Which League Has the Most Cards? 2026 Referee Data

Ask which league has the most cards and you will be told Serie A, usually by someone quoting a figure from before the pandemic. That answer has been wrong for two seasons, and if you are pricing card markets off it you are paying for a reputation the data retired. We counted every yellow and red card in 3,144 completed matches across nine European leagues in 2025/26, then ran the same count back five seasons to see which way each league is moving. The league with the most cards is Portugal's Primeira Liga, by a margin of more than one booking per game over anything in the English or Italian top flights. Every figure below is computed from football-data.co.uk match records, the same match level source behind our referee profiles, downloaded on 4 October 2026 and recounted from scratch rather than copied from a summary table.

The nine league card table for 2025/26

Here is the whole picture in one place. Cards per game below means yellow cards per game, because that is what card markets are built on. The total column adds reds. Booking points use the standard 10 for a yellow and 25 for a red that our booking points guide sets out.

Three things in that table are worth more than the ranking itself.

• The spread is 1.75 yellows per game from top to bottom. On a booking points market that is 19.2 points between a Portuguese fixture and a Dutch one, before anyone names a referee.
• Fouls do not predict cards. Serie A had the second most fouls per game at 25.4 and the second fewest yellows. Italian officials let 6.5 fouls go per card shown. Bundesliga referees card every 5.2. That ratio, not the foul count, is the league signal.
• The Championship is not the rough league its reputation says. At 3.71 yellows and 0.100 reds per game it is marginally calmer than the Premier League on both counts, across a 552 match sample.

Those gaps are stable, which is what makes them usable. The next three sections take the three biggest surprises in turn.

Portugal, not Italy, is Europe's card capital

The Primeira Liga averaged 4.97 yellow cards and 0.242 red cards per game in 2025/26, which is 5.21 cards of any colour in a typical match. The nearest major league, La Liga, is more than half a booking behind. The Premier League is 1.22 yellows behind, which over a 306 match season is 373 extra bookings in Portugal for the same number of fixtures.

This is not a one season spike. Portugal has led our nine league table in every one of the last five seasons, and it led by a wider margin in each of the first three. The trend table in the next section shows the Primeira Liga falling from 5.97 yellows per game in 2021/22, which means the league that currently looks extreme is already a full booking per game calmer than it was.

Two structural features sit behind it. Portuguese referees card at a high rate relative to fouls, one card per 5.3 fouls, which is the second strictest conversion in the table. And both teams get booked in 86.9 percent of Primeira Liga matches, the highest rate anywhere in our data, against 74.7 percent in the Premier League. That second number is the one that matters if you bet the market our both teams booked guide covers, because it turns a coin flip in England into a heavy favourite in Portugal.

At referee level the picture is just as skewed. Antonio Nobre averaged 5.12 yellows per game across 17 Primeira Liga matches and Miguel Nogueira 4.53 across 15. Both are above the strictest official in the entire Premier League sample. The full list sits on our Primeira Liga referee table, and Nobre's profile carries the per season splits.

The practical consequence is that a Portuguese fixture should not be priced with a European default. It needs its own baseline, and that baseline is roughly one and a quarter cards higher than the one most models carry.

Serie A's reputation is five years out of date

In February 2020 the CIES Football Observatory published its survey of 92 top divisions, Weekly Post 284, and put Serie A on 5.8 cards per game against 3.7 for the Premier League. That single comparison is still the source of most of what gets written about Italian discipline. Our 2025/26 count puts Serie A on 3.88 cards of any colour per game. The gap it was famous for has closed completely.

Serie A has fallen in all five seasons without a single reversal, which is rarer than it sounds. Every other league in the table has at least one season where it moved the other way. A monotonic five season decline of a full card per game is a policy change showing up in the numbers, not noise.

The same decline is visible in Portugal and Spain, and the three steepest falls in the table are the three leagues that started highest. The leagues that were already near three and a half yellows per game have drifted gently upward instead. European refereeing is converging on a common rate from both directions, and the ones converging downward are doing it fastest.

