Evidence
Which clubs beat the price they were quoted at?
Every club’s season, measured against its own closing odds with the bookmaker’s margin taken back out. Win more often than the fair line said you would and you carry a positive edge. Almost nobody does, for longer than a season.
What the table shows
England and the big five
- Clubs ranked
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- reading
- Past |z| ≥ 2
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- reading
- Corrected bar
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- too few clubs to correct for
- Clear it
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- reading
A season is thirty-eight or forty-six matches, which puts a standard deviation of about three wins on a club’s win count — so a club has to beat its expectation by six before |z| reaches 2 — and a handful of any set of clubs will manage that out of nothing at all. Which is why the bar rises with the number of clubs on the table: it is one threshold asked once per club, and a threshold asked often enough is cleared by chance. Across all seven priced seasons in this corpus, not one club-season has ever cleared it — the widest reading on record is 3.41, Plymouth in League One in 2022/23.
Reading the settled book…
How it is measured
The price is the market’s mean closing 1X2, the last number the books agreed on before kick-off. The expectation is that price with the margin removed by the Shin method — never proportionally, for the reasons the method page gives: books load their margin onto outsiders, and a flat divisor leaves it there.
Edge is measured against the fair line; money is measured against the real one. A club can carry a positive edge and a negative ROI in the same row — that gap is the margin, and it is what a bettor actually pays.
What it does not show
It is not a tip and does not become one. Last season’s edge is a record of what happened, not a forecast of what will. Every club on this table was priced by a market that had already seen its form.
The corpus is ten competitions — the English pyramid from the Premier League down to the National League, plus the top flight of each of the others. Every one is priced across the same seven seasons, so no division here has a shorter record than the one beside it.
The other thirty competitions we track are not on it. They have too few settled fixtures with a captured close to make a season out of, and presenting eight matches a club as a season would be the same mistake this page was retired for.