 (29) | 3-1 (25) | 2-2 (15) | 1-3 (14) |
| 2017-18 | 2-1 (32) | 1-2 (24) | 2-2 (19) | 3-0 (15) | 3-1 (13) |
Number of games shown in brackets.
Are Things Different in the Championship?
Knowing how many goals are scored in the Premier League is one thing, but does it work out any differently in the Championship? After all, the English top-flight will have some of the best defenders and goalscorers in the world, so you would expect them to be able to score goals and defend goals reasonably well. The same isn’t true of the second-tier, in theory, so it’s worth having a look to see if that’s true or not.
Over the course of the 2,760 games that were played in the Championship across the five seasons that we’re looking at, there was no season in which the Over 2.5 Goals occurred more often than the Under 2.5 Goals market. In other words, if you’d have placed a bet on every single match during five seasons of Championship football, you’d only have won on more games than you’d have lost if you’d been betting on the Under market – so the exact opposite of what we found in the Premier League. In the Championship, there were 1,465 games that saw Under 2.5 Goals scored, compared to 1,295 games were it was Over 2.5 Goals.
Under 2.5 Goals
Betting on the Under 2.5 Goals market might well be a be a decent enough choice to make if you’re going to bet on the Championship, but you might want to think about breaking that down even further. With that in mind, which is the scoreline that occurred the most often during the seasons that we’re looking at?
You can see that the most common scoreline in the Championship for wagers that hit the Under 2.5 Goals market is 1-1, which occurred 343 times. The least common scoreline is a 2-0 win for the away side, labelled as 0-2 in our table. That only happened 137 times, which is less than half of the number of times that a match ended 1-1. If you think a match is likely to feature fewer than 2.5 goals in the Championship, it is more likely to be 1-1 than the other scores based on these five seasons. In that sense, the most popular and least popular scores for the Under bet are the same here as in the Premier League.
Looking at La Liga
We’ve so far got an idea of the way in which things work in England, looking at both the Premier League and the Championship. The question is, are things all that different in European competitions? Rather than look at a host of them, it is worth taking a look at La Liga, which is similar to the Premier League in many ways, to see how things worked out there over the same five seasons in question. We will start by looking at the number of times a match finished with either Under 2.5 goals or Over 2.5 goals:
Across the 1,900 matches played during the course of the five seasons that we’ve been looking at, there was only one season in La Liga in which a bet on the Over on all matches would have seen matches win more often than bets on the Under, which was the 2017-2018 campaign. In total, there were 1,020 games that finished with Under 2.5 Goals being the winning bet, compared to 880 when you’d have won if you’d have bet on Over 2.5 Goals.
Under 2.5 Goals
Whilst a bet on the Under or Over market alone presents you with an opportunity to improve your earnings, you can improve the chance of taking home more by adding in something else to your bet. With that in mind, here is a look at how often each of the various scorelines that would see a bet on the Under occurred across the five seasons that we’re looking at:
A quick look at the above table shows us that the most common scoreline that would’ve been a winning bet on the Under 2.5 Goals market was 1-1, whilst the least common was 0-2, a it was with both the Premier League and the Championship.
Over 2.5 Goals
We already know from the Premier League and the Championship that there are too many scorelines that would trigger a winning bet on the Over 2.5 Goals market, but we can look at the top five scorelines across our five seasons in question and see if there’s anything we can learn from them:
La Liga’s Most Common Scores with Over 2.5 Goals
| Season | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | 2-1 (27) | 1-2 (25) | 2-2 (17) | 3-1 (14) | 3-0 (12) |
| 2020-21 | 2-1 (40) | 2-2 (21) | 1-2 (17) | 1-3 (14) | 3-1 (11) |
| 2019-20 | 2-1 (35) | 1-2 (32) | 2-2 (20) | 3-0 (14) | 3-1 (14) |
| 2018-19 | 2-1 (38) | 2-2 (27) | 1-2 (23) | 3-0 (19) | 3-1 & 3-2 (11) |
| 2017-18 | 2-1 (34) | 1-2 (23) | 2-2 (23) | 3-0 (18) | 3-1 (12) |
Number of games shown in brackets.
Interestingly, the 2018-2019 season is the only one that we’ve looked at that has two scorelines tied when it comes to the top five most common scores in the Over 2.5 Goals market, hence there being six shown in this season rather than five. A 2-1 home win was the most common of the Over 2.5 goal score lines in each of the five La Liga seasons analysed.