Both teams to score: 13,071 settled Polymarket soccer matches, by league and by half

Of 13,071 settled markets since October 24, 2025, 54.4% resolved Yes, give or take 0.85 points. The competition moves that by about ten points either way: MLS and the Bundesliga run near 63%, Serie A and Argentina's Primera División under 47%. The calendar barely moves it: re-counted in October, every kickoff month with 300 or more matches landed between 52.8% and 56.9%.

Large bets on both teams to score came in close to their prices on both sides. So start from the competition's rate, adjust for the match, and treat both teams to score and Over 2.5 as one view rather than two.

Polymarket settled 13,071 both teams to score markets from the first on October 24, 2025 to September 13, 2026, and from April 2 large bets landed on 386 of them. The count takes every such market with a kickoff on record and a Yes or No result; markets that settled 50-50 are left out. Competition comes from the event's slug prefix, and each competition's name was read off its fixtures: Manchester United against Manchester City for the Premier League, Getafe against Deportivo for La Liga.

The halftime markets start later. There are 5,741 settled draw-at-halftime markets, and 4,435 matches from February 27, 2026 with all three halftime markets settled. Joins to a match's result markets and its game total go through the match's event, which Polymarket lists separately from the side markets.

The pricing half uses the large-trade alerts from April 2, 2026, the first day the alert table's outcome labels are trustworthy (the favorite-longshot bias study documents why): 3,591 buys, $46.5 million in stakes. The smallest recorded buy was about $3,000 until July 2, 2026 and $10,000 after. Rates carry plain binomial half-widths. The pricing intervals resample markets rather than buys, because thirty large bets on one match are one result.

54.4% of the 13,071 matches settled Yes, with a half-width of 0.85 points. That is the base rate a both teams to score price starts from. Yes at 54 cents is the market calling a match average, Yes at 45 cents says one side is expected to struggle to score, and Yes at 65 cents says both attacks are expected to get through.

A single half is a much harder bet, because each team has half the time. Both teams scored in the second half of 36.7% of 1,930 settled second-half markets, and in the first half of 21.8% of 3,083. The half markets are different, smaller sets of matches, so read them as separate base rates, not two halves of the same games.

MLS and the Bundesliga run near 63%; Serie A and Argentina's Primera División run under 47%. Eleven competitions have 250 or more settled both teams to score markets, and with 250 to 450 matches each, every rate carries a half-width of five to six points.

That leaves five that clear the overall rate on either side: MLS, the Bundesliga and the Championship sit above it by more than their half-widths, Serie A and Argentina below it. The Premier League at 56.6%, La Liga at 56.4% and the rest are within the noise of the overall rate.

Argentina's low rate sits beside its draw record. The soccer draws study found Argentina's Primera División drawing 31.0% of its matches, among the highest rates of any competition there. Low scoring shows up in both numbers: more matches where one side fails to score, and more that finish level.

Both teams to score and Over 2.5 goals are different bets that usually land together. On 12,704 matches with both markets settled, the match went over 2.5 goals 77.9% of the time when both teams scored, across 6,903 matches, and 22.4% of the time when one did not, across 5,801.

The reason is arithmetic. When both teams score, the match already has two goals and needs one more to go over. When one team fails to score, the other has to score three on its own. Multiply through and about 42% of these matches had both teams score and three or more goals, the combination a sportsbook sells as BTTS and Over 2.5.

That dependence matters to anyone combining the two. Priced as if independent, a 54% chance and a 53% chance would give a combined 29%, well short of the 42% that happened. A combined bet on the two is a bet on one kind of match, open and high-scoring, and should be priced that way.

Draws are more common when both teams score. On 12,318 matches with a both teams to score market and a draw market settled, 34.4% of the matches where both teams scored ended level, and 15.5% of the matches where one did not.

A match where one team fails to score can only be drawn 0-0, so the lower figure is the 0-0 rate among those matches. Across all of them, about 7% of matches finished 0-0 and about 19% finished as a scoring draw, 1-1 or higher, which together make up the 25.8% draw rate of this sample. A trader who backs the draw is mostly backing a match where both teams score.

Across 5,741 settled draw-at-halftime markets, the match was level at the break 43.1% of the time, with a half-width of 1.28 points. That is the most likely single halftime result.

On the 4,435 matches with all three halftime markets settled, every one resolved exactly one Yes: level 41.8% of the time, the team named first ahead 32.7%, and the team named second ahead 25.4%. Polymarket's event data lists the team named first as the home side, so the seven-point gap is the home side's edge at halftime.

A team leading at halftime went on to win 75.4% of the time across 3,530 matches, drew 16.9% and lost 7.8%. A halftime lead turns into a loss about one match in thirteen.

A level halftime decides much less. Of 2,415 matches level at the break, 37.4% ended level and the rest produced a winner. That is well above the full-match draw rate of about 26%, and still short of even money: more often than not, a match level at halftime produced a winner.

These are counts of results, not prices. The in-play price of a leader or a draw at halftime already reflects the score, and this study does not say whether that price was right.

Large bets on both teams to score came in close to their prices on both sides. Yes buyers paid 54.2 cents on average and won 57.2% of the time: plus 2.91 points, and plus 3.37% on the dollar, across 1,739 buys on 296 markets. No buyers paid 58.4 cents and won 57.9%: minus 0.49 points, and minus 3.93% on the dollar.

