Can Plucky Underdogs Norwich Upset the Odds at Preston?

[westcoastcanary 173]

The consensus on here would suggest that nutty ought definitely to switch to another seat somewhere else in the ground -- I mean somewhere well away from Parma ........... 

[It's Character Forming 1,160]

3 hours ago, westcoastcanary said:

Yes Thirsty, the bookies aren't mugs. How much did they pocket from having lured the punters into piling the money on Norwich before Wednesday?

For football with traditional betting (unlike the betfair model discussed above) I thought bookies shifted the odds in line with punters’ betting so they will always make money eg if most money is going on a home win that will get short odds so it will be covered by what has gone on the draw & away win plus a margin for the bookie & vice versa. So they are essentially aiming for a given margin anyway.

 

Also according to the xG stats Norwich would normally have been expected to outscore Preston on Wednesday I think, so punters who backed city maybe had a good understanding of the percentages?

[westcoastcanary 173]

45 minutes ago, It's Character Forming said:

Also according to the xG stats Norwich would normally have been expected to outscore Preston on Wednesday I think, so punters who backed city maybe had a good understanding of the percentages?

The point can't be stressed too much, that a stat such as xG is retrospectively insightful rather than predictive, however much people in betting try to make out otherwise. For example, at the end of last season Sky (I think it was Sky) published a table showing how the EPL League Table would have looked had places been determined purely on the basis of each club's cumulative xG for the season. That's fine; it invites you to compare the xG table with the table based on actual results, and start thinking about why the two differed. If club X finished 10th in the real table, but 6th in the xG table, what can be learned from the existence of the discrepancy? That ex post facto insight gathering exercise is what analytics is all about; it's not a contribution to the art of predicting the future.

Incidentally, on the question of what to make of our lofty topping of the Championship "Goals over Expected Goals" Table, here is another graphic from Norwich City Stats:

Yes, that's right! The blue line was Ipswich last season! What it shows is that Ipswich began by massively out scoring their xG and then regressed to scoring in line with, and then well below, xG. To complete the picture you of course need to chart their league position game by game; suffice it to say they topped the league early on, but finished twelfth.