Understanding scoring trends around Europe - guide to the over/under market

The goals markets are some of the most popular for football punters

There are now so many options and possibilities that I might even assume they will eventually surpass the traditional game outcome markets.

Trying to figure the exact number of goals in a game, deal with handicaps, Asian handicaps, and even odd/even goals might offer some value away from the traditional markets.

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These markets are fun and in the majority of the cases, there are only two possible outcomes.

In this article, I will look at the scoring trends around European leagues as a guide to the goal’s markets. 

When dealing with the goals markets it is not enough to just read stats on particular teams or trust form.

As I have been trying to come up with a strategy for several years now, I came to the conclusion that Europe can generally be divided into high-scoring and low-scoring leagues. 

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These traits are based predominately on football culture, historical traditions, and player development ideas of local federations, academies, and coaches. 

It takes time to journey back a few years and consistently monitor numerous leagues for established trends when it comes to goals, but it is advisable if you want betting success.

For example, in certain countries, the second divisions are often used to test and develop younger players, who inevitably commit more defensive errors and goals in these divisions are more common.

This is kind of difficult to understand for English punters as the EFL Championship while obviously lower in quality than the Premiership is still considered a very strong second-tier league, which could see teams profit significantly if they win promotion.

You do get players out on loan and youngsters making their breaks but still, teams take things very seriously as the financial incentive is much bigger than that of the second division in Holland or Belgium for example.

I have always said in the past that the English equivalent of the second divisions in most other European countries is probably League One or even League Two in terms of pure football quality and philosophy.

That is proven by some transfers of players from teams battling to stay in the English Football League who make a pretty good transition to the top second division teams in most Central European leagues and even the top divisions in Eastern European countries.

For example, a player from one of the top Bulgarian teams, Levski Sofia, who captained that team in European games ended up considering a transfer to Coventry a good career move.

Back to the topic of goals, once you know the philosophy of certain leagues and teams, you could draw pretty solid conclusions as to how they have been developing in terms of goals over the years.

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Football culture might be mostly about money nowadays, but the charm of games ending 4:4 or 6:3 is still there, and you could get a fair number of those around the continent.  

It would be foolish to write this blog and discuss football philosophies and culture without actually giving my readers the start-up package of statistics and trends when it comes to overs and unders.

I did mention Holland and Belgium already and did the comparison with English football, but the pure stats are what really matters.

I like to separate leagues into two groups of categories when it comes to the over/under data.

One is league significance and market accessibility, and the other is over and under 60% of games with more than 2.5 goals.

The first category basically helps me take out leagues that are so obscure that you might not even find them with all bookies and there is little point in researching them much.

Armenia and Malta leagues have high over 2.5 goal matches, but many bookies do not cover these countries.

The other category has to do with a simple division of leagues into groups of those where more than 55% of the games are over and the rest.

Now, since the odds on overs/unders are usually in the region of 1.45 to 3.00 with the big value being on games with an incredibly low chance of going the other way to the bookie's valuation,

It is only logical to try and avoid risking a lot on low-value leagues or simply try to beat the bookies by figuring which game will be against the trend.

Again, to name a country, the Dutch leagues have seen a history of overs that keeps repeating itself due to the aforementioned football psychology of developing youngsters at the expense of defensive efficiency.

Just a couple of weeks ago all games in a single round in that league were overs and you would have guessed that all these overs were at odds of 1.50 at most.

I have only used the major European Leagues that the best betting sites cover. 

Obviously, if you can find that 39% of unders, you will be getting value in the region of 2.40 to 3.00 for an under, which is indeed a lot.

I have taken the time to come up with an upto date for the 2024/25 season table with a quarter of games played.