Neither side clears zero. Resampling markets, the Yes interval runs from -7.12 to plus 12.43 and the No interval from -10.71 to plus 8.83, about twenty points wide each, because fewer than 400 markets drew a large bet. Large buyers priced both teams to score about as well as the market did.

Start from the competition, not the month. Both teams score a little more than half the time, MLS and the Bundesliga near 63%, Serie A and Argentina under 47%, while no month with 300 or more matches strayed more than 2.5 points from the overall rate.

Treat both teams to score and Over 2.5 as one view, not two. When both teams scored the match went over 2.5 about four times in five, so the pair landed together 42.3% of the time, where two unrelated bets at the same rates would land together 28.6%. A trader who likes both is making one bet twice. The draw belongs to the same family: a 1-1 is both teams scoring.

A halftime lead is worth a lot and a level halftime is worth less than it looks. Leaders won three times in four; a level match at the break still produced a winner more often than not.

It does not compare Polymarket's both teams to score prices with a sportsbook's, and it does not follow how a price moved before kickoff. The pricing half uses the price large buyers paid, not a closing price, and covers April 2 to September 13, 2026.

The counts start with the first settled market of each type on record: October 24, 2025 for both teams to score, and February 27, 2026 for the complete sets of halftime markets. A market without a market type on record is not counted. The sample is uneven by month: re-counted on 12:44 UTC on October 11, 2026, Aug 2026 alone holds 24% of the matches and Jun 2026 only 385. Settlements after the study ran add matches too, 590 more by that re-count, at the same 54.4% Yes.

The competition names come from slug prefixes checked against fixtures in the run, and each prefix counts every match Polymarket filed under it. And the joins between side markets and result markets depend on Polymarket's event slugs: a match drops out of a joined figure when the other market is missing or was filed under a different slug, which is why the joined samples are smaller than the counts.

On Polymarket, both teams to score is a Yes and No market listed with the match's other markets, titled "Manchester United FC vs. Manchester City FC: Both Teams to Score". A Yes share pays $1 if each team scores at least one goal. A No share pays $1 if either team fails to score, which covers a 0-0 and any win to nil; the both teams to score guide works through reading the price.

The market's rules count the first 90 minutes plus stoppage time, so extra time and penalties do not count, and a match cancelled with no make-up game settles 50-50. That is rare: of 13,706 markets in the study's window, 33 were voided and 12 had no result on record by 12:44 UTC on October 11, 2026. Some matches also carry a first-half and a second-half version, and some carry halftime markets: one for each team leading at halftime and one for a draw at halftime.

Because every one of those markets settles to a result, the questions soccer traders ask about them have answers in the data. This study counts every settled market of each type, by competition, sets both teams to score against the 2.5 goal line and the draw on the same matches, follows halftime scores to the full-time result, and scores every large bet on both teams to score from April 2, 2026 against its price.

Polymarket listed both teams to score on 2,919 of the 3,083 soccer matches with result markets from September 11 to October 10, 2026, and the first-half and second-half versions on most of the same matches. Each match card on the soccer board can preview up to two side markets under the result prices: Most traded, or for Pro, Profitable wallets when there are qualifying wallet signals. Both teams to score appears when it belongs to the selected pair; being among the busiest does not guarantee a place in the Profitable wallets band.

With Pro, a match's event page lists every market on the match by family, both teams to score and its half versions included, with the Yes and No prices and the first outcome's change over the last hour and the last 24 hours, and its Top holders list the largest positions on each outcome. Without Pro the event page shows sample data. The soccer betting guide covers the three result markets beside it, double chance and draw no bet.

The large-trade feed lists the large taker fills it records after its size and market-share filters, marked BUY or SELL with the wallet's grade beside it, live on Pro and 24 hours behind without it. Large bets on this market are scarce: from April 2 to September 13, 2026 they landed on 386 matches, about two a day across every league Polymarket lists, so one on the feed is a trader choosing to size up on a side market.

We re-counted the market on the 1,620 matches that kicked off from September 14 to October 9, 2026, after this study's window closed. Both teams scored in 52.7% of them, give or take 2.43 points, which takes in the study's 54.4%. The base rate held.

The September figures come from one read-only run of a set of queries against the production database at 19:41 UTC on September 13, 2026. The query text, the raw output, the market-level export and the bootstrap output are public at github.com/0xinsider/research, under polymarket-sports-markets, in the files whose names carry the word btts. The export is committed, so the intervals reproduce with the bootstrap alone and no database. The re-count by month, the settlement states, the market families and the new matches come from a later read-only run on a copy of the production database at 12:44 UTC on October 11, 2026.

The outcome universe is every settled Polymarket soccer market of each type with a kickoff on record and a Yes or No result. The pricing universe is every large-trade alert for a Polymarket buy on a both teams to score market, settled after the trade, at 2 to 98 cents, from April 2 to September 13, 2026.

Expect the counts to grow; soccer settles every day. The overall rate should keep holding within its half-width, as it did on the first month of new matches. The competition rates will move with each round, and the buy-level edges should stay inside their intervals.