When I tell people about how I bet on the Premier League the question I am most often asked is, “Er, what’s an algorithm?”.  Well, it’s nothing more than a series of calculations.  They don’t have to be complex, they just follow one after the other.  The output from one calculation is used for the input to the next and so on.  Excel is a great platform for entering and holding the orginal input data, performing calculations and displaying and analysing the results.

Football betting algorithms can use data on league position, points, home wins, away wins, goals home and away, shots, fouls, so on and so forth.  Any numeric data or indeed any data which can be given a numerical value can be used for calculation and analysis. 

The first step is to dream up your own theory about what is important in predicting a team’s performance.  Is it their current league position, goals scored, consecutive games won, games since last loss, etc, etc.  You then develop your model to quantify and monitor this performance using your theory.  Your aim is to reach a point where you can compare the relative expected performance of one team against another to generate the probability of a win, lose or draw.  This probability is then converted to odds, 1/probability equals the odds. If a team has a 50% chance of a win their odds are 2 in decimal odds or evens in traditional odds.

Finally if your model gives a team a better chance of winning than the betting exchange odds the team is backed.  Conversely, you would lay a team if your model gave the team a lesser chance of winning than the betting exchange odds.

You can see how FIFA calculate their team rankings here.