Scottish Football Bets End of Season 2007-2008 Review

With the dust now settled in Vienna, and just four weeks until the new season begins in earnest I thought it would be a good time for a seasonal recap. As you’ll see below we’ve had our thrills and spills this year but we’ve come out the other side very much in profit and stronger and wiser ahead of the new campaign. One thing is for sure, it certainly has never been dull.

Rather than tackle, the year as a whole, I’ve split the service into its various components as detailed in the table above.

As it is probably still fresh in your mind the best place to start is probably Euro 2008…. 

Euro 2008

Click here for spreadsheet

Inevitably a major tournament, such as The Euros or The World Cup, carries both punters’ expectations and no little hype but any retrospective analysis should include a healthy dose of perspective.

Not only is the Euros desperately difficult to win for the competing nations, it is also a potential minefield for punters - as those now picking through the carnage accumulated within the pages of The Racing Post’s Euro 2008 supplement can attest to.

In their sober coverage of the tournament, the excellent Sports-Investor service made the wise observation that with just 31 matches played, Euro 2008 is probably best compared to punters’ or services’ betting performance on an average English Saturday league card (or if you prefer, the full Scottish card with the addition of the English Premiership thrown in).

On the face of it, a level stakes profit of just over five points doesn’t look like much to crow about but given our conservative staking strategy, it stands up quite well to a reasonably successful Saturday haul. The key figure to look at is a 22.81% return on investment from what is a relatively small sample of 25 tipped selections, staked at an average of just 0.81pts per tip.

With most football services operating to sliding scale of anything between 4-10pts advised per tip, the direct comparison stats that matter are both the ROI percentages at advised and level stakes.

Put simply, any member staking £100 per point during Euro 2008 with us will have covered the cost of their annual fees (£350) with a bit of profit to spare to add into their bank for the coming season. I have to be happy with that.

I pride myself on positioning the service at the sensible rather than superficially spectacular end of the tipping spectrum and the tournament returns reflect what I hope can be steady, incremental and sustainable growth year on year for Scottish Football Bets. The aim is to allow clients to bet within their comfort zone and gradually increase their stakes as their bank grows.

As a free offer to anyone that wanted to sample the service – and as a thankyou to existing members – I’m happy that the Euro 2008 campaign was a success. It could have been significantly better too had controversial (and wrong) decisions not gone against us in Italy v Holland, Italy v Romania, Portugal v Switzerland and Austria v Poland.

If nothing else these cruel results demonstrated the narrow margin between success and failure at the apex of the football pyramid where a disallowed goal or a wrongly called penalty shout or offside really can mean the difference between ignominious defeat or ultimate glory. This was none more so the case than in the final itself where, despite wholly dominating the last 80 minutes of the game, Spain were always vulnerable while they held the slenderest 1-0 lead. Unlike at club level, even the weakest sides in major international tournaments can all follow a gameplan, all boast at least one potential matchwinner and can all have their day if luck runs their way.

As such, I thought our negative-slanted approach to each team’s chances in our pre-tournament preview was the basis for our decent showing in a tournament. I think we avoided being suckered by a few of the talking teams such as Portugal, Romania and France and got a good line on the likes of Turkey and Holland against the prevailing hype that followed their contrasting opening games.

The tournament was also another opportunity to refine our use of the excellent ELO ratings that we began experimenting with in 2006. I think they offered us a genuinely objective gauge of competitors’ merits at key points in the tournament and they will continue to be a key component of our arsenal during next season’s World Cup Qualifiers which will again be supplementing our bread and butter Scottish betting.  

Int Football (Qual)

The plan was always to build our database and refine our use of the excellent ELO stats to peak just in time for Euro 2008 and looking back, I think we did that very well.

Our 29 tips during the qualification campaign garnered 11.25pts profit at an ROI of just under 49%. The stats proved their worth time and time again by throwing up angles on games we would never otherwise have formed a view on. The successful draw pick in the game between Slovenia and Albania is a case in point. The stats also picked out Croatia to beat England, available at 8/1 and above on Betfair. Nice for the service, but not something probably, that many of you will want or need reminding of.

As time goes by and our instincts for these ELO numbers (ratings originally created to rank chess grandmasters in competition) grows then I think we’ll learn to use them even more efficiently and profitably. However, what we do now know is that they are not so reliable when we head off the well beaten track of teams and players we know well.

African Nat Cup

The African Nations Cup experiment was conceived as a pure testing ground for the ELO ratings in a context where, by definition, our working knowledge of players and teams competing was far less comprehensive than a World Cup or Euros finals. We started well enough but what quickly became apparent is that the stats are only useful when applied to fairly consistent teams and players.

In African football however, it seems that even they players themselves don’t know what they are capable of and after falling six points down as the tournament neared its climax we decided to pull the plug (after a previously imperious Ivory Coast were swamped by Egypt). It was a sore lesson – as it accrued losses for ourselves and you – but at least we can happily conclude that African Football, at least until it embraces western consistency and professionalism, is not a fertile betting medium. We also now know where the ELO numbers’ strengths lie too and that can only stand us in good stead for the international fixtures that lie ahead next season.

