Taking the gamble

Football and gambling go hand in hand, you can bet on almost any aspect of a game, corners, fouls, bookings, red cards, goals, score, scorers etc. etc.  Some of these are fairly hard to predict, and this is reflected in the odds, obviously you can make an educated guess based on simplistic variables and previous performance, but is it possible to become successful and make real money from the favourite of every casual gambler...the spreadbet.

The general payback for a spreadbet depends on the amount of results you gamble on, and to many hardcore gamblers they are not worth even thinking about since the odds are so long for a reason or so short that the payback isn't attractive enough.  But is there a way to predict multiple results to win more often than not?  I'm not suggesting that there is a way to predict every result in every game, after all that's what we love about football, the unpredictability, every team has an off day, every now and then the form book goes out the window, but are there key factors which could help swing the odds slightly back in your favour?

Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski broach the subject in their book "Why England Lose", they come to the conclusion that one of the key factors to a teams success is their wage bill.  This makes sense, the more a team can afford to pay their players the better players they will inevitable attract (as shown by Wesley Sneijder humongous wage packet).  Take the Premier League last season as an example, the top 4 in order were Man. United, Chelsea, Man. City and Arsenal, no prizes if you can guess which 4 teams had the top wage bill in the league...the trend down the league follows a similar pattern, however outside of the top 4 and Liverpool most teams are in a couple of wage bands making the waters slightly muddier the further down you go.

So what else can we use?  Obviously the quality of the players in the squad in important, so a team with more international players should do better, but what about the quality of the international team?  No disrespect to San Marino, but I wouldn't fancy watching 11 of them turning out for Carlisle every week (we've been to non-league once in my lifetime, I don't want to go back there).  How much does form come into it?  Study upon study has been carried out with regard to sports psychology and how to get the best out of your players, but at the end of the day if a team are in a winning habit they will inevitable feel invincible...should we take this a step further and consider recent performance against top half/bottom half teams, some teams tend to perform better against better opposition. 

I think I've proved my point, spreadbets are a fools errand, however, I intend to find the winning formula, it may not be this season, but this time next year Rodders...

...I'll keep you posted