The Secrets To Winning Your Football Tipping Competition

Against my better judgment, I entered a football tipping competition this year. I say against my better judgment, because over the years I have come to realise that my performance, for better or worse, will be mainly determined by luck. Luck, you say? Allow me to explain …

First, let’s imagine that you know very little about football. In this case, a simple strategy for choosing winners would be just to pick the favourite with the bookmakers. This strategy is likely to get you a pretty good score, and probably isn’t too far off what a lot of other people will do. Now, if everyone in your competition chooses this strategy you will all end up no better or worse than anyone else. Of course that doesn’t happen, but it gives us a useful benchmark for explaining how and why people get different results.

One reason is that people may be loyal to their team. Doing this is likely to hamper your results, in some cases severely. The worst case scenario is your team is not expected to win any game, and this expectation turns out to be correct. In this case, all other things being equal, in a 22-game season you will end up 22 points behind your rivals. Obviously, the shortfall will lessen the more games your team wins; however, this strategy can really hurt your chances even if you follow a successful team. For example, if your team wins 15 games, you will still be wrong for the other seven – so other tipsters need to also be wrong about your team 7 times for you to remain on par with them. Conversely, having an irrational hatred for a team that ensures you never or rarely pick them will also hurt your chances. Other strategies that are likely to be harmful are picking teams based on colours or names, since you are making no use whatsoever of the information about a team’s actual likelihood of winning. You may indeed get lucky, but the odds are against you.

Let’s put aside for now all the people that pick teams based on loyalty, colours, or anything else that’s not based on a team’s actual likelihood of winning. That just leaves what we will call the informed, rational tipsters. Now, you don’t have to be a football nerd to fall into this category, you just need to have a rough idea of the ability of each team and actually make your tips based on this. Indeed, it is crucial to the argument that it is relatively easy for a person to fall into this category – if they didn’t the ‘nerds’ would be much more likely to win. Many tipsters will have a good idea of who the favourite is; for example, you could just follow the bookmakers’ favourites as suggested above. But the ‘favourite’ need not strictly be the bookmaker’s favourite, even without that information many tipsters would have a good idea which team other tipsters are more likely to pick.

Now obviously, of the informed, rational tipsters, not everyone can outperform the rest of the group. Half of them will be average or above, and half of them will be average or below. What determines whether you outperform the average or not? I believe it’s essentially random chance. What this means is that it is unlikely that you can systematically do better than the average informed, rational tipster. As evidence of this, consider how often people who do really well one year do remarkably average or worse the next. Now this doesn’t preclude people from doing well for three, or five, or even ten years on end. But no matter how much they like to think otherwise, for many of them it will just be because they got really lucky.

Nor does it preclude some people continuously doing well for reasons other than luck. One way to be continuously above average would be to recognise biases in other tipsters’ perceptions. For example, if the informed, rational tipsters tend to overrate a particular team – perhaps because that team is popular – then if you recognise that bias you will improve your chances of being above average. A similar way of outperforming the average would be to devise some sort of system that allows you to rate teams’ chances of winning more accurately than the consensus. This could be through, for example, some statistical model, but I doubt that many people use those. Or you could have better information about teams than the other informed tipsters (but what would that be?), or you could process the available information about teams in a more effective way. While I’m sure that many people would like to think they fall into one of these categories, again I doubt that they do. (I include myself here – maybe, just maybe, I could have a slightly better idea about football than your average informed, rational tipster, but not enough to make a significant difference.)

I’m not saying that everything is down to random chance, for you at least need to know enough about football to make a rough assessment of each team’s actual likelihood of winning. Similarly, I’m not saying that a person who has completely no idea about a team’s chance of winning can not do well, but their odds of doing so are far lower than those who do actually make their tips based on an informed and rational assessment of each team’s actual likelihood of winning. And I’m not saying that people can not do well for years in a row, or that if they do it can not be because they are somehow more skilled at tipping. What I’m saying is that skill is less important than commonly thought, and that luck is the more likely explanation for their success.

So what does mean for football tipping? Well, if you’re just in it for the sake of it, probably not much at all. But if you’re taking your ability to tip correctly as some measure of your intellect, then eventually - maybe not now, maybe not next year, but eventually - you’re probably going to end up somewhat disappointed.