Betting on Premier League Favourites

Is Backing the Premier League Favourites Blind Profitable?

As Manchester City celebrate a sixth Premier League crown in seven years, it allows not only playing and managerial personnel to take stock of what has unfolded but also those who like to place a wager each weekend.

Because with the English top tier being big business, its financial muscle is matched by those who set the odds. Although Pep Guardiola and his superstars will be delighted at ruling the roost once again, the bookmakers will also punch the air with joy.

Celebrations that come in the shape of getting the better of punters up and down the country and although there will always be stories of personal gain, many will bemoaning the loss of their bankroll.

However, the beauty of any football season is that as soon as one ends, another is just around the corner and with the likes of Liverpool and Arsenal looking to go again soon, so will the army of betting aficionados who devise their Premier League betting tips.

While with the new season being on the horizon in just a few weeks, it is time to offer up another of our betting hypotheses and by asking the question: 'Does always backing the favourite make you profitable in the long run?', we are going to take another deep data dive to find the answer.

Your Recent Favourites

With an archive of match odds uncovered for the previous eight Premier League seasons (2016/17 – 2023/24), we can combine these with each of the results that are now firmly in the history books.

While doing so, we can also calculate the profit or loss across any of the eight individual campaigns and see whether using a system of this kind would get the better of the bookmakers in the long run.

Therefore, as good a place to start as any is the season that has only just concluded, and to make things equal, the favourite has been backed in each of the 380 matches that took place and with the same virtual stake of £10.

With the criteria now set out, let’s see how we would have fared across the duration of 2023/24: 

As you can see here, the news is positive, and also, so would your bank account be if you followed this method. Because if you backed the favourite in each of the 380 Premier League matches during the 2023/24 campaign, you would have returned a £77.80 profit or a positive yield of 2.05%

A return that means we are off to a good start and with £3800 being staked across the season, the final day would return a total of £3877.80. Then again, for a system to truly work it has to be tested across multiple years.

Something that we have also managed to do with the dataset that allows us to look back at seasons past, and although this could have been updated weekly over six years, there is a far more efficient way to generate the results.

This means if we use the same £10 per game stake over 380 fixtures for the seven previous seasons as well, here is what the results look like:

As you can see there is something of a mixed bag here, in that we have five years in which profit has been secured by always backing the favourite and three seasons in which the bankroll has been eroded.

While as you can see, the 2019/20 and 2020/21 campaigns were undoubtedly ones to forget for this particular betting system. Then again, we can also offer a considerable caveat for such substantial losses.

Because Covid-19 having a vice-like grip on the Premier League and many other sporting competitions, it also had a knock-on effect when it came to results. Although Liverpool have been a superior force recently, they will quickly want to forget their 7-2 defeat at Aston Villa.

A result that was almost the perfect example when it came to the favourites being caught short and when the favourites fail to come out on top, it also can have repercussions for those who like to put their money where their mouths are.

In the two campaigns which can label a Covid-19 affected, you can see more than an 8% negative yield in each and with such hefty losses, it also played a part in the whole dataset returning a 5.89% negative yield.

With that said, the picture looked far better during 2016/17, 2018/19, 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24 seasons certainly gives us something to work with and with only one “normal season” returning a loss, it would be interesting to see what happens if we normalise the data.

Seven Becomes Five

To do this, we can strip out the overall results from 2019/20 and 2020/21 and present a table that looks at six of the last eight Premier League campaigns.

As you can see here, the results make for much better reading and with the data normalised, we can see five profitable seasons and only one which failed to offer any positivity. Not only that but there is a 10.40% yield in the right direction.

Something that suggests that always betting on the favourite can return a profit in the long term (that is, if you allow for external circumstances). Although, this celebratory tone must be tempered by the fact that two years of data have been removed.

Therefore, if you were to strictly follow the strategy throughout eight successive seasons, you would see a negative yield of 5.89% and in fairness, not many would have had the foresight to see what was around the corner in 2019/20 and 2020/21.

However, if you were to use the 2021/22 season as a starting point, a small return would be banked in both that season and the two that followed. Is this the start of a new positive trend? One that hopefully is extended into 2024/25.

Quantity over Quality

Another thing to consider is just how many times does the favourite outcome get over the line (be that either a win or in some rare cases, the draw has the shortest price) and the key number per season is 190.

If more than 190 matches ended with the favourite outcome coming out on top, it means that more than 50% of the bets placed were winners and with this magic number in mind, here is what happened during the last six seasons.

Key: False being a losing bet, True being a winning bet

Here we can see, that on each of the seven previous Premier League seasons, the favourite has been successful more often than not and although that may offer cause for celebration, it offered us no favours in three of these campaigns.

Because what needs to be considered here are the odds themselves and although a favourite may win, that same favourite could be Manchester City getting the better of Bournemouth at the Etihad – something that would be priced rather short by bookmakers.

Therefore, the quantity of wins is just as important as the quality and even with more than 50% of favourites in three of the eight seasons, we still saw a loss in these years. This means that even volume does not necessarily guarantee profit.

CONCLUSION

In answer to our hypothesis, the results are rather inconclusive, although we have also managed to offer mitigating circumstances and show this system in a positive light. With a eight-season sample, it is currently 5-3 to the favourites, which means who will find the winner at the end of 2024/25?

Correct as of 18th July 2024

Editorial information

This article was researched and fact-checked by Dan Tracey who also then added the words - Dan is a multi-talented writer, data analyst and podcaster whose six-year career in the sports data sphere has seen incredible successes. From helping UEFA create their annual technical reports to writing articles for Sports Betting Websites, including sites like TheLinesUS and Goal 

 Data from https://www.football-data.co.uk/

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