It has a fair bit to do with that, but bookies here aren’t great with the league either. They see Welly get spanked last week and dont bother to notice they were resting players etc. And aren’t a bigger club with focus on them. Also Newcastles home form against Phoenix is great (which honestly doesnt mean shit) Unlike overseas leagues, they genuinely have to make the odds here.
Theyve gotten a lot better mind you unfortunately. Around season 5-6 of the league I genuinely made a living wage off the absurd odds offered weekly before they somewhat invested in football. Teams would lose a game and go straight out to 3.50 the next one. Also when live betting was brought in, favourites flying out to big odds when a goal down early.
Not sure how this is still a surprise after 14 years, when it’s the same story every year. Betting odds are set by algorithms that respond to the actual bets placed to ensure the bookies don’t end up too far out of pocket. The bookies aren’t “betting” based on any actual knowledge, they’re just playing maths. The number of people gambling decent sums with expert knowledge on the A-League is almost insignificant, and arbitrage betting means that as soon as the odds change to create one outlier site someone will pick up the newly favourable bet and bring the odds back into line.
The odds at the start of the season seem to be set based on a team’s results the previous season (fairly meaningless in a salary capped league), weighted slightly for their pre-season results (fairly meaningless anywhere) and their long term results and/or long term popularity with punters (fairly meaningless), which track fairly closely as the most successful teams are all in the population centres. Individual match odds are then weighted heavily for generic home/away/draw probability.
From then on every match offers an opportunity for people who actually follow the teams and the squads to win some cash against the bookies who don’t - at one point we had a discussion about models and from memory always picking the underdog was a winning strategy for the first ten rounds or so over several seasons. Always picking the away team was another.
The reason these opportunities don’t close as fast as you might expect is that the bookies have little interest in predicting the correct result - they care only about not losing money. So as long as there aren’t enough people backing Wellington to create risk - and there aren’t, because so few people follow the A-League closely, support Wellington or are around any ‘hype’ about Wellington - the odds won’t meaningfully change, and you can keep (potentially) getting lucky.
It all starts to change about now, when teams have settled in to consistent enough performance records over the season and over recent weeks that the algorithms can factor these things in to get closer to the mark. But to a keen A-League watcher there’ll always be a few strange looking markets that present potential opportunities. Last night was one, when the algorithms didn’t know that Rudan rested half his team away to Perth and that they’d be ready and raring to go, or that Rudan is a tactical genius or that Roy O’Donovan is a nutcase (okay they might know that one). And yet Welly still didn’t win, which just goes to show that there’s always risk, no matter how ‘too good to be true’ the odds may be.
Disclaimer: I don’t actually bet so this may all be made up nonsense. Also gambling addictions are the worst and betting companies are bastards etc etc.
Edit: not sure why I decided to do a random rant about A-League betting in this thread, and in response to a perfectly reasonable post. Apparently this is where my didn’t-sleep-last-night jittery energy gets channeled.
You’re pretty spot on mental, I’ve worked in the game and have friends who still do. Bigger bookies employ sport specific people now to try and minimise that all as much as possible too though.
So, now its Melb City vs Adelaide. I tipped Melb City to win, as they seem to have a great record of late against Adelaide, and they’re playing at home so they should be pretty strong.
I wish Aleague commentators would just call the fucking game and not interject with banal questions like why the goalkeeper isn’t wearing a fucking hat and spending 10 mins disagreeing whether it was a foul or not. These cunts are insufferable.
The use of the term ‘commentator’s curse’ is another irritant, not only the A-league.
I can absolutely guarantee you that as soon as a commentator compliments a player the actually want something to go wrong just so that they can use the term ‘commentators curse’
