A draw is just every level scoreline added up

Expected goals give the chance of each side scoring 0, 1, 2 … goals, and combining them gives every scoreline. Here is the real thing: how often each score happened in 544,567 matches. The green diagonal is the draw — add it up and you get 23.29%.

Percentages of all matches. A real model builds this table per match from that match's two expected-goal figures; this one is the whole database at once.

The simple version assumes the two teams score independently of each other. It is close, but it is reliably wrong on the lowest scores — and those decide draws. Below, each scoreline's real frequency against what the simple model predicts from the same two averages.

Look at 0-0: it really happens more often than the simple model expects, while 1-1 happens less. That is the pattern Dixon and Coles found in 1997 and fixed with a small adjustment to exactly four scorelines — 0-0, 1-0, 0-1 and 1-1 — nudging them to match reality. Everything else in the model is left alone. Two teams at 0-0 late in a match stop playing like the simple model assumes, and the correction is what puts that back.

Honest caveat: this table uses one pair of averages for every match, while a real model fits a pair per match. Part of the gap you see is that simplification rather than the effect itself — which is why the fit has to be judged per match, not in aggregate.

This database runs the model over every match it holds, always from what was known before each one. A probability is only worth anything if it comes true at the rate it claims: of the matches it gave a 27% chance of a draw, about 27% should have drawn.

Across 160,869 matches carrying a bookmaker's closing price, the model's average error is 0.19289 against the market's 0.19160 (lower is better, and both are "how far off, squared, on average"). So the model is close, honest about its own confidence — and still behind the people setting the prices. That is the expected outcome of a first model, and it is reported here rather than hidden: a draw tool is only worth betting when it beats the price, and this one does not yet.

Expected goals are what the model thinks each side will score; the draw chance is every level scoreline added up. A high number here means an even, low-scoring fixture — not that the draw is good value. Where a price is shown, remember it still contains the bookmaker's margin (see the odds explainer), and on the evidence above the market prices these better than the model does.