Is Betting Over 2.50 Goals Profitable? A Comprehensive Analysis

With the dust now settled on another Premier League season, it is time to take stock of what has taken place across the course of nine frenetic months and although the main narrative will be Manchester City’s fifth league title in six years, there are plenty of other stories to be told.

Stories that are not only found up and down the table, but the statistics that are connected to them and when it comes to statistics, this is where the worlds of football and betting are so neatly intertwined. 

Especially when it comes to the pursuit of Premier League goals and with the over/under 2.5 markets being one of the most popular on any given weekend, it also gives us scope to carry out another deep dive of analysis.

Analysis that comes in whether betting over 2.5 goals can be a profitable system over the course of any season or even multiple campaigns and to do that, we are going to set up a hypothesis before we proceed further.

One that asks: If you backed every game in a Premier League season to finish with over 2.5 goals, would you be in profit by the end of it?

That is the question that we are going to ask ourselves and with the data that has been made available, we can also answer this over the course of the last six complete Premier League campaigns. 

The Most Recent

First, we will take a look at the most recent Premier League campaign and to make all things equal, we are going to virtually bet on each of the 380 games that took place between August of last year and May of this.

Not only that, but the stake will be equal across the board and with this in mind, we will be laying a £10 wager on every game played. Doing this means there will be an outlay of £3800 across any single campaign.

We will also explain how this project has been constructed with that expenditure.

One way to do this would be to update the dataset after every round of Premier League fixtures and keep an ongoing tally of profit/loss. Thankfully though, there is also archived odds data which allows us to mop up every result in one swoop.

Therefore, with a dataset that logs every Premier League result, whether it was a game that ended over or under 2.5 goals, the stake placed and the winnings from any return, here are the 2022/23 campaign results.

As you can see, the most recent season of the Premier League would not return a profit. If anything, it is quite a distance removed from profit. Betting in the manner stated above would have meant a loss of £234.40 at the end of the campaign.

However, the best way to test whether a concept truly works, is by running the logic over the course of many other seasons and with the same process being carried out as above, we can also look at the data from each of the last seven Premier League seasons.

Going Further Back

In the table above, you can see that each of the last six Premier League seasons would have returned a loss in each and even though there was profit at the end of 2016/17 campaign when combining all of the results together, it eventually created a negative yield of 26.6%.

Which means if you bet on each of the 2,660 matches in our data sample and always backed over 2.5 goals in every game, your bankroll would end up being 26.6% lighter than when it started, and this is not the route to profitability.

However, this is not necessarily the lost cause that you may consider it to be and when we look the 2018/19 campaign, it was very close to running breakeven with just a negative yield of 0.36% and for four of the six seasons, the negative yield was less than 3.5% (including one winning season)

Something that suggests, that with some fine tuning, this could be a concept that actually works for you, not against you and if there is one thing we have learned, it is that blanket betting concepts will always catch you out.

While although a 26% negative yield sounds like it is approaching unmitigated disaster, there is one caveat we can look to use and that is the Covid-19 effected seasons of 2019/20 and 2020/21, as the results for this campaign are very much the outlier in all of this.

Especially as the 2019/20 and 2020/21 campaigns saw a negative yield of 10.01% and 8.65% respectively – something that suggests the outside forces we all witnessed, also created a downfall when it comes to betting behaviour.

Over or Under

Of course, another way to look at this, is the quantity of either over or under 2.5 goals in each Premier League game per season and when we look at these results, it does shine our concept in a somewhat better light.

When looking at the over 2.5 and under 2.5 totals per season, 190 is the magic number and if the over column has more than this, it means that more than 50% of the Premier League games per season ended with three or more goals.

Something that happened in in six of the last seven seasons and was an exact 50/50 split in the other (2020/21). This means that the concept is not getting let down by not enough matches ending in over 2.5 goals, it is just that not enough are getting over the line.

Not only that, but also odds will play a huge part in any yield and if the over 2.5 goals returns are always paltry, it suggest that quantity is not necessarily enough to return a profit to any system of this kind.

Tweaks to be Made

When looking at the data tables above, we can see that there is potential for this to work – it is just that the system needs finetuning and one way to look at evolving this, is by not necessarily backing every game.

Logically you need to be looking at the teams that score and concede the most and with this idea in mind, the system can be tweaked by cutting out those teams that usually flounce around in mid-table each year.

For example, if we were to look at this concept across 2023/24, we could take the top five scoring teams from the previous season and the five teams that conceded the most (excluding relegated teams) and only back over 2.5 goals when the relevant teams meet next season.

This would mean, that the 9 teams to keep a stronger focus on would be: 

• Manchester City
• Arsenal
• Liverpool
• Brighton
• Tottenham
• Bournemouth
• Nottingham Forest
• Tottenham
• Wolves
• Everton

But what if we applied the same process to last season? 

This would mean, that the nine teams to keep a stronger focus on would be: 

•     Manchester City
•     Liverpool
•     Chelsea
•     Tottenham
•     Leicester
•     Leeds
•     Southampton
•     Everton
•     Newcastle

(The reason that it is nine instead of 10, is because Leicester were in both the top five scored for this season and top five conceded)

These nine teams would end up playing a total of 72 head-to-head matches and with the same £10 per game stakes applied, the overall outlay would be £720. However, the winning plus stakes would only be £704.5 – a loss of £15.5.

But this only a negative yield of 2.15% and perhaps just enough to follow the same principle for next season. Can this filtered approach come good in 2023/24? 

CONCLUSION

To answer our hypothesis, if you were to bet on over 2.5 goals per Premier League game, by the end of the season you would lose money. However, there is certainly scope to finetune this concept and make the pursuit of goals work for you, rather than against you.

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Methodology

All data was collected from the superb post event information available at https://www.football-data.co.uk/

Correct as of 29th June 2023