---
title: "How Often Soccer Matches End in a Draw: 17,953 Settled Polymarket Matches, by League"
canonical: "https://0xinsider.com/research/soccer-draws-polymarket"
datePublished: "2026-09-13"
dateModified: "2026-09-13"
description: "25.9% of 17,953 settled Polymarket soccer matches ended in a draw: 26.2% in the Premier League, 18.4% in the Champions League, 31.0% in Argentina. Large bets on the draw came in ahead of the price, inside the noise."
---

# How Often Soccer Matches End in a Draw: 17,953 Settled Polymarket Matches, by League

Last updated: 2026-09-13
Canonical: https://0xinsider.com/research/soccer-draws-polymarket

Polymarket lists every soccer match as three markets: one for each team to win and one for the draw. That makes the draw a price you can check against the result. Of 17,953 settled draw markets since August 24, 2024, 25.9% resolved Yes, to within 0.64 of a point. The Premier League drew 26.2% of the time, La Liga 24.9%, the Champions League 18.4% and Argentina's Primera División 31.0%. Large bettors who bought the draw from April came in 4.0 points ahead of the price, and bettors against a team to win 3.25 ahead, the direction to expect if bettors shy away from backing a stalemate. Neither interval clears zero once each match counts once.

## A match is three markets on Polymarket

At a sportsbook a soccer match is one 1X2 market with three prices: home, draw, away. Polymarket splits the same match into three binary markets under one event. For the Manchester derby on September 13, 2026 those were "Will Manchester United FC win on 2026-09-13?", "Will Manchester City FC win on 2026-09-13?" and "Will Manchester United FC vs. Manchester City FC end in a draw?". Each has a Yes and a No, each Yes pays $1 if its outcome happens, and exactly one of the three settles Yes.

That structure makes the draw unusually easy to study. The draw is its own market with its own price and its own result, so how often matches draw is a count, and whether the draw price was right is a comparison of a price with that count. It also makes the draw easy to bet from either side: buying No on a team to win is a bet that the match ends in a draw or a win for the other team.

This study does both. It counts every settled draw market Polymarket has listed, by competition, and it scores every large bet on the three markets of a match from April 2, 2026 against the result.

## 17,953 settled draw markets

The count covers every Polymarket draw market with a kickoff and a settled result, from the first on August 24, 2024 to September 13, 2026: 17,953 matches. A draw market is identified by its title, because the oldest markets carry no market type. Competition comes from the event's slug prefix, and each competition's name in this study was read off its fixtures, Manchester United against Manchester City for the Premier League, Levante against Barcelona for La Liga.

The pricing half uses the large-trade alerts from April 2, 2026, the first day the alert table's outcome labels are trustworthy (0xinsider.com/research/favorite-longshot-bias-polymarket-sports documents why). It covers 92,313 buys of $1,000 or more on the three markets of a match, from 5,903 wallets across 4,763 markets, $1.95 billion in stakes. 10,724 of them were on draw markets and 32,910 landed after kickoff.

Edge is the share of buys that won minus the average price paid, in percentage points. The dollar return is stake-weighted and held to settlement, before fees. Buy-level intervals resample matches rather than buys, because thirty large bets on one match are one result. Draw rates carry plain binomial half-widths.

## One match in four ends level

25.9% of the 17,953 matches ended in a draw, with a half-width of 0.64 points. In the April 2 window it was 26.1% of 10,196. The rate holds from quarter to quarter: 24.7% at the end of 2025, 26.9% in the first quarter of 2026, 27.1% in the second and 25.5% so far in the third. The one outlier, 16.3% in early 2025, is 208 matches from the months when Polymarket listed few.

That is the base rate every draw price starts from. A draw priced at 26 cents is the market's statement that this match is an average match; a draw at 20 cents says one side is clearly better; a draw at 32 cents says the teams are close and the match is expected to be tight.

## Draw rates by competition

Nineteen competitions have 300 or more settled draw markets. Most sit within a point or two of a quarter. The Premier League drew 26.2% of 770 matches, MLS 25.3% of 601, the Championship 25.6%, La Liga 24.9%, Serie A 25.1%, the Bundesliga 24.4%, Ligue 1 25.9%, Liga MX 25.4% and the Saudi Pro League 24.9%.

Four stand above the pack: Argentina's Primera División at 31.0% of 500 matches, the spring 2026 J2 League at 31.6%, the Süper Lig at 28.4% and Serie B at 28.3%. Argentina and the J2 League sit further above the overall rate than their half-widths; the Süper Lig and Serie B sit inside theirs.

Two stand below: the Champions League and the Europa League, both at 18.4%. Their half-widths are 3.5 and 4.3 points, so both sit clearly under the overall rate. The table lists each competition's half-width, which for 300 to 800 matches runs from three to five points.

