Across thirty Premiership seasons Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates have played sixty league matches and won eighteen each, with twenty-four drawn. South Africa's most argued-about fixture is, on the modern league record, exactly level. Every meeting we can itemise — 88 of them — with date, venue, score and attendance where it exists.
By Noma Dora, Senior Regulatory & Sports Journalist · Published · Last updated
More than four years covering sport for the regional South African press.
A living record. Updated after each derby.
Across thirty seasons of the Premiership, Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates have played sixty league matches and won eighteen each. Twenty-four were drawn. The most fiercely argued fixture in South African football is, on the league record of the modern era, exactly level.
It is level in both halves of that era, too. In the first fifteen Premiership seasons: eight wins each. In the last fifteen: ten wins each. There is no era in the professional-league record in which either club has been meaningfully ahead of the other.
Below is every meeting we can itemise — 88 of them — with date, venue, score and attendance where it was recorded. The full table is downloadable, and the parts we could not verify are set out as plainly as the parts we could.
| Grouping | Meetings | Chiefs | Draws | Pirates | Draw rate | Goals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| League — all 30 Premiership seasons | 60 | 18 | 24 | 18 | 40.0% | 61–66 |
| Cup competitions, 1970–71 to 2024–25 | 28 | 10 | 6 | 12 | 21.4% | 33–43 |
| All itemised meetings | 88 | 28 | 30 | 30 | 34.1% | 94–109 |
Two things stand out immediately.
The league record is a dead heat, and the goals are nearly level too — 66 for Pirates against 61 for Chiefs across 60 matches. Whatever else is true about these two clubs, the modern league fixture between them has not been won by either.
Four derbies in ten are drawn. A 40% league draw rate is extraordinarily high. For comparison, our own altitude analysis measured the league-wide draw rate at 29.2% across 930 matches. The Soweto derby draws about a third more often than an average Premiership fixture — which is what you would expect of a match where both sides have far more to lose than to gain.
The single most interesting movement in the data is not in the win column. It is in the draws, and it is recent.
| Era | Matches | Chiefs | Draws | Pirates | Draw rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1996–97 to 2010–11 | 30 | 8 | 14 | 8 | 46.7% |
| 2011–12 to 2019–20 | 18 | 5 | 9 | 4 | 50.0% |
| 2020–21 to 2025–26 | 12 | 5 | 1 | 6 | 8.3% |
For the first twenty-four Premiership seasons, close to half of all Soweto derbies finished level — fourteen draws in the first thirty meetings, then nine in the next eighteen. Since 2020–21 there has been one draw in twelve league meetings.
We are not going to over-explain this. Twelve matches is a small sample, and a run of that kind can occur by chance. But it is a large change from a stable base of nearly a quarter of a century, and it is the clearest trend anywhere in this dataset. The 2025–26 season's second derby — a 1–1 draw at FNB Stadium in front of 94,736 people, the largest attendance in our entire record — was the first level derby in the league since the 2010s.
Note also what did not change: even in this draw-free era the wins split almost evenly, five to Chiefs and six to Pirates.
Across the sixty Premiership meetings:
| Matches | Host wins | Draws | Visitor wins | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kaizer Chiefs at home | 30 | 10 | 13 | 7 |
| Orlando Pirates at home | 30 | 11 | 11 | 8 |
Hosting is worth something, but not much — 21 host wins against 15 visitor wins over sixty matches. That sits well below the league-wide home advantage of about 0.40 points per game we measured across 930 matches, and it fits the derby's character: these are effectively neutral occasions. Both clubs are Soweto clubs, both sets of supporters travel in numbers, and the biggest fixtures are frequently moved to FNB Stadium regardless of which club is nominally at home. The 2025–26 record shows both derbies played at FNB Stadium, one of them with Pirates as the designated home side.
The shortest away trip in South African top-flight football, incidentally, is the one between these two grounds: 5.9 km from FNB Stadium to Orlando Stadium, as computed in our travel-load analysis.
