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What Does GF, GA And GD Mean In Soccer?

26 Oct, 2025

Learning how to communicate about football means understanding a wide variety of different words, phrases, acronyms, and abbreviations that might mean little to those uninterested in the sport.

It’s almost like a brand new language; from initialisms like xG and PPDA to position-specific descriptors like inverted full-back, deep-lying playmaker or inside forward, more and more of these terms are entering the game as the importance of tactics, analytics, and data continues to increase across the world of professional football.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on a few of the longest-standing and most easily digestible abbreviations used in general football parlance: GD, GA, and GF. We’ll explain what each of these phrases stands for and look at when they first became relevant in football.

We’ll also explore how they can be used alongside other statistics and metrics to paint more vivid pictures of how football teams are performing and what their main strengths and weaknesses are.

What Does GA Mean In Soccer?

GA is an initialism that stands for ‘Goals Against’. The meaning of GA in football is simple: this is the most common way of recording the number of goals conceded by a team.

You’ll usually see GA or goals against listed as a vertical column at the top of a league table. The three non-negotiable columns you’ll find in virtually every league table are Games Played, Points, and GD (more on this shortly).

However, in more detailed league tables, there are a number of other pieces of information recorded, one of which is goals against.

Goals against isn’t normally used to refer to individual games. For example, if a team loses a match 3-2, you’re unlikely to hear a commentator saying they’ve recorded three goals against in that particular fixture.

Rather, it’s used to record defensive performances across an extended period of time, for example, over a domestic league season or in the group stages of a cup competition. GA notes how many goals each team has conceded and thereby offers a solid gauge of how good they are at guarding their backline and preventing the opposition from scoring.

What Does GF Mean In Soccer?

GF is the metric used to record the number of goals a team has scored across a competition. GF stands for Goals For and it’s the kind of figure attack-minded coaches are often looking to prioritise. If you’ve got a strong figure in the GF column at the end of a season, it means you’ve been able to constantly break through opposition backlines and find the back of the net.

Comparing goals for with goals against can give us a good indication of what a manager is looking to build their game around. Take the 2024/25 Premier League season, for example. Tottenham Hotspur suffered their lowest ever PL finish in 17th, conceding a dismal 65 goals in the league.

However, if you look across to their GF column, you'll find that they scored an impressive 64 goals, a tally beaten by only six Premier League teams. This reflects the uber-attacking philosophy of former manager Ange Postecoglou, whose willingness to sacrifice defensive solidity in search of fluid attacking football boosted the GF tally, but ultimately led to Spurs’ low league finish.

What Does GD Mean In Soccer?

On their own, Goals For and Goals Against cannot tell the full story of a team’s attacking or defensive record. In the modern game, there are a number of different metrics that are used to support these basic figures, but one figure that offers a more balanced take on a team’s performances is GD.

The abbreviation GD stands for Goal Difference. To calculate a team’s goal difference, you simply subtract the number of goals they’ve conceded (GA) from the total number of goals they have scored (GF).

For example, if a team had played 14 games, scored 29 goals, and conceded 21 goals, their overall goal difference or GD over this time period would be +8.

It’s also possible for a team to have a minus goal difference (usually, this will be the case for most of the bottom half of a league). Sometimes these figures can be a damning indication of a division’s gulf in quality.

The three relegated Premier League sides in 2024/25, for example, all had an abysmal goal difference record: bottom-placed Southampton were on -60, while 19th-placed Ipswich Town stood on -46 and 18th-placed Leicester City on -47.

This final table showed how large the gap between the Championship and the Premier League had grown, with all three newly promoted sides facing immediate relegation for the second season running.

When Are GA, GD, and GF Used In Football?

Goal difference has been a key part of professional football for over half a century. It was first introduced by FIFA as a tie-breaker for the group stages of the 1970 World Cup, and it soon caught on, with the English Football League introducing GD five years later.

Before this point, competitions like the EFL had used goal average instead, an old metric calculated by dividing the total number of goals scored by the total number of goals conceded.

The primary purpose of goal difference is to help shape the order of domestic league tables. GD doesn’t just add extra context about attacking and defensive output; rather, it’s a tool used to see who finishes where.

League tables are ordered based on the number of points accumulated; the team that earns the most points over a season wins the league. However, when two or more teams are level on points, other statistics have to be taken into account.

And the first statistic used to decide who finishes higher when two teams are tied on points is goal difference. This can have serious ramifications, with Manchester City dramatically crowned Premier League champions for the first time in 2011/12 due to their superior goal difference over runners-up Manchester United.

The two rivals were tied on 89 points, but City’s GD of +64 was eight goals more than United’s GD of +56, and so they were handed the Premier League trophy.

This kind of situation is rare, but in the even more unlikely scenario of a team being level on both points and goal difference, another goal-based metric is taken into account. The next highest-weighted statistic is GF, so out of two level-pegging teams, the one with the most goals scored will finish higher.

If even this metric is tied, the highest-placed team is decided by the head-to-head record between the two sides in question. Goals against don’t tend to count towards league standings at all, with disciplinary records and even alphabetical order typically favoured in terms of determining rankings.

It isn’t just domestic league tables that make use of goal difference, goals for, and goals against in football. Knockout club competitions like the UEFA Champions League and Europa League, which feature a group stage (or league phase in the newly structured formats), will utilise goal difference and goals for in order to decide who qualifies for the knockout stages.

In international football, metrics like GD are also crucial in deciding who progresses from the group stages to the knockout rounds; at Euro 2020, for example, semi-finalists Denmark only secured 2nd place in their group (and automatic qualification for the knockouts) on goal difference, but would’ve reached the final if it weren’t for a dramatic late semis winner from England’s Harry Kane.

Is GF A Useful Metric For Recording Attacking Output?

On the surface, GF or goals for is a very useful type of statistic for measuring how effective a team’s attack is. It’s simple: if they’re scoring lots of goals, clearly they pose a serious threat up top. But there are tons of other things to consider when valuing a team's strength in the opposition final third.

For example, there are metrics that record how well a team presses the opposition backline, like passes per defensive action (PPDA), high recoveries, and goals directly from high turnovers.

In the modern game, when pressing and counter-pressing play a crucial role in chance generation for many coaches, these statistics give a good indication of how dangerous a team is in the final third.

Additionally, expected goals (xG) is a great metric for underlining how many high-quality opportunities are being created, while analysts and coaches also place value in newer metrics like expected threat (xT), which is all about evaluating how a player's actions (eg. passes, carries and dribbles) impact the likelihood of a goal being scored.

Analysing a figure like GF on its own isn’t particularly helpful when it comes to painting a broad picture of a team’s attacking output.

However, taking into consideration this wide variety of different metrics can help create a more reliable portrait of the types of chances being created, the methods coaches are prioritising, and how clinical forwards are performing when they get in front of goal. GD, GA, and GF are all important parts of football, but crucially, they are all about providing context, rather than the full story.

Want to find out more about some of the key football metrics we’ve mentioned in this article? Check out our article on the role of expected goals (xG) in modern football.

Author: Fred Garratt-Stanley

Lead Content Writer

Fred Garratt-Stanley is an experienced football writer and journalist, specialising in industry insights, tactical analysis, and the culture of the game. He has contributed to publications such as NME, GQ, The Quietus, and Resident Advisor. As Lead Content Writer at Jobs In Football, he focuses on providing reliable, research-driven articles to help people navigate careers in the football industry.