What is a scorigami? The Premier League edition

Where the word comes from

The term was coined by the writer Jon Bois for American football, where teams score in awkward chunks of three and seven and genuinely new final scores still turn up most seasons. The idea travels well: take every result a competition has ever produced, plot them on a grid, and look for the squares that are still empty. Each empty square is a result waiting to happen for the first time.

Why football is different

Football is a low-scoring game, so its grid is small. Across 13,216 Premier League matches since August 1992, only 36 different final scores have ever been recorded, if you ignore which side was at home. Four results account for more than half of every match played: 1–0 (2,324 times), 2–1 (1,984), 2–0 (1,662) and 1–1 (1,521).

At the other end, six scorelines have happened exactly once: 5–5, 6–4, 7–3, 7–4, 8–2 and 9–1. Those are the league's classic scorigamis, and the most recent arrived on 19 May 2013, when West Brom and Manchester United drew 5–5 in Sir Alex Ferguson's final match. The stories behind all six are in the rarest scorelines in Premier League history.

How to read the grid

On the home page, every square is a final score. By default the horizontal axis is the home team's goals and the vertical axis is the away team's, so a 3–1 home win and a 1–3 away win are different squares. The number in each square is how many times that result has happened, and the colour bands group squares from "Once" up to "1,000+". Empty squares are scorelines the Premier League has never produced.

Tap any square to see the first time it happened, the most recent time, and how often it has cropped up season by season. The season picker narrows the grid to a single campaign, from 1992/93 to the current one.

Two ways to count

The classic scorigami count ignores venue: 3–1 and 1–3 are the same result. Switch the grid to Winner / Loser to see it that way, with each of the 36 scorelines shown on both sides of the diagonal. The Home / Away view splits every result by venue, which turns 36 scorelines into 60 and brings the empty squares much closer to the action.

Home advantage is visible in the shape of the grid. Home teams have won 45.6% of Premier League matches and away teams 28.7%, with 25.7% drawn. That is why the away half of the grid thins out so much sooner than the home half.

Where the next one could come from

Counting home and away separately, the Premier League has produced three brand-new results since 2019, all of them away demolitions: Southampton 0–9 Leicester City (25 October 2019), Crystal Palace 0–7 Liverpool (19 December 2020) and Sheffield United 0–8 Newcastle (24 September 2023). The likeliest candidate for the next one is an away 7–2 win. It has never happened, even though 7–2 has been a home result five times. Here is why the home/away view is where new scorigamis will come from.