VAR - Veritable Away Results

In both the last post, and again last month, I touched on the topic of European club matches, and the differences between First and Second Leg games, and some of you may have noticed that over the last five seasons, backing the Away team in the Second Leg has been very lucrative, with an ROI of 33% from 186 matches.

Since 2004, following this unsophisticated strategy would not surprisingly have lost you 3%, so the recent profitability is interesting, and may be due in part to the introduction of VAR which removes some of the Home advantage.  

In 41 games where the First Leg was a Draw, the ROI over this time (past five seasons) has been 124%, with the score of the Draw not a factor. There is one game tonight in the Europa League that meets this criterion, and one in the new Europa Conference League where VAR is not being used. This match is also the first in spreadsheet history to follow a 4:4 draw.

In the NBA, my advice from January to back Overs on totals greater than 223 continues to be profitable, with a 95-69-1 record from February, an ROI of 13%. These numbers are provisional from GimmetheDog since Killer Sports seems to have a bug on the query.