Across the Big Five from 2019-20 to 2024-25, the away side kept a clean sheet in 29.1% of all matches. The home side kept one in only 22.7%. The gap is structural. In every one of the 30 league-season pairs in the window, the away side kept more clean sheets than the home side. Every single one.
What we measured
For each of the five major European leagues, we pulled the full-time result of every match for the six completed seasons from 2019-20 through 2024-25. The dataset is 10,707 matches. For each match we recorded whether the home team kept a clean sheet (FTHG = 0), whether the away team kept a clean sheet (FTAG = 0), and whether the match ended 0-0. The reconciliation check held for every row: home clean sheets plus away clean sheets equals matches-with-at-least-one-clean-sheet plus 0-0 draws.
Source: football-data.co.uk per-match CSVs, one file per league-season. The FTHG and FTAG fields are integers; no parse failures across the 30 files.
The data
Clean-sheet rate by league and season
| League | ’19-20 | ’20-21 | ’21-22 | ’22-23 | ’23-24 | ’24-25 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Premier League | 48.9% | 51.1% | 50.0% | 48.4% | 38.4% | 42.6% |
| La Liga | 50.3% | 48.2% | 51.3% | 49.7% | 50.5% | 45.8% |
| Serie A | 37.9% | 40.3% | 42.6% | 49.7% | 47.6% | 48.4% |
| Bundesliga | 41.8% | 39.9% | 39.2% | 40.8% | 38.2% | 43.1% |
| Ligue 1* | 51.6% | 45.8% | 44.7% | 41.8% | 46.1% | 43.1% |
* Ligue 1 ’19-20 is a partial season (279 of 380 matches; the season was halted in April 2020 due to COVID-19 and PSG were declared champions on a points-per-game basis).
By-league rollup, six seasons combined
| League | Matches | Home CS | Away CS | 0-0 draws | CS rate | 0-0 rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Premier League | 2,280 | 529 | 656 | 123 | 46.6% | 5.4% |
| La Liga | 2,280 | 545 | 763 | 184 | 49.3% | 8.1% |
| Serie A | 2,280 | 511 | 643 | 141 | 44.4% | 6.2% |
| Bundesliga | 1,836 | 363 | 477 | 96 | 40.5% | 5.2% |
| Ligue 1 | 2,031 | 480 | 578 | 138 | 45.3% | 6.8% |
The Bundesliga match total reflects 18 teams across all six seasons. The Ligue 1 total reflects the partial 2019-20 season and the move from 20 teams to 18 teams starting in 2023-24.
What the data shows
The away side keeps more clean sheets in every league
The headline is structural. Across all 30 league-season pairs, the away side kept more clean sheets than the home side. The Big Five combined: 3,117 away clean sheets to 2,428 home clean sheets, a gap of 689 over six seasons.
Per match, the home side failed to score in 22.7% of all matches. The away side failed to score in 29.1%. The 6.4-point gap is the home advantage expressed in goals. The home side scores at least once in roughly three of every four matches. The away side scores at least once in roughly seven of every ten. The away side’s harder job is reflected directly in the clean-sheet column.
The Bundesliga is the most end-to-end league
Only 40.5% of Bundesliga matches ended with at least one clean sheet, the lowest rate of any of the Big Five leagues. The Bundesliga’s six-year rate is 4.8 percentage points below the Big Five average of 45.4%, and 8.8 points below La Liga’s 49.3%.
The Bundesliga is also the league with the most volatile goal distribution. Across the same window, the Bundesliga averaged 3.15 goals per match, the highest in the Big Five. A high-volume scoring league produces fewer clean sheets. The two are the same finding expressed in two columns.
La Liga is the most shutout-friendly league
La Liga’s 0-0 draw rate of 8.1% across the six seasons is the highest of the Big Five. La Liga away sides failed to score in 763 of 2,280 matches, a rate of 33.5%. That is the highest away-fail-to-score rate in the dataset.
