Why Premier League games with two-goal comebacks are more common than ever this season

“Two-nil is the most dangerous lead in football” is one of the game’s most familiar cliches.

Known in his home country as Csaplar’s Trap, its origins are attributed to Czech football coach and football commentator Josef Csaplar. The phenomenon is more intangible than grounded in fact, relating to the horrible feeling, when your team go ahead 2-0,  of knowing that one goal for the opposition brings them right back into the game and the embarrassment of chants of “Two-nil, and you f***ed it up!” potentially await.

“The danger everybody knows about,” Jurgen Klopp said in a press conference after his Liverpool side took a two-goal lead over Inter Milan back to Anfield in the 2021-22 Champions League’s round of 16. “It’s 2-0; the lead, I think, which got turned over most often in the history of football. Because if you enter half-time 2-0 up and you have a team who thinks, ‘We are halfway through’, you are already on the wrong path.”

You would struggle to find any football pitch on the planet where somebody hasn’t once uttered “dangerous” when a team go two goals up, but it’s a myth that got busted a while ago.

In 2017, Sky Sports and Opta analysed all 2,766 occasions up to that point where a Premier League club had held a two-goal lead. Of those, 2,481 ended up winning the fixture, with 212 ending as draws and 73 in defeats. In other words, 90 per cent of teams who go two up win the game, 7.4 per cent draw, and only 2.6 per cent lose.

So why have the two latter outcomes happened so much in the first three months of this season?

In 2024-25, the proportion of games with two-goal leads where the other team has fought back to claim a result is at a record high (17.5 per cent).

Everton have been the league’s biggest culprits, taking two-goal leads on consecutive matchdays in September before collapsing in dramatic style to lose 3-2 on both occasions, but it’s going on around the league.

It’s not just two-goal deficits, either. Last weekend, five games had a result-altering goal scored in the 90th minute (or later) in the Premier League — the most across a single matchday in the competition’s 32-year history.

While it’s too early to label this the Premier League’s top “comeback season”, they have steadily risen in recent years. The highest rate for comebacks across an entire campaign is the 16.6 per cent last season (63 times). Since the competition began in 1992-93, only four seasons have seen at least 50 comeback wins, and three of those have come in the last four to be completed.

“The Premier League is so equal, and the opponents always have the individual quality to create a goal,” Brighton & Hove Albion head coach Fabian Hurzeler said in a press conference this week. “Everyone can beat everyone. We saw so many late goals over the weekend, not only in our game but also in Aston Villa vs Everton.

“The game is not over until the referee’s whistle. You have to defend and make the right decisions. Maybe before, you would stick to the match plan, but in the end, it’s just about, ‘How do you win this game?’. The formation of the opponents changes completely; they play with a defender as a striker. It is difficult then to stay in the normal pressing patterns or the normal formation. Making the right football decisions in the last minutes is so important.”

Hurzeler hits on several interesting points.

From top to bottom, the Premier League has never been so blessed with quality. Last weekend, four-in-a-row champions and current table-toppers Manchester City beat Southampton, the league’s bottom club, just 1-0 at home. Unsurprisingly, all 13 of the players Pep Guardiola used in the match have won an international cap, with 19-year-old England full-back Rico Lewis’ four the fewest, but Southampton, despite their struggles since last season’s promotion back to the top flight, have plenty of pedigree too.

There are 41 combined England caps mong their experienced core of Adam Lallana (34), Aaron Ramsdale (five) and Kyle Walker-Peters (two). Defender Jan Bednarek is a 64-cap veteran for Poland, and Joe Aribo, Yukinari Sugawara and Maxwel Cornet, who all started the day on the bench, are internationals for Nigeria, Japan and Ivory Coast, respectively.

Compared to other relegation candidates in other top five European leagues, Premier League clubs simply have more money available to sign established international players — meaning even its weaker sides can stick around in matches and affect results late on.

“Something that has made a big impact on the end of the game is changing the number of substitutes,” UEFA sports scientist Chris Barnes tells The Athletic, referencing the league’s decision to switch from three permitted substitutions per game to five ahead of the 2022-23 season.

