The Premier League, the Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and La Liga: they may be considered the top five leagues in the world, but how different is the football that’s played in them? We delved into the numbers…
Throughout the history of football, certain styles of play or philosophies have become associated with specific countries. The examples are plentiful, but among the most famous would be the care-free jogo bonito state of mind embraced by Brazilians, ‘Total Football’ in the Netherlands, catenaccio in Italy and tiki-taka in Spain.
While generally most closely linked to individual teams or managers, they’ve helped create perceptions of the broader football landscape in those countries – fairly or not. For instance, while you wouldn’t have necessarily said any other club rivalled Barcelona’s brand of passing football during Pep Guardiola’s time in charge, it’s fair to say Spanish football around that time probably benefited simply through association.
Furthermore, La Liga was seen by many as the home of passing football, though we can reveal that only once since 2006-07 has Spain’s top tier averaged the most passes per game over a full season among Europe’s top five leagues.
Similarly, Italy has – rightly or wrongly – never really been able to shake the association with defensive football, and over the past decade or so, Germany has become renowned as the home of gegenpressing.
Although specific perceptions might remain for some countries/leagues, times change and new styles become fashionable. So, how different is the beautiful game across the top five leagues?
In Possession
Of course, it’s important to mention from the outset that, firstly, there’s no “right” way to play football, and secondly, there are so many different facets of the game to look at when analysing styles of football.
That being said, how teams operate when they’re in possession is one of the main identifiers and core principles of most philosophies.
We can look at a metric called sequences to determine how teams work with the ball; a sequence is simply a passage of play belonging to one team that ends once the ball is lost. In these sequences, we can see how many passes teams make and how quickly they progress the ball up the field.
The graphic below compares the averages of teams’ in-possession metrics from across the top five leagues since the start of the 2022-23 season, with each campaign in that time plotted.
As you can see, the Premier League and Serie A fit closest with the ‘slow and intricate’ label in 2024-25, suggesting there’s a much greater concentration of teams who look to be considered and patient on the ball in the English and Italian top flights compared to Spain, Germany and France.
Interestingly, every single one of the top five leagues has moved closer to the bottom-right of the graphic as the years progress – Serie A deserves a special mention, though, with possession habits there seemingly very similar to the Premier League, but even more considered given the increased average passes per sequence.
This is notable because there appears to have been quite a significant shift in that regard in the past couple of years, and something similar has occurred in Germany, where it would seem there’s less of an emphasis on fast and direct forays forward than in the two seasons prior.
We can also look at the data on a club-by-club level this season. What it tells us – if we didn’t already know! – is many of the top clubs favour the more patient approach when on the ball, with “control” seen as something of a Holy Grail in football at the moment.
Nevertheless, it’s not just Champions League hopefuls and title challengers such as Manchester City, Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich trying to keep the ball these days; there are a few exceptions to the rule. Serie A strugglers Monza stick out down near the bottom-right corner of the graphic below, as do Girona (granted, they did qualify for the Champions League this season against all odds) and Southampton, the latter of whom have attracted plenty of attention for their attempts to play a possession-based style in their first campaign back in the Premier League.
Playing out from the back is a major part of possession football. Such a mentality emphasises the importance of retaining possession and making your way up the pitch gradually as opposed to punting the ball up the field in the hope your striker can somehow make something of it despite being crowded by two centre-backs and a defensive midfielder.
Undoubtedly a rule change by law-makers the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in 2019 has helped, with defenders since allowed to be within their own penalty area when a goal-kick is taken.
But passing out from the back was already on the rise. The graphs below chart the increase in successful passes played in teams’ own halves per game since 2006-07; each of the top five leagues has seen at least a 47% increase on a per-game basis over that time, while the Premier League’s has gone up by 65.2%.
It’s on the rise everywhere, but the difference in this regard in England’s top flight is truly remarkable.
The Real Length of a Football Match
‘Ball-in-play’ time has become quite an influential and important metric over the past few years. It’s helped shine a light on how much time is actually lost in an average football match, thus bringing into focus how fans arguably aren’t getting maximum value and hinting that entertainment levels could be higher.
This has undoubtedly impacted refereeing directives at the top of the game, too. At the 2022 FIFA World Cup, it was decided that additional time at the ends of halves would more accurately reflect the real amount of time lost to stoppages in games, and this approach has been embraced more widely at club level since – although certainly not across the board.
So, for just how long is the ball in play across the top leagues in Europe?
