James has worked for the jockey club and has 20 years sports betting experience he utilises his skills in our tipster competitions and writes sports betting content.
EPL Result Statistics
A game of football can be thought of as a three-horse race, the three horses being “home win”, “away win” and “draw”.
You can see the latest update of HDA football statistics from recent seasons.
| Season | Home | Draw | Away | Home % | Draw % | Away % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | 171 | 91 | 118 | 45% | 24% | 31% |
| 2018-19 | 182 | 72 | 129 | 48% | 19% | 34% |
Statistics should play a part when you are assessing football form for your weekly football bets.
The OLBG betting school has a range of articles on football, all are worth a read.
Home Draw Away Football Statistics
If we look at the Premier League over the previous five seasons, the performances of these ”horses” are as follows.
We can see here that by far the most common result is a home win, over the whole of the five seasons (1900 games) there were 882 home wins, meaning this outcome happened 46.4% of the time.
| Draws and away wins accounted for 26.6% and 27% of the games respectively. Away wins then happened slightly more than draws, but I wouldn't take this to mean that they always happen more often. Away wins happened just eight times more often that draws over the five-season, but over 1900 games I don't think that this is significant. In two of the five seasons, draws happened more often than away wins. |
| Without getting too technical in my reasoning I think the correct conclusions to draw from this are that home wins happen generally more often than both draws and aways wins, and that draws are not significantly more or less likely to happen than away wins. If we could bet on football games at the same odds for each outcome for every game, then the best outcome to bet on would be home win. If bookies would give us odds of 2/1 every time for this outcome, we would be able to simply bet on home wins for every game and over the course of a season we would be practically guaranteed to make a profit. | |
Of course, bookmakers do not operate on a charitable basis, they offered odds of 2/1 or better on a home win only 24% of the time over the last five seasons and a punter that backed the home win in all of these games would have won just over 23% of the time.
It looks like bookmakers only give odds of 2/1 or better on a home win, when the game is one where the home team has a much lower than average chance.
The left-hand side of the next table shows the average odds that were available in all the games during the last five seasons.
| We can see that home wins have average odds of 2.68, draws 3.90 and away wins 4.97. These are the average of the odds for all games, regardless of what the results actually were. On the right and side, the average odds are shown for each result in the games that actually ended in that result. Here we see that in all cases, the odds were on average lower, when that result happened, than they were in all games. This confirms what we already know is true to a certain extent: bookmakers know what is going to happen in a game and change the odds accordingly. This admittedly fairly obvious fact is the main reason it is difficult to make money betting on football. |
You might think to yourself, if only the bookie didn't know what was going to happen, then I would be able to make more money, well in that case, what you need to do is find the games where this is closest to being true. The average odds of a home win of 2.68 in all games, is pulled up by 0.58 by the odds in games that didn't end in a home win.
The average odds of an away win in all games of 4.97 goes down by 1.77 when just the odds of games that ended in away draws are taken. But for draws this difference is just 0.22. I think this last fact tells a very important story, bookmakers seem to be less able to pick out when draws will happen than they are with away wins, despite the fact that they happen roughly as often.
This means that on average a winning punter that has backed the draw will get a return that is nearly 22% greater than a winning punter on an away win. In short, if you are looking for the games the bookies can't pick, I think you will recognise a lot of them by the result being a draw.
Obviously this doesn't help us too much, unless we are able to find which games are draws. I have a few statistics that I think that will help to do this, and these will form the basis of my next blog.
This is part of a series of blogs,
read the next blog here
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