The Form Table Trap: When Recent Results Mislead Football Bettors

One of the first and most important lessons you need to learn as you get into sports betting is that past results don’t determine future outcomes. It’s a version of the gambler’s fallacy, but it has more credence because it feels logical to look at how well a team has played in recent games as a predictor of what they’ll do next.

Superficially, it might seem that the form table should be a good guide, but once you appreciate its potential to mislead, you’ll take any data it contains with a healthy pinch of salt.

Beyond the Score

Teams can have a run of victories despite the fact that their actual on-field performance in each is objectively poor. Working out whether the results are obscuring the reality of their underlying performance involves looking into more than just goals scored. Specifically, you need to see how many shots were taken, how many were on target, and whether the apparent run of good form was more down to luck and opposition error as opposed to player skill and team tactics.

Using a soccer betting website to review the odds for upcoming games is a quick way to see if a team is actually on a hot streak that’s justified by their underlying performance credentials. Bookmakers have the time and resources to dissect all of the relevant statistics, so you don’t have to.

The Impact of Scheduling

Recent form tables are often shaped more by the vagaries of match scheduling over the course of a season than they are by a team’s capabilities. So, for instance, a mid-table team with a similarly middling line-up might win four or five games on the trot and seem to be on an upward trajectory as a result, whereas the actual cause of this is simply that every one of these games was against an opponent from around the relegation zone.

Similarly, a team that has had a run of home games and local derbies, so hasn’t had to travel far to play, will be well rested and in a better position to win. Once they start travelling further afield and facing tougher opponents, that streak will fall apart.

A Clash of Tactics

Tactical mismatches or alignments can have more to do with winning and losing streaks than the actual form of a team and its true potential in the long term of a season. When you get two sides that focus on counter-attacking, it’s exciting and volatile, as well as leaving room for higher-tier teams to suffer unexpected defeats. Conversely, if an opponent is all about sitting deep and defending, opponents that don’t know how to cope with this style of play might suddenly look slightly amateurish.

It’s important to point out that you shouldn’t discount recent results completely when deciding how to bet. They’re useful if you know the context around each game outcome, and you apply them in addition to analysing other factors affecting upcoming matches. Once you accept that anything could happen when a game gets underway, it’s easier to be philosophical about betting as well.