A lot of successful professional football bettors keep track of their match ratings and it can be very simple for you to replicate a similar system that you can evolve into your own.
Your system can be as simple or as complicated as you’d like to make it, but you could do it as simple as creating an excel spreadsheet and for each match give an estimation out of 10 of the match performance.
Why should I do this?
The objective of this system is to get you immersed in forms for upcoming matches.
Listen, results do not always tell you the full story, Football can be unpredictable with red cards, player switches and honestly the results can not always be a fair reflection of what happened in the game. A result of 3 – 0 might look like the losing team got slaughtered, but it could’ve been closer than you’d think, with multiple missed opportunities that just needed a little luck to score a goal.
You do not need to give every game a mark out of 10 and you don’t need to give every team a mark out of 10 for their match performance, but it’s a good habit to get into instead of score watching and using that to judge your betting decision.
You might be surprised that things are closer than scores tell you and that with the right opportunity a team has a lot of potential to turn those tables.
Do I have to watch every game?
No, you don’t! You can learn a lot about the performance of a team by just watching highlights, match of the day and maybe a couple of live games every week when you want
Then with this information, you can start using this system to predict match results.
If you’ve given a game or team marks out of 10, you could total up those numbers at the end of a season and compare it to every other team. This can be done in seconds with a couple of formulas on Excel or Google spreadsheets.
If you have a leading team, that can be your favourite pick and the runners up can be strong picks for matchups.
How is this different from just watching a game and knowing what teams perform well?
Well, there isn’t much difference as it is still based on your judgement, the only difference is that it is stored in an excel spreadsheet so it’s factual judgement and not reliant on your memory. You’re not always going to win using this system but getting into a habit of using a system instead of your perceived judgement of games that happened weeks ago is much more reliable.
It can also help you avoid backing weak or underpriced favourites that you thought were good, but they’re obviously not when tallying up the ratings.
This depends entirely on your judgement so isn’t statistical proof but sometimes statistics don’t tell the full story as we said.
Results are not always a fair reflection of a teams performance, they might have been performing well but didn’t have the right opportunity to score a goal. You don’t want to overlook these teams just because they didn’t score this time around.
The more games you watch, the better your judgement and the more you’ll be able to paint a picture. Bookies tend to overreact to results and that comes through in their odds, so this is a great way of finding value in plenty of different sport categories.
This is just an idea for beginners, you might already have your own systems in place, feel free to share those systems with the community if they’ve been working for you!