Going back to the start of the 2022-23 season, games in Ligue 1 have seen the ball in play for 56 minutes and 35 seconds on average – the longest of the top five leagues. While that’s only two seconds more than the Premier League (56:33), games in England are going on for longer, meaning Ligue 1 fixtures see actual football for a greater proportion of match time (58%).
The ball is in play for 56.5% of Premier League matches, which also puts it just behind the Bundesliga (56.8%) when looking at the metric as a proportion of match time. La Liga is quite comfortably bottom of the pile for both total time the ball is in play and as a proportion of match time.
Fans in Spain see on average 36 seconds less football than those in Italy, while viewers of the Premier League and Bundesliga get to enjoy (well, not always, you know what we mean) more than an additional two minutes of action than those watching La Liga.
That might not sound like a lot, but if you extrapolate the Premier League’s additional 2:06 on average over a whole season, fans are getting extra football to the tune of about 80 minutes – or not far off a full match.
Attacking Output
Goals are probably the best or most universally accepted barometer of entertainment in football. Sure, there are other elements as well, but if someone said a certain league was the best or their favourite on the basis of it having the most goals, it would stand to reason, really.
However, we aren’t going to just look at goals here. Expected goals (xG) also give us a good idea of the amount of high-quality chances being created by teams, and that in itself should be seen as a decent way of measuring entertainment.
The graphic below highlights some stark differences across the top five leagues over the past two-and-a-bit years.
La Liga seasons of 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25 are clustered towards the bottom left, indicating they’re all at the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to goals per game and xG per game.
While there’s obviously plenty of time for things to change this season, at 2.49 goals per game, La Liga 2024-25 is on course to have the fewest goals average of any of the top five leagues over the period in question.
Since 2006-07, there have only been 10 instances of one of the top five leagues averaging fewer goals over a full campaign. In fact, there’s a real danger we could see a record low for La Liga over that time as this season is only slightly ahead of the 2.48 set in 2019-20 and 2006-07.
At the other end of the scale, the Bundesliga is averaging 3.48 goals per game this season. Going back to 2006-07, the highest goals-per-game average for any of the top five leagues is 3.28 (Premier League 2023-24), so the German top flight is on course to smash that record. The same can be said of the 3.2 xG being recorded per game in Germany this term.
Ligue 1 has seen a real glut of goals during the early weeks of this season, too. With 3.1 per game, it will demolish the league’s previous high of 2.81 (in 2021-22 and 2022-23) if French clubs carry on scoring at their current rate.
Of course, you can’t score if you don’t shoot (generally speaking, anyway). That presumably goes some way to explaining La Liga’s underwhelming return of goals, with the 24.0 shots per game in Spain’s top tier this season considerably less than the other top leagues – they’re all beyond 26, while the Bundesliga is averaging 27.4 each match.
So, it’s fair to say that if you want entertainment in the shape of goals, the Bundesliga is the place to be at the moment.
And that leads us nicely on to…
Shooting Habits
As we’ve seen there is undoubtedly a trend across all of the top five leagues that’s seeing many teams become more considered and intricate in their possession game, but this isn’t leading to a dearth of fast breaks.
Fast breaks are defined as instances of quickly turning defence into attack after winning the ball in your own half, and shot-ending fast breaks are interestingly being seen at quite a high frequency this season across Europe.
While total fast breaks might not be nearing record highs, such situations that yield shots are in some cases. In the Bundesliga, we’re seeing 2.1 shots per game from fast breaks, which if maintained over the full season would be a new high across the top five leagues as far back as Opta has this data (since 2010-11).
Ligue 1 (1.86) and the Premier League (1.77) are also on track to set their own new highs for a single campaign in 2024-25, while 1.66 per game would be the second-highest average on record for La Liga (behind 1.99 in 2010-11). Serie A is a little way back (1.5), though that’d still be the third most on record for shot-ending fast breaks per game in Italy’s top tier.
One aspect around shooting that has developed almost in unison across the top five leagues over the years is the increase in the proportion of shots taken from inside the penalty area.
Opta has this data for all of the competitions in question going back as far as 2006-07. Back then, the average for the top five leagues was 51.4% of shots being taken from inside the penalty area. This season, the average is 66.4%. We’re just a few matchdays in, but it’s only slightly above the 65.4% average of 2023-24, suggesting this season’s small sample size isn’t a problem.
