International Football Feast - Africa and Asia

It's not been the most productive start to a year in terms of posts, as some of you might have noticed. My focus has been in other areas, most notably reviewing my investment portfolio with more attention to dividends, (and for this I owe a big a big thank you to David and Simon for their help) and updating my retirement spreadsheet as that date moves inexorably nearer. I also sailed through another Dry January and at the behest of my son, have now signed up for a gym membership to work on strength training as I move into old age.

With the domestic and European football leagues passing the halfway point of the season, the Draw systems take a back seat with a noticeable decline usually observed in the second half, but we do have not one, but two international tournaments currently in progress where backing the Draw in the knockout stages is perennially a successful strategy as readers will be aware.

They are the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations and the 2023 AFC Asian Cup - despite the year being 2024, the two tournaments were both postponed and retain their original years in the name.

Both are at the semi-finals stage, and after the Round of 16 and Quarter-Final matches, backing the Draw in Africa is currently showing a small loss of 0.12 units while in Asia the strategy is up 6.13 units. 

The ROI from the 24 matches is thus a little over 25% so far this year, and while a small sample size is fairly meaningless, across the 376 matches since 2004, the ROI of 23.7% is very impressive.

The CONFED (FIFA Confederations Cup) tournament has been scrapped and so of current competitions only CONCACAF's Gold Cup tournament is negative, although it did make a small profit last summer.

Prices are sourced from the very useful Odds Portal site and on this topic I had a comment from weirimdi - possibly not his real name:

Hello again,

I want to re-ephasize how awesome it is to read along your journey. You inspired i think a rather quiet audience to have a better view on sports/investing and betting as a journey.

A few questions. I use football-data.co.uk often and have built my own dataset for other sports thanks to killersports etc.

Do you know another resource like football-data.co.uk which has the odds for cup matches covered?

It is very tedious to get them from oddsportal manually.

Second question: what is your experience of the time when to take a bet?

Closer to kick off to be nearer to the market status or as early as possible?

Best wishes

The answer to the 'cup matches' question is unfortunately no I don't. I use Odds Portal for these matches, and while it is tedious, I'm grateful that there is at least a source available. The other challenge with these 

For the second question posed regarding when to place your bets, for my systems it is best to place them as close to the start time as possible since the closing price is what determines them to be selections or not. As I've mentioned before, a match may look likely to be a qualifier for a system, but a late move in the line, total or price may ultimately disqualify it, while the opposite is also true on occasion. Many times I've backed an outcome that ended up not being a system qualifier, and many times I've not backed one that did end up being a qualifier. It's one reason why the 'official' results I publish are never going to be exactly replicated in reality.