Every September produces the same genre of article: a league is scoring more goals than last year, here are some overs to back. Most of them are wrong, because four or five rounds of football is not enough to tell a change from a coincidence.
So we tested it properly. Nine European leagues, this season's scoring against last season's completed campaign, with a significance test on every one. Three of the nine show a real change. Six do not. And in the three that do, bookmakers have already repriced - correctly, and in the right leagues - but only about a third of the way to what those leagues are currently doing.
For each league: goals per game, the share of matches with both teams scoring, and the share going over 2.5 goals, for 2026/27 so far against the full 2025/26 season. Then a two-proportion test on the rates and a Poisson-based test on goals per game, because the question is not is this number bigger but is this number bigger than chance would produce.
The sample sizes matter and we are showing them. Forty matches is a fortnight of noise. Eighty is starting to mean something.
Eredivisie - the strongest signal in Europe. 3.18 goals per game last season, 3.91 across 53 games this season. That clears significance comfortably (p=0.007), and the over 2.5 rate has gone from 61.7 percent to 79.2 percent (p=0.014). Both teams have scored in 73.6 percent of matches. It is the third season in a row the Dutch top flight has gone up: 3.02, then 3.18, now 3.91.
Serie A - the one everyone has noticed, and it holds. Italy averaged 2.43 goals per game last season, the lowest of the big five. This season it is 3.02 across 40 games (p=0.032). Both-teams-to-score has jumped from 45.3 percent to 60.0 percent. What makes this one interesting is that it is a reversal rather than a continuation: Serie A went down last season, from 2.56 to 2.43, before this. The underlying numbers are on the Serie A xG table.
Championship - the quiet one, and the most convincing shape. The goals-per-game rise is not significant on its own yet, but the over 2.5 rate is (p=0.034), and it is the only league here where all three numbers have climbed in each of the last three seasons:
| Season | Games | Goals/game | Both score | Over 2.5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024/25 | 557 | 2.45 | 50.3% | 44.7% |
| 2025/26 | 556 | 2.59 | 56.5% | 50.4% |
| 2026/27 | 81 | 2.86 | 66.7% | 63.0% |
A single season jumping is a story. Three consecutive seasons moving the same way, across more than 1,100 completed matches of baseline, is a trend. Form ordering is on the Championship power rankings.
This is the half that usually gets left out.
Bundesliga looks like the biggest story in Europe and is not - yet. 3.85 goals per game and an eye-watering 81.5 percent of games over 2.5. But that is 27 matches. Neither figure clears significance (p=0.106 and p=0.063). It may well become the story of the season. It is not evidence today, and anyone selling it to you as evidence is selling you 27 games.
The Premier League has gone the other way. 2.85 goals per game against 2.75, which sounds like a rise, but both-teams-to-score is down from 56.1 percent to 52.5 and the over 2.5 rate is down from 55.0 to 52.5. Nothing here is significant in either direction. England is having an ordinary season. See the Premier League xG table.
La Liga, Ligue 1, Liga Portugal and the Super Lig all sit within noise of last season. Ligue 1 is the only league in the sample actually scoring fewer goals, 2.75 against 2.83, and that is not significant either. Four leagues where the correct answer is that nothing has happened.
Correction, 15 September: this article first ran under the headline "the market has not moved" and argued that bookmakers had not repriced. That was wrong. We had compared current prices against the two season baselines without ever checking prices over time, which is not the same test. We have now run the real one, and it changes the conclusion. The original claim and the corrected numbers are both below.
The proper test is what a league's over 2.5 price was at the start of the season against what it is now. We took every match-level over 2.5 price bet365 has offered since 1 August and grouped it by the month the game was played in.
| League | August implied | September implied | Move | League is running at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bundesliga | 67.2% | 70.6% | +3.4pts | 81.5% |
| Serie A | 51.0% | 53.7% | +2.7pts | 57.5% |
| Eredivisie | 69.6% | 72.1% | +2.5pts | 79.2% |
| Championship | 53.3% | 55.2% | +1.9pts | 63.0% |
| Premier League | 58.1% | 59.7% | +1.6pts | 52.5% |
So the market has moved. It has also moved in a way that makes the trend more credible rather than less: the biggest repricing is in the leagues where the scoring change is real, and the individual price movements recorded over the last thirty days line up the same way. Across 1,333 recorded moves on Serie A overs the average price shortened 0.95 percent; the Eredivisie 0.81 percent across 995 moves; the Bundesliga 0.69; the Championship 0.34. The Premier League, which has no trend, shortened 0.13 percent across 1,452 moves - essentially nothing.
That is the finding, and it is a better one than we started with. Bookmakers are not asleep. They have repriced selectively and correctly, in the right leagues, in the right order of magnitude.
What survives is narrower and more honest: the repricing has closed perhaps a third of the gap. Serie A is priced at 53.7 percent while running at 57.5. The Championship is priced at 55.2 while running at 63.0. Whether the rest of that gap should close is a genuine question rather than an oversight - early-season rates regress hard and no league finishes at 79 percent overs, so pricing below the running rate is correct. The bet, if there is one, is that the market is regressing these leagues slightly too far towards last year.
The Premier League remains the control: prices there drifted back out again for October fixtures, to 56.7 percent, which is what a market with nothing to chase looks like.
We ran our own projections through the same test, and they do not come out of it well. Across those same fixtures our model implies 50.7 percent in Serie A, 51.4 in the Championship and 65.9 in the Eredivisie - within about a point of the bookmaker in all three.
So our model is not capturing this shift either. It is anchored to the same historical baselines the market is. That is worth publishing rather than hiding, because it tells you what the model is good for: it is built to find mispriced individual matches, not to notice that an entire league has changed character. Those are different jobs, and this is the one it is not currently doing.
Not as a blanket instruction to back overs. Three specific things:
Every fixture on today's card, model number beside bookmaker number, is on the Acca Sheet and football predictions today. Our own daily slips, with a settled public ledger, are on the Daily Acca.
We will re-run this test every month. If the Bundesliga clears, we will say so; if Serie A regresses to its old baseline, we will say that too.
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18+. Please gamble responsibly - begambleaware.org. Scoring data from our own match database, correct to 15 September 2026. Odds correct at time of writing.