Leagues Where Favourites Win
The Champions League is back.
- Favourites win 53.5% of the time. Home team favourites win more often than away team favourites. Home teams are the favourites in 70% of the matches. Playing at home improves results by 22.7% on average but the home advantage varies by league. Bookmakers tend to underestimate the home advantage to a small degree.
- La Liga returns this weekend, and it will surely be a lot of fun to see our footballing icons running again. However, the Champions League is set to relaunch after the leagues, and these are the five favourites to win the coveted title. The Champions League is a festival of football many are eager to.
- After every match, our model calculates three additional metrics for each team. Adjusted goals takes into account that not all goals are created equal: A team’s final score is reduced if a goal comes late in a game that it’s leading or when the opponent is a man down. (Meanwhile, goals that are scored in regular situations are adjusted upward to balance out the total number of.
Now, don't get me wrong, it's been lovely to tuck into a feast of Premier League football over the festive period, but there's nothing like hearing the 'chaaaaampions' belted out in stadiums across Europe.
No matter how events are unfolding across the continent's top leagues, you just know that anything can happen in Europe's premier competition, particularly in an unprecedented season like this.
Scotland - Highland / Lowland Football Leagues. 58 Total Home Wins. 451 Total Goals. Kenya - Kenyan Premier League. 55 Total Home Wins. 265 Total Goals.
Round of 16 blockbusters
Now, sure, there's still some way to go before the dramatic climax for European supremacy set to be held in Istanbul, but there are already some blockbuster ties for us to watch in the round of 16.
Barcelona vs Paris Saint-Germain are due to rerun their 2016/17 classic, Liverpool vs RB Leipzig has the makings of an underrated gem and Chelsea vs Atletico Madrid looks set to be a tactical chess match.
But even if these almighty European fixtures descend into absolute snoozefests, the knockout rounds mean that a winner must be found somehow and that alone makes for guaranteed drama.
European contenders
However, that doesn't make picking a potential winner any easier and I think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to say that a particular European giant has emerged as the favourite for 'Big Ears'.
And while it might be impossible to predict something as unpredictable as the Champions League, data at least allows us to come as close as possible and that's where FiveThirtyEight comes in.
The revered data analysts forecast everything from politics to science and they've lined up their ranking of the remaining 16 Champions League teams by their estimated chances of winning.
Champions League favourites
Intriguing, right? Well, fear not, because we decided to put their statistical model under the spotlight to see how the clubs ranked from least to most likely to win, so check out the findings below:
16. Lazio - less than 1%
15. Borussia Monchengladbach - less than 1%
14. FC Porto - less than 1%
13. Atalanta - 2%
12. Sevilla - 2%
11. Paris Saint-Germain - 2%
10. RB Leipzig - 3%
9. Borussia Dortmund - 3%
8. Atletico Madrid - 3%
7. Juventus - 5%
6. Chelsea - 5%
5. Real Madrid - 6%
4. Liverpool - 7%
3. Bayern Munich - 11%
2. Barcelona - 13%
1. Manchester City - 37%
GIVEMESPORT's Kobe Tong says
Go on, accuse of me hopping aboard the hype train, but I'm in complete agreement with the data analysts when it comes to backing City and I've felt that way since the early days of the season.
Long before the Citizens pulled away in the Premier League title race, I was wondering whether Pep Guardiola would plough all his focus into Europe a la Rafael Benitez's Liverpool in 2005 and 2007.
Besides, you'd have forgiven Guardiola for not renewing his deal and bowing out of the Etihad Stadium if it wasn't for the singular hole in his resume at the club: the Champions League.
Maybe I'm reading between the lines too much, but I think City are going to throw the kitchen sink at Europe and potentially achieve something special with one of the continent's finest defensive units.
With Ederson, Ruben Dias, Aymeric Laporte, John Stones and Joao Cancelo firing on all cylinders, they have an imperious foundation on which their world-class midfield can flow freely and cause havoc.
They have, from where I'm sitting, shown a stronger propensity for consistent performances, high-quality football and big-game nerves than the likes of Barcelona, Liverpool and Juventus at least.
But then again, given City's track record in Europe, I wouldn't be surprised if all of the above looked like the ravings of a lunatic in just a few week's time. That's football for you.
