Do football streaks carry on? We checked 299,000 matches
A winning streak, an unbeaten run, seven matches in a row with both teams scoring: numbers like these open match previews and stats round-ups. On 298,621 league matches from 37 leagues we checked how often a streak continues in the next match, compared with the league average, with the team's form and with the bookmakers' odds. Result streaks say something, because they reflect a team's strength; goal streaks say almost nothing, and a run of draws says nothing at all. The odds already know all of this. We also looked separately at player streaks: a goal, or a goal or an assist, in consecutive matches.
Key takeaways
- After at least 6 straight wins, 57% of teams won their next match, against 37% of all league matches, although the same teams had won 77% of their matches that season.
- Goal streaks say almost nothing: after 6 or more matches with over 2.5 goals, the next one went over 2.5 in 57.5% of cases, against 55% in the same leagues and seasons.
- A run of draws lasts no longer than the league suggests: after 3–6 draws in a row the next match was a draw 26–28% of the time, the same as those leagues' average.
- Pinnacle closing odds for 57,000 matches already price streaks in, and on over/under 2.5 and winless runs they slightly overrate the streak carrying on, by 1–1.5 percentage points.
- Players who had scored in at least 3 matches in a row kept the streak going 31% of the time, when before the streak the same players scored in 27% of appearances, and a run of cards means nothing.
Where the numbers come from
- Matches: 298,621 league matches from 37 domestic leagues, from the 1992/93 season (the Premier League and the Championship from 1993/94) to 24 September 2026. League matches only, the result after 90 minutes, no walkovers.
- Streaks: we count them separately for each team in its league, match by match, across the break between seasons too. Only a season spent outside the league breaks a streak. For each match we take only the streak built from matches played before it.
- Benchmarks: the league average in the same season for teams playing at the same venue (home or away), and the team's form, meaning its record that season before the match.
- Odds: Pinnacle closing odds with the margin removed, for 57,131 matches from 2021–2026 (1X2 and over/under 2.5). We checked the conclusions on a second set of 124,767 matches with 1X2 odds.
Each match counts twice, once for the home side and once for the away side, so there are about 597,000 cases in all.
Winning and losing streaks reflect a team's strength
How the next match ended after a streak of a given length:
| streak before the match | all matches | after 3 | after 4 | after 5 | after 6 | after 8–9 | after 10 or more |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| wins (another win) | 37% | 44% | 48% | 51% | 54% | 60% | 65% |
| defeats (another defeat) | 37% | 43% | 45% | 49% | 50% | 56% | 64% |
| unbeaten (another match without defeat) | 63% | 64% | 66% | 68% | 70% | 73% | 78% |
| winless (another match without a win) | 63% | 65% | 67% | 67% | 69% | 71% | 73% |
After 6 straight wins, 54% of teams won their next match (2,049 cases), although on average only 37% of a team's matches end in a win. So a streak means something: long winning streaks usually belong to strong teams, and strong teams stay strong. In the same way, long losing streaks belong to weak teams.
But a streak inflates the picture of a team. Teams on a run of at least 6 wins had won 77% of their matches that season, and 57% of them won the next one (4,775 cases). Recent results are strength plus luck, and luck does not carry over to the next match. That is regression to the mean, the same effect behind the myth of late goals. A team's strength is better measured by club Elo ratings, which count hundreds of matches and the strength of the opponents, not just the latest run. Even once we know the league average and the team's form, the length of the streak adds very little to the forecast.
Goal streaks: over 2.5, under and BTTS are almost noise
Goal streaks look like a team trait, but the next match differs little from the league average:
A 6-match over 2.5 streak lifts the next match barely 2 percentage points above that league's average, and a BTTS streak by 1 point. The number of goals in a single match depends on how well both teams attack and defend, and beyond that largely on chance. Goal streaks come about mainly because the events are common: over 2.5 is roughly every other match, so six in a row happens somewhere in Europe all the time.
Our separate test on 6 Premier League seasons reached the same conclusion: a team's over 2.5 and BTTS rates in the first half of a season did not predict the second half at all. Corner and card rates did hold up.
