Efficiency of online football betting markets

This paper evaluates the efficiency of online betting markets for European (association) football leagues. The existing literature shows mixed empirical evidence regarding the degree to which betting markets are efficient. We propose a forecast-based approach for formally testing the efficiency of online betting markets. By considering the odds proposed by 41 bookmakers on 11 European major leagues over the last 11 years, we find evidence of differing degrees of efficiency among markets. We show that, if the best odds are selected across bookmakers, eight markets are efficient while three show inefficiencies that imply profit opportunities for bettors. In particular, our approach allows the estimation of the odds thresholds that could be used to set profitable betting strategies both ex post and ex ante.     

Additional evidence of heuristic-based inefficiency in season wins total betting markets: Major League Baseball

The large majority of sports betting papers have addressed questions of market efficiency based on the outcome of single game, such as spread (sides) or point totals wagers. This research examines the Major League Baseball (MLB) season wins total over/under betting market with respect to questions of market efficiency and profitability. Woodland and Woodland (2013, 2015) investigated the season wins total markets for the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) and found significant inefficiencies. Betting rules tested in this paper parallel those proposed by Woodland and Woodland for the NFL and NBA. They aim to take advantage of the implications of the representativeness heuristic, that is, individuals expect results from a small number of games to generalize to the entire population. The MLB market is found to be inefficient, and provides opportunities for profitable wagering. We establish a tendency for bettors to overreact to a team’s performance in the previous season, particularly for teams with winning records. Results are consistent with the findings for the NFL and NBA season wins totals betting markets. This may be the consequence of monetary betting limits and a structure requiring the completion of a sport’s season before the bet outcome is determined, both of which could discourage some bettors from participating.     

Implications of the Bosman ruling for football transfer markets

This paper seeks to assess the implications of the 1995 Judgement of the European Court of Justice on the case of Jean-Marc Bosman for the operation of football transfer markets. Although it is inevitable that many more out-of-contract footballers will be able to move between dubs without payment of transfer fees to the selling club, it is argued that there remains a role for transfer markets in professional football, with compensation to selling clubs for training, development and replacement of players.     

Market efficiency in Scandinavian racetrack betting

This study analyzes Scandinavian racetrack betting markets. We discuss market efficiency and investor behavior in light of the fact that investors earn negative returns on average. Show bets on favorites in Norway yield a small positive return, while all the other betting markets are weak form efficient. We establish the favorite-longshot bias for quinella and exactor bettors, but not for win bettors. Our results can be explained by small pools and high track takes. Investors wagering at the racetrack have a different risk attitude than investors wagering off the track. We explain how our results should influence the design of betting products, especially with respect to the fraction of the pool returned to winners.     

Regional information and market efficiency: the case of spread betting in United States college football

Using game results over a seven year span (1999–2006), we find that United States college football teams in arid regions “win” against the spread in 56.64% of games in which they host a team from a humid region. This result provides statistically significant evidence for both weak and strong form inefficiency in the spread betting markets of such games. By examining other cases of intraregional and interregional competition within the sport, we conclude that this inefficiency does not arise from the effects of travel or home field advantage. Rather, the result indicates that climate aridity is an observed characteristic for which college football betting markets do not accurately control. It is quite rare to find strong form market inefficiency arise from a single variable rather than from an elaborate, multivariable betting strategy. Therefore, the effect of climate aridity upon college football spread betting market efficiency can be characterized as dramatic. It is conjectured that remote market participants may need to “experience” certain types of relevant regional information, such as climate, to act in a market efficient manner.     

