Data-Driven Guide to Beating the Betting Markets with Ratings Models

by Martin Chamberlain

In collective sports it is often said that teams are more than the mere sum of the individual players’ capabilities. In the betting industry, however, the absence of a team’s leading player usually leads to movements in the pre-game odds. Indeed, a Barcelona side without Lionel Messi or a Liverpool side without Virgil van Dijk will still be considered favourites against any opposition in their respective leagues, though the absence of those key players will make the markets a lot less certain. As a star player’s abilities are widely known to the general public, his potential impact on the game is relatively easy to assess even by non-expert gamblers. And while the exercise of quantifying the value of a team’s best player is fairly simple, it is significantly more difficult to assess the importance of players of a lesser calibre.

In this book, Martin Chamberlain presents a powerful modelling technique based on the players’ perceived football capabilities that will help gamblers raise their game by quantifying a team’s strength on any given match day. Inspired by the severe lack of reliable resources targeted at amateur football gamblers willing to leverage the power of data but lacking the technical skills to do so, this guide will present a ratings-based Modelling Tool in Excel that is statistically sound and extremely intuitive to use.This book is a prelude to the online Data-Driven Football Betting Masterclass for From Zero to Hero with Ratings Models in Excel covering the English Premier League, the English Championship, the Italian Serie A, the Portuguese Primeira Liga, the Russian Premier League and the US Major League Soccer, in which Martin Chamberlain presents how to build profitable data-driven models in Excel from scratch with the help of Football Data Labs’ exclusive player ratings and extensive historical database.

186 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 12, 2020