Your approach to football statistics will directly influence the way you bet. If you are not currently tracking the players’, team’s, and match-specific stats and looking at them during the week of play, then start doing so immediately as this is what truly separates recreational ‘bettors’ from winning sports gamblers.
Note: Do not confuse your approach with stats and the importance of stats with analysis. The analysis is when you use football statistics to back up an opinion or prediction based on other non-statistical factors such as team form, injuries, suspensions, or recent results against similar opposition. The stronger your football statistics knowledge, the better the analysis and, ultimately, your esports betting tips.
A few quick points to establish proper football stats tracking and analysis:
Football Statistics Should Tell a Story – Football statistics are like puzzle pieces, and you need to know how and when to use them. When it comes to using stats, no one method works for each bettor but somewhat various approaches. I use them to help with my selection process and decide which teams to back – such as when to lay or support the home team vs. away team, favorites v underdogs, which markets offer value, etc. For me, knowing the stats that complement these selections can help make a profit in the long run.
The statistics that I use the most are:
H2H – Head to head stats between 2 teams (e.g., home team v away team, soccer betting odds over-under, etc.)
Away Goals Betting Odds – Is this a good time to bet on over/under? (Soccer betting strategy)
Last 5 Matches: How well has a team performed during the previous five games? (Soccer betting strategy)
Previous Betting Overall Records
What’s a team’s overall record when wagering on the money line in MLS matches? (Soccer betting strategy)
Betting Tips for Myself and Opinions for Others
There are a lot of different ways in which you can use football statistics. You might be like me and keep an extensive record that goes back to the start of the season, while others may just be starting out or only log data from the current season. The more information you have recorded about a team in your football stats database, the better you will analyze of esports betting tips.
Football statistics help me make quick decisions and beat the bookmaker, but I also have many opinions not based on stats. Sometimes my thoughts are correct, and sometimes they’re wrong, but these ‘hunch’ picks cause losses all the same. Just because you use football statistics or work in the industry does not mean that you are right all the time, so be careful about relying on only stats.
For those of you who think this is too much information for a betting beginner, let’s start with an even more straightforward approach to football statistics and get your mind around what they are. Look at any game of the week or any sport’s match odds. You will notice that every single set of odds has a form guide next to them. This contains as much information, if not more than what you are likely to find in most esports betting tips.
So let’s start by taking an example from these group stage World Cup 2014 odds from Paddy Power Sports as they are pretty typical:
These soccer betting odds for the group stages show that Brazil has been given a win probability of 71.4%; Netherlands, 60.3%; Spain, 55.0%; Chile, 45.8% and Australia, 22.9%. These percentages are what is known as a ‘fractional odds handicap.’ This is a way that bookmakers allow you to compare the chances of two football teams or multiple football teams, and it is how we are going to organize our information from here on out. For now, don’t worry about what these numbers mean; remember them as we will be using them later.
Any football stats need to be organized in a particular way. The format, which is now recognized as the most common method of presenting any statistic, was introduced by Charles Reep over 50 years ago and is known as “Reep’s Football Ratings.” This article outlines his system in detail, but we will focus on a modified, easier-to-use version.
Here is how you should organize your soccer betting odds and football stats:
Let’s go back to the previous example from Paddy Power Sports on the World Cup 2014 games. First, take a look at these odds:
These are ‘fractional odds handicaps,’ which means that each team has been given a number to represent how many goals they are expected to win by. In this example, Brazil has been given a handicap of -1 and is likely to win by one goal. If you multiply the handicap (-1) and the total odds (4.0), you get three, which we call ‘fractional odds.’
In football betting, any team you bet on has a positive number in the handicap category; if bookmakers gave negative handicaps, this would be impossible as you can not lose more than a game for esports betting tips.