There have been 17 goalless draws in the Premier League in 2025-26, already more than each of the previous two seasons. We look at possible reasons for the increase in games ending 0-0.
In February last year, Gerard Piqué spoke to former Spain teammate Iker Casillas on his podcast, and the topic of 0-0 draws came up.
Having been such a successful centre-back, you may have thought Piqué would have waxed lyrical with the former goalkeeper about the art of defending.
Instead, he suggested that teams should be punished for participating in goalless draws, saying: “It can’t be that you go to a football stadium [as a fan], spend €100, €200 or €300, and the match ends 0-0.
“Something needs to change. One proposal to consider would be that if the match ends 0-0, the teams would score zero points. The match would [then] open up in the 70th minute.”
The sentiment is understandable, but it was nonetheless interesting for the now-retired former Manchester United and Barcelona defender to suggest that goalless draws are so undesirable.
Thankfully for Premier League teams, Pique’s idea has not yet come to fruition, because if it had, several of them would have fewer points this season.
There were two 0-0 draws in England’s top flight last weekend, with Nottingham Forest and Arsenal playing out a fairly dour stalemate on Saturday, before Wolves and Newcastle United did the same on Sunday.
For leaders Arsenal, it was their second consecutive 0-0 in the league after a home draw against Liverpool. It was the first time the Gunners had experienced back-to-back 0-0 draws in the Premier League since their opening two games of the 2012-13 campaign (vs Sunderland and Stoke).
The stalemate at Molineux was the 17th 0-0 in the Premier League this season, already more than last season (16) and the season before (11).
In those two most recent goalless draws, one featured the team at the top of the table and the other featured the team at the bottom, which felt almost symbolic; in this league, anyone can draw 0-0 (except for the three teams who haven’t, but we’ll get to them).
Before we get too carried away, it’s important to note that the last two seasons have seen the lowest proportion of goalless draws in Premier League history. Prior to that, there had never been fewer than 21 in a single season in the competition, so this is not the say there are now more than ever before, just that the recent trend of there being fewer 0-0s appears to be a thing of the past, and the numbers are reverting back to normal.
The topic was brought into focus on New Year’s Day, when three of the four Premier League games played in the first 24 hours of 2026 ended 0-0, making it only the second day in the competition’s history to see as few as four games played but as many as three goalless draws, after 11 April 2010.
The most 0-0 draws in a Premier League season since the competition launched in 1992 came in the 1998-99 campaign, when there were a remarkable 49 goalless games, making up 12.9% of all Premier League matches that season.
That was largely an outlier, though. Since then, there have only been two Premier League seasons with at least 40 goalless draws, and none since 2008-09 (42).
As mentioned, they have been especially rare in recent seasons, with just 2.9% of games ending 0-0 in 2023-24, the fewest in the competition’s history. The current rate of 7.7% this season is the highest it has been since 2020-21 (7.9%).
Crystal Palace and Newcastle have played in the most 0-0 draws in the Premier League this season (four each). In fact, both have already had more 0-0s this season than in the whole of last season (Palace three, Newcastle one), while only Manchester United, Fulham and West Ham are yet to compete in a goalless draw in the Premier League in 2025-26.
It’s not just in England that we’re seeing this. Italy has always had a reputation for valuing the defensive side of the game, and Serie A has featured 21 goalless draws in just 210 games (10%). That’s a steep climb from last season’s 7.4%, and the highest it’s been since the 2011-12 season (11.6%).
However, none of the other top five leagues in Europe have had anywhere near as many. There have been just nine 0-0 draws in the Bundesliga (5.7%), nine in La Liga (4.5%), and eight in Ligue 1 (4.9%) this season.
Heading back to the Premier League, and one of the obvious causes is the reduction in goals per game this season. After 220 games played, there have been 603 goals scored, an average of 2.7 goals per game. That’s the 13th most in a single Premier League campaign, so it’s not as if we’re being starved of goals, but it may feel that way after coming off the back of the two highest scoring seasons since the competition began.
There were an incredible 1,246 goals scored in the Premier League in the 2023-24 campaign, the most ever in the competition’s history in a single season at an average of 3.3 per game, while last season had 1,115 goals, the second highest average in the Premier League era (2.9 per game).
It could be that the fairly drastic change in playing style is a factor. We have revealed here on Opta Analyst this season that Premier League teams are generally going more direct, making fewer passes, playing more long balls and relying far more on set-pieces for goals, but is that leading to fewer shots, and in turn impacting the total number of goals?
