Saturday 25 February 2017

Trends, Blips and League Two

I've written before how detecting trends before they are widely discussed, can be profitable, for example the increase in goals in the English Premier League discussed in recent posts.

Heading into this weekend, here are a few trends that might be worth monitoring. 

The comments below relate to the past ten seasons of 2007-17, which is obviously not quite ten full seasons, and the top levels of leagues in England, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, i.e 80 seasons.


Top Home Winning % 2007-17
Homes: Only seven times have Home wins comprised 50%+ of the results. 

This season, three leagues are currently on pace to do just that. France, Italy and Belgium, all at highs for their leagues, as are Germany although shy of the 50% total. 

Conversely, the Netherlands at 40.6% look certain to set a record low Home total. 

Draws: The Draw percentage has never finished below 20% - currently Serie A is at 19.8%.

Goals Per Game: As previously mentioned, the EPL's current 2.82 is a record high for that league, and Serie A's 2.81 this seasons is also a league record. 

At 2.29 goals per game, Portugal is setting a new low. 

Ratio of Home Goals : Away Goals: The Netherlands and Spain are selling league lows here, although at 1.5, France is bucking the trend towards Away teams with a new league low.

Outside of top leagues, the Championship is setting a new league high for Home wins at 46.4%, and an all-time low for the English lower leagues for draws, at just 22.8%.


League Two is again where the Aways are leading the way, and for the sixth straight season, it looks like they will end above the 30% level. 


Using Pinnacle's Closing prices, this continues to be a money-spinner, but don't tell everybody:




The best value on the Away is found in the 20% - 39.9% range where the ROI is double the above at 14.6% this season, from 259 bets.

My spreadsheet tells me the optimal range is actually where the implied probability ranges from 20% to 44.99%, where the ROI drops to 12.9%, but the number of bets increases to 701 and a 90.67 point profit. 

Good luck this weekend. Incidentally, if you have any leagues that you want me to plug into my analysis spreadsheet, don't hesitate to ask. So long as it's covered on Football-data.co.uk it will highlight areas where the market may be less than efficient. 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I took a closer look into the L2 results for away wins recently, seems to be down over 20points this year, a "system" which is likely to achieve big DD's at times i'd imagine. It was up over 13p's Dec 16. Would be really interested to know what the results were like in years with a lower away win %, from 2011-2015- would it still have been profitable? If we think the trend of away wins growing will continue i'm sure we could put up with the big DD's, i guess you have to look at the factors that could be causing the away win % to increase, less hostile crowds etc.

Enjoy the blog, keep it up. Regards, CK.