Tight Draws in Africa

If you're playing the Draw in the Africa Cup of Nations knockout stage, you should be guaranteed a small profit with just the Final to come. The 'official' results from backing the Draw in all 14 games so far is 0.89 units (6% ROI) and from the matches with no team fairly priced at odds-on, a more exciting return so far of 5.59 units and a 93% ROI, though as I've written before, ROIs on such a small number of matches are fairly meaningless. 

The Final tomorrow (Senegal v Egypt) is a 'no odds-on' match with Senegal favourites and the Draw at around 2.83, (2.85 on Pinnacle and 2.96 on Betfair.) This will likely be the 8th match of the 15 where the Draw price has been priced at 3.0 or shorter. This is a familiar trend in the Africa Cup of Nations with 7 of 15 in 2019 and 6 of 7 in 2017 (with the one exception priced at 3.04). That 2017 tournament was the first time I have seen the Draw be the favourite, and which actually happened in two matches, neither of which ended as a Draw. We did also see this in the Copa América last year in one game, which did finish as a Draw, but in 8194 EPL matches, the Draw has never been favourite.

Contrast these numbers with the EPL where this has been the case just 16 times in the Pinnacle era, which is 3634 matches, with a shortest price of 2.89 (in a game that did finish 0:0). It's almost as if the sportsbooks are reading this blog, but as always, the average prices used can usually be improved upon.

The Third-Place game isn't a knockout / elimination game so it's not a candidate, but if you're interested since 2006 the return is -0.60 units from 24 matches, a number hugely inflated by the 100% winning record for the Draw in the now extinct Confederation Cup and the one Gold Cup playoff in 2015:

The Nations Cup is too new, but looking for the Draw in World Cups, Euros or Africa hasn't historically been a great idea.