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.
In my last blog I looked into the idea that it might be possible to make money backing the same team every week.
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My conclusion was that last season there were teams that could have been backed every week to make a profit, although knowing which this teams at the start of the season may have been a problem.
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I am sure I was not alone being surprised at which teams these were.
You might expect the most successful teams to be the best ones to back because they win most often.
The problem is that the very top teams are also the teams with the shortest odds.
In actual fact if you were going to back the same team every week over the whole of last season, then the teams you would have had the most success with were those which are slightly below the "top-top" teams.
Top Ten Teams Over The Season
| Team | LSP Overall | League Position |
| Real Sociedad | 22.25 | 4 |
| Rayo Vallecano | 16.74 | 8 |
| Hamburger SV | 14.65 | 7 |
| Real Betis | 13.93 | 7 |
| Bayer Leverkusen | 10.88 | 3 |
| Nice | 10.04 | 4 |
| Lazio | 9.44 | 7 |
| West Brom | 7.48 | 8 |
| Tottenham Hotspur | 6.84 | 5 |
| Man United | 6.49 | 1 |
I have repeated this table here to hammer home the fact that the teams in my top ten last time were not all top teams in their respective leagues.
My gut feeling before starting would be that the very best teams in the leagues would be the ones that would be the most profitable to back.
Obviously I knew that all teams would fail to win at least occasionally, and I knew that the higher up the league a team finished, the more occasionally this would be.
I also thought that the teams that went on to win the league would be priced shorter than those that were less successful.
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But I thought that the prices for more successful teams would be more competitive than those for the less successful and longer priced teams.
I think it was reiterating that I am not advising anyone to go out and religiously back these teams this season.
Firstly I have no idea whether history is going to repeat itself (and this was only one season after all).
But also if you wanted to make money last season on these teams then backing them at level stakes every week would not have been the way to do it.
For example, the three Spanish Teams in my top ten managed to get 7 points out of a possible 36, against Barcelona and Real Madrid last season, and at the Santiago Bernabeu and the Camp Nou none of the three managed a single point against the top two.
But given the teams that are in the top ten aren't the ones I would have expected, will this be the case for the teams that would have made the biggest losses for the punter who backed them every week.
I thought this would be interesting for two reasons, partly out of a morbid curiosity to see which were the poorest performing teams and partly because if it were possible to lay teams at the same rate that you could back them, then it would be possible that money could also be made out of these teams.
Bottom Ten Teams Over The Season
| Team | LSP Overall | League Position |
| La Coruna | -17.98 | 19 |
| Bremen | -16.46 | 14 |
| Stoke | -15.26 | 13 |
| Reading | -15.04 | 19 |
| Celta | -14.75 | 17 |
| Troyes | -14.27 | 19 |
| QPR | -13.85 | 20 |
| Torino | -13.65 | 16 |
| Mallorca | -13.2 | 18 |
| Fortuna | -12.77 | 17 |
A brief look at the third column of this table indicates that if you, like me, were expecting a lot of relegated teams to appear here, then you were right.
Of the ten teams, featured, six no longer play in the top league and none finished in the top half of the table.
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The best performers were either Stoke City or Werder Bremen depending on which way you look at it (the German Bundesliga only has 18 teams) and neither of these teams could be said to have been a long way away from the relegation fight last season.
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So whereas the teams that were most profitable to back last season were not necessarily the ones that you might expect, it seems that the ones that were most profitable to lay were much more predictable.
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It should be noted however, that a layer who laid La Coruna every week last season would have made just under 18 points, whereas a backer who backed Real Sociedad all season would have won over 22 points.
