Block Assignment

Analysis of FA Premier League Football betting sites

June 18, 2012 Tijmen Boer, s2217600 Lucas Vogels, s2190516 Philip Moll, s2139642

Introduction In England, the FA Premier League is the most prestigious Football League. This competition is being broadcasted to over 600 million people in over 200 countries worldwide. Every year, 20 teams play matches against each other, trying to gain the National title. Over the last 10 years, the competition has made some major increases when looking at size and status. Annual revenues from all clubs together approximately reach 3 billion dollars. Not only the clubs and players make a fortune by playing matches, some betters do the same. Betting companies such as Bet365, Blue Square, Bet & Win provide betters the opportunity to make money by predicting football matches. In order to make sure that not every better decides to bet on the best performing team, betting companies established different payouts for every match. The expected losing team gets a high payout rate, whereas the favorite team obtains a low payout rate. In this paper you can expect statistics of the FA Premier Leagues season 10-11 and 1112. The emphasis will be on the analysis of betting companies and their payouts. For the actual Stata inputs, adaptions, calculations and commands, we refer to the attached do-file. Here, the model we used is thoroughly explained. Match facts To gain more significant results, we decided to use data of 2 seasons (10-11 and 11-12) instead of just 1 season. Every season, all 20 teams play 2 matches against each other, 1 at home and 1 away. Therefore, every season a total of 380 matches are played, which means we have a total dataset of 760 matches. This dataset contains relevant information about full time home goals, full time away goals and payout values of different betting sites. Table 1

Table 1 provides the statistics of the home wins (HW), away wins (AW) and the draws (D). From this table we can see that in 46,1% of the matches the home team ends as the winner, in 27,1% the away team and 26,8% ends in a draw.

Betting statistics results An important consideration to make for betters is which betting site to use. Betting sites show different payout rates per match and therefore eventual profits or loses differ. In our analysis we compare 10 different betting companies or sites. Suppose we could have correctly predicted the outcome of all 760 matches from the last 2 seasons. Table 2 shows the average payout rate per match per betting site. The highest mean of 3.008584 implies an average payout of approximately 3 times the input. Looking at the standard deviations in Table 2, we see a positive correlation with the means. A higher average payout is combined with a larger average spread in payout (standard deviation). Table 2

The ratio between mean and standard deviation is given in Table 2 under the name coeff. The lowest standard deviation (most certain about payout amount) occurs at betting site Interwinner (siteiw). The highest standard deviation (most uncertain about payout amount) occurs at betting site Victorbet (sitevc). Scatterplot 1

Scatterplot 1 shows a positive correlation between the spread of payout (standard deviation) and the mean payment. We now limit our analysis to the 2 betting sites siteiw and sitevc which are the top and bottom points in the scatterplot. We focus on 2 different scenarios, without any information about the outcome of the matches in advance. In the first scenario, for every match we constantly put our money on the outcome which has the lowest payout ratio. Hence, we only make profit if the match ends with the most expected outcome. In this case, it is likely to win more often than lose, but the payout when the prediction is correct, is the lowest payout. If we than compare siteiw and sitevc we obtain Table 3. Table 3

Table 3 shows that when betting only on the lowest payout rate, on average, you would have obtained 0,9372632 times your initial input money for siteiw and 0,9322632 times your initial money for sitevc. This outcome implies that betting your money on the outcome which is most likely to occur would have resulted in losses. The Min and Max values in Table 3 indicate the upper and lower payout rate. A 0 indicates that our prediction was incorrect, hence the payout is equal to 0. If we now apply the same strategy for the highest payout rate (less likely to occur), we obtain Table 4. Table 4

Using this strategy we can conclude from table 4 that in both cases we would have made a profit. On average, your input money would have been multiplied with 1,006053 when investing on siteiw and 1,099118 when investing on sitevc. Table 4 shows that the standard deviation with the higher payout mean is much higher than the standard deviation from the lower payout mean. The Max payout which occurred when investing on the highest payout rate is 29 for sitevc and 14 for siteiw. Conclusion & Discussion Looking at Table 2, we can conclude that Victorbet (sitevc) has the highest average payout rate and Interwinner (siteiw) has the lowest average payout rate, assuming you have predicted everything correctly. Looking at the scatterplot, we see that a mean average payout rate is positively correlated to the spread of payout (standard deviation). Therefore betting on Victorbet provides you with a high payout amount, but the chance of actually receiving this amount is low. The strategy of putting your money on the most expected outcome turns out to be less profitable, even loss, than putting your money on the less expected outcome. These conclusions are based on the 2 years of Premier League data. If we had taken more seasons into account, we would have obtained more significant results. Furthermore, data from the past are not a certainty in the future. This especially counts in soccer, where unexpected outcomes often occur. References The Premier League data used as our Stata dataset has been obtained from the following websites: (1) http://www.football-data.co.uk/italym.php (2) http://www.football-data.co.uk/notes.txt