How to price a soccer match
- Why should you price soccer matches?
- How can you price a soccer match?
- Identify your weaknesses and maximising your edge in soccer betting
Why should you price soccer matches?
In order to identify value bets, you need to compare the odds you are betting on with what you believe to be a more accurate reflection of the true probability for an outcome. If the available odds underestimate the chance of an outcome in an event compared to your estimate, this will provide you with positive expected value.
While this is a simple enough concept to understand, establishing reliable data to compare against the bookmakers’ odds is where most bettors will fall down. Comparing odds will certainly help you find the best odds to bet with, but creating your own probabilities and comparing them against the market is what will help you find the right option to bet on.
A lot of people fail to recognise how difficult winning in betting actually is, and you’re not going to start finding value bets https://soho-london.co.uk/is-there-going-to-be-a-ted-lasso-season-4/ as soon as you begin pricing matches yourself. However, you need to start somewhere and at the very least, pricing matches will help you improve your understanding of probability. Once you develop your knowledge, get access to more reliable information, and experiment with various inputs and pricing methods, you may begin to find legitimate betting opportunities.
While this article will cover how to price a soccer match, it’s important to note that you don’t necessarily have to do the ‘heavy lifting’ of pricing a market yourself. Some people will choose to trust the market, using information provided by an efficient bookmaker such as Pinnacle and look for discrepancies with others.
Finally, the prospect of essentially creating your own odds for a match with incomparable resources to a bookmaker’s will likely seem daunting. Indeed, the process requires you to put in time to learn, make mistakes, and accept inevitable failures. However, if you’re willing to persevere then there is something to be gained from it.
How do you price a soccer match?
In order to help explain why pricing a soccer match is important if you want to bet on it, we have used a simple example to show how it could be done. It should be noted that this approach has plenty of flaws (which will be outlined later on in the article) and cannot help you find value in soccer betting markets when used by itself.
For the purposes of this article, we have used a Poisson model to create 1X2 odds for a match from final round of Premier League fixtures in the 2020/21 season. Using Infogol’s expected goals data for that season, we can calculate the Attack Strength and Defence Strength of each team for playing both at home and away.
This provides us with a relative measure of a team’s ability in terms of scoring and conceding goals by using the ratio of a team’s average and the league average. Using expected goals instead of actual goals will give a more accurate reflection of a team’s performances, as well as reduce the elements of randomness and luck capable of impacting on a 38-match season.
- Home Attack Strength (HAS) = Team expected goals (xG) per home game / League average expected goals (xG) per home game (the higher the better).
- Home Defence Strength (HDS) = Team expected goals against (xGA) per home game / League average expected goals against (xGA) per home game (the lower the better).
- Away Attack Strength (AAS) = Team expected goals (xG) per away game / League average expected goals per away game (the higher the better).
- Away Defence Strength (ADS) = Team expected goals (xGA) against per away game / League average expected goals against (xGA) per away game (the lower the better).