Serie A Betting: Getting to the bottom of Serie A 's obscenely high home win ratio

Jonathan Wilson / Jonathan Wilson / 18 December 2008 / 1 Comments

Jonathan Wilson has discovered an anomaly in Serie A this season that is useful for football punters to know about and this triggered his own Poirot-like investigation as to why it's happening.

Something very odd is going on in Serie A - and it could be very good news for gamblers. How often have you looked at a sure thing, been put off by how short the odds are, and decided to try to increase your profits by doubling or trebling up on another sure thing or two - only for it then to turn out that the other sure thing wasn't quite so sure after all? It's the curse of every accumulator. Except in Italy this season, sure things look a little bit surer.

In England, 41 per cent of top-flight games this season have been won by the home side. In Spain that figure is 48 per cent and in Germany 49. In Italy, though, the percentage of games own by a home team is a staggering 58 per cent. Internazionale, Napoli, Fiorentina, Genoa, even lowly Siena all remain unbeaten at home. Juventus, AC Milan, Atalanta, Roma, Catania and Sampdoria have all lost only once on their own turf.

Again, the comparison with the Premier League is telling: there, only Liverpool and Manchester United remain unbeaten at home; only Aston Villa and Fulham have lost only once.

From a betting point of view, this is golden. We don't have to understand why this is happening to feel that little bit more secure in backing the home side: on Sunday I had a treble come in on Internazionale to beat Chievo (which was, admittedly, the shortest price of any game in the big five leagues), Fiorentina to beat Catania and Roma to beat Cagliari.

So what if Roma needed a last-minute winner from Mirko Vucinic - who had such a bad game until then that he lost it on scoring, ripping off not only his shirt, but also his shorts - as any gambler knows, it doesn't matter when the goals are scored, just that they are. The only reason I didn't include Napoli's Saturday win over Lecce was that I preferred the neatness of having all three games on the same day.

Still, it would be nice to know why that is going on, not just for professional pride, but in case we can spot the exceptions that might leave a home team priced too short. So I asked a couple of Italian football experts. Both were surprised, and made the comment that historically there have been more draws in Italian football than anywhere else. That makes sense: this, after all, is a country whose most feted football journalist of all time, Gianni Brera, would argue that the perfect game finished 0-0.

Could it be that away teams still carry the psychological residue of the days of catenaccio and so are more conservative, allowing the home team to take the initiative? Then, because modern law changes have made it harder to frustrate attacking sides, they are overwhelmed? The theory sounds plausible, except that in the last three seasons the percentage of home teams winning was 46, and in the two before that 44 and 43. Only this season does Italy stand so radically apart.

So I asked why home teams are more likely to win than away teams. Three obvious reasons stand out: travel is debilitating; familiarity with surroundings breeds confidence (and a US study has shown unfamiliarity can lead to a drop in testosterone levels); and the backing of the majority of fans can increase resolve.

So have any of those three factors changed between this season and last? Travel has not (although it is not often that there are six teams from Italy's south or the islands in Serie A - Lecce winning promotion to join Napoli, Reggina, Cagliari, Catania and Palermo - so perhaps increased long distance travel has something to do with it). There is nothing to make teams more or less familiar with surroundings. But there is a difference in the number of away fans travelling.

Thanks to new anti-hooligan legislation, a committee now meets each week to decide which games away fans should be banned from travelling to, and even where there are not bans, there is an understandable reluctance to travel. Perhaps away teams, having got used to being cheered by travelling support, are finding their absence difficult to cope with.

I'm not entirely convinced by that explanation, but, whatever the reason, AC Milan at home to Udinese at [1.68] and Cagliari at home to Reggina [1.83] look very good things to me.

Percentage of games won by home team (as of 17/12/08)

Season ITA ENG SPA GER

08-09 58 41 48 49

07-08 46 46 48 47
06-07 46 48 45 44
05-06 46 51 43 43
04-05 44 46 51 49
03-04 43 44 45 52

Comments (1)

1. Simon Davies | 19 December 2008

   Jonathan

   I liked your betting tips on Sportsxchange tv. Sadly the channel has now deceased.

   Where can I get hold of your other tips for the weekend?