Soccer Betting - The Superiority Method

Soccer Betting is a series of articles that describe some well known and well used statistical techniques that will help the soccer punter make more informed bets. Each of the techniques has its own advantages and disadvantages and using them in isolation will improve your chances of winning. However, together they will prove invaluable in your battle with the bookies. In each article we will describe in detail how a particular method works giving you enough information for you to go ahead and create your own forecasts. We will also give you information as to where you can already find websites that use this technique in comprising their weekly soccer betting forecasts.

The statistical methods described in this set of articles will help you to arrive at a better decision about the match, or matches, that you are betting on.

In this article we will be describing the well known Superiority method. The Superiority method is based on goal difference (superiority) for both teams in a fixture over the past set number of games.

Here are the basic rules…

Get goal difference for each team. This could be either;

a) All home games only for the home team and all away games only for the away team over the last N games.

Or

b) All games for each team over the last N games.

Next we need to count each occurrence of a particular goal difference. We need to do this for both the home side and the away side. We create a table which holds the counts and in our case we have chosen to have thirteen rows in our table that represent the following goal differences:

INDEX GOAL DIFF
1..........>-5
2..........-5
3..........-4
4..........-3
5..........-2
6..........-1
7..........0
8..........1
9..........2
10........3
11........4
12........5
13........>5

So for our N matches we will add one to the content of each index whenever that goal difference is encountered. This may be a little confusing so let’s look at an example.

Arsenal v West Ham

ARSENAL 2 -1 0 0 3 -2 1 1 1 5 1 0 0 -2
WEST HAM 0 0 -2 -3 -1 3 1 -1 -1 2 1 3 0 1

The above shows the goal differences for the last fourteen matches for Arsenal and West Ham, now let’s add these to our goal difference table:

INDEX GOAL DIFF ARSENAL WEST HAM
1..........>-5.......0..........0
2..........-5.........0..........0
3..........-4.........0..........0
4..........-3.........0..........1
5..........-2.........2..........1
6..........-1.........1..........3
7..........0..........4..........3
8..........1..........4..........3
9..........2..........1..........1
10........3..........1..........2
11........4..........0..........0
12........5..........1..........0
13........>5........0..........0

Now each home team array count is added to the opposite array count for the away side. So, the home teams’ array index 13 is added to the away teams’ array index 1, the home teams array index 12 is added to the away teams array index 2, etc. In our example this gives us;

INDEX GOAL DIFF COMBINED
1..........>-5.........0
2..........-5...........0
3..........-4...........0
4..........-3...........2
5..........-2...........3
6..........-1...........4
7..........0............7
8..........1............7
9..........2............2
10........3............2
11........4............0
12........5............1
13........>5..........0

The forecast can now be determined. If we assume that a draw is represented by array index 7 then array indexes 1 to 6 represent an away win, and array indexes 8 to 13 represent a home win. So, the home win counts are totalled and so are the away win counts. In our example this gives us;

AWAY WIN9
DRAW7
HOME WIN12

The total number of counts = 28
Therefore,
Away win possibility = 32%
Draw possibility = 25%
Home win possibility = 43%.

Now it’s your turn…

Of course you may choose to use different values to those shown above and by experimenting you may come up with better values to use. If you have the necessary skills you could go away and build your own spreadsheet of data or even write a piece of software to take in results and fixtures and apply the Superiority method to your data. Or, if you’re lazy like me, you could grab some free software that already does this for you. 1X2Monster and Footyforecast have been providing this kind of facility since 1999.

Here is a list of all the articles in this series…

Soccer Betting - How To Make A Profit
Soccer Betting - The Rateform Method
Soccer Betting - The Footyforecast Method
Soccer Betting - The Win Draw Loss Method
Soccer Betting - The Simple Sequence Method
Soccer Betting - The Score Prediction Method
Soccer Betting - The Superiority Method