Football Picks - My Review (Part One of Two)

Now that the 2025/26 club football season ended with Saturday evening's Champions League Final, I now have a pretty big dataset I can look back on. As it happens, I have as far as I can tell all the official picks since this group was started in 2021. I go through these every so often for backtesting and finding general trends and patterns that may be useful. This post is not an official report and as such I will refrain from giving any precise figures. I will simply highlight the most prescient observations I noticed and how these may help us find value into the World Cup and next season.

First the Premier League. This was a very handsomely profitable season and the strongest performing of all the leagues. Indeed, the Premier League has been profitable every season that picks have been given out for it. This includes over 700 picks across five seasons. That is no mean feat at all as the Premier League is the most bet upon league in the entire world. There is such enormous money going into it that it makes the lines extremely competitive; this does not mean however that said lines are unbeatable as the last five years have shown. The underdog heavy style of the official picks lends itself very well to the Premier League as it is a league that rewards bravery, physical intensity and a willingness to rise to your opponent, especially in front of a home ground that can easily sense blood in the air.

Next, we have the European continental competitions, that is the Champions League, the Europa League and the Conference League. These competitions do have some notable differences in dynamics but they are topologically similar in that they involve matchups between teams that generally play each other rarely if ever at all, so there is often much less information about how two specific teams may match up based on having played each other previously. For me this makes tactical asymmetries more impactful as there is a very real element of surprise in most ties. This is something which Unai Emery has exploited to good effect over the years and thus it proved again this season, which all three competitions being profitable and the official pick for Aston Villa to win the final being a hit. I have witnessed some season to season variance in the official picks though. I believe that is strongly influenced by the changing of the group stage format for all three competitions to a Swiss format, which means all teams are competing against each other for seeding. Based on my research, this has increased volatility as there are now bigger incentives to pursue goal difference and smaller incentives to settle for a draw. I believe this is something that will have to be factored into account for more accurate edge identification in the group stages. The knockout stages have been profitable and I would highlight the Barnes Brothers videos as being very helpful for talking through each matchup in detail as the stakes in each match are very high and thus do not have the same dynamics of standard games. Like the Premier League, the Champions League commands enormous betting volume so the lines are once again very sharp, but that does not mean unbeatable as with careful preparation, there is opportunity to be had.

Other European leagues are where we have some more variability but the Bundesliga has been strong. Tactical identities are settled yet volatility still remains. This means you can end up with blowouts more often than you might expect but there have been some good draw opportunities. Betting Bayern Munich has been a little bit touch and go due to Vincent Kompany's playstyle being the kind that can ruthlessly exploit a talent difference but when it has hit, the payout has been quite big. Next was La Liga, where the big three teams of Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid have all had slip ups but match ups lower in the table had more volatility. After that, Ligue 1 presented good opportunity as PSG were not on form for much of the first half of the season, having played every game possible last season, all the way up to the Club World Cup final. The league that has stood out to me as being more resistant to the methods that have worked well elsewhere is Serie A. This can partially be explained by an unusual level of dominance by Inter Milan under Cristian Chivu, who managed to take an older squad that was running on fumes by the end of last season under Simeone Inzaghi and get a fresh run out of them with his own tactical style. In addition, Como continued their overperformances from last year to secure a place in next year's Champions League. This was at the expense of AC Milan, who underwent a late collapse and have since sacked Massimiliano Allegri, a man who never met a draw he didn't like. Serie A is a league that is generally ripe for underdog orientated betting as tactical preparations are taken very seriously there and are often tailored specifically to the opponent, but this can cut both ways. Although every league is different to an extent, my suspicion is that Serie A requires a special treatment because although baseline tactical identities are relatively stable, there are a lot of subtle tactical variations both from game to game but also within each game itself as Italian football is very sensitive to game state management to a greater degree than in a league like the Premier League.

There is one league that we have out on an island and that is MLS. This has presented a rather tricky curveball for sports handicapping because tactical identities are not settled and there is considerably less squad depth due to the rules designed to ensure balance between the teams in the league. Injuries to a few key players can lead to an enormous drop off in quality from the starting eleven. On top of that, there are enormous travel distances and variations in time zone, climate conditions and atmospheric pressure. There is therefore an enormous amount of volatility that is difficult to price accurately as those underlying conditions are not stable. This is not totally without its analogue: the English Championship also has more intra game volatility and less settled tactical identities than the Premier League and yet betting has been profitable. It may be slightly comparable also to the Conference League as the travel distances there are large too and the tactical identities of teams that compete in it are not as stable as in the Europa League or Champions League. I have witnessed that draw pricing is cheaper in the MLS than you would see in comparable circumstances in Europe. I suspect that the underlying draw probability may be lower and thus may not provide the same edge as in European top leagues.

There are several leagues that have smaller sample sizes and thus we can't conclude anything definitively from them. This includes domestic cup competitions such as the FA Cup, Coppa Italia, Copa Del Rey etc, international football and to a lesser extent playoffs, such as the Championship playoffs and the MLS post season so I won't say much about them, only to say that they do have slightly different asymmetries and pressures to standard league football.

My original write up is too big for one post so I have split it up in two parts. This part covered the leagues themselves. Part two below will cover methodologies.

https://sportspicks.locals.com/post/7973598/football-picks-my-review-part-two-of-two-this-is-the-second-part-of-the-post-i-began-below