Betting on Football: How to predict a 0-0 in the Premier League

• Put some science in your betting
• Find out how to analyse Premier League data
• Predict a 0-0 and profit by backing unders

Last week we set ourselves the task of picking a winning bet on a football match. We needed to find a game that would end in under 2.5 goals.

We succeeded - landing our bet on Nottingham Forest v Aston Villa, which ended 1-1 - but it wasn't an easy task. There were lots of goals elsewhere in the Premier League last weekend.

The average number of goals per match was 3.125, and only two out of eight games ended with under 2.5 goals. But we successfully picked one of those.

Rather than using the current form, we used goals to determine which match to pick.

The key to forecasting football matches is not to try and predict the result but to focus instead on the number of goals each team will score and then combine those values.

Let's illustrate that by looking at how to forecast a 0-0 result.

How to forecast a goalless draw

The first thing to understand is that some football results are more likely than others. We can see how this is the case if we take every score from the Premier League last season and analyse them.

Adding these all up and representing them as a percentage, we see that the most common correct score for a match is 1-1. Nearly 12% of all games end up with this scoreline, followed by 1-0 and 0-1.

In total, roughly one-third of matches end up on these score lines.

It all makes sense if you look at things from a broad perspective. In the Premier League last season, an average of 2.82 goals were scored per game.

You can't have 0.82 of a goal, so you would expect score lines that contain two goals to be more common outcomes. If teams are equally matched, that means a scoreline of 1-1.

We've leapt from a very broad league statistic to the outcome of a match.

If you are correct score betting, 1-1 will see you win most often. The closer the forecast goals is to two goals, the more likely a 1-1 scoreline.

So we can summarise by saying that the average number of goals in a league will closely predict the most likely scores.

Using a clever bit of maths, I can work out that if the league has an average of 2.82 goals, the chance of a game ending with no goals is roughly 6%.

In the 380 games that we saw in last season's EPL, I can therefore predict that 22 games will end with a 0-0 scoreline.

We saw 22 games ending with a 0-0 score, so we were spot on with that forecast.

Put some science in your betting

Of course, we are talking at a league level here after the results are known. But the calculation also holds if you focus on an individual match.

If you can forecast the average number of goals scored by the home team, you will know the chance of them scoring no goals. You can also do this for the away team, and if you multiply the two together, you get the chance of a 0-0 score.

Rather than bore you with the detail, I suggest you watch this video, where I run through the process and calculation for you.

Each match day, I perform this sort of calculation across a myriad of matches, then rank them in order of the likelihood of a 0-0 result.

I can then work out which matches are more or less likely to have goals. The match(es) with the lowest number of potential goals are the matches where I will be looking to bet on under 2.5 goals or do some trading strategy to benefit from fewer goals.

Rather than going on gut feel, put a bit of science into your betting or trading, and you will stand a much better chance of profiting.