Hello welcome to another blog this time looking at win odds in the championship so far this year and comparing each teams odds. The aim is to review the data and see if their are any trends we can spot. To get the data i downloaded the raw CSV from the football data. The CSV is available on their website for free and contains lots of other interesting information.
The summary above shows each team in the sky bet championship with the home and away game odds plotted. The big thing to take away is the spread for some teams. If you look at Wolves they were generally well fancied in their home and away games. Burton however even in their well fancied games at home they were still less fancied then other teams at home. Also the better team the more overlapping of home and away odds.
I have now updated the graphs to focus just home and away games. The home games again Wolves generally have the lower odds for home games. The only team that has some odd close the Wolves is Aston Villa who are obviously a well fancied home team. The biggest surprise for me is that despite Burton having clearly the higher odds then any other team in the division they dont hole the least fancied odds for a home team. That accolade goes to Barnsley. A similar pattern is seen with the away odds, obviously they are generally higher then the home odds. This data seems ot suggest that the better teams have both lower odds and smaller grouping of odds. Also this could be a way to review how closely matched a league is the more spread out the odds the closer the teams are in terms of quality.
The graph above compares the number of home wins for a team against their average odds to win. As expected the lower the average home win odds the more home wins a team has got. However there are some outliers which are interesting. The two big overachievers when looking at the bookies odds are Cardiff and Bolton. Cardiff look like they should have similar amount of wins to the teams in the playoff mix and Bolton look like they should have theoretically the second lowest home wins in the league. Underachievers look to be maybe Brentford and Norwich though there seems to be more teams Overachieving then Underachieving.
Finally away wins shows the same trend however this time there are clear teams at the bottom and top showing how much harder it is to win away from home. The big overachiever away from home is Burton which suggests they play well when teams underestimate them. A team which has under achieved is Middlesbrough who look to have been expected to get more then 10 wins away this season but have only 7.
Sport Data Science 