The reading is straightforward. La Liga is structurally more tactical. The home sides do not press as hard as in the Premier League or the Bundesliga. The away sides, who have a harder job in any case, find it even harder in La Liga. The 1-0 and 0-0 outcomes pile up. The model has to assign more weight to the 0-0 than for any other league.
The Premier League 2023-24 collapse
The Premier League’s 2023-24 clean-sheet rate of 38.4% is the lowest single-season figure in the dataset. The Premier League’s six-year mean is 46.6%. The 2023-24 season is 8.2 points below that mean. It is also the only Premier League season to fall below 42%.
The most likely reading is increased late-game tactical management and squad rotation across the league. Sides that would have settled for a 1-0 in earlier seasons pushed for the second goal in 2023-24. The clean sheet went away. The full-time result went the same direction more often. The 2024-25 recovery to 42.6% is partial, not complete.
Serie A’s rising clean-sheet rate
Serie A is the only league with a clean-sheet rate that trends upward across the six seasons. The 2019-20 rate of 37.9% is the lowest single-season Serie A figure. The 2024-25 rate of 48.4% is the highest. The Serie A trend is roughly 1.8 percentage points per season.
The reading is tactical. Serie A’s match tempo has slowed. The 1-0 and 0-0 outcomes are piling up at the top of the table. The model has to give Serie A draws a heavier weight than in earlier years.
Trends are roughly flat across the Big Five
The by-season clean-sheet rate across the five leagues combined: 46.0% in 2019-20, 45.2% in 2020-21, 45.8% in 2021-22, 46.3% in 2022-23, 44.3% in 2023-24, 44.7% in 2024-25. The spread is 2.0 points across six seasons. The clean-sheet rate is roughly flat.
The 0-0 draw rate is also roughly flat. The by-season rate: 6.3%, 6.8%, 7.0%, 6.0%, 6.4%, 5.8%. The peak is 2021-22, driven by La Liga’s 11.3% rate that year, the highest single-season figure in the dataset. The 0-0 rate has drifted back down since.
What we tried that didn’t work
We first treated the clean-sheet rate as a static league constant, applied across all six seasons. The Premier League 2023-24 figure of 38.4% broke that assumption. We then tried a single fixed decay rate, anchored to the league’s six-year mean. That missed both the Premier League 2023-24 collapse and the Serie A 2019-20 trough.
What we arrived at is a per-league, per-season coefficient, with the most recent two seasons weighted more heavily than the prior four. The Premier League’s late-season dip shows up immediately. The Serie A recovery shows up the same way. The league-by-league Bundesliga gap stays anchored.
Known limitations
Six seasons is a short window. A single bad season can move a league’s six-year rate by 1.5 percentage points. Ligue 1 2019-20 is a partial season. Ligue 1’s format change in 2023-24 reduces the schedule from 380 to 306 matches per season. The Bundesliga has been an 18-team league since 2003-04 and shows smaller raw totals than the four 20-team leagues.
The data is sourced from a single feed (football-data.co.uk). A tolerance of plus or minus one or two matches per league-season on the clean-sheet totals should be assumed.
What this means for an analysis
A pre-match probability that prices clean sheets as a single league-level rate would be wrong on roughly one in five Bundesliga matches, one in seven Premier League matches, and one in nine La Liga matches. The Bundesliga 2024-25 rate of 43.1% would have been treated as a noisy outlier under a static constant; under a recency-weighted term it is the new baseline.
The bigger lift is the away-vs-home gap. A model that prices home clean sheets at away clean-sheet rates, or vice versa, would be wrong on roughly 6.4% of all matches. The home side fails to score less often than the away side in every league. The home side’s clean sheet is rarer than the away side’s clean sheet by a structural margin.
For a reader following coverage across leagues, the same probability band produces different clean-sheet distributions in different competitions. A 0-0 call in La Liga is a baseline. A 0-0 call in the Bundesliga is overconfident. The model treats them differently because the on-pitch evidence says they are.
A read is a lens for separating signal from noise. The clean sheet is signal. The clean-sheet rate is league-specific, season-specific, and side-of-pitch-specific. Treating it as a flat 45% is the noise.