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Premier LeaguePremier League Tactical Trends: How Passing, Set-Pieces, Long Throws Have Changed in 2025-26
5 days ago David SegarThis season, there has been an average of 24.4 shots per game, the second fewest on record (since 2003-04) after the 2020-21 campaign (24.2), which was almost entirely played behind closed doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Having no fans in the stadium to provide a certain urgency likely led to players being more cautious in deciding when to attempt shots that season.
There have also generally been fewer shots than there used to be in the last few years in the Premier League as teams try to be more patient, waiting for more opportune moments rather than going for quantity over quality. That’s shown by the fact that each of the top 10 seasons for fewest shots on record have come in the last 11 campaigns.
However, attempting shots is one thing, but how often are teams actually getting them through to the goal? When looking at total shots excluding blocked ones, this season is the lowest on record for the average per game in the Premier League (17.3), suggesting that defending teams are getting more men behind the ball and/or are just better at getting in the way of shots than before.
There have only been an average of 8.2 shots on target per game in the Premier League this season, also the fewest on record, which is quite the drop when you consider the 2023-24 campaign had the most (9.9 per game). There were 3,760 shots on target in the Premier League two seasons ago, but this season is on course to see around 3,120, which would be a drop of 640 in just two years (17%).
Curiously given that there are fewer shots on target than before, another fact that suggests how well teams are doing to close down shots is that only three seasons on record (since 2003-04) have seen a higher average for attempts inside the box (16.7 per game). So it’s not as if teams aren’t getting close to goal and getting shots away, they’re just struggling to get clear efforts through tightly-packed defences.
Given the lack of shots overall but the relatively high level of shots in the box, it therefore follows that we’re seeing fewer shots from long range. In fact, for the first time on record (since 2003-04) Premier League games are averaging fewer than eight shots from outside the box (7.8).
Obviously they generally carry a very low xG value, but how many times over the years has a tight game been opened up by an inspired strike from distance that flew into the top corner? As ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky famously once uttered: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” so perhaps going back to unleashing from outside the box could at the very least draw opponents out, if not result in a goal directly.
However, teams are clearly determined to get as close as possible to goal, which does broadly make sense, and it is made clear by the fact they are still having a decent number of touches in the opposition’s box. There has been an average of 50.3 touches in the opposition box in Premier League games this season, the third-most on record (since 2008-09), only after the two most recent seasons.
Could it also be that finishing has been worse this season? Well, the average shot conversion rate in the Premier League in 2025-26 currently stands at 11.2%, with only three campaigns on record (since 2003-04) having higher, so it seems to be more down to the lack of shots rather than the lack of quality in them.
In the 1950s, Italian coach Annibale Frossi said the perfect game would finish 0-0 as “it is an expression of the balance between the attack and defence.”
Two decades later, former Manchester United and Celtic midfielder Paddy Crerand made a similar albeit significantly more glass-half-empty observation that “If [football] tacticians ever reached perfection, the result would be a 0-0 draw, and there would be no one there to see it.”
It does indeed seem like the tacticians are getting their way. Due to the significant increase in goals in the Premier League in recent years, we have subsequently seen coaches trying harder to combat that, which has led to the aforementioned change in playing styles that has occurred with many teams in England’s top flight in the last couple of years.
It is absolutely a cliché, because it’s true, that football trends go in cycles. With goals down and 0-0 draws on the rise, who knows? Perhaps it will soon lead to teams deciding they can gain an advantage by doing more work on their attacking output and these numbers will all go in the other direction over the coming seasons, if not months.
Now that goals are harder to come by, it would seem logical coaches will focus on the best way to combat this again, which hopefully for the average fan, will lead to more goals in future.
Some football purists will argue that watching two teams cancel each other out and defend better than they attack is like observing a great chess match, and equally as fascinating as an eight-goal thriller.
But let’s face it, bonkers rule suggestion aside, Piqué had a point. We all want to see goals.
Unless it’s against your team, there’s nothing like watching a player larrup the ball into the back of the net before knee-sliding in front of his adoring fans.
Seeing a defender perform a basic block tackle to concede a corner before pumping his fists and roaring like he’s just scored an overhead kick in a World Cup final just doesn’t hit the same.
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Nil-Nilling Me Softly: Why Are Premier League Games Producing So Many Goalless Draws? Opta Analyst.
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