Is Betting Over 2.50 Goals Profitable? A Comprehensive Analysis

Discover if backing over 2.5 goals in the Premier League is a profitable strategy. We analyze the last six seasons to determine if consistently betting on high-scoring games would yield a profit.
Is Betting Over 2.50 Goals Profitable? A Comprehensive Analysis
Dan Tracey
Dan Tracey Data Scientist and Football Editor

Writer, analyst, podcaster, Spurs fan. Three out of four is not bad. If there is a data angle, I will find it.

With the dust now settled on another Premier League season, it is time to take stock of what has taken place across the course of nine frenetic months and although the main narrative will be Manchester City’s sixth league title in seven years, there are plenty of other stories to be told.

Stories that are not only found up and down the table, but the statistics that are connected to them and when it comes to statistics, this is where the worlds of football and betting are so neatly intertwined. 

Be Selective with Overs Betting is the Key
The most recent season of the Premier League would return a profit betting over 2.5 goals blindly on every game as you would expect. Showing a profit of £180.2 to £10 stakes, it means that the punters won at the end of the campaign.

Especially when it comes to the pursuit of Premier League goals and with the over/under 2.5 markets being one of the most popular on any given weekend, it also gives us scope to carry out another deep dive of analysis.

Analysis that comes in whether betting over 2.5 goals can be a profitable system over the course of any season or even multiple campaigns and to do that, we are going to set up a hypothesis before we proceed further.

One that asks: If you backed every game in a Premier League season to finish with over 2.5 goals, would you be in profit by the end of it?

That is the question that we are going to ask ourselves and with the data that has been made available, we can also answer this over the course of the last six complete Premier League campaigns. 

The Most Recent

First, we will take a look at the most recent Premier League campaign and to make all things equal, we are going to virtually bet on each of the 380 games that took place between August of last year and May of this.

Not only that, but the stake will be equal across the board and with this in mind, we will be laying a £10 wager on every game played. Doing this means there will be an outlay of £3800 across any single campaign.

We will also explain how this project has been constructed with that expenditure.

Working on the Numbers
📊🔍 Curious if betting on over 2.5 goals brings profit? Let's find out! 🧐🏆 In our analysis, we virtually bet £10 on each of the 380 Premier League games in the most recent campaign. 💰💻

One way to do this would be to update the dataset after every round of Premier League fixtures and keep an ongoing tally of profit/loss. Thankfully though, there is also archived odds data which allows us to mop up every result in one swoop.

Therefore, with a dataset that logs every Premier League result, whether it was a game that ended over or under 2.5 goals, the stake placed and the winnings from any return, here are the 2023/24 campaign results.

SeasonStakesWinning Plus StakesProfit/Loss% Yield
2023/2438003980.2180.24.74%

As you can see, the most recent season of the Premier League would return a profit. Betting in the manner stated above would have meant an overall profit of £180.20 at the end of the campaign.

However, the best way to test whether a concept truly works, is by running the logic over the course of many other seasons and with the same process being carried out as above, we can also look at the data from each of the last eight Premier League seasons.

Going Further Back

SeasonStakesWinning Plus StakesProfit/Loss% Yield
2016/1738003917.5117.53.09%
2017/1838003712.3-87.7-2.31%
2018/1938003786.4-13.6-0.36%
2019/2038003419.8-380.2-10.01%
2020/2138003471.2-328.8-8.65%
2021/2238003713.7-86.3-2.27%
2022/2338003565.6-234.4-6.17%
2023/2438003980.2180.24.74%
TOTAL3040029566.7-833.3-21.93%

In the table above, you can see that in six of the last seven Premier League seasons have returned a loss in each and even though there was profit at the end of 2016/17 and 2023/24 campaigns when combining all of the results together, it eventually created a negative yield of 21.93%.

Which means if you bet on each of the 3,040 matches in our data sample and always backed over 2.5 goals in every game, your bankroll would end up being 21.93% lighter than when it started, and this is not the route to profitability.