The demand for game day attendance in college football: an analysis of the 1997 Division 1‐A season

This paper develops a predictive model which includes game, team and university specific factors that are likely to influence game day demand for Division 1‐A college football. Attendance during the 1997 regular season is used as the dependent variable. Tobit estimates of two separate equations reveal that the quality of both teams, traditional rivalry and membership of specific conferences have a significant influence on demand. In addition, colleges with lower enrollments and a higher percentage of off‐campus students attract smaller crowds. The presence of a nearby professional football team also detracts from a college team's drawing power. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

公共足球课程教学困境及改革方向探析

足球项目一直以来受到欢迎和认可,但是高等院校公共足球课程却存在着课程设计、课程实施、教学环境的困境,改革公共足球课程的教学也应当着力突破这三方面的困境提升整个高校的公共足球课程的教学能力。     

海南省高校足球运动发展现状及对策研究

本文通过对海南省17所高校部分在校大学生进行问卷调查以及对海南省各高校体育部领导及足球专家进行访谈,结合现代足球运动项目的特点,对目前海南省高校足球发展现状进行研究分析,找出影响海南省高校足球运动发展的因素,积极探索海南省高校足球运动今后发展的新思路,为海南省高校足球运动的良性发展提供参考依据。     

我国职业足球管理体制初探

文章分析了我国职业足球管理体制的现状,并找出其不足及问题。从我国的国情出发,提出了进一步完善我国职业足球管理体制的方法和途径:加强法制建设、转变政府职能、明晰中超职业足球联赛的产权、建立与市场经济体制相适应的职业足球联盟,综合开发我国职业足球市场。     

Fair bets and profitability in college football gambling

Efficient markets in college football are tested over a 25-year period, 1976–2000. the market in general is found to be efficient, but betting on underdogs of more than 28 points violates a fair bet. The strategy of betting home underdogs reveals stronger results. Home underdogs of more than seven points are found to reject the null hypotheses of a fair bet over the last 10 years of the sample, 1991–2000. Home underdogs of more than 28 points are found to reject the null of no profitability during the same time frame.     

Incentives and revenue sharing in college football: Spreading the wealth or giving away the game?

The incentive mechanism literature is mostly theoretical since data limitations typically prohibit the testing of predictions. This paper offers an empirical study of the relationship between incentives and economic performance as applied to conference revenue sharing in college football. Revenue sharing acts as a disincentive to build a stronger team since the pecuniary rewards of team success are diminished if a team must share these rewards with conference opponents. This proposition is tested using data on team performance and revenue sharing rules in Division I-A college football. The results confirm the main theoretical proposition – conferences which share more, tend to be weaker.     

Betting on a buzz: Mispricing and inefficiency in online sportsbooks

Bookmakers sell claims to bettors that depend on the outcomes of professional sports events. Like other financial assets, the wisdom of crowds could help sellers to price these claims more efficiently. We use the Wikipedia profile page views of professional tennis players involved in over 10,000 singles matches to construct a buzz factor. This measures the difference between players in their pre-match page views relative to the usual number of views they received over the previous year. The buzz factor significantly predicts mispricing by bookmakers. Using this fact to forecast match outcomes, we demonstrate that a strategy of betting on players who received more pre-match buzz than their opponents can generate substantial profits. These results imply that sportsbooks could price outcomes more efficiently by listening to the buzz.     

Sportsbook pricing and the behavioral biases of bettors in the NHL

The betting market for the NHL is investigated using actual betting percentages on favorites and underdogs from real sportsbooks. Sportsbooks do not appear to attempt to price to balance the book as betting percentages are not proportional to set odds. As in the NFL and NBA, bettors are shown to have a strong preference for favorites and road favorites in particular. Simple strategies of betting against significant imbalances toward the favorite are shown to generate positive returns. Although not pricing to balance the book, sportsbooks do not appear to price to exploit known bettor biases in all cases. Clear bettor behavioral biases for road favorites are not priced into the odds as the prices set in these cases appear to be a forecast of game outcomes. Pricing as a forecast may ensure long-run viability for the sportsbook as it discourages entry into this market by informed traders and still allows the sportsbook to capture its commission on losing bets over time.     

Empirical evidence of error in pricing of favorites and longshots in greyhound racing

Sports bettors' success depends on the ability to accurately assess the true probability of outcomes. Successful racetrack bettors can realize returns better than the track take out. Historical empirical evidence shows the presence of favorite-longshot bias (FLB) in horse racing where bettors underbet favorites. Conversely, bettors overbet longshots. We tested for FLB bias in racing data from three greyhound racetracks. Our results show opposite behavior. We show bettors apparently underestimated for longshots, and overestimated for favorites, the true probability of winning. In 10 out of 14 grades bettors significantly overbet favorites, and underbet longshots in 8 out of 14.     

