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?
(User:Aloba, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
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?
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