Category: Football trading strategies
My season long shot
May day is pay day for me, on a number of football markets. Season long bets mature and pay out months of hard work.
Relegation and promotion markets are something I play in each year and they can be quite fertile territory, if you have the patience.
Where to look
The new manager effect is a well understood phenomena in football. The old manager is given the boot and existing players suddenly have somebody new to impress. It’s a little …
How do the Italians get away with it?
I know I’ve posted a few times on this, but it’s really difficult to fathom in an age of close scrutiny and elevated morality in sport how matches like this occur. Today – Bari vs Cesena
I just downloaded todays football for analysis and on this match £30k has been match and all but a minor amount has been matched on the draw, which is going off odds on! Amazing, or it would be, if it wasn’t so predictable!
You …
The longest running Betfair market ever
News that Sir Alex Ferguson is about to retire has re-ignited interest in the long forgotten ‘Next Man Utd manager market’.
This is a market that must hold the record for the longest ever market on Betfair. Some must be glad it is coming to a close! According to the start date on Betfair, the market first opened on 17th September 2001! I realised it had been up there for some time, but that date even surprised me.
Since the …
End of season Italian football – I predict a draw
As I have pointed out in prior years at the same time, end of season Italian football can throw up some strange situations and odds. Here are the ‘top’ eight matches with the lowest price for the draw today.
Spezia Vs. Lanciano – Draw odds – 2.08
Cesena Vs. Juve Stabia – Draw odds – 2.1
Chievo Vs. Cagliari – Draw odds – 2.3
Cittadella Vs. Reggina – Draw odds – 3.1
Crotone Vs. Modena – Draw odds – 3.3…
What’s Messi worth to Barcelona?
I recently asked a similar question of Gareth Bale and last night made me feel a move for Mr Bale is almost certain this summer when Spurs fail to qualify for the champions league.
But back to last night.
I must admit I was anticipating that Barcelona would ‘go for it’ from the off in an attempt to get an early goal and put pressure on Bayern early on, but it never came. Bad tactics, poor motivation? It seemed something …
My favourite football trading set up
We had a couple of wonderful matches in the champions league last night, I am hoping for some more tonight.
If you want to qualify the comments on this post, simply browse the football related posts I’ve made over the years on here and you will see why last night was a really nice set up for a possible bumper result.
Both matches last night were good trading fodder as they had a really strong incentive to score in both …
How much is Gareth Bale worth?
Quite a lot I would reckon. So the inevitable summer debate will be will who will Spurs sell him to?
Never quite seems to work out though does it? I don’t know how many star players I have seen sold, only to see them not fit into their new set up. But there is one thing that is in no doubt, just how much Gareth Bale is worth for Spurs not just in monetary terms, but on the pitch.
If …
Lessons from England vs San Marino
When England played San Marino at Wembley last time I captured a bunch of data. I was aiming to try and understand the best way to approach matches at such short odds.
In hindsight, most of it was obvious but it was worth examining; after-all there are lots of very short prices out there this evening.
There isn’t much to say about matches like this, England should completely pummel San Marino, but England are England aren’t they?
At Wembley, despite …
Money buying
Lots of money buying going on today with the World Cup 2014 qualification matches taking place. Some pretty uncompetitive affairs in there, here is a list of key matches listed by decimal odds, from the least competitive to the most competitive: –
1.01 – San Marino vs. England
1.07 – Netherlands vs. Estonia
1.08 – Spain vs. Finland
1.09 – Kazakhstan vs. Germany
1.09 – Andorra vs. Turkey
1.13 – Egypt vs. Swaziland
1.14 – Austria vs. Faroe Islands
1.15 …
Real problems for Man Utd?
My favourite champions league memory comes from a Man Utd vs Juventus match back in 1999, before the dawn of betting exchanges.
A friend phoned me and told me he had a spare ticket for the match and “Did I want to go?”. I immediately dropped everything and headed up to Manchester. I needed a hotel, so picked a reasonable one on a late booking and headed straight there. Remarkably I’d managed to pick the hotel where the Juventus were …
Spurs 4 Arsenal 5
Browsing my archives this morning I was reminded of this extraordinary match back in November 2004. I have attached the chart for the draw on this match.
Local derbies are quite likely to throw up unlikely results, but this was way out there. Typically matches between two local teams are more likely to throw up much more level results over time. Local pride, bragging rights & historical encounters tend to make the underdog up it’s game in an effort not …
Finding value in football matches
Value is created where the odds on offer don’t reflect the true reality of the underlying event. If you back when you think value is high and lay when it is low you should, over long periods of time, profit from this discrepancy. The key question of course is, what is value and how do you spot it?
Let me give you some scenarios: –
Match one description
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The home team is ranked 1st in the division and is
Are Bayern Munich the new Barcelona?
This doesn’t seem a realistic proposition but if you look at the Arsenal champions league match this evening that’s what the market is saying.
Tonight Arsenal are 4.50 to beat their opponents and their opponents are odds on to beat Arsenal but the only similar match I can see in my recent database is when Arsenal met Barcelona on 16/2/2011. Arsenal won that 2-1, Wegner must be praying for a similar result this evening!
FA Cup fifth round
So the FA Cup trundles on.
No real surprises so far in terms of how the tournament is playing out. I’ve pointed out in previous blog posts that from a tournament trading perspective it’s dominated by the top teams. So far this year premiership teams have dominated the book% in all rounds and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change.
Volumes on FA Cup matches are lower than higher profile so I’m starting to find it a bit annoying! …
A look under Betfair’s football markets
As you may know I’m bit of a stats man, but it’s a useful discipline. Monitoring your own activity can give you a useful insight into the markets and your activity on them. I spend at least a couple of hours a day either analysing what I did yesterday, or some aspect of the market or a strategy.
