Recently, my brother has been inspiring me with his great returns from betting on European football (soccer). I'm not the gambling type, but I do appreciate the fact that you can make money when you have an edge. I decided to backtest how well I would have done had I bet on these games, but taking emotion out of it.
I chose to look at each of the teams in Europe's top 5 leagues (German Bundesliga, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, French Ligue 1 and the English Premier League) as well as Europe's top tournaments for club football (Europa League and Champions League).
I gathered the historical payout multiples of each game from Oddsportal (via webscraping) focusing on Double Chance. Double Chance is betting on a team winning or drawing their game.
To try get my edge, I chose to use FiveThirtyEight's prediction on the outcome of the match. For each match, they predict the likelihood of each team winning, or a draw. The predictions from FiveThirtyEight begins at the beginning of the 2016-2017 season. Therefore, this analysis also starts at this time. As an aside, FiveThirtyEight is a tremendous website created by an analyst I consider top of the game, Nate Silver. I highly recommend his book, The Signal and the Noise.
With the visualization below, you're able to see how correct FiveThirtyEight's predictions are, as well as how much money you could possibly have won (or lost).
What surprised me most about the results was that it was extremely difficult to earn profit. When betting all of the games where FiveThirtyEight predicted a win or tie with 75% outcome, the result was only profit 3 times out of 4 years for each league (3/27). Additionally, when selecting a team with a winning record, it was very likely that the losses more than offset the winnings. Explore the following tables for a summary of results from the above visualization.
| League | Teams with (+) Return | Total Teams | Percentage (%) | Average Return / Team ($) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bundesliga | 5 | 18 | 27.8 | -12.04 |
| Premier League | 5 | 20 | 25.0 | -11.16 |
| Serie A | 5 | 20 | 25.0 | -10.20 |
| Ligue 1 | 11 | 20 | 55.0 | -0.95 |
| Europa League | 28 | 56 | 50.0 | -2.71 |
| Champions League | 23 | 32 | 71.9 | 0.64 |
| Laliga | 7 | 20 | 35.0 | -9.53 |
| League | Teams with (+) Return | Total Teams | Percentage (%) | Average Return ($) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bundesliga | 6 | 18 | 33.3 | -3.53 |
| Premier League | 5 | 20 | 25.0 | -7.44 |
| Serie A | 8 | 20 | 40.0 | -8.61 |
| Ligue 1 | 4 | 20 | 20.0 | -10.99 |
| Europa League | 27 | 56 | 48.2 | -3.30 |
| Champions League | 21 | 32 | 65.6 | -1.55 |
| Laliga | 6 | 20 | 30.0 | -12.21 |
| League | Teams with (+) Return | Total Teams | Percentage (%) | Average Return ($) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bundesliga | 8 | 18 | 44.4 | -4.98 |
| Premier League | 6 | 20 | 30.0 | -11.88 |
| Serie A | 5 | 20 | 25.0 | -8.20 |
| Ligue 1 | 5 | 20 | 25.0 | -17.02 |
| Europa League | 19 | 56 | 33.93 | -3.49 |
| Champions League | 11 | 32 | 34.4 | -7.81 |
| Laliga | 5 | 20 | 25.0 | -9.11 |
| League | Teams with (+) Return | Total Teams | Percentage (%) | Average Return ($) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bundesliga | 9 | 18 | 50.0 | -3.40 |
| Premier League | 8 | 20 | 40.0 | -5.33 |
| Serie A | 9 | 20 | 45.0 | -3.82 |
| Ligue 1 | 9 | 20 | 45.0 | -4.11 |
| Champions League | 21 | 32 | 65.6 | 0.98 |
| Laliga | 11 | 20 | 55.0 | 0.40 |
Feel free to reach out if you would like to get results from something similar, or see different combinations of leagues / teams / odds.
*Data is updated once a day.
**Due to the structure of promotion/relegation, some teams don't feature in all years of the dataset.