## European cup ties draw less often

The Champions League's 18.4% over 484 matches and the Europa League's 18.4% over 310 are the two lowest rates of any competition in the table, seven points under the overall rate. The Conference League, 24.9% over 373, does not follow them.

This data does not say why. What it does show is who the matches are between: recent fixtures on record include Slavia Praha against Lens and Bayern against Bodø/Glimt in the Champions League, and Anderlecht against Qairat in the Europa League, clubs from different leagues and different tiers of their own. For a bettor the number matters more than the reason: a European match that is priced like a league match on the draw is priced for a result that happens less often.

## Every match resolved exactly one market

A three-market match only works if exactly one market settles Yes. In the April 2 window there were 10,057 matches with all three markets listed and settled, and 10,057 of them resolved exactly one Yes. None settled two, and none settled all three No.

That check is worth stating because the rest of the study depends on it. It is what makes "No on a team to win" mean "the other team wins or the match draws", and it is what lets a bettor build double chance and draw no bet out of Polymarket shares, which the guide at 0xinsider.com/learn/how-to-bet-on-soccer-polymarket works through.

## What large bets on the draw paid

Buyers of the draw paid 42.6 cents on average and won 46.6% of the time: plus 4.00 points, and plus 15.26% on the dollar. Buyers of No on the draw paid 76 cents and won 73.9%: -2.11 points. On the team markets, buyers of Yes came in at -1.18 points over 42,787 buys, and buyers of No, a bet against a team to win, at plus 3.25 over 38,802.

Every one of those points in the same direction: the side that includes the draw came in ahead of its price, and the side that excludes it came in behind. That is the pattern to expect if bettors prefer backing a team to backing a stalemate and leave the draw a little cheap.

None of it clears zero. Resampling matches, the draw Yes interval runs from -3.48 to plus 11.24, and the team No interval from -0.91 to plus 7.06. Large bets pile onto a few matches: the ten draw markets with the most large Yes buys carry 17.3% of them, and 8 of those ten matches drew. A handful of big matches ending level moves the buy-level number more than it moves the truth.

## Before kickoff, the draw was priced close to its rate

Before kickoff, large buyers of the draw paid 28.1 cents and won 31.8% of the time, plus 3.66 points with an interval from -4.97 to plus 12.81. Count each match once, and the 350 draw markets bought before kickoff were priced at 27.3 cents on average and drew 28.6% of the time: plus 1.27 points. With the big matches weighted like the small ones, most of the buy-level edge goes away.

By price the pre-kickoff draw bets are too thin to read band by band. Draws bought at 25 to 30 cents, the most common price, drew 34.5% of the time over 166 matches; draws bought at 20 to 25 cents drew 19.0% over 76. Neither band's interval excludes the price.

The practical reading is that a pre-kickoff draw price on Polymarket is close to a fair statement of the base rate for that match. A bettor who believes the draw is systematically cheap has a few points of history on their side and no proof.

## Betting against a team to win

Because No on a team to win covers the draw and the other team, it is the Polymarket version of a double chance bet, and it was the busiest place the draw bias showed. Before kickoff, buyers of No on the favorite paid 38.5 cents and won 41.4% of the time, plus 2.92 points. Buyers of No on the underdog paid 69.2 cents and won 72.9%, plus 3.69. The Yes sides of the same markets came in behind: minus 1.62 points on favorites and minus 1.21 on underdogs.

Across all team markets the No side came in at plus 3.25 points over 2,877 markets, with an interval from -0.91 to plus 7.06. That is the closest result in this study to clearing zero, and it does not. Before kickoff alone it is plus 3.4 with an interval from -0.83 to plus 7.55.

## In-play, the draw price climbs with the clock

Once a match starts, the draw market behaves differently from the team markets. A level match gets more likely to finish level with every minute that passes, so the draw price rises through the second half of a tied game and collapses the moment someone scores. In-play draw buyers paid 51.8 cents on average, against 28.1 before kickoff.

In-play draw buys at 50 to 70 cents won 68.2% of the time at an average of 59.5 cents, plus 8.70 points over 147 matches. Buys at 70 cents and up, a level match deep in stoppage time, won 81.2% at 84.1 cents, minus 2.95. The whole in-play draw Yes result is plus 4.21 points with an interval from minus 4.21 to plus 12.00. The mid-priced live draw is the part of the draw market that most looks cheap in this sample, and the sample is 544 buys.

## Graded wallets have no draw edge either

From June 1, when grade coverage widened, each buy carries the grade its wallet held that day. On the draw, the grade does not separate anyone. Wallets graded S, A or B came in at plus 3.46 points on draw Yes and minus 6.83 on draw No; wallets graded D or F at plus 10.57 on draw Yes and minus 4.33 on draw No. Every interval spans zero, the widest by more than thirty points, because the June-onward draw buys sit on about a hundred matches per cohort.