“And that in itself will obviously allow you to play a different style of game, and even though the players that start the game are fit, if you bring that new burst of energy onto the field, you’ve got a good chance that that might manifest itself in terms of a changed game dynamic.”

The quality at the disposal of Premier League clubs was evident in Aston Villa’s 3-2 comeback win against Everton on September 14. After Dwight McNeil and Dominic Calvert-Lewin had put the visitors two up, Villa rallied with goals from England striker Ollie Watkins either side of half-time.

Villa manager Unai Emery made five changes during the second half, including bringing on Ross Barkley, who has gone to two major tournaments as an England player, Ian Maatsen, who started last season’s Champions League final while on loan at Borussia Dortmund before joining the Birmingham club from Chelsea for £37.5million ($47.7m) in the summer and Jhon Duran, a Colombia international and one of Europe’s most coveted young attackers.

Fifteen minutes from time, Duran scored the winner with a long-distance stunner that soared over the head of England’s first-choice goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and into the top corner.

Villa are one of the Premier League’s better teams (they are also top the table in the new 36-club league phase of the Champions League with maximum points after three of its eight matchweeks — Liverpool and City are second and third, incidentally) but the quality in depth is apparent throughout English game’s elite division.

But Premier League players are not just better than ever; they’re fitter too.

“There is absolute evidence that the demands of football have increased over the last five to 10 years, particularly in the Premier League,” says Barnes. “We’ve got loads of evidence to show the game’s tempo has increased beyond belief, and within that, the players’ fitness has also increased. So when you’re talking about the tail end of the game, where I think it’s fair to say that, traditionally, you would have teams that were good at going in the lead and then killing off the game, the opposition now has the wherewithal to impose themselves to effect a change.”

While fitness is an important factor in the Premier League’s tempo increase, it’s also a consequence of referees cracking down on players time-wasting. It now has the highest average ball-in-play time across Europe’s top five domestic leagues. Where seemingly small acts such as knocking the ball away or staying on the ground to receive treatment might have eaten into the clock considerably a few years ago, refs these days are encouraging play to continue and honouring longer periods of added time.

The change to five substitutes has been significant (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

“It is probably the reason why people are so in love with the Premier League,” Italian head coach Enzo Maresca said before his Chelsea side’s 2-0 Carabao Cup last-16 defeat away against Newcastle United on Wednesday. “Because you are from England, you don’t realise how loved the Premier League is. One of the reasons why is because the game never finishes. In my country, for instance, if you are 2-0 up in the last five minutes, you can have five or six players that fall down for 20 seconds or half an hour! The game is difficult to come back. In England, it is a different culture.”

This season, Premier League players have an average of two minutes and 13 seconds longer to overturn a deficit than their counterparts in Italy’s Serie A. Where Italian clubs can slow the game down in the final minutes of a match by employing the “dark arts” of the game, Premier League officiating encourages conditions for staging a comeback.

Like the officials, fans might also be contributing to the apparent rise of comebacks in England’s top flight.

The Premier League is comfortably the most popular football league in the world, and the supply of tickets does not match the demand. While middling clubs in Serie A, France’s Ligue 1 and La Liga in Spain frequently experience large pockets of their stadium being without spectators, Premier League sell-outs are extremely common. Supporters can contribute to a more frenzied game state, allowing the home side to gain momentum and fight back in the latter stages.

That’s particularly effective as Premier League managers and head coaches have become more dogmatic, insisting their team stick to footballing principles, such as playing out from the back, despite turnover rates continuing to rise season-on-season. When fans turn up the volume and the opposition’s pressing becomes more intense late in matches, players are naturally more susceptible to making mistakes in the build-up.

So the next time your team are down in the final minutes, don’t be tempted to beat the post-game rush by leaving early: wait for your manager or head coach to bring on attacking reinforcements and jeer your opponents’ every touch.

The chances of them making an error and gifting your lads a game-altering goal are better than ever.

(Top photos: Getty Images)