There is a trap in that for anyone using career averages. A referee's lifetime figure blends the league they work in now with the league it was five years ago, so an Italian official with a long record will look stricter than their recent work. Our Serie A referee page and every profile on the site carry a last 20 matches view for exactly this reason, and on a league moving a full card in five years that recent view is the one to trust.

The leagues people argue about have quietly converged

Strip Portugal and Spain out of the table and look at what is left. Bundesliga 3.81, Premier League 3.75, Ligue 1 3.74, Championship 3.71, Serie A 3.70. Five competitions in four countries, across 1,924 matches, inside a band of 0.11 yellow cards per game.

That band is smaller than the gap between two referees in any one of them. John Brooks and the Premier League average are 0.97 yellows apart on our Premier League referee card stats page. Felix Zwayer sits 1.02 above the Bundesliga average. The identity of the official is therefore worth roughly nine times more than the identity of the league, once you are inside this group.

• If your fixture is in the convergence group, the league adjustment is noise. Spend the effort on the referee, the derby status and the fixture tempo instead.
• If it is in Portugal or Spain, the league adjustment is the single biggest term and it is worth more than most referee reads.
• If it is in the Eredivisie, adjust down hard. At 3.22 yellows and a 40.8 percent over 3.5 rate the Dutch top flight is the outlier at the quiet end, and its strictest official, Jeroen Manschot on 3.82, would rank twelfth of the 47 Premier League referees in our sample rather than first.

This is the finding that most cross league content misses, because comparing two leagues at a time hides it. The Premier League against Serie A looks like a real question. The Premier League against Serie A, Ligue 1, the Bundesliga and the Championship all at once looks like the same league five times.

Red cards are a different league table entirely

Yellow card rates and red card rates are usually treated as the same measure of strictness. They are not even close, and the Premier League is the proof.

The two English divisions send off a player in 9.2 percent of matches. Ligue 1 does it in 22.5 percent. English football produces 2.7 reds per 100 yellows while France produces 6.7, so an English referee reaching for a second yellow or a straight red is less than half as likely as a French one holding an identical set of yellows.

Ligue 1 is the sharpest illustration of why these are separate measures. It sits sixth on yellows, 0.01 above the Championship, and first on red card frequency. A model that scales red card risk from a yellow card baseline will underprice French dismissals by a factor of two and overprice Portuguese ones, since Portugal leads on yellows and is only third on reds.

For booking points markets this matters more than it looks, because a red carries 25 points against a yellow's 10. Ligue 1's 43.7 average booking points is higher than the Bundesliga's 42.3 despite Ligue 1 showing fewer yellows, and the whole of that inversion comes from dismissals. The mechanics of how that gets priced are in our guide on how card markets are priced.

What the baselines are worth in card markets

An average is not a price. An over rate is, because it is already a probability, and the gap between the two is where most league level card analysis stops being useful. These are the raw hit rates for the two lines that actually get traded, with the break even decimal price each one implies.

Read the over 4.5 column rather than the over 3.5 one if you want to see how much the league is doing for you. On the 3.5 line, the seven leagues between Portugal and the Netherlands span 1.39 to 1.92, a range most bookmaker margins would swallow. On the 4.5 line the same seven span 1.72 to 3.03, which no margin hides.

Three habits follow from that table, and the first one is the one I break most often.

1. Price the line, not the league. A Primeira Liga over 3.5 at 1.39 fair is a market where you need a real edge to beat the margin. The same league's over 4.5 at 1.72 fair is where the 58.2 percent hit rate has room to pay.
2. Treat both teams booked as a separate league table. Portugal's 86.9 percent and the Eredivisie's 70.3 percent are 16.6 points apart, a wider relative gap than the leagues show on over 3.5.
3. Never carry one league's baseline into another. A model calibrated on the Premier League's 56.1 percent will be 15.8 points wrong on every Portuguese fixture and 15.3 points wrong the other way on every Dutch one.

