If you want to place winning bets, you need a good grasp of football betting stats. The more time you spend analyzing each team’s strengths and weaknesses, the better your chances of placing winning bets. 

Thirty years ago, punters made do with a lot less information. Most people just played hunches or bet loyally in favor of the local squad.

Some people still trust intuition or support their favourite teams despite the odds, but serious bettors know better. 

The internet is more than a conduit for cat videos and birthday greetings from people you forgot you knew. It also gives us access to mountains of up-to-date football data. There is no excuse for placing bets without consulting the statistics and taking reliable historical information into account – even if you wind up playing your hunches anyway. 

Blogs, team pages, league websites, news publications, and other online data sources offer us a wealth of current and historical information on teams, players, and matches. Analyzing these statistics is the only realistic way to identify the best teams or predict the winner of the Premier League.

Pros and Cons of Using Football Stats

Although there is no doubt that football stats can help increase your chances of winning a bet, don’t imagine that they can lead you to a sure thing. Upsets of even the most heavily favoured teams happen so often they are practically routine. Even advanced metrics are limited in what they can tell us, and although they can boost our confidence along with our odds of winning, they can be misleading too, especially if we don’t read them carefully.

Here are some of the pros and cons of using stats when wagering on football.

The Most Important Football Stats for Betting

Now that we have highlighted the advantages and dangers of following stats, the next question is clear: Which numbers can help us make sound betting decisions?

It turns out not to be a simple question. If you’re making simple match bets based on who will win a particular game, then you want to look at win-loss records, points scored, and so on. If you’re making a more complicated bet, you’ll need to look at different numbers.

No matter what kinds of bets you prefer, some basic betting stats can help make you a better punter.

Position in the League

Even though you may be completely familiar with a team, you can get a clearer idea of its future performance by looking at its past positions in the league. This shouldn’t be the only thing you look at. But if you want to get a deeper understanding of the team, you need to start with the basics – and nothing is more basic than a team’s position.

Current Form

Football form stats are among the most basic football betting statistics, and every punter should study them. The form delivers valuable insights on how well or how badly each team is playing at a particular moment. Of course you should take this data into account as you prepare your bets.

Any team can suffer a slump at any time; however, the cross-referencing form is a very good way to decide if you like the odds your bookmaker is offering. The league form is a good summary of how the teams are currently playing. But before you lay your money down, it’s worth taking some time to make sure you have all the relevant football data, including matches that aren’t part of league play.

The conclusions you draw from the form are not always strictly numeric. In general, teams that are playing well continue to play well, and teams performing poorly tend to continue losing. But confidence and momentum play large roles in football, and a team making a mid-season bid for the title may perform better than its statistics lead you to expect.

Stats on the form can help you make a better prediction on the outcome of a match. Be sure to consider additional football bet data like the quality of the opponents, current win/lose trends, winning margins, and other factors to get the whole picture.

Opposition Strength

A team can’t really be considered in top form because it has won the past two or three matches. It needs to have defeated direct rivals and other teams that stand between them and a championship. Before anyone gets excited about a five-game winning streak, it’s important to look at who the opponents were. A lopsided schedule could cluster meetings with weaker teams all at once, leading fans and unwary punters to unwarranted predictions about a team’s future. The solution? More football bet data. 

Crunch the numbers. Were the defeated competitors strong teams? Did they appear in the top 10 division? If your team has not tested its mettle against powerful opponents, it is foolish to suggest it will beat them.

There is important data to collect from a month or two of games, but for a clearer picture, it’s best to analyze as many months as you can. Winning consistently over the long haul is what makes football teams worth betting on. A great many wagers are lost by punters who fail to evaluate team performance against relevant rivals.

Winning and Losing Margins

The margins of winning or losing are easy to overlook, but they are important factors to consider when football betting. A team that has won a number of matches by a hair’s breadth may be weaker than a team with a smaller number of decisive wins. In both these cases, the win-loss record alone paints a misleading picture.

It is easy to assume that a team with a string of losses is performing badly, but if they are playing stronger opponents or losing by a single goal, this might not be a fair assessment.

Home vs. Away

It is pretty common knowledge that teams perform better at home than on someone else’s turf. Take a look at these football team stats from the 2016-2017 Premier League season:

• Home goals: 607
• Away goals: 457
• 49.2% of games won by home team
• 28.7% of games won by away team

Similar numbers have been recorded for every year since 1888. 

Bookmakers are aware of this factor, and often include a home advantage index in their odds calculations. Home versus away football form stats can give you a betting advantage over less observant punters.

This isn’t a sure thing. As you can see, 28.7% of Premier League games are won by away teams. But if you know that a team has a poor record at home and better performance on the road, that’s worth taking into account in wagering. It gets complicated if the away team is also a weak player at home. 

Possession Statistics

Possession is one of the key pieces of information you should evaluate before making a football bet. Possession simply indicates the percentage of time each team has possession of the ball. This is one of the most common football stats in match reports and it can reveal a lot about a team’s performance and playing style.

Home teams typically have more possession time than away teams. The same is true of stronger teams against weaker opponents. 

Football statistics like possession can help you detect fluctuations during the game that suggest a team may be struggling.

Shots vs. Goals

Shots metrics are often used alongside possession statistics. Knowing that a team has made twice as many shots at the goal as its opponents can help you make a more informed bet.

These bet statistics can be misleading. For example, when a team is behind and time is running out, it may become desperate and make a lot more shots. The numbers look impressive, but in context, they do not reflect good performance. It is generally more informative and helpful to compare the number of shots taken to the number of goals scored.

Average Goals Scored

Average goals scored is an important statistic, especially when your bet is essentially a prediction of how many goals will be scored in an upcoming match. So you’ve got to look at both teams and determine the average goals per game.

It’s not that easy, of course. Nothing is. A successful team may lose 0-1 once in a while, and even the weakest team has the occasional 4-0 victory. But in the long run, teams that score more goals win more games.

Consider a team that averages 2.7 goals per game over the season. It might be reasonable to bet that it will score over 2.5 in the next match – depending on how generous the odds are, of course.

Head-to-Head Football Stats

Professional football bettors are divided on whether head-to-head stats are important. Our advice is to take them into account, especially if two teams have a long history with one consistently dominating the other. Head-to-head statistics can also be revealing when you’re betting on total goals or another aspect of the game.

The problem with head-to-head bet stats is that they aren’t always relevant. There are always multiple reasons behind wins and losses. Signing a new coach, the injury of a key player, inclement weather – if you’re not aware of these factors, it is easy to read too much into head-to-head stats. Don’t get hooked in by a statistical anomaly. 

The Final Score

When it comes to stats, more is better. The better informed you are, the more analysis you do, the better prepared you will be to make winning bets. That’s the beauty of football statistics and predictions. 

That doesn’t mean you’ll always win, of course. You will probably bet more confidently and win more often, but even that isn’t a sure thing. On any given day, anything can happen on the playing field. But it is undeniable that some outcomes are more likely than others, and you can identify them by tracking and analyzing key statistics. This approach will put you on the road toward more profitable football betting.