Not surprisingly, there is no Holy Grail to finding value in football. Just a lot of hard work. Last season, I relied mostly on my CRAP system, with, it has to be said, pretty much lived up to its name. As the season progressed I tried factoring in recent form, and this season, I will be additionally keeping track of more data than just the final score (box-score: primarily shots, both on and off target, and corners). This will help with those matches where a team wins 1-0, but is totally outplayed.
Keeping all this data is very time consuming, and so, at least initially, I will only be tracking the new data on the Premier League. Of course, if it suddenly makes a huge difference to my bottom line, I will be tracking all leagues down to and including the Thornton Heath and District league. Well, maybe not, but I will certainly be only too keen to expand coverage. (I've noticed how my enthusiasm, and time available, for maintaining spreadsheets is directly related to how good the numbers being entered are!)
I need a reliable data source for shots on/off target, corners, offsides etc. Being subjective in nature, there is often a discrepancy on these numbers I have noticed.
My problem for now is what weighting do I put onto the three categories of overall rating, recent form, and box-score numbers. I will at least be in a position to back-test these matches somewhere down the road, but initially at least, it's a bit of a shot in the dark. But then, with football, isn't it always?
thank you for sharing your blog. have recently started my own and am looking to exchange links with fellow bloggers.
ReplyDeletei have already added your blog to my blog roll and would appreciate if you could add me to yours.
my url is:
http://my-betfair-trading-journal.blogspot.com/
best,
john