On the team markets both cohorts came in ahead on No, plus 3.22 for S, A and B and plus 3.91 for D and F, which is the draw bias again rather than a difference in skill. The sharp money study at 0xinsider.com/research/sharp-money-polymarket-sports found the graded cohort's sports edge almost entirely in-play and on spreads and totals; the soccer draw is not where it lives.

## What this study does not show

It does not compare Polymarket's draw prices with a sportsbook's, and it does not say how a match's draw price moved before kickoff. The price in the pricing half is the price large buyers paid, not a closing price.

The competition names come from slug prefixes checked against fixtures in the run, and each prefix counts every match Polymarket filed under it. How Polymarket settles a draw market is set in each market's rules; this study counts the result it settled on.

The pricing half is April 2 to September 13, 2026, weighted to June, which holds 5,511 of the 10,724 large draw buys. The draw sides flip sign month to month: draw Yes came in at plus 0.30 in April, minus 0.38 in May, plus 6.62 in June and plus 4.23 in July. August and September hold 34 draw Yes buys between them after the alert floor rose to $10,000.

And every position is scored as held to settlement at the buyer's price, before fees.

## What it means for a soccer bettor

One match in four ends level, and the rate varies more by competition than by season. Argentina's league draws three matches in ten and European cup matches fewer than one in five. If you bet the draw, the competition is the first input, and a price that ignores it is the one worth questioning.

The draw is not a free bet on Polymarket. Large bettors who backed it, or who bet against a team to win, came in a few points ahead in this window, in the direction a draw-shy crowd would produce, and the history is too clustered to call it an edge. What a bettor can take from it is narrower: the Polymarket draw price starts close to the base rate, and a view that one match is more or less likely to finish level than an average match is a view the market will price only as well as the bettors in it.

## How to use it on 0xinsider

Every match on 0xinsider.com/sports/soccer shows the three Polymarket prices, home, draw and away, with the kickoff countdown and the live score once the match starts. The Profitable wallets block under a match shows each outcome's share of the profitable wallets' money beside its price, the draw included, so a draw the profitable wallets back more than its price does is visible before kickoff.

Open a match and the event page's Top holders tab lists the wallets holding each outcome with the grade each has earned, with a Yes and No switch on each of the three markets. The whale alerts feed at 0xinsider.com/whale-alerts shows every large buy on the draw as it lands, with the buyer's grade beside it. The guide at 0xinsider.com/learn/how-to-bet-on-soccer-polymarket covers the three markets, double chance and draw no bet, and 0xinsider.com/learn/over-under-betting-explained covers soccer totals.

## How to check it yourself

Every number on this page comes from one read-only run of a set of queries against the production database at 18:32 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 words soccer-draws. The export is committed, so the intervals reproduce with the bootstrap alone and no database.

The draw-rate universe is every settled soccer market whose title asks whether a match ends in a draw, with a kickoff on record. The pricing universe is every large-trade alert for a Polymarket buy on a soccer moneyline market with Yes and No outcomes from April 2, 2026, settled after the trade, at 2 to 98 cents, from April 2 to September 13, 2026. The grade is the most recent daily ranking dated on or before the trade day.

Expect the counts to grow; soccer settles every day. The overall draw rate should hold within its half-width. The competition rates will move with each new round, and the buy-level edges should stay inside their intervals, which a rerun that puts the team No interval above zero would change.

## FAQ

### How often do soccer matches end in a draw?

On Polymarket, 25.9% of 17,953 settled soccer matches from August 24, 2024 to September 13, 2026 ended in a draw, with a binomial half-width of 0.64 points. The rate held between 24.7% and 27.1% in every quarter with more than 700 matches.

### What percentage of Premier League matches end in a draw?

26.2% of the 770 Premier League matches Polymarket settled from August 24, 2024 to September 13, 2026, with a half-width of 3.1 points. La Liga drew 24.9% of 425, Serie A 25.1% of 386, the Bundesliga 24.4% of 332 and Ligue 1 25.9% of 343.

### Which soccer leagues have the most draws?

Among competitions with 300 or more settled Polymarket draw markets, the spring 2026 J2 League drew most often at 31.6% and Argentina's Primera División at 31.0%, followed by the Süper Lig at 28.4% and Serie B at 28.3%. The Champions League and the Europa League drew least, both at 18.4%.

### Is the draw underpriced on Polymarket?

Not measurably. From April 2 to September 13, 2026, large buyers of the draw paid 42.6 cents and won 46.6% of the time, plus 4.00 points, with a match-resampled interval from -3.48 to plus 11.24. Counting each match once, pre-kickoff draw markets were priced at 27.3 cents and drew 28.6% of the time.

### Is betting against a team to win a good soccer bet?

It came in ahead of the price without clearing zero. Large buyers of No on a Polymarket team-to-win market, which wins on a draw or the other team winning, came in at plus 3.25 points over 38,802 buys, with an interval from -0.91 to plus 7.06. It was positive on favorites and underdogs alike.