Trading team news on football matches
I’m looking at the Man City and West Ham match this evening. I see City are 1/5 on for the win! The big question I am asking myself at this moment in time is, what teams will walk onto the pitch this evening?
I trade a lot of football before the match starts. Why? Well if I do anything in-play then trading before the off gives me some leeway to what I want to do with a strategy in-play. If I have some spare cash you can sometimes magnify this up to a much larger amount in-play or use it to ‘subsidise’ your in-play strategy.
But trading before the off brings it’s hazards and opportunities. The market can be pretty quiet for long periods of time and it’s only late on, as with most markets, that the real volume arrives. But as with a lot of sports there are key moments in this period before the start. In football its the announcement of the team sheet. Teams are obligated to return a sheet at least one hour before the start of the match. So typically a lot of teams don’t release the sheet until the last minute and it can have a bit effect on price.
West Ham recently played Nottingham Forest in the FA CUP. West Ham are having a torrid time of it at the moment and the big question before this match was whether players would be rested or not for a tricky away tie. The answer was an emphatic YES. West Ham fielded such a weak team they lost 5-0 to a team one division below them.
There was early clue that a fielding a weak team could be the case. West Ham manager Sam Allardyce, said before the game that the FA Cup fell behind top-flight survival and the Capital One Cup semi-final against Manchester City in his priorities. He also commented a number of injury problems.
The price on Forest started to creep in slightly, but as the team sheet was announced and people struggled to work out who was actually in the West Ham team; the price shunted in. There was a good 20 ticks to be had by backing Forest. On the graph you see on this post, you can see the bottom axis is time in seconds to the start of the match. So this gives you a feel for when this move started and how long it went on for.
Today’s match is heavily discounting a Man City win, so I don’t expect much action this evening. But keeping your ear to the ground is always a useful thing to do when it comes to trading football before the off.
Category: Football trading strategies
