Favourite and Underdog Football Statistics

Footy Statistics

The first blog in this series covered Odds-on favourites. 

In the second, I shall study favourites and underdogs in all settings. 

Many people love the thrill of backing a big priced winner; some will never have that thrill because they do not back anything at long odds. 

As in all walks of life, there will be surprises, and to those who only back very short-priced selections, the occasional nasty shock. 

A study of what happens in the EPL when blindly backing favourites, draws, or underdogs will be covered here. 

Once you have digested all the info in this blog please check out our betting systems and statistics article for further reading. 

Favourite and Underdog Explanation

Every EPL season, particularly at the beginning before form settles down, and at the end when the result is possibly more important to some teams than others, there will be surprise results with some teams winning at long odds. 

We saw in the first blog that backing all favourites showed a slight loss on average over 12 seasons.  

To repeat those figures, there has been an average of 264 home and 116 away favourites per season. However, the number of home favourites continues to fall. 

Home favourites have shown an average loss of 0.21 pts per season (about 0.08%) while away favourites have shown a loss of 1.58 pts (about 1.36%). 

Neither is a large figure, but finding a way to turn a small loss into any sort of profit could only be done by backing odds-on favourites at home.

Away underdogs are where most of the big priced winners can be found, but these do not come close to making the selections profitable overall, with an average loss of 9.74%.

On the other hand, home underdogs have made a reasonable profit (5.26%), and that ties in well with odds-on favourites away from home not faring well.

Fluctuations are so violent as to make a season by season chart meaningless, so only the cumulative figures are displayed below. 

Favourite and Underdog Statistics

Turning my attention to draws didn’t initially appear attractive in view of an average loss of 14.44 pts per season (3.8%), of which draws with a home favourite accounted for 4.35 pts (1.65%) and with an away favourite 10.09 pts (8.70%). 

However, after certain filters were applied, fairly consistent profits could be shown on a much-reduced number of bets, and that will be the subject of my next blog. 

My OLBG.com username is Davidg3907. 

Key Information To Takeaway

• A very bumpy ride but home EPL underdogs show a profitable ROI.

• Occasionally, big priced away underdogs win, but they will not cover overall losses.

• Home underdogs and Odds-on home favourites remain the best options.