The champions league matches give me a chance really get under the skin of the market. This is because the liquidity is …
Champions league knock out stages
We are at the stage of the champions league that I enjoy the most. There is nothing like ‘incentive to score’ to throw up some nice trading opportunities. Hopefully we will get a few over the next couple of weeks.
With the away goal rule you have one team desperate not to concede and another desperate to score and according to my stats this throws up the largest amount of variability on football matches. Basically any cup competition is more …
Friendless friendlies
Just scanned through the list of international friendlies today.
As you may know, through the profiling tools available in Bet Angel, I like to roughly model an event before it has started. Ths is so I can work out my rough risk and payoff on an event.
The problem I have with friendlies is that I find it difficult to make broadly correct assumptions, so these are matches I am much less likely to be active on. You can see …
Seeded vs non-Seeded tournaments
We have a couple of classic divergences being display in full glory in the markets at the moment.
In Melbourne we have the Australian open Tennis where, in a seeded tournament, the semi finals look like they will be played out amongst the top four seeds. Seeded tournaments are basically there to ensure the top competitors have every chance of meeting in the latter stages.
In the UK, I just watched Bradford City complete a remarkable cup run to make …
Picking an FA Cup shock
Ah, the romance of the FA Cup!
The romance bit comes from a non league team coming up against a major club and beating them. But the evidence for regular giant killings is a little thin on the ground.
Last year, for the first time since 1994 a minor team made the fifth round. In the prior year a league two team made the fifth round, but there are often many years where this doesn’t occur. It really is the …
Goal fest
More amazing score lines in the premier league yesterday, but an interesting peice of psychology appears to be at hand.
A friend of mine sent me a text last night to exclaim just how many goals there had been this season, to which I replied, ‘It feels like it doesn’t it’. There-in ensued an argument about whether there actually had been more goals or not.
Yesterday we had a 3-4 and a 7-3, on boxing day an 8-0. Both very …
Trading correlated win markets
Last night we were presented with a good opportunity to trade a correlated market and it’s a favourite trade of mine.
Leeds were playing Chelsea and the opportunity was to oppose Chelsea without actually betting against them. This is because we were in the latter stages of a tournament. It’s important to note that this tactic only really has any logic when matches are taking place on different days.
In the latter stages of a tournament a red hot favourite …
Is the Queen a West Brom supporter?
While watching MOTD 2 the other day, I noticed that the Queen has been pretty busy.
Not only did she manage to visit the prime ministers cabinet meeting this week, but at the weekend I seem to have caught her watching West Brom vs West Ham. See picture: –
Clever ways to trade and visualise football data
Market data can be boring in it’s flat form format. By re-interpreting this data you can not only get a bit of depth in a market but perhaps see things you haven’t seen before. I tend to visualise data, because this allows you to look at the data in a much more intuitive manner and this means you can spot opportunties easier as it significantly aids your reading of a market.
In the embedded video we use the multi market …
Are traders really the dominant force on Betfair?
You often read about traditional backers (or layers) moaning how traders ‘mess up’ the market.
I’ve posted elsewhere on the blog that I actually think trading creates a range of new opportunities for traditional strategies because they often chase prices into value territory, without actually realising it. So much so that I’ve started taking advantage of outlier prices. But that point aside, I do often wonder just how much trading goes on and on what scale? We already know you …
Trading the last set of group matches
A couple of nice reminders in the last two days on curious scenarios that can occur in the dead rubber matches.
First we had Arsenal last night. Already through to the next stage of the champions league and not much to play for in the last match. As consequence people started discounting the fact that Arsenal would not win and it pulled in the price of Olympiakos quite dramatically before the off. When the team news came out and the …
Fergie time
Here is an interesting piece from the BBC website about Manchester United and extra time. I did an article for a magazine around four years ago on exactly the same subject, I think I may have blogged on it as well at some point. Unfortunately the BBC didn’t pick up on that, but hey I’m not bitter about it!
However this is well constructed and a good summary of the situation relating to whether teams get additional time when they …
Champions league
An interesting set up for tonights Champions league.
The market thinks there will be around three goals a game on average this evening and total of 21. I’m not so sure?
An average of three goals is often forecast when there is a clear winner, but that really doesn’ t look the case tonight. The least competitive matches are Spartak Moscow vs Barcelona, FC Nordsj vs Shakhtar and Benfica vs Celtic. But of course, as Celtic have proven, that odds …
Tactical football trading
As is well publicised, I started my odyssey in sports when I was very young, analysing footy matches looking for draws.
I still endlessly search for new information, a quest to find something that hasn’t been found before. To give you some hope if you are doing the same, I am always finding new things. Sometimes by looking for something else.
I recently revisited how a football match unfolds and if there was information contain in the first half stats …
The comeback kings
When trading you are looking to lay at the shortest possible odds first then trade out at much higher odds, or vice versa. Doesn’t matter which, I’ll take either!
However you need something to happen for that opportunity to arise. In football there are many ways that this can happen but the main method to see a swing in odds is goals.
The perfect scenario is for a team to conceded a goal then comeback to win the match. This …
Trading the unexpected
Reading 5, Arsenal 7 – This was obvious the stand out football result from the last week. A most remarkable scoreline.
For so many goals to be scored in one match is rare, especially seven goals away from home; though Leeds fans may have more recent memories. But to win 7-5 from 4-0 down is remarkable. I’ve been scanning my records to see if I could find an example, but I can’t. 4-4 draw’s are rare, but I do …
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