Is the game getting more exciting?
Football (soccer) fans like to see exciting matches. Draws are boring but wins or losses are interesting; fans want to see teams give their all on the pitch. Which begs the question, is the game getting more or less thrilling over time? One way to answer this question is to look at fraction of matches in a league that end in a draw. The most boring extreme is every game is a draw (draw fraction = 1). The most engaging extreme is that every game ends in a win/loss (draw fraction = 0). How does the proportion of drawn games change over time?
Draws by league and by season
From multiple sources, I put together a file containing all English national league games from the foundation of the league system in 1888 to the end of the 2024-2025 season. The different leagues started in different seasons, with the National League (tier 5) being the most recent. The top tier (tier 1) is currently called the Premier League, though, like the other leagues, it has undergone a number of confusing name changes.
From this data set, I calculated the fraction of all matches in a season and a league that ended in a draw. I also calculated the standard deviations so you can get a sense of the spread of the data. (Because the standard deviation values aren’t close to 0 or 1, I don’t need to use the Wilson Score Interval approach here, the “usual” way of calculating the standard deviation or standard error of a proportion is good enough.)
This chart shows the fraction of draws by league by season. The salmon-colored blocks are World War I and World War II. I’ll explain the blue lines later. The chart is interactive; click on the legend to turn the leagues off and on.
The standard deviation makes this chart hard to understand, so I’ve re-drawn the chart without it (below). Again, it’s interactive.
Let’s look at the top tier (tier 1 – currently, the Premier League). The fraction of draws started off low (around 0.167 in 1888) increasing up to the start of the First World War (0.274 in 1914). Things were more or less stable in the interwar period and the immediate post-war years. In 1968, the draw fraction shot up to 0.303, remained more or less steady, before starting a slow decline after 1993 (0.216 in 2023). The other leagues show a similar pattern, except they show no decline post 1993. How do we explain what’s going on?
Are rule changes the cause?
Let’s start by looking at significant rule changes in the game. The blue lines represent the first season significant rule changes were introduced:
- In 1968, clubs were allowed to make substitutions for any reason (rather than just replace injured players).
- In 1981, the points system was changed from 2 for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss, to 3 for a win, 1 for a draw, and 0 for a loss. The thinking here was that this would encourage clubs to be more risk taking and go for a win when them might otherwise accept a draw.
- Of course, in 1993, the Premier League was founded.
You can judge for yourself the impact of the 1968 and 1981 changes.
The foundation of the Premier League (the new top tier) marks the start of a decline in the draw fraction for the top tier only; none of the other leagues show a similar sustained drop. The question is, why?
More or less equal?
There are at least two reasons why the fraction of draws in a league might change:
- The clubs are becoming more (less) equal. If all the teams in a league were equally skilled, we might expect every match to be a draw.
- The style of play changes so that wins/losses become more prevalent than draws. The clubs could still be equally skilled though; in the case of equally matched clubs, they might go from drawing all games, to winning and losing in equal measure.
For the Premier League case, we have two competing explanations for why the draw fraction changed: unequal clubs vs. playing style. Fortunately, there is a way of analyzing the data for evidence supporting one of these explanations.
If all clubs are equal, then the fraction of matches each team wins will be about the same for all clubs. If clubs are very unequal, some clubs will win way more matches than others, so the win fraction for the top performing clubs will be higher than the win fraction for the low performing clubs. In other words, equality means little variance in the win fraction and inequality means high variance in the win variance.
For each league tier and each season, I calculated the standard deviation of the win fraction (which is the square root of the variance). The chart below shows the results. Bear in mind, the lower the standard deviation win fraction, the more equal the teams are, the higher it is, the less equal the teams are.
Prior to 1914, tier 1 and tier 2 show the same trend, a decline in win fraction standard deviation, suggesting the leagues are becoming more equal. Post-World War II, tiers 2, 3, 4 and 5 show no change over time with a low win fraction standard deviation, again suggesting equally matched teams. The Premier League is different, it shows an increasing win fraction over time, implying this league is becoming less and less equal; the difference between the winners and losers is getting bigger.
To be clear, these results suggest that the cause of the Premier League declining draw fraction is not due to a change in the style of play, it’s due to the league tier becoming more unequal.
Supporting evidence
If you’re a football fan, inequality in the Premier League comes as no surprise. There’s been a lot of discussion about the Premier League having a league-within-a-league of top clubs (currently Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea, and Arsenal). A few years ago, the top clubs in Europe talked about forming a breakaway European super-league which lends credence to the idea that top clubs really are different. On the flip side, it’s also true that most clubs that get promoted into the league get relegated soon after (for example, Luton).
Money might be the cause, but the picture is more complicated than it seems.
A Deloitte analysis [https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/services/consulting/research/annual-review-of-football-finance-premier-league-clubs.html] for the 2023-2024 season shows Manchester City had a revenue of £719 million, compared to Luton's £132 million. Any guesses how these teams finished the season? The drop from most revenue to least isn't linear either.
For the same 2023-2024 season, the entire English Championship League (tier 2) was £958 million, which is less than the revenue from just the top two Premiership clubs. Championship club revenue is also not evenly distributed, showing the same kind "top heavy" pattern the Premier League shows (see [https://swissramble.substack.com/p/english-clubs-by-revenue-grouping] for a chart). If the Championship also has unequal revenue distributions, why doesn't it show the same win fraction standard deviation as the Premier League? I'm not sure, but I can offer a couple of ideas. Money buys talent, but maybe it isn't even. For example, a £100 million player maybe twice as good as a £50 million player, but a £10 million player might only be 1.5 times as good as a £5 million player (there are many more £5 million players than there are £100 million players). This would mean lower leagues become more equitable because the money difference matters less as the amount of money goes down.
The bottom line is, the Premier League is becoming more winner-takes-all while the lower leagues are more equitable.
What does this mean?
It may well be true that draws are boring, but having dominant teams is also boring. If you can reliably predict who will win a match, it’s not as interesting. If your team always wins, why do you care?
Inequality has implications for promotion and relegation. Inequality suggests there may be a revolving door of the same few clubs moving between the Premier League and the Championship. If newly promoted clubs mostly get relegated, that's pretty dull. If it's the "usual suspects" for promotion/relegation then things start to look the same season to season.
Given that the Premier League was founded over money sharing issues, it's hard to see any changes that would more equitably distribute money.
For the foreseeable future, we may have a very unequal Premier League with much more equal lower leagues.
Other football posts:
- G-O-A-L! Goals in English football - https://blog.engora.com/2025/07/g-o-l-goals-in-english-football.html
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