The cup record reaches back much further than the league record, because the itemised cup list starts with the 1970–71 Life Challenge Cup final. It is also the half of the dataset where Pirates hold an edge.
| Competition | Meetings | Chiefs | Draws | Pirates |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Life Challenge Cup | 5 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Nedbank Cup | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| MTN 8 (incl. 2020 edition) | 7 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| Bob Save Super Bowl | 5 | 1 | 0 | 4 |
| Telkom Knockout | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| Benson & Hedges Cup | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 28 | 10 | 6 | 12 |
Cup derbies are more decisive and higher-scoring than league derbies: a 21.4% draw rate against 40.0%, and 2.71 goals per game against 2.12. Knockout football removes the incentive to protect a point, and the numbers show it.
One cup result we are flagging rather than repeating. The record includes a 1971–72 final listed as Orlando Pirates 10–1 Kaizer Chiefs. We have kept it in the downloadable data because it is in the source, but we do not believe it should be quoted without independent confirmation: a 10–1 scoreline in a final between these two clubs is not corroborated anywhere else we checked, and the competition it is filed under is retro-labelled. That single fixture supplies 10 of Pirates' 109 goals in the all-meetings total. Excluding it, the goal record over the other 87 meetings is Chiefs 93, Pirates 99.
The brief for this page asked for attendance. Here is exactly what exists.
| Attendance status | Meetings |
|---|---|
| A figure is recorded | 45 |
| Recorded as zero (played behind closed doors) | 5 |
| No figure recorded at all | 38 |
Attendance is recorded for 45 of 88 meetings — 51%. We have not estimated a single one of the missing 38, and we have not carried a figure forward from a comparable fixture. A blank in the attendance column of the downloadable data means the number was not recorded in our source, and that is all it means.
Where figures do exist, the derby is one of the largest regular sporting occasions in Africa:
| Attendance | Match | Date | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 94,736 | Orlando Pirates v Kaizer Chiefs | 25 April 2026 | 1–1 |
| 92,515 | Kaizer Chiefs v Orlando Pirates | 26 February 2011 | 1–1 |
| 90,000 | Orlando Pirates v Kaizer Chiefs | 15 March 2014 | 0–1 |
| 90,000 | Kaizer Chiefs v Orlando Pirates | 31 October 2015 | 1–3 |
| 90,000 | Kaizer Chiefs v Orlando Pirates | 5 March 2016 (Nedbank Cup) | 0–2 |
The mean of the 45 recorded, non-zero figures is 71,872.
Two honest notes on that column. First, the repeated "90,000" entries are suspiciously round, and almost certainly a stadium-capacity convention rather than a turnstile count — treat them as approximate. Second, the five zeroes are real and meaningful: they are the 2020–21 and 2021–22 derbies played without spectators. They are excluded from the mean but kept in the data, because a derby with nobody in it is a fact about those seasons worth preserving.
This matters more than anything else on the page, so it gets its own section.
This is not a complete all-time record, and we are not going to present it as one. What we have is:
What is missing is the league record from the first meeting in 1970 to the formation of the Premiership in 1996. Published all-time figures are substantially higher than ours because they include that quarter-century: SuperSport's derby preview puts the all-time total across all competitions at 184 meetings and the all-time league record at 45 wins to Chiefs against 27 to Pirates with 36 draws. We could not itemise those matches — no source we checked lists them fixture by fixture with dates, venues and scores — so we have not folded them into our totals.
The implication is worth stating carefully, as an observation and not a verified finding: if the published all-time league figures are right, then Chiefs' historical league advantage sits almost entirely in the pre-1996 era, because the thirty Premiership seasons we can itemise are exactly level. We cannot confirm that until the earlier matches are itemised from primary records, and we would rather say so than publish an all-time table we cannot check.
Two further source problems we found and are disclosing:
The summary table on our main source does not reconcile with its own itemised list. It gives the league record as 53 fixtures with 20 Chiefs wins and 12 Pirates wins. But the itemised list contains sixty league fixtures — which is exactly right for thirty seasons of a double round-robin — and yields 18 wins each. The draw count is the only figure that matches, at 24. We have used the itemised list, because it is checkable fixture by fixture and its internal cross-checks all pass; the summary table cannot be right, since thirty seasons cannot contain 53 league meetings.
