Goals are up in the Premier League, and with them a sense that the division has become more open. The scoring rate has risen from 2.75 goals per game last season to 2.82 so far in 2026-27 — a modest increase on the surface, but one that could easily widen. In four of the past five seasons the goals-per-game rate was at least 0.21 higher across the final 330 matches than it was over the first 50. Should 2026-27 follow the same pattern, it would become the second highest scoring campaign in the Premier League era.
What makes the early surge unusual is its timing. Goals are supposed to be harder to come by at this stage of a season, when teams are fresher and better organised, before the December fixture pile-up and the demands of European football drain legs. The evidence of that extra intensity is visible in the running data: every club is averaging more distance per match than it did in 2025-26, and Liverpool sit bottom of the division for that metric while still covering more ground than any side managed across the whole of last season.
Part of the explanation may lie in how much of the football is now played in transition. The Premier League averaged the fewest Opta-defined fast-break shots of Europe’s big five leagues in 2025-26, at 1.75 per game, a figure that has climbed to 2.08 — a rate that would have ranked second only to the Bundesliga (2.26) last season. Chelsea, on 2.2 fast-break shots per game, and Bournemouth, on 1.6, are among the top five for the metric, while Matthias Jaissle’s Newcastle sit joint-seventh on 1.0. The uplift is not entirely the work of Xabi Alonso and Marco Rose arriving in English football, but the influence of German football appears to be having a mild effect.
Shooting and scoring from outside the penalty box has also risen. Brighton are the extreme case, already just two goals short of the six long-range goals they managed last season: they took a 2-0 lead against Arsenal on Saturday with strikes from distance, while Lewis Dunk nominated himself for goal of the season from far outside the box at Coventry, where Yasin Ayari also scored from beyond the 18-yard line. Something has to give for that rise to happen, and close-range goals have declined in 2026-27.
The dip in goals from inside the six-yard box appears tied to a fall in set-piece strikes. Nine teams have yet to score from a set piece — the champions among them — and another two clubs have only one such goal. Premier League matches are actually averaging more shots from set plays than last season, 8.2 against 7.8, yet the expected goal value of those chances has dropped from 0.76 to 0.72. The margins are small, but together they lower the average quality of the chances teams are creating, and set-piece goals have fallen from 0.71 per game to 0.56 as a consequence.
The season is only just under way, and these trends may yet settle. They could be the product of a campaign beginning with more new managers than ever before, with dugout transition bringing uncertainty on the pitch and making it harder to know what to expect from newly appointed coaches. Few games are being settled early: 2-2 is the joint-most common scoreline, with six instances, and the first three of those involved clubs whose managers were both appointed in the summer. Five of the six saw either both teams lead or one side go ahead twice before conceding two equalisers. Big leads have rarely been squandered, but the proportion of drawn matches is up and wins by two or more goals are in decline. Teams are trading blows, attacking and countering, and running further as a result — though the wind could blow these numbers back towards last season’s figures soon enough.