Premier League Value - The Alternative League Table

Alternative Options

You can see below my experiment when assessing results using odds. 

Here you can view teams that were overpriced and then subsequently showed a profit from a selected number of games. 

If we were to select teams on their betting odds rather than our opinion on whether they would win the game some real value would be had.

It is a worthwhile exercise and a betting system and strategy that can reap plenty of big priced winners. 

Why not test it out for the new EPL season?

EPL League Table Betting Odds

We have tweaked the options for the 2020/21 season but all the time looking for teams that could be overpriced. 

Remember the table is based on betting odds at kick-off, so for example Liverpool may win every game this season but in most games would be odds on. 

A team like Crystal Palace may repeat their opening victory against the likes of Manchester City and Chelsea away, and would therefore be high up the table because their odds to win those games would be so high. 

The key is really finding teams who can outperform their odds, place bets on them, and hopefully secure victories. 

Naturally, teams towards the bottom of the table will give you better odds but are more likely to lose

Teams towards the top of our table are showing winning form at good prices.   

Our table only features those teams that won and the betting odds they won at. 

You can view the top-performing teams and see the profits you could have made. 

Further discussion each week will be on the OLBG EPL Forum - Please Join In.  

Teams have now played around all games of the 2020/21 EPL season.

Leicester topped the table through the season until the final game when Aston Villa passed them in beating Chelsea.  

Backing Leicester away from the King Power and Everton away from Goodison would have seen you rake in the profits, both have been consistently overpriced.

West Ham have been excellent both home and away the bookies may have expected them to tail off so their odds have been kept quite high. 

Most sides (except Southampton and Wolves) had bigger overall odds away from home, this makes sense with away teams generally higher priced.  

Look at the difference in odds between home and away. 

This experiment was undertaken during one of the strangest seasons when crowds were not allowed. This seems to have had a strong effect on teams not winning home games.

The takeaway from this table is do not be shy in backing away teams at generous prices, especially when they are taking on one of the big six. 

However if the 2021/22 season goes back to normal then more home wins may return. 

Final Table

There is a so-called big 6 in the EPL, based partially on stature and partially on results. 

Punters back these teams expecting them to win, but what happens when the teams fall short of expectations?

This season 2020/21 is a classic example, look at the top 6 teams and see how they have performed. 

You need to look for teams sitting in the top half of this table on a regular basis and you will find teams that are regularly under-priced because they are less fashionable

You can check the biggest prices in each round of matches >>> via this new EPL blog.

Original Alternative League Table Experiment

As someone who enjoys betting on football, I am always looking for value; that is a bet where the odds reflect a lower chance of winning than the actual probability of the outcome I am betting on. 

It is a belief I have had for some time that these bets exist regularly in football for various reasons which I explain in my blog here. 

I have also written a couple of blogs where I produced an alternative league table, designed to spot the teams that are consistently overpriced. The table is based not on 3 points for a win, but rather on the LSP that a punter would make if they had bet on the team winning.

So for example if I bet on a team at 4/1 and they win, then my LSP is 3, if they are priced at 1 / 2 then my LSP is 0.5. 

In this table, there are no points for a loss or a draw. I have redone this table for the first 25 games of the Premier League season so far (up to and including games played the 10th and 11th of February), with some interesting results. 

There are two ways a team can be high up on this table, the first is to win very regularly, the other is to win less regularly but when they are expected not to win, and therefore have longer odds layed against them. The best example of a team using the first route is Chelsea. Of the games considered here, 

Chelsea have won 18, but in only two of these games have they been priced better than even money (against Liverpool and Everton).

So overall from all the games a punter backing Chelsea each time would have an LSP of only 2.25. The odds offered on the Premier League so far have meant that the latter of these is the more successful route this season and the second route arguably provides us with all of the top five in this table.

The runaway winners of this table are Stoke, helped hugely by what was possibly the biggest shock result of the season, the 1-0 victory over Manchester City. 

The odds against this were 17/1 so this accounts for a large part of this profit, but wins against Newcastle, Swansea, Tottenham, Everton, and Leicester (all at better than even money) mean that it would have been profitable to back Stoke in every over game except for the City game, despite only having won 9 out of 24 of them. 

Swansea managed to beat Arsenal at home, and perhaps more impressively Man United and Southampton away. Their five other wins were at less impressive odds, but together their results make them second in the table with an LSP of 7.68. Southampton are the team from the top five that has the best win percentage but consecutive home wins against Newcastle, QPR, Sunderland, Stoke, and Leicester would only have netted a punter backing them in each game an LSP of 2.9, showing that sometimes the bookies do learn quickly. 

When Southampton played Newcastle they had lost 2 out of 3 games played, had a manager new to English football, and had sold in the summer what were seen as some of their best players. 

A punter would have netted an LSP of 0.8 for this game, but by the time they reached the last win of five in a row at home against Leicester, this return was only 0.44, despite Leicester having, had some quite impressive results at that point in the season. 

More lucrative games for a punter backing Southampton would have been the home victories over Everton and Arsenal and away wins at Upton Park, The Liberty Stadium and Old Trafford. 

Spurs have enjoyed good home wins over Southampton, Everton and Arsenal and have perhaps been a little overpriced at times away from home, with backers collecting better than even money for wins over Aston Villa, Hull, Leicester and West Brom. West Ham complete the top five with an LSP of 4.71, owing in large part to home wins over Liverpool and Manchester City.

If a bookmaker is doing his job correctly then over a large number of games we might expect all teams to be showing a negative LSP of roughly 5-10% of the total number of games played. 

For example, after 100 games we would expect an LSP of between -5 and -10. 

Obviously though, in every game, there has to be a winner, so over a small number of games it isn't possible for a bookmaker to achieve this on every team. 

Therefore there is a certain level of LSP that a team can show and this won't mean that the bookmaker is pricing them up incorrectly; knowing what this is, is difficult, but my estimate after this number of games is that it is probably risky to draw too many conclusions about any LSP between -4 and 4, 

I can imagine anywhere between these two numbers could be the result of luck, rather than bookmakers consistently pricing up a team in a way that doesn't reflect their true chances.

This assumption means that there are eight teams, Newcastle, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, Man City, Arsenal, Man United and Liverpool, for whom we think the prices have generally been correct so far this season. 

Near the bottom of the table are a lot of the teams you might expect, even those that are long odds to win, will not get very high in the table if they don't win the games, so the bottom of the table is strongly represented here. 

In fact, the bottom seven in the alternative league table contains six of the bottom seven from the actual table. The exception is Aston Villa, who are 19th in the actual league table but ninth in the alternative table thanks in large part to the shock win over Liverpool in September. 

Everton is perhaps the shock entry at the very bottom of the alternative table having won only six games all season, only one of these being at better than even money. 

When we split the same table into home and away, we can see that for home games Stoke drop right into mid-table and West Ham are top. Aston Villa is in the top four away from home, again largely thanks to their defeat of Liverpool and West Ham drop right down into the bottom half of that table. 

If you have a system, strategy, or betting idea why not try it out in the tipping competition or on the olbg forum.