Similarities and Differences between Stock Trading and Football Betting

Layman Punters Exploited?

In advance of their game on 26 March, 2012, I analysed the Manchester United v Fulham match for Betfair and prepared a prediction that the result was likely to be either a 1-0 or a 2-0 win to United.

One may think that this was good news for United fans, but my husband somehow didn’t like the fact that Manchester were destined by my prediction to score so few goals, as he wanted many more in order that United made ground on Manchester City’s goal difference advantage.

Despite all my statistics and trend analyses he marched to the pub full of hope of witnessing a big scoreline, but returned a little disappointed (and a little drunk!) after a very close 1-0 victory.

In the stock market, great faith is always placed in the work of professional trend analysts with purchasing decisions made off the back of this predictive work.

However, in football a fan refuses to accept that statistics are relevant to the outcome of the big midweek match…

Stock analysis shows a strategic picture; football information is lost in detail

Yesterday, I started to write an article about the quarter-final tie in the UEFA Champions’ League between Marseille and Bayern Munich, and before publishing searched the Internet one last time for what I considered to be pretty simple information.

The teams have never met before and all I wanted to know was the results of Bayern playing against French teams in European competitions over the last 10-years, and also for Marseille playing German opposition in Europe over the same time scale.

Could I find this easily? No!

Moreover, one is lost in a jungle of information overload and a professional analysis of football matches becomes almost impossible as most of the available data are regretfully irrelevant.

Most of the reports and match previews are based on personal opinions only.

For example, there might be a newspaper article announcing that a particular striker has extended his contract with one of the prominent teams and this, the newspaper argues, should act to motivate his team knowing that their most potent weapon is staying with the club.

Then there are a lot of various tables and performance statistics, the connections and inter-relationships of which, nobody really understands, together with eternally long lists of previous match results.

In turn, the match reports themselves are written by a plethora of different people seeing things through their own eyes and giving slightly different views as to how each match was played and how each player performed (as if their eyes were glued on each of the 22 players at the same time for the entire match!).

Which shareholder would base his/her decision to invest in Nokia shares purely on a detailed outline that their new flagship mobile ‘phone costs 69 €, weighs approximately 200g, with a standby time of 390 hours, Bluetooth, and comes in a multitude of different designs?

But unfortunately, this decision making process is exactly what is observed in football betting!

People are mainly focused on all kinds of ‘specification’ details.

In other words, form, players, injuries, suspensions, etc., news of which, is often mixed with mere speculation.

Many football betting decisions are then made based on this realm of confusing information and a degree of ‘gut feeling’.

If clever business people called ‘bookmakers’ then exploit this situation in order to make a profit then it should come as no surprise to their victims, the layman punters…