UK Football 2019:20 – Fav / Dog performance

Betting each favourite to win £200 at SP in the 2019/20 season

The graph below shows the results of betting each favuorite up to 2nd February 2020. This strategy would have resulted in profit in League 1 and League 2. Betting each fav would have resulted in -£2,180 in the EPL and -£2216 in the Championship. Across all four divisions net profit would have been £5.5k due to the strong performance of the favs in League 1.

Favourite Performance vs Boosts P/L

There is correlation between the performance of favourites and the season-long p/l of boosts. Generally, we can make two assumptions about boosts at UK bookmakers. (1) They primarily focus on matches in the Premiership, and (2) they primarily focus on favourites. An example will be the Sky and William Hill weekend headline boosts who will often boost Premiership favourites in enhanced trebles.

Whilst boosts on underdogs and European football exists, the majority of boosts are on favourites in the Premiership. Therefore there is correlation between the performance of Premiership favourites and the p/l of boosts at UK bookmakers.

Does that make Boosts -EV?

No, the EV of the boost does not change based on the season long performance of favourites. A single season is far too short a timescale to analyse the performance of favourites in a league. We would expect the wisdom of the crowds to see the performance of favourites converge to zero over multiple season. As with all betting, get the strategy right and don’t worry about the results in the short term (i.e. one seasons worth of bets on teams in the Premiership is not enough data to determine whether a strategy works or not).

 

Betting each underdog to win £200 at SP in the 2019/20 season

The graph below shows the results of betting each favuorite up to 2nd February 2020. This strategy would have resulted in profit in League 2 alone. Betting each fav would have resulted in -£280 in the EPL -£1547 in the Championship and -£3,001 in League 1. Across all four divisions net loss would have been £2.8k.

 

Over / Under 2.5 goals in the 2019-20 season

A loss of £1,024 would have been made betting the favourite to win in the over/under 2.5 market on the EPL this season to 2nd Feb.

EPL -£1025

Champ -£2014

League 1 +£1680

League 2 +£1705

Across all four leagues (over 1367 games) the p/l is less than 0.5 x the average stake of 1 bet: +£72.