Betting on Football: How to predict the outcome of a match

If you are betting, you need to find odds that underestimate the chance of an outcome occurring to profit in the long term.

Suppose you can back the top team in a league at odds of 3.02/1. That will be great value if they are playing the team at the bottom of the league, but significantly less if they are playing their title rivals away from home.

You are always looking for odds where the gap between what the odds say and the reality of what could happen are mismatched.

But how are these odds created? Are they just somebody having a wild guess, looking at historical data, or something more scientific? What is the number one statistic you should use?

I started predicting football odds in the 1980s and the first thing I had to do was understand what the key factors were in the outcome of a match. If I could predict those, I could predict the outcome of a match.

It wasn't long before I realised that historical data only actually told you what had happened, it wasn't a great indicator as to what could happen in the next match.

But I found something that did allow me to predict the future with a decent degree of accuracy.

Understand scoring patterns to predict result

It sounds obvious, but if you can predict how many goals there will be in a match then you can predict the outcome. But, as always, you need to dig a bit deeper to understand why and how.

At a top level, you can look at home and away league tables and that gives you a quick hint at whether the over/under bet you are about to place make sense.

Recent goal scoring form

Picking a team at the top or bottom of the league doesn't necessarily tell you which match will have fewer goals. But looking at how many goals either team has scored will help you achieve that.

If we look at the last five home games in the current Premier League season, you find five teams that have averaged less than one goal a game.

Despite this, only one of those teams is in the bottom three and all have won one or more games in their last five.

If you switch to the last five away games you can perform a similar analysis, sorting the league by goals scored away and that immediately gives you some candidates for low scoring matches.

Back unders in Forest v Villa on Monday

If we look at the next round of matches in the Premier League, Nottingham Forest v Aston Villa catches my eye from a low scoring perspective.

You have a home team that has scored a few goals, but against weaker teams. So that is worth less in this scenario. They play an Aston Villa team that isn't exactly banging them in so far.

A combination of those two factors would put this match at the top of your under 2.5 goals betting this week.

Between them both these teams have set up a low scoring scenario.

'Seeing the future'

Of course, that doesn't mean that it will happen. There is a chance that this match could surprise us all and be the biggest scoring match of the weekend, but our initial analysis shows that this is much less likely.

The key to understanding the actual chance of how many goals there are likely to be is contained in this graph.

On this graph we have plotted how often matches end up with zero to seven goals. As you can see, it's more likely that a match will contain two or three goals than any other type of outcome.

In the next article we will explain exactly how to use that information to get the exact chance and odds of, for example, the match ending as 0-0 draw.

In the meantime, good luck with your betting.