My Adjustments for MLS Picks This Season

Recently I posted a review of the official picks for European football and the adjustments I would make to maximise their profitability. I did not include MLS picks in that post for two reasons. One was that I've never watched MLS so I can't speak to it with the same intuition I would on any of the European leagues. The other was that the dynamics in MLS are very different to those in European football, based on what Robert said in the livestreams and also based on the statistical data I was seeing in the picks.

To summarise my findings from European football, I found that when you take every official pick that was a pick'em (or listed on bookmakers between +1/4 and -1/4 spread) and took moneyline draw, every league become more profitable. Any leagues that were operating at a loss became profitable, provided you were line shopping sensibly. This was because a pick'em has no direct way to benefit from an edge on the draw, so when you start taking the draw in that case, you can start benefiting from underpriced draw odds.

MLS on the other hand was different. Despite most teams in it being evenly matched, there appeared to be a consistent edge towards home teams, possibly borne out of long travel times and more dramatic atmospheric differences than you would see in Europe. On top of that, squads have less depth than European teams who play in continental competitions, so less ability to dampen the impact of long distance of travel. There was from what I saw more volatility when it came to results because the gap between starters and reserves was bigger than you would see in European leagues.

I did a deep dive on MLS using a number of different strategic permutations and I observed that although taking the opposite position of official picks gave the most profitable return, I would be hesitant to recommend that as a strategy. Favourites had an almost anomalous edge and I'm not entirely sure that will continue to be the case. I do think the overall cut and thrust of the official picks was directionally correct. Robert did say on last Saturday's livestream that long shots did the best so far and that was the case in my backtesting.

To my surprise (and possibly relief as well), I found that the adjustments I made for European football gave the most well rounded results here (though I did have to apply them quite aggressively). I converted all pick'ems to draws and all spreads of +0.5 or greater to +0.5 (via the no option on Polymarket). This turned the strategy into mostly draws, but the draws were where the money was made. All the other modes (moneyline win, no on one team etc) were more or less break even. Over a larger sample size, I'm sure we would have seen a small edge on those legs that would help reduce variance over picks as a whole. Taken all together, MLS picks with these adjustments yielded a good profit, with the no on favourites helping to generate returns even when the underdog couldn't quite finish the job as well as the draw picks taking advantage of the generally evenly matched nature of teams in the league.

On a side note, I have not done a review of European cup football so far. This is mainly because the site I use for historical odds doesn't have them documented. I may contact the guy who runs the site and ask him to track them. European cup football was profitable this season and my suspicion is the adjustments I described above would have been profitable on European cup football too.

We will see how this coming football season goes but I'm quietly optimistic of it being a profitable season. With new markets on Polymarket and Kalshi I have no doubt that we will have a lot of options to juice the maximum possible edge this year.