People often say that no goals are scored in Italy. On this Serie A match day, that was truer than ever before.
For a moment, it looked as if the record might be broken after all: in the final Monday evening match of the 7th Serie A match day between US Cremonese and Udinese Calcio, the hosts took the lead in the 4th minute. Was this the sign of a small goal spectacle that could break the negative record? The answer came just under two hours later: no. Because in the remaining 86 minutes plus stoppage time, only one more goal was scored—Udinese’s equalizer to make it 1-1—the seventh matchday of the 2025/26 season is now the lowest-scoring matchday since the league was expanded to 20 teams in 2004. Including the two goals on Monday evening, the 20 teams managed just eleven goals. A total of four games ended without any goals, while the 2-1 win by new league leaders AC Milan against AC Florence was the most spectacular of the boring games and the only one to produce more than two goals.
By comparison, on the last Bundesliga matchday, only one game—the 1-1 draw between Cologne and Augsburg—had fewer than three goals, with a total of 33 goals scored. The cliché of Italian catenaccio, which is repeatedly disproved, proved true in all its glory this weekend.
Previously, four matchdays had shared the negative record with a total of 13 goals, most recently on matchday 2 of 2022/23, when four games ended 0-0. Although there had been even lower-scoring weekends in Serie A history—on matchday 27 in 1968/69 and on matchday 1 in 1979/80, only six goals were scored—at that time, the league consisted of only 16 teams and thus two fewer games per matchday.
Eleven goals on one matchday is also the negative record in the Bundesliga history books, set on matchday 26 of the 1989/90 season and later equaled on matchday 20 of the 1998/99 season. However, only nine games were played on both matchdays – one less than in Italy.