A big part of soccer live betting is sensing when a goal will be scored before it happens. (Photo credit: Ronnie Macdonald / Foter / CC BY)
Soccer betting is becoming more about live betting and less about pre-match betting.
This makes it critical for you to understand where to look for profitable opportunities during games that are in progress.
The key to making a profit doing soccer live betting is the same as any other type of betting: you need to take advantage of market inefficiencies. This means calculating when the odds do not reflect the true probability.
In soccer live betting, there are specific areas you can focus on to discover — and take advantage of — these inefficiencies.
It only takes a second to score
Soccer commentators are renowned for churning out meaningless clichés, but one of the most frequent – ‘It only takes a second to score a goal’ – is actually quite insightful. There are a huge number of potential goals in any given game – making a live soccer bettor’s life interesting.
In proportion, however, the actual number of goals scored is very small because goals are rare. And goals are random – from a statistical perspective – as they don’t come in clusters, so one goal doesn’t necessarily trigger further goals. So how do you predict something that is both random and rare?
Professional bettors and bookmakers use a vast array of complex statistical models that try to predict goal distribution, but at a fundamental level, soccer is played and coached by humans, who can exhibit distinct tendencies. It’s up to you to understand and quantify the impact of those, and recognize when the market’s estimation of outcomes might not accurately reflect their impact.
So for now, let’s start at a basic level by looking at goal distribution from the 2011-12 Premier League season over six intervals of 15 minutes. This data is freely available over the Internet.
When are goals more likely?
Graph 1 shows that goals tend to become more frequent as the game progresses, except for the period leading up to half time, where there is a slight spike.
The likelihood of a goal in the final sixth of a game is almost double that of one occurring in the opening 15 minutes.
This data is the overall picture for the Premier League, but by investigating the idiosyncrasies and varying approaches of individual teams and their components – players and coaching staff – things can look very different.
Let’s look at the same data for Reading’s first 26 games of the 2012-13 season in Graph 2. The final 15 minutes of games involving the Royals produced three times as many goals as the first, and over four times that of the period from 46-60 minutes. It would be vital to know this kind of information when doing soccer live betting, as it shows that Reading’s matches were playing out in a fashion very different to the “average team”.
This could bias you in two ways. If you predominantly watched Reading’s games that season, you could over-estimate the number of times a team scores near the end of the game. Not watched any Reading? Then you might underestimate their chance of grabbing a last-minute winner (or more likely, an equalizer).
It’s equally important to accurately attribute a cause of this. One or two games that had a lot of goals at the end might skew the statistics, and as the season progresses, frequencies might regress more towards the mean. It’s essential for you to pin-point what is behind it, whether it is simply a blip, or is reflective of something more significant.
Goal distribution is a useful headline measure, but this broad data reflects a myriad of goal-trigger events that measure superiority and game intensity, which should be investigated in more detail.
It’s a game of two halves
When you do soccer live betting, you have access to a lot of freely available data – % possession, shots (on and off target) & corners – all of which hint that goals may be imminent. Keeping tabs of these can provide a good assessment on who is on top, but given they are no secret, the trick is to use these in conjunction with your own analysis. To be a winning bettor, you need to see where odds are over-valuing a team playing at an unsustainable pace.
The most important fact regarding game intensity is that it isn’t a constant. There are some basic examples where the balance of possession can be skewed with things like the crowd intensity, adrenalin and situational factors coming into play:
- Derby games
- Cup games, especially with unbalanced matchups (e.g English FA Cup)
- Relegation/Promotion battles
- Tournament scenarios
In these circumstances, seeing the game as literally two separate halves (increasing our cliché quota) for betting purposes can be a smart move. (First and second half lines are available at Pinnacle Sports for all major leagues).
Our introduction to goal distribution and game intensity are really just scratching the surface of the subject of soccer live betting.