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Gerard Piqué spoke to his former Spain teammate Iker Casillas on his podcast last February and the topic of goalless draws came up. You might expect a centre-back and goalkeeper to be excited about the art of defending but rather Piqué suggested that teams should be punished for participating in goalless draws.
“It can’t be that you go to a football stadium, spend €100, €200 or €300, and the match ends 0-0,” said Piqué. “Something needs to change. One proposal to consider would be that if the match ends 0-0, the teams would score zero points. Then the match would open up in the 70th minute.”
Thankfully for Premier League teams, Piqué’s idea has not yet come to fruition. There were two goalless draws in the top flight at the weekend, with Nottingham Forest and Arsenal playing out a fairly dour stalemate on Saturday before Wolves and Newcastle did the same on Sunday.
It was Arsenal’s second consecutive 0-0 in the league after their home draw against Liverpool. The stalemate at Molineux was the 17th goalless draw in the Premier League this season, already more than last season (16) and the season before (11). The topic was brought into focus on New Year’s Day, when three of the four games played ended goalless.
Before we get too carried away, it’s important to note that the last two seasons featured the fewest goalless draws in Premier League history. So we are not saying there are more goalless draws than ever before, just that the recent trend of there being fewer 0-0s appears to be a thing of the past.
The Premier League season with the most 0-0 draws was the 1998-99 campaign, when there were a remarkable 49 goalless games, making up 12.9% of all matches that season. That was largely an outlier, though. Since then, there have only been two seasons with at least 40 goalless draws, and none since 2008-09 (42).
Goalless draws 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 this season (four each). In fact, both have already had more goalless draws this season than in the whole of last season (Palace three, Newcastle one). Only Manchester United, Fulham and West Ham are yet to draw 0-0 in the league this season.
So why are goalless draws on the rise in the Premier League this season? One obvious reason is the reduction in goals. There have been 603 goals in 220 games, an average of 2.7 goals per game. That’s the 13th most in a Premier League campaign, so we’re not exactly starved of goals, but we are coming off the two highest-scoring seasons since the competition began.
There were an incredible 1,246 goals in the 2023-24 campaign, the most in the competition’s history at an average of 3.3 per game. Last season had 1,115 goals – 2.9 per game, the second highest average in the Premier League era.
The fairly drastic change in playing style this season could also be a factor. Teams are 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 reducing the number of goals? There have been 24.4 shots per game this season, 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 pandemic.
In recent years teams have been more patient in attack, waiting for opportune moments to shoot rather than going for quantity over quality. That’s shown by the fact that the top 10 seasons for fewest shots have all come in the last 11 campaigns.
There have only been 8.2 shots on target per game this season, the fewest on record, which is quite the drop when you consider the 2023-24 campaign had the most (9.9 per game). The interesting thing to note is the type of shots that players are no longer taking. There have been plenty of shots from inside the box this season – 16.7 per game, the fourth highest since records began – but, for the first time on record, Premier League games are averaging fewer than eight shots from outside the box (7.8).
Teams are clearly determined to get as close as possible to goal, which is borne out by the fact they are still having a lot of touches in the opposition’s box. Teams are averaging 50.3 touches per game in the opposition’s box this season, the third most on record.
One other factor to consider is whether players are simply missing more chances. But the average shot conversion rate in 2025-26 stands at 11.2%, with only three campaigns on record having higher. So it seems that the rise in goalless draws is more to do with a lack of shots rather than their lack of quality.
In the 1950s, the 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, the former Manchester United and Celtic midfielder Paddy Crerand made a similar albeit more pessimistic observation: “If tacticians ever reached perfection, the result would be a 0-0 draw, and there would be no one there to see it.”
It seems as if the tacticians are having their way. After the significant increase in goals in recent years, coaches reacted and tried to work out ways of being more solid defensively. That has led to a change in playing styles. Football trends go in cycles. With goals down and goalless draws on the rise, perhaps coaches will decide they can gain an advantage by doing more work on their attacking output and these numbers will all start to go in the other direction.
Some football purists will argue that watching two teams cancel each other out is as fascinating as an eight-goal thriller. But, let’s face it – crazy rule suggestion aside – Piqué had a point. We all want to see goals. There’s nothing like watching a player larrup the ball into the net before knee-sliding in front of their fans. Seeing a defender block a shot before pumping his fists and roaring as if he has just scored an overhead kick in a World Cup final just doesn’t hit the same.
This is an article by Opta Analyst
