Tactical football trading
As is well publicised, I started my odyssey in sports when I was very young, analysing footy matches looking for draws.
I still endlessly search for new information, a quest to find something that hasn’t been found before. To give you some hope if you are doing the same, I am always finding new things. Sometimes by looking for something else.
I recently revisited how a football match unfolds and if there was information contain in the first half stats that could be reworked to produce a prediction for the second half. You often see that half time, rather obviously, is a key moment in a match. However, the information contained in half time stats is a little more obscure than it seems.
If you track first half stats you can see that often they don’t tend to map to the second half. This is because if a team has an advantage, depending on the set up of the match, they may push on for the win or defend their lead.
I was looking for some correlation between the first and the second half, but what I actually found was information on how a manager reacts to a situation in the first half. As you dig deeper into the stats you realise that different managers tend to alter tactics at half time according to the set up of the match and the current score. This leads you to be able to predict how the second half is likely to unfold, but only if you have enough information on how the manager / team will react. It seems that managers tend to follow a pre-set course of action in relation to how a match unfolds in the first half. The implications for matches is quite interesting. If you know how a manager will react at half time, as a manager, you can nullify his tactics yourself.
So it is possible to see the likely future of a match based on how the first half has played out, but only by understanding how a team will react to the first half result. The concept is simple but there you run into another issue, how the other team reacts to the team that is reacting to the first half. That’s another whole area again!
Category: bookmark, Football trading strategies