Don't Bet Over 2.5 Goals Blindly
💰🚫 Betting on over 2.5 goals for every match may not be the road to profitability. ⚽️📊 Our analysis reveals that if you placed this bet on all 3,040 matches in our data sample, your bankroll would end up 21.93% lighter. 😱❌

However, this is not necessarily the lost cause that you may consider it to be and when we look the 2018/19 campaign, it was very close to running breakeven with just a negative yield of 0.36% and for three of the eight seasons, the negative yield was less than 3.5% (including two winning seasons)

Something that suggests, that with some fine tuning, this could be a concept that actually works for you, not against you and if there is one thing we have learned, it is that blanket betting concepts will always catch you out.

While although a 21.93% negative yield sounds like it is approaching unmitigated disaster, there is one caveat we can look to use and that is the Covid-19 effected seasons of 2019/20 and 2020/21, as the results for this campaign are very much the outlier in all of this.

Especially as the 2019/20 and 2020/21 campaigns saw a negative yield of 10.01% and 8.65% respectively – something that suggests the outside forces we all witnessed, also created a downfall when it comes to betting behaviour.

Over or Under

Of course, another way to look at this, is the quantity of either over or under 2.5 goals in each Premier League game per season and when we look at these results, it does shine our concept in a somewhat better light.

SeasonStakesWinning Plus StakesProfit/Loss% YieldOver 2.5Under 2.5
2016/1738003917.5117.53.09%206174
2017/1838003712.3-87.7-2.31%194186
2018/1938003786.4-13.6-0.36%204176
2019/2038003419.8-380.2-10.01%198182
2020/2138003471.2-328.8-8.65%190190
2021/2238003713.7-86.3-2.27%205175
2022/2338003565.6-234.4-6.17%200180
2023/2438003980.2180.24.74%246134
TOTAL3040029566.7-833.3-21.93%16431397

When looking at the over 2.5 and under 2.5 totals per season, 190 is the magic number and if the over column has more than this, it means that more than 50% of the Premier League games per season ended with three or more goals.

quantity is not necessarily enough to return a profit to any system of this kind.
Dan Tracey - Football Betting Expert - OLBG.com

Something that happened in in seven of the last eight seasons and was an exact 50/50 split in the other (2020/21). This means that the concept is not getting let down by not enough matches ending in over 2.5 goals, it is just that not enough are getting over the line. While the concept was certainly not let down at the end of the 2023/24 season as 64.7% of that campaign's Premier League matches ended in over 2.5 goals.

Not only that, but also odds will play a huge part in any yield and if the over 2.5 goals returns are always paltry, it suggest that quantity is not necessarily enough to return a profit to any system of this kind.


Tweaks to be Made

When looking at the data tables above, we can see that there is potential for this to work – it is just that the system needs finetuning and one way to look at evolving this, is by not necessarily backing every game.

Logically you need to be looking at the teams that score and concede the most and with this idea in mind, the system can be tweaked by cutting out those teams that usually flounce around in mid-table each year.

For example, if we were to look at this concept across 2024/25, we could take the top five scoring teams from the previous season and the five teams that conceded the most (excluding relegated teams) and only back over 2.5 goals when the relevant teams meet next season.

This would mean, that the 10 teams to keep a stronger focus on would be: 

  • Manchester City
  • Arsenal
  • Liverpool
  • Newcastle
  • Chelsea
  • Brentford
  • Wolves
  • Bournemouth
  • Nottingham Forest
  • Wolves

But what if we applied the same process to last season? 

This would mean, that the nine teams to keep a stronger focus on would be: 

  • Manchester City
  • Arsenal
  • Liverpool
  • Brighton
  • Tottenham
  • Bournemouth
  • Nottingham Forest
  • Wolves
  • Everton

    (nine because Tottenham were both in the top five top scorers and top five goals against)
SeasonStakesWinning Plus StakesProfit/Loss% Yield
2023/24720656-64-8.89%

These nine teams would end up playing a total of 72 head-to-head matches and with the same £10 per game stakes applied, the overall outlay would be £720. However, the winning plus stakes would only be £656 – a loss of £64.

But this only a negative yield of 8.89% and perhaps just enough to follow the same principle for next season. Can this filtered approach come good in 2024/25? 

CONCLUSION

To answer our hypothesis, if you were to bet on over 2.5 goals per Premier League game, by the end of the 2023/24 season you would end up making money. However, there is certainly scope for it all to go against you and therefore, the season the concept has been used on will play a large part on whether you are profitable or not.


Methodology

All data was collected from the superb post event information available at https://www.football-data.co.uk/

Correct as of 18th July 2024

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