Clean sheets and matches without scoring
A single team's streaks say more than streaks of match goals. After at least 6 matches in a row without conceding, the next one was also a clean sheet in 42.6% of cases, against 29.5% on average in those leagues. After 6 or more matches without scoring, the team also failed to score in the next one in 36.4% of cases, against 28.8% on average. These streaks are rare, though: the whole database has 735 and 484 of them among about 597,000 cases.
A run of draws does not mean a draw is "in the air"
After 3 draws in a row the next match was a draw 26.8% of the time, after 4 it was 28.3%, after 5 25.6% and after 6 26.0%. The same leagues averaged 27–28% draws (how often draws come up in each league and in which matches is in our football draw statistics). So a run of draws says nothing about the next match, and after the longer, rarer runs there were even fewer draws than average. The opposite belief, that after a long run without a draw one is "due", is the gambler's fallacy, which we tested on the draw progression system.
Do bookmakers' odds account for streaks?
Yes. The chance implied by the odds rises with the length of the streak, just as the actual results do:
| streak of 6+ matches | matches with odds | chance from odds | actual |
|---|---|---|---|
| wins (another win) | 1,052 | 57.8% | 58.3% |
| over 2.5 (another over) | 2,639 | 57.8% | 56.7% |
| under 2.5 (another under) | 2,038 | 57.0% | 56.7% |
We found no streak length or market where the odds were clearly wrong. If anything, on over/under 2.5 and winless runs the odds slightly overrate the streak carrying on, by 1–1.5 percentage points for streaks of 6 or more matches, and they do so in both data sets. That is less than the margin most bookmakers build into their odds, so betting against a streak is no way to make money. Nor did it help when both teams had a streak in the same direction: when both were on a BTTS run of 4 or more matches, both teams scored in 52.9% of 465 matches, against 56.8% implied by the odds.
We tested the same thing earlier, in our article on betting psychology, on a different data set: teams on 5 or more straight wins won 56.4% of their matches, against 56.7% according to the odds.
Why there are so many eye-catching streaks
The 37 leagues play 51 matches a day on average. Counting streaks of 6 or more matches across 14 markets (results, match goals, team goals), that makes about 141 active streaks a day, in 85% of matches. Three quarters of them are streaks of over 1.5, scoring a goal, a goal in the first half, unbeaten and winless runs, which are events that happen often anyway.
The share of a team's matches that start with a streak of 6 or more:
So six over 1.5 matches in a row is nothing special, while six straight wins is dozens of times rarer. When you look through hundreds of teams and a dozen or so markets at once, some streak always looks impressive, even when there is nothing behind it.
Player scoring streaks
Players have streaks too: a striker who has scored in five matches in a row, or a midfielder who has scored or assisted in each of his last games. We checked them on players' league appearances from 2019–2026. A streak runs over a player's consecutive appearances in one league, so a match he did not play does not break it. Penalties count; own goals do not.
| streak before the match | cases | went on | player before the streak |
|---|---|---|---|
| goal, at least 3 matches | 5,181 | 31% | 27% |
| goal, at least 5 matches | 576 | 39% | 35% |
| goal or assist, at least 3 matches | 11,588 | 36% | 32% |
| card, at least 3 matches | 5,079 | 18% | 20% |
The last column shows how often the same players scored (or scored or assisted, or were booked) in their 30 appearances before the streak began. A scoring streak adds about 4 percentage points to that, because it often belongs to a player in form or in a new role in the team. That is still less than the streak itself suggests: over their last 30 appearances including the streak, players with at least 3 matches with a goal had scored in 37% of matches, and 31% of them scored in the next one. A run of cards says nothing, because after three matches with a card players were booked in the next one less often than usual. We do not yet have goalscorer odds over a long enough period to check whether bookmakers price these streaks well.
How SharkBetz shows streaks
We show streaks on two pages: Team streaks and Player scoring streaks. The team streaks page gathers the active streaks before the league matches of today, tomorrow and the day after, in kick-off order. We show only streaks from the length in the last column of the table above (draws from 4), leaving out over 1.5 and scoring a goal. Each streak comes with:
- Went on: a bar showing how often a streak of this length carried on in the next match in this article's data,
- the tick on the bar: how often the same happened in this league this season to teams playing at the same venue, so you can see at once whether the streak runs above the league,
- Model: our model's chance that the streak carries on in this match,
- Record: the longest such streak in this league since our data begins.
