Creating a Profitable Betting Strategy for Football by Using Statistical Modelling

Abstract: Our goal was to investigate the possibility of creating a profitable betting strategy for league football. We built the Poisson model for this purpose and examined its usefulness in the betting market. We also compared the Poisson model against other most commonly used prediction methods, such as Elo ratings and multinomial ordered probit model. In the thesis, we characterized most of the betting types but were mainly focused on fixed odds betting. The efficiency of using the model in more exotic forms of betting, such as Asian handicap and spread betting, was also briefly discussed.

According to market research studies, sports betting will have an increasing entertainment value in the future with the penetration of new technology. When majority of government-licensed bookmakers are making their transition from online terminals into the Internet, the competition will increase and bring more emphasis on risk management. In this thesis, we investigated the benefits of using a statistically acceptable model as a support of one’s decisions both from bookmaker's and punter's point of views and concluded that it would have potential to improve their performance.

The model proposed here was proven to be useful for football betting purposes. The validation indicated that it quite effectively captured many aspects of the game and finally enabled us to finish the season with positive return.

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