Forecasting football results and exploiting betting markets: The case of “both teams to score”

The continuous growth of available football data presents unprecedented research opportunities for a better understanding of football dynamics. While many research works focus on predicting which team will win a match, other interesting questions, such as whether both teams will score in a game, are still unexplored and have gained momentum with the rise of betting markets. With this in mind, we investigate the following research questions in this paper: “How difficult is the ‘both teams to score’ (BTTS) prediction problem?”, “Are machine learning classifiers capable of predicting BTTS better than bookmakers?”, and “Are machine learning classifiers useful for devising profitable betting strategies in the BTTS market?”. We collected historical football data, extracted groups of features to represent the teams’ strengths, and fed these to state-of-the-art classification models. We performed a comprehensive set of experiments and showed that, although hard to predict, in some scenarios it is possible to outperform bookmakers, which are robust baselines per se. More importantly, in some cases it is possible to beat the market and devise profitable strategies based on machine learning algorithms. The results are encouraging and, besides shedding light on the problem, may provide novel insights for all kinds of football stakeholders.     

Effort reduction of employer‐to‐employer changers: Empirical evidence from football

We investigate changes in effort investment of employees who still fulfill a contract with their current employer but already signed a follow‐up contract with a new employer (employer‐to‐employer change). Because effort and outside contract assignments are hard to measure in firms, we use running data from professional football (n = 26,577) to proxy effort decisions. Fixed effect regressions reveal a statistically significant but weak reduction in a player's effort after signing a follow‐up contract with a new club. Because we find a statistically significant effort reduction in public sports, this effect might be even larger in less transparent labor markets.     

论五人制足球运动在陕西省高校推广的意义

通过对五人制足球运动的介绍和十一人制足球运动特点的比较,以及对影响陕西省高校足球运动开展的影响因素的分析,得出五人制足球运动相对于十一人制足球运动更适合在陕西省高校开展。     

Organizing College Athletes Utilizing the Civil Rights Unionism Model

In January 2014, Northwestern University (NU) football players filed a certification election petition with the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) Chicago regional office. After the NLRB ruled that they were employees having the legal right to unionize, the football players voted at the end of April 2014 with NU immediately appealing the regional director’s ruling after the balloting. In mid-August 2015, the Washington D.C. NLRB declined jurisdiction in this case, ending the football players’ unionization attempt. Because of the NLRB’s appellate ruling, however, unionization of college athletes remains a distinct possibility. Since a majority of U.S. collegiate basketball and football players are black, this paper argues that the model of unionism that should be adopted in any unionization attempt of these college athletes is civil rights unionism which represents a continuation of the historic, collective struggle of Black athletes to obtain their rights on athletic fields and in classrooms.     

Informational efficiency and behaviour within in-play prediction markets

Studies of financial market informational efficiency have proven burdensome in practice, because it is difficult to pinpoint when news breaks and is known by some or all the participants. We overcome this by designing a framework to detect mispricing, test informational efficiency and evaluate the behavioural biases within high-frequency prediction markets. We demonstrate this using betting exchange data for association football, exploiting the moment when the first goal is scored in a match as major news that breaks cleanly. There are pre-match and in-play mispricing and inefficiency in these markets, explained by reverse favourite-longshot bias (favourite bias). The mispricing tends to increase when the major news is a surprise, such as a goal scored by a longshot team late in a match, with the market underestimating their chances of going on to win These results suggest that, even in prediction markets with large crowds of participants trading state-contingent claims, significant informational inefficiency and behavioural biases can be reflected in prices.     

Competitive equilibria in Shapley–Scarf markets with couples

We investigate the existence and properties of competitive equilibrium in Shapley–Scarf markets involving an exogenous partition of individuals into couples. The presence of couples generates preference interdependencies which cause existence problems. For both cases of transferable and non-transferable income among partners, we establish properties for preferences that are sufficient for the existence of an equilibrium. Moreover, we show that these properties define a maximal preference domain.