Below the list are the streaks settled yesterday and today: which survived and which ended. A streak describes the past. The forecast is the chance from the model or the odds, not the streak itself. The player streaks page lists goal streaks and goal-or-assist streaks of 3 matches or more, before the matches of the same three days. Each one shows how many goals (and assists) the player has in the streak, how often a streak of that length carried on and how often the player has scored this season. We do not show card streaks, because the table above shows they mean nothing. We walk through both pages step by step, on real streaks, in our guide on how to read team and player streaks.
The longest streaks in the Premier League and the Championship
A few records from our data:
| league (data from) | streak | record |
|---|---|---|
| Premier League (1993/94) | unbeaten | 49 matches, Arsenal (2003–2004) |
| Premier League (1993/94) | wins | 18 matches, Manchester City (2017), matched by Liverpool (2019–2020) |
| Premier League (1993/94) | winless | 32 matches, Derby County (2007–2008) |
| Premier League (1993/94) | scoring | 55 matches, Arsenal (2001–2002) |
| Championship (1993/94) | unbeaten | 33 matches, Reading (2005–2006), matched by Burnley (2024–2025) |
| Championship (1993/94) | winless | 39 matches, Sheffield Wednesday (2025–2026) |
| Championship (1993/94) | scoring | 31 matches, Leicester City (2013–2014), matched by QPR (2021) |
The Premier League records match the league's well-known history, which speaks well for the data. Final tables season by season, with the points it took to stay up and to win the title, are in our article on how many points it takes to stay up. Our data for both leagues starts in 1993/94, so older streaks are not in it; for the Championship it includes the seasons up to 2003/04, when England's second tier was still called the First Division.
Summary
A streak describes what has already happened; it is not a preview of the next match. Winning, losing and clean-sheet streaks help you spot a strong or a weak team, but Elo ratings, a model and the odds measure the same strength better and more precisely. Goal, BTTS and draw streaks are mostly the work of chance and of how many matches we look at at once. A player's scoring streak says a little more than his earlier record, but less than it seems to, and a run of cards says nothing. Before a streak talks you into a bet, check three things: how often a streak this long carried on, how often the same happens in this league and what chance the odds or a model give. If those numbers are close together, the streak tells you nothing the odds do not already know.
FAQ
Does a winning streak make another win more likely?
A little, because the streak reflects the team's strength. After 6 straight wins, 54% of teams won their next match, while on average a team wins 37% of its matches. But the same teams had won 77% of their matches that season, so their recent record inflates the picture. Bookmakers' odds take this into account.
Is it worth betting against a streak?
There is no easy edge here. On over/under 2.5 and winless runs the odds slightly overrate the streak carrying on, by 1–1.5 percentage points for streaks of 6 or more matches. That is less than the margin most bookmakers charge, so it is not enough to make a profit.
Do BTTS and over 2.5 streaks mean anything?
Almost nothing. After 6 or more matches with over 2.5 goals, the next one went over 2.5 in 57.5% of cases, against 55.3% on average in the same leagues. After a BTTS run of that length, both teams scored in 56.3% of matches, against 55.3% on average.
Is a draw more likely after a run of draws?
No. After 3–6 draws in a row the next match was a draw 26–28% of the time, the same as the average in those leagues. After longer runs there were even fewer draws.
Do player scoring streaks carry on?
More often than an average appearance, but less often than it seems. After scoring in at least 3 matches in a row, a player scored in the next match 31% of the time, having scored in 27% of his 30 appearances before the streak. After a goal-or-assist run of 3 matches it is 36% against 32%.
How long does a streak have to be to be really rare?
It depends on the market. The rarest 2% start at 4 clean sheets, 5 wins or defeats, 6 matches under 2.5, 7 over 2.5 or BTTS, 10 without a win and 12 unbeaten. A run of 6 over 1.5 matches starts 18% of a team's matches, so it is nothing exceptional.