2026/27 so far, and why early season card rates lie

The 2026/27 season is five to seven rounds old. Here is where each league stands, and the reason to hold these numbers loosely.

Seven of nine leagues are carding below their own 2025/26 rate, several of them heavily. The honest reading is that 36 to 95 matches is not enough to call a trend. A Bundesliga sample of 36 matches moves by 0.23 yellows per game if eight bookings land differently, and eight bookings is one bad tempered afternoon.

The reverse error is the more expensive one, and it has a documented example. On 9 February 2024, with the 2023/24 Premier League season 60 percent complete, The Analyst reported a record card rate running more than 20 percent above the previous season. In our count the season finished 16 percent up on 2022/23, at 4.17 yellows per game, and the two seasons since have come in at 4.05 and 3.75. A model built on that mid season reading would have carried about 4.3 yellows per game into 2024/25, which arrived at 4.05, so it started roughly a quarter of a card per game too high.

So the rule for using the table above is narrow. Treat it as a flag for which leagues to re check in December, not as this season's baseline. The baseline is still the completed 2025/26 column, and it stays the baseline until a league has 150 matches behind it.

Using a league baseline with a referee read

A league number on its own is a prior, and the referee is the update. The order matters, because doing it the other way round is how a strict official in a quiet league gets mistaken for a strict official.

1. Start from the league's over rate, not its average. Take the figure from the market table above for the line you are betting. That is your opening probability.
2. Find the official's rate in that same competition. Not their career figure, and not their rate in another league. A referee page on this site splits by competition precisely because the two differ by half a card per game or more.
3. Check the sample before you move. Under 15 matches in the competition, leave the league baseline alone. Between 15 and 40, move a third of the way toward the referee's figure. Above 40, use the referee's figure.
4. Apply the red card rate separately. It does not scale from yellows, as the Ligue 1 and Premier League rows show, so treat dismissal risk as its own input.
5. Adjust last for the fixture. A derby or a relegation six pointer pulls up, a dead rubber in May pulls down, and neither is in the referee's average.

Step three is the one that gets skipped. Alejandro Hernandez at 5.00 yellows per game across 22 La Liga matches is a usable number because the sample supports it, and his profile shows the splits behind it. A Bundesliga official with nine matches is not, however extreme the figure looks. Our wider guide on how referee stats win card bets works through the sizing, and the appointments tracker shows who has which fixture once the sheets are published.

How we counted, and what these numbers do not cover

Every figure on this page comes from completed match records, one row per fixture, carrying the home and away yellow and red counts as the match report filed them. We downloaded the nine league files on 4 October 2026 and recomputed every rate rather than reusing a published summary, which is also why the totals here differ slightly from the league pages on this site: those pages average across every season we hold, and this guide isolates single seasons.

• A second yellow is recorded by the source as one yellow plus one red in most seasons. We do not try to reconcile that, we count what the source filed, and our methodology page states it plainly.
• There are no card minutes in this data, so nothing above splits first half from second half. That split exists on our referee pages only for competitions where we hold event level data.
• The 2026/27 column stops at 20 September 2026, which is where the source files ended when we pulled them. It is not a full picture of the season to today.
• Nine leagues is not Europe. The CIES survey covers 92 divisions and found rates from 2.3 to 7.0 cards per game worldwide, so treat the Primeira Liga as the most carded league in this sample, not on earth.
• Referee level figures in this guide come from the RefOdds dataset rather than the raw files, because the source rows do not name officials outside the English and Scottish leagues. Where a referee is named, the match count is given next to the rate.

The disciplinary law behind all of it has not changed through any of these seasons. Law 12 of the IFAB Laws of the Game defines the cautionable offences identically in every competition here, which is what makes the gaps between leagues interesting. Nine competitions applying one rule book produce a 1.75 card per game spread, and that spread is interpretation rather than law.

We recount these tables when each season closes. If you want the live version for a single official rather than a league, the referee profiles update as matches are ingested, and the strictest Premier League referees guide is the England specific companion to this one.