News Now - Sport NewsA quick search for betting on favourites on Google throws up hundreds of “fool-proof” systems for making money, which simply require your credit card details and a one-time payment of $100 to read about them. And one of the most common “systems” you will encounter is betting on favourites, because here we find there is some truth behind the lies.
A lot of academic research has been done into the so-called favourite longshot bias in betting markets. All winning betting strategies are based on exploiting market inefficiencies and when it comes to favourites there appears to be rather a large one in place. Put simply, favourites are much closer to “true odds” than longshots.
One major study you will find quoted in lightly researched articles on favourite betting is by two American academics who examined the results of over 6 million horse races in America and found backing favourites lost at a rate of 5.5% while backing from 3/1-15/1 lost at 18% on average.
The good news for bookmakers there is no matter what people bet on they lose, but it’s a significant difference between favourites and longer odds bets. Favourites are priced up more accurately than longshots. It’s also been shown to apply to other markets with particular application to political and novelty markets where it seems the shorter the odds the greater the bias.
Favourites in Football
In the last 20 years a number of research papers have been published to see if this applies to football with confusingly mixed results. Some say yes, some say no and some say both. If you were hoping that a simple “always bet on the favourite” strategy was your route to profit, then think again. But there are some key lessons:
- Betting on the favourite is rarely a bad bet
- Shorter priced favourites are often better value than longer priced ones
- You need to do some work of your own
What various academic and recreational research from bettors has found is betting on favourites generally allows you to lose more slowly. This isn’t a great long-term strategy, but as a starting point it at least demonstrates that betting the favourite is rarely a bad bet. As a starting point, losing at a slow rate is a damn sight better than most punters manage.
For some bettors the nature of betting short-priced favourites seems counterintuitive to their notion of “value”. Risk reward is an odd concept, and betting £100 to win £20 on a 1.2 selection doesn’t seem hugely attractive to many, but research has shown this is often a better bet than £100 on a 1.8 shot in terms of expected long-term returns.
A good demonstration of this comes in rugby union, where New Zealand will often be priced at something absurdly unattractive like 1/80 to beat most sides outside the top six. But losses to those teams are extremely rare. In fact the All Blacks have never lost to an international team that isn’t Australia, England, South Africa, France or Wales. Never. How good does your 1/80 look now?
The All Blacks are perennial favourites. Their 2015 World Cup winning team is regarded by many as the greatest rugby team ever assembled
When favourites betting goes bad
But if you are too cavalier with these kinds of stats you can come unstuck as South Africa showed in the Rugby World Cup where they were 1/100 to beat Japan. The Springboks had similar stats to New Zealand, having only lost internationals to 8 teams in their history. The loss to the minnows of Japan was the biggest shock of the tournament, but it should be seen as an exception and not the rule.
Leagues Where Favorites Winner
There were warning signs including an improving Japanese side a South African side that lost all three of its games in the Rugby Championship including at home to Argentina. And the final and most important point is you can’t just trust blindly in backing short-priced favourites and expect to never be stung for a big loss now and again.
Take the 2015/16 Premier League as an example of how favourites perform on a long-term betting basis. The 2014/15 season threw up a rather conveniently even 100 wins from 150 games where the home side was under 2.0. In other words odds-on to win. This would have given a total profit of £4.85 to a £1 level stakes bet. Pretty good.
The following season, by early February, there were 50 winners from 91 games for a total loss of £13.75 to the same level £1 stakes. The 2013/14 season had 99 winners from 143 games for a season-long profit of £1.21. So it shows that an expected long-term trend can sometimes go wildly off track.
In Conclusion
So what does all this tell us? Well firstly that this is not an exact science and secondly that despite the 15/16 anomaly there is a lot of value to be had in odds on favourites. What it should encourage you to do is go and analyse the huge wealth of stats and betting data that exists for free on the internet and try and find your own conclusions.
Find a data source and play around with the results. Spot a pattern and develop a system that works for you by refining the data and using your own insight into what might make odds-on chances more or less likely to win. But don’t, whatever you do, fall into the trap of thinking a 1.20 bet doesn’t present value.
Top Tips
Leagues Where Favorites Win Prizes
- Betting on the favourite is rarely a bad bet
- Shorter priced favourites are often better value than longer priced ones
- You need to do some work of your own