The other day a mate was over at my place and he showed me something on Facebook that piqued my interest. I can't remember the name exactly (something along the line of 'Daily Odds Picks') but it was boasting some pretty impressive numbers. Accumulators were rolling in at 32/1, 50/1, 80/1 etc and so on, you get the picture. My immediate reaction was that this was utter bollocks. If you were pulling down odds like that on a regular basis then why would you bother setting up a subscription service and selling them? Surely you would be too busy sitting on your yacht, drinking fancy cocktails while surrounded by women that look like they should be in a hip-hop video?
Anyhoo, the basic premise is to back a whole bunch of short-priced favourites to win football matches around Europe and the World at large. I had a quick look at some of the winning accas on this site and suddenly the whole idea didn't look quite so outlandish. Football is, after all, a simple game when compared to other areas of gambling. In horse racing, an odds on favourite can fall over, be brought down by another falling horse, get stuck in the stalls or boxed in down the home straight. In golf, a player can lead the Masters for two days, look certain to win and then stick a couple of shots in the drink and boom, he's fucked it up and some young rookie can sneak up and take the prize. In short, there are variables in all sport that can affect the outcome of the contest. However, in football, these variables appear to be much less impactful.
If Sergio Aguero is injured for a Manchester City game then Gabriel Jesus, a replacement better than the strikers in most other Premier League teams, will step up and do the job. If a short-priced favourite has a goal wrongly disallowed against lesser opposition then nineteen times out of twenty they will get another one, two, three or four chances to score. Obviously, the favourite doesn't always win, otherwise, why would anybody bother watching, but nowadays, more than ever before, the top teams will dispose of lesser opposition. Want proof? Just look at the points totals of Manchester City last season and Liverpool and City for this season in the Premier League. Look at Juventus in Italy, PSG in France, Barcelona in Spain. In modern football, the good teams have more money than ever and the competition has skewed perhaps irreversibly in their favour.
The upshot of all this is that perhaps there is a future in long-list, short-price, favourite backing in football. Each week from now until I get bored, become a gazillionaire or go completely bankrupt (my odds is on the last one there) I will be putting together a big old coupon and sticking on the princely sum of one English pound. The downside is that only one selection needs to go bad to blow the whole jig. The upside is that with odds of 30/1 minimum I don't need to be right very often to turn a tidy profit. This weeks coupon is below and happily, two of the picks have already come in, so over the coming weekend there are eight more selections across six different leagues in five different countries. Will they all come in? Who will balls it up for me? I'll be back after the weekend for a debrief.