As the new season is upon us all football fans up and down the country will no doubt have fresh hopes about what the season will bring. Transfers will have been done and hopes raised. But what is it that makes a team successful? What is the most defining characteristic?
As is well known, a lot of club revenue gets spent on wages to attract top players. This is in the hope that buying talent buys performances. So I wanted to know if wages were correlated to performance. If it was, then the bigger the wage bill the higher the league position and vice versa.
Comparing the finishing positions of premier league teams over a number of seasons and Deloitte reports reveals a strong correlation each year between wage bill and final league position. This meant that the league pretty much ended up with the lower spending teams near the bottom and the higher spending teams at the top. The inevitable conclusion was that if your club owner doesn’t have big pockets it’s unlikely you will ever challenge those that do. Every year you do tend to get one over or under performer though, but in general it seems that money really does buy success!
The advantage of this knowledge is that does allow you to, generally, forecast longer term success or failure of a club. Wages appear to be a good proxy for generally how well a club ‘should’ perform This also has important ramifications for how you should asses a manager’s performance and prospects. If we look at relative performance we can even out the playing field and see who really is achieving above their means. Sometimes ‘star’ managers are not actually performing well to their wage bill, but others are performing miracles on limited budgets. So how best can you use this information?
Before the start of each season and during the season you can watch the news flow coming from each club. If the club is struggling financially then it is certain that their prospects for doing well in the league will diminish. If a team has a bottomless pit of money then it will most likely improve prospects. New managers can wipe the slate clean and kick start the team back to an appropriate level but there is little evidence they can get them to perform far above it. Popular managers that resign can have the opposing effect. Thanks to betting exchanges you can take advantage of temporarily success or failure by backing or laying a team and trading out when they regress to their rightful place in the league. But you may also be willing to take longer term positions and benefit from increasing certainty or uncertainty as the season progresses.
Picking teams likely to win leagues is pretty easy and it tends to be a simple process of selecting from a small bunch of likely candidates, it but doesn’t offer much value or really good trading opportunities in my opinion. For that you need to head down into mid table obscurity and the lower reaches of the league.
A bad run can send an average team towards the lower reaches of the league and threaten relegation. The markets have historically overrated the chances of relegation with a lot of teams. Sacking an unpopular manager at this point can turn a clubs season around, especially if they have a good, read expensive, squad of players. Some clubs though exhibit the epitome of incompetence at this point and are doomed to be relegated. You also have the situation at the start of the season where new teams or managerial teams need to settle our play out. Newly promoted teams may also have spent good sums in an attempt to establish themselves and that will add a few places to their expected finishing place. The ‘shock of the new’ effect with can also occur with newly promoted teams, but this tends to wear off over the full season.
So as a consequence my favourite play on the league is to take multiple positions in the ‘to be relegated’ market. Over the course of the season there are many opportunities to lay at short or reasonable odds. The view you should have is that the market should always be priced to 300% in a three team relegation situation. By laying at the lowest odds available last year, you would have returned 780%, plenty of room for error there!
Teams I am interested in at the start of the season are Chelsea, Spurs, Arsenal, Liverpool, Swansea, Reading and Southampton. You should also keep an eye on the developing situation at Portsmouth. All have interesting themes that will unfold early in the season
Be aware that relegation or promotion markets are not settled till the underlying event has happened, which could be some time in the future. But don’t let that stop you; they can be very profitable markets.
Did you know that as well as checking the realtime prices on BETDAQ below – you can also log into your account and place your bets directly into BETDAQ from BETDAQ TIPS.
