Post season analysis of betting strategies for European football (soccer)/adjustments for next season

This post is partly driven by my attempts to adjust and refine my approaches to football betting this past season and partly by Robert Barnes' recently saying on stream that the official picks' being primarily spread betting was under review, that he was going to assess if we would be more profitable using moneyline. Since we all become stronger when we pool knowledge together, I am going to analyse the trends I saw this season and the implications it has for betting value for the coming season. I will also be outlining some adjustments I will be making to my own personal strategy and how I will be using them to optimise official picks for the coming season.

At the outset it's important to emphasise that football betting is by the standards of sports betting, very hard. It's an extremely heavily optimised market and there are a large number of markets where there quite simply is no edge if you go into a conventional bookmaker; the probabilities will be within the margin of error implied by the overround. That's not to say that there are not plenty of opportunities for edge (there are) but European sports in my view require a somewhat different approach to American sports. Not only are the mechanics very different (primarily that moneyline is ternary in European sports whereas it is binary in American sports) but the psychology is very different too. The general public will still bet on favourites and parlays but European sports betters (qua Europe) primarily bet moneyline or if they bet spreads it tends to be draw no bet or double chance. There are three way handicaps but I think they're very situational. Asian style handicapping is not the primary mode of expression for football.

What were the primary trends I observed last season? An absurd number of red cards (almost every fourth game) and last minute goals. These weren't necessarily game changing goals, often times they came when the game was already dead and turned a spread that was on course to cover to miss. I ran an experiment on my spreadsheet where I keep a record of odds for games across the top European leagues - when I switched all the official picks from spread to moneyline, they performed worse than when they were spread picks. This might sound discouraging on the face of it, but it's not - if anything, it gives me confidence that draw moneyline contained a lot of hidden value that spreads don't catch. When I zoomed in on spreads where there was a clear favourite (favoured by more than half a goal) they performed noticeably better than the spreads that were within half a goal. Indeed, I noticed that when I took spreads of less than half a goal (this includes quarter spreads) and I turned official picks into draw moneyline, this band performed by far the best.

This was no surprise to me. Suppose you have AC Milan vs Juventus, if you are approaching it from a spread point of view, your primary choice is do I take Juventus draw no bet or AC Milan draw no bet? If the draw is the undervalued outcome here, then it is very likely that the spread choice is moot because neither of the draw no bet markets truly have a way to take advantage of the draw, they can only use it to mitigate risk on the chosen team not winning, which in turn makes it difficult to truly juice out an edge. Indeed, when draws started appearing in the official picks for the Champions League knockout stages, games involving Italian teams were profitable.

I would remark with caution again that moneyline didn't work quite so well for minnows vs favourites when you get to the larger spreads. This would be readily apparent when watching Liverpool who went a very large stretch of the season without losing a game. This is something that happens more and more these years where a top league has a team clicks and really starts dispatching teams lower in the table with ease. I think some kind of spread that at least incorporates a draw is necessary to juice out an edge here and that leads on to my next point - my own personal adjustments.

As you will know if you have read my posts here lately, I am very big on using tradeable betting exchanges to gain the best entries possible for any events that there are markets for. I have consistently been able to get better entries on Polymarket (and the same would be true of Kalshi but I can't legally access it), especially when using limit orders. The gain in edge is significant enough to turn a lossy run into a winning run. Last year I used Polymarket only for the official picks that had tight spreads, that is the pick'em and the 0.5 spreads. The reason I did this is that you can build synthetic spreads from moneyline that mimic the risk profile of these low spreads and generally with better prices too (I had a post on that earlier this year). I didn't use this method for larger spreads as I didn't have the means to imitate them directly from moneyline. This year I will generally be using moneyline for favourites and when I'm taking an underdog I will look to sell the favourites moneyline. Since the public likes to bet on favourites, it's not too hard to get filled selling a moneyline bet to them (since moneyline is equivalent to -0.5, selling moneyline is equivalent to +0.5).

Underpinning this methodology is calculation of expected values. To maximise your edge, you have to be able to convert odds into implied probabilities and reference them with estimated probabilities for each outcome happening to calculate the average return across all outcomes. Sometimes the bookies' spreads will be better value. Other times betting yes on the minnow will have better value than betting no on the favourite. Since the small spreads can be built from moneyline, what finding an edge amounts to is figuring out which moneyline outcomes are overvalued and which are undervalued. Using this with an accurate estimate of what prices someone is willing to fill you at is ultimately how you maximise profits once you have enough of an edge to be deadly. I'll close by linking these to some exotic synthetic spreads that I may test at some stage this season.

The draw spread - this is a spread you can take when you think there is an edge on a draw but you're slightly more bullish on one team to win over the other. Split your stake into two components. Place enough of that stake on the team you favour to win such that it covers your total stake if said team wins. Place the rest on the draw. Your position is in effect a win no bet. You profit if the teams draw and you only lose out if the team you favoured slightly loses.

The no draw pick'em - if you think either team will win but not sure which, you can bet on both teams proportionally or sell the draw so that you profit to the same extent if either team wins and you only lose out if they draw. You may find use for this if you are expecting a volatile game where two teams really go for it.

The no draw spread - similar to the no draw pick'em except you slightly favour one team over the other. Here you would bet enough on the team you don't favour to cover the original stake if they win and place the rest on the team you favour. That way you only lose out if the game ends in a draw and if your favoured team doesn't win, you get your stake back.

Finally, a point I forgot to touch on earlier is overrounds. For a standard -110 pick'em, your overround is ~4.76%. With BetOnline you can normally get the moneyline overround down to about 4% or 3.5%. This suggest further that on average moneyline has slightly better value. On Polymarket/Kalshi, you can eliminate that entirely with the right limit orders or even get a slight underround. Once again it may be a little bit here and there but it is crucial to making real profits off a sport as competitive as football.