Early venue attributions are unreliable. The cup list records 1970s matches at FNB Stadium, which did not open until 1989. We have reproduced the venue column as we found it and flagged it rather than silently correcting or deleting it, but do not cite pre-1989 venues from this data.
Every one of the 88 meetings was parsed programmatically from the itemised source tables rather than transcribed by hand, then validated two ways.
The colour cross-check. The source encodes each result twice — once as a score, once as a background colour marking the winning side. We parsed the score and the colour independently and compared them on all 88 rows. They agree in every single case. That is the strongest available check that the scores were read correctly and that no row's home and away teams were transposed.
The completeness check. Thirty Premiership seasons of a double round-robin must produce exactly sixty league meetings. The itemised list produces sixty, across a continuous run of seasons from 1996–97 to 2025–26 with none missing.
Spot-checked against independent reporting: the 28 February 2026 derby (Chiefs 0–3 Pirates) matches ESPN's match record, and the 25 April 2026 result matches the league record for that round.
What is the all-time head-to-head record between Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates? On the record we can itemise — 88 meetings — it is 30 wins to Pirates, 28 to Chiefs and 30 draws. Published all-time figures are higher because they include league matches from 1970 to 1996 that we could not itemise; SuperSport puts the all-time total at 184 meetings.
Who has won more Soweto derbies in the Premiership? Neither. Across all thirty Premiership seasons, 1996–97 to 2025–26, it is 18 wins each with 24 draws in sixty matches. It is level in both halves of that period too: eight wins each in the first fifteen seasons, ten each in the last fifteen.
How many Soweto derbies end in a draw? Historically about four in ten league meetings — 24 of 60, or 40%, which is well above the 29.2% league-wide draw rate. But that has changed sharply: there has been just one draw in the twelve league derbies since 2020–21.
What is the biggest Soweto derby attendance? 94,736, at FNB Stadium on 25 April 2026, for a 1–1 draw. That is the highest figure in our record, ahead of 92,515 in February 2011. Attendance is only recorded for 45 of the 88 meetings.
Have any Soweto derbies been played without spectators? Yes — five in our record, across the 2020–21 and 2021–22 seasons, including both legs of the 2020 MTN 8 semi-final.
Is home advantage a factor in the Soweto derby? Barely. Across sixty Premiership meetings the host side won 21 and the visitor 15, with 24 draws — much weaker than the league-wide home advantage. Both clubs are Soweto clubs and the biggest derbies are often played at FNB Stadium whichever club is nominally at home.
Why does this page not list all 184 meetings? Because no source we checked itemises them. We can list the sixty Premiership league matches and twenty-eight cup matches with dates, venues and scores. The 1970–1996 league meetings are counted in published totals but not itemised anywhere we could verify, so we have left them out of our tables rather than reproduce figures we cannot check.
Period covered: Sixty South African Premiership league meetings across all thirty seasons from 1996–97 to 2025–26, plus twenty-eight cup meetings from 1970–71 to 2024–25. 88 itemised meetings in total.
Every figure on this page is in the files below, so you can check the arithmetic yourself. Released under CC BY 4.0 — free to reuse, including commercially, with attribution.
Journalists and researchers are welcome to use this data. Please credit Bet AFR and link to this page — that link is the only thing we ask for in return.
Bet AFR, "Soweto Derby Database — every recorded Kaizer Chiefs v Orlando Pirates meeting", last updated 27 July 2026. https://betafr.co.za/statistics/soweto-derby-database
Licensed CC BY 4.0 (licence terms). Spotted an error, or have a better source? Tell us — corrections are published with the date they were made.
More reference data: the PSL altitude advantage (source of the 29.2% league-wide draw rate), the PSL travel load, our goals-per-game record and the season-by-season history.