This is an article I originally wrote for the Betting School in April 2011. Some of the content should be worthwhile despite some of the data being slightly old.

When both teams score …

In the last few months I have often come across people talking about the Goals Galore coupon with Betfred and the equivalents that other bookmakers offer. For those who are unfamiliar with it the aim is to find matches where both teams score and Betfred pay 9/4 on 2 correct, 9/2 on 3 correct all the way up to 1150/1 for 12 correct for those keen to lose money.

Working with Betting School we have come up with a console that will hopefully help to pinpoint games that are more likely to have both teams score and that is already available to members.

The idea with this article is to search round the both teams to score angle to see what can be found and how the console can be used with these ides. In this article the abbreviation BTS will be used for both teams score/scored/scoring. The data used is from the English Premiership, Championship, Leagues 1 and 2, the Conference and the top league in Scotland, France, Italy and Spain. I have included the results for Germany in a table below and we see why Betfred don’t include it on their coupon.

Some readers may think this is a bit late in the season to be looking at this type of bet but as I showed in the January article as we get to the end of the season the number of goals increases and therefore so does the number of games where BTS. The table below shows the percentage of games where BTS by month.

You can see that the start and end of the seasons look the best times for attacking this angle and overall in 50.7% of matches BTS. Therefore the chance of getting a double with two random games is 1 in 4 which equates to 3/1 and so Betfred only offering 9/4 mean we need to find more angles. To get to a break even situation we need to find games where the chance of BTS is between 55-56%. If we find games where the chance is 56% the decimal odds should be 3.19 on the double but Betfred are offering 3.25 (9/4) so we get value.

If we break the statistics down by the individual leagues we can see if some are better for concentrating on than others.

The German league comes out on top and it’s no surprise that this does not feature on the Betfred coupon. The French league is considerably lower than the others and it’s a bit of a surprise to see the Italian league so high up. The 4 English lower leagues also fair well but in any analysis like this I like to look at results with and without the big teams to see if this makes a difference to the results.

The leagues I am using and the clubs I am classifying as big are as follows:

England – Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Man United

France – Bordeaux, Lyon and Marseille

Italy – Fiorentina. Inter, Juventus, Milan and Roma

Scotland – Rangers and Celtic

Spain – Atletico Madrid, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Sevilla and Villarreal

If we look at matches involving big teams only we some interesting results.

The two British leagues are the odd ones out in this as all the other leagues have a considerably higher percentage of BTS when it’s just the big teams playing. It is very high in France, and although the sample is very small this would be a pattern I am happy to follow. The same has to be said for Italy where the 63% BTS is well above the 56% threshold we are after.

Normally I would look at games with big teams against non-big teams overall but in this I think it makes sense to break it down depending on who is at home. If we start with games where the big club is at home against a non-big club we get the results below.

France is the only league where these results are above the average for all games. I would expect this figure to be lower as you would think these teams are more likely to keep clean sheets. I expect most people would not use these games anyway in their coupon but they can be useful when you look back over a team’s form as you may see a couple of games where both teams did not score, but if this was against a big side it may be worth ignoring it. For example on the console I looked at a Bolton away match and both teams had scored in a healthy 10/15 matches. However, the games when they didn’t were against Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Sunderland and Stoke. The first 3 teams, along with Arsenal fill the top 4 places in the league and have done most of the season so if we ignore games at the top 4 clubs their record becomes an even healthier 9/11. I would imagine these results also work for lower divisions based on the top sides each season but without testing this cannot say so for sure.

The table below shows when the big team is away.

Aside from France the results go up compared to the table above. The Scottish result is a particularly high one and any games with an old firm team away could warrant a second look.

Finally we look at games where none of the big teams are playing below.

The Premiership is again an exception here but for all the other leagues we can see that the results for this are more or less equal to the average for all games. Essentially in these games there is nothing outside of norm so we would need to look for patterns with particular teams.

With a bet like this you want to look for teams that follow patterns as they are likely to keep them up. I believe Peterborough and Crewe are often taken off the Goals Galore coupon as they were having BTS so much. Whist writing this article I used the console and saw that Southend host Aldershot on 2^nd April and 14/19 Southend home games and 13/19 Aldershot away games had BTS. Both of these teams have a good pattern and would be a decent selection if featured on the coupon.

I looked at individual team patterns a bit more and found some startling results for certain teams over the course of a season. The table below shows 5 teams on either end of the extremes.

Some of these values are outstanding but show how some teams get a pattern and stick with it all season. That’s not to say you don’t need to be aware of a change in pattern but hopefully the console will help with that. An example of a change in pattern would be Rotherham this season. At home 8 of their first 10 games had BTS but since then just 2 of the last 8 games have had BTS and what’s interesting is that they have kept scoring but have started to keep clean sheets and so those 6 games in the last 8 were all where they kept a clean sheet.

I hope this will all help with anyone interested in trying to make money from the Goals Galore coupon or similar using the console. The other two sections the console has show over/under goal statistics and also the average shots and shots on target. The over/under section just helps to give an idea of how many goals are being scored by these teams and it is all relevant to the both teams scoring market. In the nearly 20,000 games I have been through the games with both teams scoring average 1.4 shots more than those without. 0.95 of that difference is down to the visiting teams having more shots so finding teams with a better than average number of shots, particularly when away can be another factor that will swing whether to bet or not.

I can be contacted with ideas for improvements for the console, problems or any questions to do with it or anything in my articles.

Leon Pidgeon