Scottish Football

It has definitely been a year of two halves. A very good period up until December 2007 and then a pretty poor spell since then when we have pretty much just scrubbed along without making any headway after a very poor January and February.

Over all I am not sure where I stand on the season just past in Scotland.

Having set myself a seasonal target off 40pts profit all in, I can’t be too unhappy with a seasonal total just two and a bit points short. That’s a decent seasonal return and an annual profit of almost £3,500 to £100 per pt level stakes after fees.

However, having started so well I am disappointed not to have pushed on since Christmas.

At the start of the year, the Scottish bets hit a high point of 43.5pts profit and with the Euro 2008 qualifiers bets flying too we were looking at a bumper season.

If only debt, death, deluge and disasters hadn’t been waiting just around the corner – to throw everything into chaos and with a mind to hang around.

As I’ve said before, the second half of the season will be more memorable for events off the field than on and as a result I think we’ve saw a series of increasingly unfathomable results and unfocussed and inconsistent performances from players and teams swept up in the ensuing freak conditions.

From January onwards games turned into lotteries by endless gales, storms and waterlogged pitches. Add in key player and manager movements (Barry Robson took an age to move to Celtic while Mark McGhee’s Motherwell were sent off course as the manager was linked to the vacant Scotland job for weeks).

The chaos was kick-started by the tragic on-field death of Motherwell skipper Phil O’Donnell and Gretna’s slow, painful and circuitous financial implosion in The SPL. Gretna’s lingering death, achieved as they simultaneously destroyed their landlords’ Fir Park pitch, effectively nullified the SPL relegation battle, creating a backlog of ultimately meaningless games. 

Taken together, there were a lot of time-specific variables that coalesced over the winter – nothing too tough to handle in isolation, but a nightmare when jumbled all together simultaneously.

This was officially the worst football weather in Scotland since 1962 and even in April match reports a number of managers were still complaining about the state of the pitches at a point in the campaign when conditions are generally near perfect (bar seasonal wear and tear).

I reckon we lost between 10-13 strong specific team news-based bets to postponement in four months and that could have made a massive difference to our bottom line. Global warming has a lot to answer for….

Normally we’d expect firm surfaces and a period of prolonged sunny weather to coincide with the season’s end but that just never materialised this year. The season’s slow death, rather than dynamic and distinct phases, effectively ensured that we were always chasing our tails. Rather than the usually fertile eight week betting period straddling February, March and April we had a protracted formless phase shaped by sodden pitches, meaningless games and a fixture backlog. I even had a bet voided for a waterlogged pitch in April at Dumbarton – that is pretty much unheard of.

Elsewhere we didn’t get much rub of the green. In our antepost roster for example Steven Fletcher was out on his own, clear in second place, at 50/1 ew in the SPL top scorer market – only to fail to score away from home in four months. His each way place was pipped finally, in the last month of the season.

The only thing that dried up after Christmas was the steady stream of big priced winners such as Rangers at anything up to 10/1, Motherwell to bt Hearts 10/3, Dundee Utd to bt at Rangers 5/1, East Stirling to bt Arbroath at 9/2 and Stenhousemuir to bt East Fife at 7/2, that had shaped an excellent five months of the campaign. 

But equally there was lots to get excited about not least two Saturday clean sweeps where everything landed at odds of 13/8, 10/3, 11/8 and 17/10 in the first instance and 11/10, 11/4, 7/4 and 9/4 in the second.

At significant points in the season we were ahead of the compilers with our views on East Stirling, Dundee United, Dumbarton, Arbroath and Queen of the South and as a result, we had the inside knowledge to take advantage of some seriously out of line prices. There is no reason why we won't see more of the same next term. Despite the fact that the players have just returned to training after their break, we already have significant lines on a number of teams.

I am certainly hoping that the onfield activity will be more significant than the off the field stuff next season. If that's the case then there will be much to look forward to.

All in all it has been a frustrating few months but over the season we are still well in profit and I think I have to be reassured that despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune rained upon us we have still come out of the campaign fighting and very close to our initial target - the only negative is that we couldn't capitalise on what was a very assured start where hard work, contacts and shoe leather brought its own reward.

We are all in good heart and raring to go for the new season after a successful Euro 2008.

The team is increasingly battle-hardened and another year more experienced after the ups and downs of our first ‘proper’ campaign as a paid service and we’ve been joined by another useful contact whose extra eyes at lower league games will allow us an even bigger spread each Saturday and a notable addition to our notes on teams and players.

I’ve been promising you this for ages, I know, but……As well as a nicer site with improved content, features and results sections one of the key additions next season will be free text message alerts for members. All I have to do is manage the handover to the new site……but I am getting there slowly but surely.

Before our season begins in earnest with a raft of cup games on July 26th there may be a few antepost bets to add into our roster for next season. A few firms have priced up the top three leagues and already I have spotted something I want to take advantage of. It is just a question of waiting for a few more firms to price up. So stand by for imminent notification on that soon.

Before I sign off however, I would just like to take the opportunity to thank you all for your support during the season just past. I hope you have enjoyed the campaign just gone and that you will be with us again next season as we strive for bigger and better things.