Seemingly one of the most recent markers in Football that has seen a massive rise in betting and in bookie coverage accordingly is Player Stats or even Team Stats.
Now this wont be new to Basketball or American Football bettors as stat lines or “props” as they are known in America have been around for ages and are widely covered, however it once was a uncovered market in Football over here.
Player stats is effectively betting on an individual player to do certain things in a match, for example hit X amount of shots or make Y amount of tackles. There is an absolute abundance of lines becoming available on the market now. Including but not limited to; Shots, Shots on Target, Assists, Passes, Tackles etc.
I was fortunate to get on the boat quite early with Player Stats and even started building my own database and collaborated with others in doing so but it unfortunately just proved too time consuming to maintain and build, which is a real shame as given the time I felt it could of been a real profitable venture.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t stats out there you can already research yourself, I just felt there was a gap in the market for the kind of thing I wanted built. A great starting point is the website https://www.whoscored.com/Statistics which is free. Its a fantastic tool for getting a basic and quick over view of the stats behind a line you might be looking to play. An app I also swear by is http://statszone.tiki-taka.co/ that covers all the major leagues including the Champions League and Europa League and goes back as far as data from the 10/11 Premier League and Champs League. It also presents the data in a very easy to read way, for a statistician like me it is incredibly useful and enjoyable. It does however come at a minimum yearly subscription cost £9.99 for full access but there are cheaper access packages available.
I like to look for what lines are currently available and check them against the stats to see if I feel its priced up correctly. I assess all kinds of factors such as how the player in question has performed against this level of opposition previously that season, how that player has performed in home games or away games, has their been a managerial change that could affect his output as he may have been asked to perform a different tactical role. Take into account averages over last 5,10,15 & 20 games as well as seasonal averages. As this is a fairy new market to a lot of bookies operating over here, there has been some terrific value found in the lines I have seen utilised. @JJValueHunter and @TomLove_18 are great examples of accounts that constantly find great angles and value prices. But as I previously mentioned all the research in the world cant help you sometimes as football doesnt always go by the script. Try to think outside the box and for reasons why that player may perform in a certain way that game. Perhaps he’s had a slagging in the press and wants to respond, perhaps he’s up against a former team mate or manager and is eager to prove himself. Things like that, that a bookie might not take into account in their pricing.
Team stats are very much the same but focuses on the team as a collective so total team passes/shots/tackles things like that. I haven’t really dabbled on these myself much but in similar vein you can find fantastic value if you do a bit of homework and think rationally. But like all sports bets its ultimately a gamble, no matter how well researched a gamble it is.
Bookmakers I like to use for Player Stats are mostly; Sky Bet for their depth of lines available, Bet365 is limited but does sometimes offer a juicy over/under line not to be ignored and Betfair Sports book have started pricing a-lot of these up.
This leads me to talk about the growth of trading platforms in which you trade footballers based on their performances, such as Football Index and Sport Stack but i’m going to cover them in a separate blog. Hope this article gives you a brief explanation of the markets available and how I look to play them.
The Percentage Game 