This has obviously had an impact on goals as well. Back in 2006-07, 81.9% were scored from inside the box, whereas in 2023-24 that was up to 88.4%.
It’s pretty clear that one of the primary causes for this is the greater availability of data and increased influence of analytics as a result – essentially, the closer you are to goal, the more likely you are to score, and so there’s a greater emphasis on shooting inside the box.
There are also some signs that this could be influencing an increase in headed shots.
When looking at three-season averages for headed shots per game, all but one of the top five leagues had their lowest results around the mid-2010s; those particular competitions have all seen a gradual increase in these averages in the most recent three-season period.
The Premier League’s average of 4.1 headed shots per game is its most since 4.14 in 2011-12; Serie A’s 4.23 in 2024-25 has only been bettered once on record (4.24 in 2018-19); the Bundesliga is on track to average over 4.0 (4.19) for the seventh season in a row; while the 4.03 recorded in La Liga last term was only the second time it went over 4.0 since 2009-10.
Ligue 1 is the exception. It would seem that at no point in the past 18 seasons have the French been purveyors of lumping high balls into the box: 3.88 headed shots (2016-17) is its highest average on record, and it’s not been beyond 3.68 since.
For the most part, however, the increased emphasis on shooting closer to goal has had a direct influence on goalscoring figures.
In 2006-07 and 2007-08, the average shot conversion rates across the top five leagues were 9.47% and 9.77%. In 2022-23 and 2023-24, those were 11.1% and 11.01%, while the 12.72% and 12.52% conversion rates seen in the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 respectively this season have never been matched over a full season in the top five leagues (on record).
If there’s one competition where players tend to take their chances the most, it’s the Bundesliga. Over the past five seasons (including 2024-25), the average conversion rate in Germany’s top flight is 12.2% – the Premier League’s is 11.2%, Ligue 1’s is 11.6%, it’s 10.8% in Serie A and 10.7% in La Liga.
Defending From the Front
As alluded to before, Germany is seen by many as the spiritual home of gegenpressing, or counter-pressing, which involves instantly putting the opposition under pressure once you lose the ball, with the aim of winning it back as quickly as possible and springing forward to catch your opponents destabilised.
While the very act of putting pressure on an opponent has always been a part of football, its implementation as a formal and structured method of defending from the front has arguably only become widespread in the past 20 years or so.
An aspect of pressing in a broader sense that has been popularised as a result is the high turnover, which is simply winning the ball back from your opponents within 40 metres of their goal line.
High turnovers as a metric helps to demonstrate the effectiveness of teams who look to press their opponents high up the pitch, with the idea being that it’s easier to score the higher you win possession back.
Opta has high turnover data as far back as the 2014-15 season. Although that may not be that long ago, it’s still more than enough time to illustrate how a high press has taken on greater significance.
The average number of high turnovers recorded per game across the top five leagues back in 2014-15 was 11.3. That increased every season until 2022-23 when it dropped from 15.1 to 14.97 and then 14.72 last season. Despite those slight reductions, we are still looking at a considerable increase from just 10 years ago.
Furthermore, the average of 2.4 shot-ending high turnovers per match last season across the five competitions was the highest on record. The Premier League played a major role here, with its 2.8 shot-ending high turnovers per game being comfortably the most for a single league over one season since Opta records began.
In fact, if Germany is the original home of counter-pressing, then the Premier League has arguably become the adopted home of the high press, with matches over the past four seasons (including 2024-25) averaging 15.9 high turnovers. That figure is 14.9 in the Bundesliga, 14.7 in Ligue 1, 13.5 in Serie A and 14.2 in La Liga.
Premier League teams have also shown excellent efficiency in terms of turning those situations into opportunities as well. With 0.4 goal-ending high turnovers per game in the English top flight, we’re seeing teams capitalise at a greater frequency than ever before on record, whereas in Germany they’re leading to goals less than half as often (0.17 per game).
The Bundesliga has seen a decrease in high turnovers in general from 15.04 to 13.61 per game, though the data shows a similar backward step elsewhere: Serie A saw 12.76 per game last season and 11.74 in 2024-25, while La Liga has gone from 14.4 to 13.67.
Could it be that more teams are getting better at playing out from the back and therefore causing high turnovers to decrease in some leagues? Or are managers seeing a greater upside to being compact in midfield and winning the back deeper so as not to risk being caught in transition?
It could of course just be down to variance and perhaps numbers will spike across the rest of the season – either way, it’s one to watch.
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