Betting each favourite to win £200 at SP in the 2020/21 season

Early in 2020 I wrote a blog about the poor performance of favourites in the English Premier League.

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.

If the average odds of the favs is evens then the boost is already 7/1; bookies don’t put underdogs in trebles (usually) to limit liability exposure on +EV bets and make their boosts more tempting to your average punter.

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.

The following graph shows fav performance in the 2020/21 season in the EPL:

It is a similar story to last season – favourites have returned a negative ROI and underdogs have returned a positive ROI. In fact it is a trend that has been ongoing for the best part of two years now:

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 seasons.  As with all betting, get the strategy right and don’t worry about the results in the short term (i.e. two seasons worth of bets on teams in the Premiership may not produce enough data to determine whether a strategy works or not).  Do however consider what has changed as a result of the lack of crowds during lockdown.  It’s certainly possible that even the exchanges haven’t reacted enough to build this in completely.

Comparison with other leagues