Make Money Backing the Same Team Every Week!

I got the idea for this blog on overhearing a conversation in a pub, as it often does, the discussion moved around to betting. 

One of the group sat near to me informed his friends that he'd had a great idea; he had just opened an account with one of the best betting sites and he was going to put five pounds on a certain team every week. 

This team were a successful team, and would win most of their games over the season, so he couldn't go wrong. 

I don't doubt that he would have won a lot of his bets, his friends seemed quite impressed with the idea; none of them seemed to question the fact that the bookies might have thought about this a bit longer than he had and he might be backing this particular team at very low odds. 

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My initial thoughts were that even if the team in question won nearly all their games, this would not necessarily be a guarantee that he would make money, but I didn't know that for sure. 

This made me want to find out what would happen and in the absence of a crystal ball to see what would happen this season, I decided to check what would have happened in the past had a punter backed the same team all season. 

I looked at 98 teams that played in the top leagues in Spain, England, Germany, Italy and France over one season, and worked out what the outcome would have been had a punter backed each of the teams to win for the whole season.

Then i revisited this idea for the 2024/25 EPL season, which you can check out in the next section of this blog. 

Top Ten Teams Over The Season 

One thing to clear up at this point is that despite my slightly silly title for this blog, I am not advocating going out and betting on the same team every week. 

Even a lot of teams that got in the top ten were only marginally in profit over a season, and of course to bet on the teams that made the most money over the season you would need to know who they were before the season started. 

But I do think that looking at the sorts of teams that are in this top ten is useful to change the way that we can sometimes think about betting. 

Firstly they are not all from the same league. Spain and England both had three teams each in the top ten. 

Germany had two teams in the top ten and Italy and France had one each. 

There is of course a very good argument that nobody should bet on a league that they know little about, but there is no reason why it is a bad thing to learn more a about a variety of different leagues. 

The teams that were in the top ten all offered some of the best value opportunities to bet last season, but a punter that only considered betting on a single league would have missed a lot of them whichever league that was.

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The glamourous names in the top ten are largely noticeable by their absence; in fact if they have anything in common it is probably that on the whole they are unglamourous names. With the exception of Manchester United, none of the top ten teams for overall LSP over last season won their league. 

None of the teams finished lower than eighth but apart from one team the highest position was third. If there was any correlation between the position a team had come in this league and the position they had come in their actual league, then it was probably a negative one. 

Manchester United the only first placed team in my top ten, were at number ten, whereas three of the top four had finished seventh or eighth in their national leagues. 

When one top ten was made for home games and one for away games, only Real Sociedad, Real Betis and Hamburger SV were in both of them. 

This goes to show that it is a very bad idea to think backing a team away from home is similar to backing them at home. 

An extreme example of how different home and away form can be was the 18th placed side in the Bundesliga last season Greuther Fürth; at home their LSP was -17 for the season having failed to win a single game.

Away from home they managed to win four away games but the odds in these games were so long as to outweigh the other 13 games and give them a positive LSP of 6.25 (enough to sneak into seventh place in the table for away games).

Top Ten Teams in Away Games Over The Season 

At the start of this blog I deliberately didn't tell you which team the man in the pub had been planning on betting on each week.

I suppose it is only fair that I let the cat out of the bag now and admit that my initial thoughts were not proven correct by the calculation I have just told you about. 

As it happens he had managed to land on one of the teams that was in my top ten for LSP last season.I am sad to report though, that his choice of Manchester United to back every game this season will have left him disappointed so far. 

I will be watching to see if his luck changes soon, I for one hope that it will.