Over 2.5 goals rates by league: the real numbers, 2021-2026
Published
The most repeated number in goals betting is that over 2.5 lands “about half the time”. Measured on our own results database — more than 16,000 finished matches across ten competitions, from the 2021-22 season through 2025-26 and the 2021-2025 Brasileirão — that folk rule is true almost nowhere. Over 2.5 goals rates by league run from 44.3% to 64.0%, and the league you’re standing in decides which side of “half the time” you live on.
Every figure below was computed from that database on 31 August 2026 — no third-party stats, no rounding to the nearest anecdote — and the tables get recomputed each season.
The table: where the overs actually live
| Competition | Matches | Over 2.5 % | Avg. goals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Champions League* | 503 | 64.0% | 3.35 |
| Bundesliga | 1,530 | 61.0% | 3.18 |
| Eredivisie | 1,530 | 59.1% | 3.06 |
| Premier League | 1,900 | 56.6% | 2.93 |
| Ligue 1 | 1,678 | 53.5% | 2.82 |
| Primeira Liga | 1,530 | 51.0% | 2.65 |
| Serie A | 1,900 | 48.9% | 2.61 |
| Championship | 2,760 | 47.6% | 2.54 |
| La Liga | 1,900 | 47.4% | 2.59 |
| Brasileirão | 1,900 | 44.3% | 2.41 |
* Champions League data covers 2023-24 to 2025-26, the seasons in our dataset.
The spread is close to twenty percentage points. At the top, the Champions League has been getting more open every season in our sample — 58.4% in 2023-24, 65.6% in 2024-25, 66.1% in 2025-26. At the bottom, the Brasileirão has never reached 48% in any of its five seasons, though it has climbed a long way from an extraordinary 39.5% in 2021.
An identical price means different things in different leagues
Bookmakers know all of this, and the market’s goals lines broadly track it. The practical use of the table is not “bet overs in Germany” — it’s calibration. Odds of 1.90 on over 2.5 imply roughly 52.6% before margin. In the Eredivisie that implied number sits below the league’s five-season base rate; in La Liga it sits five points above it. The same ticket is a fundamentally different claim in each place. How to convert a goals probability into a fair price, and what the 2.5 line actually settles on, is covered in our over/under 2.5 goals guide.
Goals per game overstates the gap — the distribution decides
Notice La Liga and Serie A: more average goals than the Championship, nearly identical over-2.5 rates. And the Primeira Liga clears all three despite a modest 2.65 goals per game. Totals betting settles on whole-match counts, so what matters is how often a match reaches three, not how gaudy the mean is — a league can bank its goals in 4-0 blowouts and still leave the overs bettor poor the rest of the month. That’s why our model prices each fixture from a full scoreline distribution rather than an average, as explained on the over/under tips hub.
Stability check: how much do these rates move?
League character persists, but single seasons wobble hard. The Premier League spiked to 64.7% in 2023-24 — briefly out-scoring everyone — and gave most of it back within a season. The Eredivisie has ranged from 55.2% to 63.7% across five years. Treat a league base rate the way our model does: as the prior you start from, worth a handful of percentage points, before the two teams involved move the number a lot further.
For per-match probabilities updated before every kickoff, the over/under 2.5 tips page is the live surface, and every league page breaks this table down to club level — each side’s over-2.5 rate across its last 30 matches. The companion piece on BTTS rates by league shows why the both-teams-score ordering differs from this one, and the data page documents the dataset both are computed from.