Blog · Data

The deeper you go down the amateur pyramid, the more goals go in

8 September 2026 · 9 min read

3.02 goals a game in Régional 1. 5.92 in Départemental 7. In between, a ladder nobody had ever published — so we counted it, tier by tier.

What we counted, and what we left out

An average only means something if you know what went into it. The scope of this article is deliberately narrow: senior men’s 11-a-side league football, everywhere in France, 2026-2027 season. A match only enters an average once it has been played and carries a score. Fixtures still to come do not count — which is why every row of the table shows its sample size n, and why you should read that column before the average itself.

Excluded, and every exclusion has a reason:

• Futsal. On its own it would blow the table apart: five a side, indoors, double-digit scorelines that shock nobody. Mixing futsal into 11-a-side football does not produce an “overall” average, it produces an average that is wrong for both.
• Cups, challenges and knockout series. These are single-leg ties where an R1 club sometimes draws a D3 club. Those lopsided fixtures inflate the goal count without telling you anything about the level of a league group.
• Youth (every U category) and women’s competitions. They deserve their own count rather than being drowned in the senior men’s one. Adding them together would mean publishing an average that describes nobody.
• Veterans, recreational, corporate, beach soccer. Different formats, squad sizes and match lengths. Same reason, same verdict: out.

One last, more unusual exclusion: no national tier appears in the table. No Ligue 3, no National 1, no National 2. Not out of inverted snobbery: simply because as of 8 September those competitions have played only a handful of matchdays. An average built on that would be a tiny-sample number, wrong, and checkable by anyone in ten seconds. So we stop where the sample stops.

The ladder, tier by tier

n = number of matches played with a recorded score, as of 8 September 2026. Senior men’s 11-a-side league football, all of France, 2026-2027 season. Total: 6,913 matches. Sporting facts from the official competitions; aggregation and computation by Bobibets.

Read the left column as a staircase: from Régional 1, the ceiling of regional amateur football, down to Départemental 7 and 8, the last district floors — where you play fifteen kilometres from home with the clubhouse just behind the barrier. Between the top and the bottom of that ladder there are almost three goals of difference per game. Between R1 and D4, two tiers plenty of players know in a single career, there are already nearly two.

Put another way: a Sunday in D4 offers, on average, an R1 game plus nearly two goals. If you have played both levels, that sentence teaches you nothing — your legs knew it. It has simply, for the first time, been counted.

An almost monotonic climb — and two hiccups

From R1 to D7 the curve rises with barely a slip: 3.02 → 3.46 → 3.71, then 3.86 → 4.23 → 4.50 → 4.92, and finally 5.92 at the very bottom. Eleven steps out of twelve go the same way. That is rare — which is exactly why the two that do not go that way deserve a paragraph of their own.

The marketing reflex would have been to merge D7 and D8 into a nice smooth “D7+”, or to drop the R4 row to get a clean diagonal. We did not: both hiccups land on the two smallest samples in the table, which is precisely how real data behaves. A perfect curve across twelve tiers should have made you suspicious.

Another honest irregularity, less spectacular: the D4-D5-D6 plateau, at 4.92, 4.95 and 4.97. Three near-identical steps. The ladder is not a steady slope, it is a staircase with a landing — followed by one very tall final step.

The draw vanishes on the way down

This is the cleanest result of the whole count, and more useful than it looks. In Régional 1, 22.4% of matches end level: better than one in five. In D3 it is 14.7%. In D4, 11.2%. In D7 and D8, 9.1% and 8.6% — fewer than one game in ten.

The slide is not perfectly regular either: D1 climbs back to 21.3%, and D6 shows 16.1% on a sample of 205 matches that calls for caution. But the order of magnitude is not up for debate: between the top of Régional and the bottom of the district, the probability of a match finishing level is more than halved.

Mechanically it adds up: when five or six goals go in, finishing level becomes hard — 0-0 and 1-1 imply a closed game, and closed games get rarer as you go down. For anyone predicting a district group on Bobibets, the consequence is direct: ticking the draw in D4 means backing an event that happens about once in nine, whereas in R1 it happens better than once in five. That is not the same call at all — and plenty of players tick “draw” with the same reflex everywhere.

Home advantage, on the other hand, does not move

We expected the opposite. Intuition says that on the way down, playing at home should count for more: longer Sunday-morning trips, rougher pitches, the touchline closer, refereeing lonelier. The numbers do not show it.

The home-win rate wanders between 43.4% (D1) and 49.8% (D6) — a band of barely six points across twelve tiers, going up and down with no direction: 44.5% in R1, 48.6% in R3, 43.4% in D1, 49.1% in D4, 44.0% in D5, 47.5% in D7. There is no trend in there, and claiming otherwise would mean telling a story instead of reading the data.

There is, however, an interesting consequence. Since draws collapse on the way down while home wins stay flat, away wins take all the ground the draws give up: by difference, they go from roughly 33% of matches in R1 to nearly 43% in D7. District football does not favour the home side — it eliminates the middle ground.

What these numbers do not say

A data article that does not list its blind spots is a marketing article. Here are ours.

• Forfeits count as results. A game awarded off the pitch enters the average exactly like a game that was played. We do not separate them — and they are more frequent at the bottom of the pyramid, where a squad stretched thin is enough to lose a Sunday.
• Postponed matches are nowhere. Waterlogged pitch, council closure, no referee: those games do not count until they are played. They will come back later in the season and move their tier’s average.
• Three tiers sit at or below 100 matches — R4 (97), D7 (99), D8 (58). Treat those three rows as orders of magnitude, not as values. The first decimal is fragile there, the second barely exists.
• This is the start of a season. A few matchdays only, squads still settling, uneven pre-seasons. The opening weeks of an amateur league do not always look like the rest of the year.
• We measure, we do not explain. Nothing here proves why more goals go in down the pyramid. The hypotheses are plausible — wider quality gaps inside a group, more volatile squads, a more direct game — but they are hypotheses, not results.

Finally, this article is an aggregate and nothing else: no fixture list, no official standings, no match report is republished here. To check a specific game, a specific matchday or the official table of a group, the reference source remains epreuves.fff.fr — this page does not replace it and does not try to.

Why we counted this

Because nobody publishes it. Professional football is over-measured: every shot on target has its statistic, its chart and its Monday argument. Amateur football, where the overwhelming majority of French matches are played every weekend, has none of that — everyone there knows from experience that “more goals go in down below”, without ever having seen the figure. Now it exists.

Second reason: these gaps change how you play. On Bobibets, your club’s group is already a public league — you do not create it, you join it, and you predict every matchday against the other players from around your way. Knowing that the draw is a 9% event in D7 and a better-than-22% event in R1 is usable from next Sunday on. As of 8 September 2026, coverage stands at 1,638 active regional and district groups, 18 regions and 37,668 upcoming amateur matches.

One last number for texture, on the same scope: half of all entered teams are reserve teams (50.0%), and 70.8% of matches involve at least one reserve side. That French peculiarity deserves its own article — we wrote it in what a reserve team changes in amateur football. And if R1, D1 and D3 still mean nothing to you, the French football pyramid explained puts every step back in its place, from the top down to the last district. And if you run a club rather than just play for one, the same figures become a season-long contest: seven ideas to keep a grassroots club alive off the pitch.

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