Placing bets on bookings

We know that there is no winning formula for football. Every team must change its approach every week, every game. Instead, a manager must know his players, his team, and he must know his opponents. He must make use of every resource at his disposal to gain every possible advantage. This applies not only to every manager, but to every professional punter.

Take bookings, for example. Knowing which defenders are most often penalized can give us an edge over total bookings in a match. That applies to teams that are not favoured in a match, leagues with high number of cards, certain referees and derby matches. Analytics can produce useful information about which action on the pitch yield which results: do long balls create more fouls than crosses? Does dribbling in your own half or the team formation result in more bookings?

Analysis show that defenders are more likely to get a card and a defender who has created at least 4 fouls in the game has a 60% chance of finishing the game with at least one yellow card. This is chance is greater than that of an attacker who, with the same number of fouls) have no more than 30% chance of receiving a booking. Moreover, a defender who has made seven or more fouls is virtually certain to get carded. In a nutshell, defenders are twice as likely to get booked compared to forwards. This is a good starting point when looking at bookings betting markets and filtering defenders who commit on average more fouls than others is a good starting point.

The picture above shows the players with most cards for the current EPL season. We can clearly see that all players are defenders with the exception of Brighton midfielder Dale Stephens. A more detailed statistics can be seen below courtesy of Whoscored.com

If you are able to analyse player’s temperament in detail, you will notice that not all fouls are accidents. Sometimes, players commit these fouls out of spite, intentionally, to control the clock or avoid conceding a goal. Moreover, there are players that don’t want others to use them as a skill showcase. Another common character in player’s performance is the judgement of the referee and acting out in in the heat of the moment, which usually results in a booking. With in-play betting and looking for the above factors, you can easily gain an advantage over  the bookie.

Another logical thought when deciding on card markets is the difference in strength between the two teams. This can be seen via the offered bookmakers’ odds, if you don’t have your own teams’ rating based on expected goals. (Football modelling and expected goals) It is true to think that weaker teams will be pushed more by strong teams and therefore more fouls will be committed based on the greater number of challenges. Also, strong favourites that become frustrated when their performance is worse than the underdog, commit more fouls as well that can lead to more cards shown. These are the matches where strong favourites win by a single goal only or the game finishes in draw. Usually the better teams are more confident in passing the ball quickly through the middle of the pitch rather than using long balls. There are certainly more fouls when one of the team is obsessively passing the ball in a bid to keep control and storm their opponents. Quick passes and controlling the ball wins possession and makes the other team to panic, which often result in a tackle.

Equally important is the league that you are placing a bet on. There are leagues that produce more bookings than others and finding value in these competitions is a bit more difficult. The English Premier league for example, has nearly 6.5 fouls per card, which is a bit high taking into account that the EPL is considered a physical and aggressive league.

Spain needs on average only 5 fouls per card and it produces 2 cards more on average than the English Premier League. La Liga has on average, 5.5 total cards per match and the EPL just 3.5. The Bundesliga comes to about 3.75 cards per match and the Italian Seria A produces about 5 cards per match. The Argentinian Superliga comes close with 4.85 cards per match for the 2017/2018 season. If you are starting out in these betting markets, it is preferable to pick leagues that produce loads of cards: Spanish and South American leagues.

The other important ingredient in guessing a match cards is the referee. Mike Dean, for example, has shown 991 yellow cards in 272 matches, which brings his total average to 3.64 cards per game. The picture below shows his total stats. A detailed analysis of his cards shown per team can be found here.

Each referee builds his own reputation in terms of total cards shown. Lee Mason, on the other hand, has an average of 3.05 over 232 matches and is more lenient towards transgression.

Phil Dowd is another one to make note of. A reasonable process here will be to create a table and average total cards and points for each referee. This will be a good start for you to help your decision-making when placing a bet.

Another factor when looking for value bets in bookings is the local derby. These matches are very competitive and usually produce a high number of total bookings. Sometimes, a match might seem boring and without any action, but a single foul or tackle can change that in an instance. In the Premier League, the popular derbies are the Merseyside, North London, Manchester and Tyne and Wear derby and between these, in about 24 game, there have been an average of 4.7 cards, compared to the league average of 3.5. The El Clasico has a reputation of producing on average 7 cards per match.

There are a few more factors that can make your mind about a card bet. There are certain footballers who pride themselves in their theatrical skills and want to show these as much as possible on the football pitch. Knowing such players and referees that do not tolerate this is a good start. Two of my personal favourites are shown on the picture below.

Red cards, like all important events in football matches, are rare. In Spain a team picks up a sending off about once in every five games; in Italy, that’s once in every six matches and in Germany and England it is only once every twelve or thirteen games.

Quick and easy calculations of the season-long performance of red-carded players using data from OPTA show that, on average, players who receive red cards shoot less accurately, make fewer passes, a lower proportion of which are so-called “key” passes, and commit more than twice as many fouls as players that don’t receive red cards. This doesn’t mean that if a player who doesn’t contribute as much as the rest gets sent off, his team will play better. On the contrary, looking at games from the big four European leagues, over a number of years, we see that sendings off are damaging.

In Spain, England and Italy, receiving one red card reduces a team’s point expectation for a match from about 1.5 to somewhere around 1, a reduction of a third. In the Bundesliga, over the five seasons from 2005 to 2010, a single red card cost a team almost half of its expected points, slicing 1.42 points per game with no red cards to 0.75 with one card. Red cards are very costly – playing ten-against-eleven football is a recipe for defeat.

Red cards are very hard to predict because there are different sorts of red cards. Luis Suarez’s (pictured above) dismissal in Uruguay’s 2010 World Cup quarter-final against Ghana for handling Dominic Adiyiah’s header on the line was a proxy for poor defensive play. It was also a blatant example of cheating. But, more importantly to Uruguay, it also traded up the certainty of defeat had Adiyiah scored, to a 75 per cent chance of losing if Ghana converted the subsequent penalty. It was, in that sense, a calculated gamble, and one that paid off.

There are red cards that are sustained in the heat of the match – like Zinedine Zidane on Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final, or Wayne Rooney on Ricardo Carvalho in the quarter-finals of that tournament. These are, it would seem reasonable to suggest, more common in games where your team is condemned to defeat, when things are going badly, and frustration has set in, or when a player is lashing out in response to provocation from the other side. This usually happens in finals or local derbies and it is a good indicator for more cards coming in.

Running a regression (Machine learning in sports betting) on data from all four leagues for the five most recent seasons, while accounting for match-specific differences – home advantage, shots, goals and fouls – we can show the connection between the number of red cards and the likelihood of a team losing or winning a match. Here, too, it is clear that red cards increase a team’s chances of defeat.

Going from no red cards to one increases the probability of earning no points from 24 per cent to 38 per cent. If your team gets a second red card, losing becomes the most likely outcome, even more probable than gaining a point. The chances of taking three points decreases from 36 per cent to 22 per cent when a team has a man sent off, and the odds against winning to more than 7-1 when a team has two players dismissed. The most fitting comparison is with being at home: playing on familiar territory, as opposed to at an away ground, increases a team’s chances of winning from 27 per cent to 42 per cent, while decreasing the chances of losing from 32 per cent to 18 per cent. A single red card costs a team 0.42 expected points while changing where a match takes place from home pitch to away costs a team 0.43 expected points. Having a man sent off is roughly the same as giving your opponent home advantage.

Betting on cards is best achieved during in-play. As bookmakers change the odds with the duration of the game, value bets start to come up based on how you have evaluated the above-mentioned factors. Knowing the referee, the players and how they get affected during the match, and being able to judge the current situation is more than enough not to be bad at betting on cards.