5dollarfootballapi/premier-league-first-goal-impact-2025-26

What Is the First Goal Worth? — 2025/26 Premier League

Match-level data behind a 5DollarFootballAPI study of how the first confirmed goal changed Bet365's normalized in-play win probabilities during the 2025/26 Premier League season.

Across 347 usable matches, the median within-match increase in the scoring team's normalized win probability was 23.1 percentage points (bootstrap 95% CI: 22.4–24.2). The median first goal after minute 75 moved the probability by 62.2 points, although that group contains only 17 matches.

Research and source

• Full article and methodology: What Is the First Goal Worth?
• Product: 5DollarFootballAPI
• Odds-history documentation: 5dollarfootballapi.com/docs/odds-history
• Premier League API: 5dollarfootballapi.com/premier-league-api

Every row identifies Bet365 as the bookmaker, 5DollarFootballAPI as the study publisher, and includes the canonical methodology URL.

Files

• data.csv — 347 accepted first-goal events; this is the file rendered by the Dataset Viewer.
• first_goal_impact_2025_26.xlsx — formatted workbook with raw events, season coverage, formula-driven summaries, methodology and automated quality checks.
• first-goal-impact-by-minute.png — publication-ready 1200×630 chart.
• dataset_info.json — compact provenance and field metadata.

What each row represents

One row is one Premier League match with a usable confirmed first-goal event. It includes:

• match, teams, kickoff, final score and first scorer;
• the last valid 0–0 full-time 1X2 quote before the goal;
• the first changed valid 1X2 quote after the confirmed goal;
• decimal prices and normalized home/draw/away probabilities before and after;
• the scoring team's within-match probability change;
• quote timing, overround, favorite status and final result;
• bookmaker, publisher and methodology provenance.

Timestamps in the CSV use Beijing time (UTC+8), matching the source database. The study window is 2025-08-01 through 2026-06-15 Beijing time.

Method summary

1. Start with all 380 finished Premier League matches in 2025/26.
2. Define the first confirmed goal as the first 1–0 or 0–1 score state that never later reverts in the odds-tick sequence. This removes transient VAR-cancelled goals.
3. Pair the last valid 0–0 Bet365 full-time 1X2 quote with the first changed quote within 120 seconds after the confirmed score appears.
4. Require the two quotes to be no more than 300 seconds apart.
5. Convert decimal prices to implied probabilities and normalize home, draw and away to total 100%, removing the displayed bookmaker overround.
6. Calculate the scoring team's after-minus-before probability change within each match.

Twenty-seven matches finished 0–0. Six scoring matches did not meet the quote-pair timing rules, leaving 347 events: 98.3% of the 353 matches with at least one goal.

The full definitions, confidence-interval procedure and limitations are documented in the canonical research article.

Intended use

Suitable for reproducible sports-analytics examples, data visualization, teaching, methodological review and comparisons of event timing. It may be cited or used in articles and notebooks with a link back to the canonical research page.

This is not a betting system or betting advice. Displayed bookmaker prices are a market proxy, not ground-truth probabilities or guaranteed executable prices.

Limitations

• One bookmaker, one league and one season.
• Descriptive event study; it does not identify a causal effect independent of match state.
• The after-minute-75 bucket contains only 17 matches.
• Feed timestamps do not support claims about exchange-level repricing latency.
• This dataset is a derived research sample, not a complete raw odds feed.

Terms

License metadata is marked other. This derived research dataset may be used for analysis, teaching and editorial citation with attribution to 5DollarFootballAPI and a link to the research page. Republishing, reselling or reconstructing a complete raw feed is not permitted. See the 5DollarFootballAPI terms.

Citation

@misc{5dollarfootballapi_first_goal_2026,
  author       = {{5DollarFootballAPI}},
  title        = {What Is the First Goal Worth? 2025/26 Premier League},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://5dollarfootballapi.com/blog/what-is-the-first-goal-worth},
  note         = {Bet365 full-time 1X2 tick-history event study, 347 matches}
}