The 2020/21 Premier League season produced a surge of penalties under tightened handball interpretations and full VAR usage, and that shift was not distributed evenly across clubs. Understanding which teams consistently earned or conceded spot-kicks—and why—offers practical insight for anyone trying to read totals, goal scorers, or in-play markets through a data-driven lens.
From the opening weeks, it was clear that refereeing and VAR emphasis on handball and contact in the box would shape the season’s scoring profile. By early November 2020, 41 penalties had already been awarded in just 78 matches, a rate on track for nearly double the 92 penalties seen across the entire 2019/20 campaign if it had held. Across the full 2020/21 season, league-wide data indicates that penalties accounted for a notably higher share of goals than in many previous years, with some teams deriving more than 14 percent of their total goals from the spot.
Penalties matter for bettors because they shift expected goals and change the way tight games break late. Across recent seasons starting in 2020/21, penalties have been converted at historically high rates, with one analysis showing that only around 11.7 percent of spot-kicks were saved on average over the four seasons from 2020–2024, down from 19.1 percent in the preceding four-season block. In practical terms, that means a penalty in 2020/21 was closer than ever to a “near-certain” goal, so teams and bettors could treat any systematic bias in favour of or against particular clubs as a serious, repeatable edge rather than mere noise.
Club-level statistics show a pronounced skew in how many penalties teams were awarded. Leicester City topped the 2020/21 table with 12 penalties “for,” followed closely by Manchester United with 11 and Chelsea with 10, while several other sides clustered just below—Brighton with 9, Manchester City with 9, and Newcastle with 7. These numbers reflect not only the quality of attacking players but also how often teams entered the penalty area with control, drew contact, or forced defenders into handball situations under the updated laws.
A simplified snapshot of penalties awarded “for” in 2020/21:
This distribution shows that certain clubs combined high box entry with penalty-friendly profiles—dynamic forwards, dribbling volume, and aggressive overlapping—making frequent spot-kicks a structural feature rather than a fluke.
Just as some sides regularly earned penalties, others repeatedly put themselves in positions where they were punished. Aggregate 2020/21 data indicates that several mid- and lower-table teams conceded four or more penalties, with West Brom, Fulham, Sheffield United and Crystal Palace among those repeatedly on the wrong end of VAR and referee decisions inside their own area. Deep defensive blocks facing constant crossing and sustained pressure effectively raised exposure to handball calls and late, recovery tackles, increasing the probability that a single misjudgement would become a spot-kick against.
From a stylistic standpoint, clubs that defended for long stretches in their own box with limited capacity to push the line higher were more vulnerable, because every extra touch in crowded zones increased the chance of accidental contact that modern interpretations treat harshly.
The pattern of penalties “for” and “against” in 2020/21 lines up strongly with how teams tried to play. High-pressing, possession-oriented sides that constantly attacked the half-spaces and penalty area—Leicester under Brendan Rodgers, Manchester City, and to a degree Manchester United—generated more situations where attackers could draw fouls or forced defenders into handball pressure. In contrast, teams that attacked mainly through crosses from distance or long balls without sustained box combinations had fewer chances to win penalties, because defenders had more time to see the ball and avoid clumsy contact.
On the other side of the ball, teams that collapsed deep under pressure conceded more penalties, since their defenders had to block more shots and cut-backs at short range, raising the likelihood of handling offences and desperate tackles. VAR magnified this effect by allowing slow-motion review of marginal incidents, particularly handball interpretations that drew widespread attention early in the campaign.
It is important, however, not to treat a single season’s penalty count as a guaranteed long-term edge. Some clubs’ elevated totals reflected a combination of style, specific personnel and refereeing emphasis in 2020/21, but small-sample variance still played a role—especially in cases where a handful of borderline decisions swung the numbers. Moreover, law clarifications and mid-season guidance to officials can alter the penalty environment even within one campaign, reducing handball awards relative to early rounds and weakening straightforward extrapolations.
From the viewpoint of player markets, penalties significantly shaped goal totals and scorer bets for specific profiles. Leicester’s Jamie Vardy, Manchester United’s Bruno Fernandes, Chelsea’s Jorginho and others saw large fractions of their goals come from the spot; in some cases, over half of an individual’s league tally was penalty-based. At team level, data shows that Sheffield United and Brighton saw 15 percent of their goals come from penalties, while Leicester’s share was 14.71 percent and Chelsea’s 13.79 percent, underlining how central spot-kicks were to their scoring output.
These ratios matter because they highlight where a change in penalty environment—either through law tweaks, tactical adjustments, or different attacking personnel—could disproportionately affect both team goal projections and the value of backing certain scorers. A side heavily reliant on penalties for its marginal goals is more exposed if refereeing emphasis shifts or if its main penalty-winner suffers injury.
For bettors assessing 2020/21 matches through an online sports betting environment, the question was how to translate penalty trends into practical decisions without overfitting. When a fixture featured a team that consistently earned penalties—Leicester, Manchester United, Chelsea, Brighton—against an opponent that often conceded them, there was a rational case to treat penalty-related markets and “anytime scorer” odds for designated takers as slightly mispriced if bookmakers leaned too heavily on long-run league averages. In that context, anyone studying matchups on the ufa168 เว็บตรง betting platform needed to weigh how frequently each side entered or defended its box, which players routinely won spot-kicks, and whether the appointed referee had above-average history for pointing to the spot, because these concrete factors offered more signal than generic narratives about “penalty FC.”
Because penalty stories are vivid—controversial calls, VAR stoppages, late spot-kicks—they tend to dominate highlight packages and social media coverage. That visibility can bias casual perceptions, leading some fans to overestimate how often certain teams “always get penalties” while underestimating how much of that pattern comes from legitimate structural causes such as box entries and dribbles. In practice, users entering a casino online website to place bets around penalties needed to combine emotional memory with hard data, verifying whether a club’s reputation aligned with actual 2020/21 figures on penalties for, against and percentage of goals from the spot before committing to specials or scorer markets driven by the narrative.
Penalty trends in the 2020/21 Premier League season reflected a mix of stricter interpretations, VAR’s full influence and underlying team styles, rather than pure luck. Leicester, Manchester United and Chelsea stood out for the number of penalties they received, while several lower-table sides repeatedly conceded spot-kicks under sustained pressure. For anyone analysing that campaign, the most useful takeaway is that systematic differences in box entries, defensive depth and penalty-taker roles created identifiable patterns, but those patterns only translated into betting value when interpreted alongside evolving laws, referee guidance and the inherently high conversion rates that turned each 2020/21 penalty into something close to a free goal.
Supriyo Khan
Supriyo Khan
Supriyo Khan
Supriyo Khan
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