I built this to find the places where what I think about a match and what the market thinks about it don’t line up. It won’t tell you what to bet.
Price the Match is a research tool. You start from what the exchange already believes, weigh up the stories you reckon are under-priced, and see what’s left. No tips, no advice, no bets taken.
Every price starts life as a live Betfair Exchange market with the margin taken back out. That’s the baseline — the number thousands of people have already put money behind. What you’re doing here is saying where you think they’ve got it wrong, and by how much.
The list is the next few days of football from the leagues I collect prices for, straight off the exchange. Open one and you get its current price for home, draw and away, and when it was last read.
A fixture you haven’t touched prices exactly the same as the market does. That’s on purpose. Most of the time the market has already worked it out, and I’d rather the tool started by admitting that than pretend it knows better.
The history the evidence column compares against is eleven seasons of closing prices, Pinnacle where they quoted the match, with the bookmaker’s margin taken out by Shin. One thing in it is worth knowing before you lean on a long price: longshots underperform what they are quoted at — a return of −9.3% on everything above 10.0.
A story is something about the match you don’t think the price has taken in yet: the keeper’s out, the manager is on his last week, the side is three games into a European week. Tick the ones you believe and set how big you think each one is. Some fixtures turn up with suggested notes attached — they sit there doing nothing until you tick them.
Size is a dial, and it’s yours to set — I haven’t measured these for you. The fixture-clock stories I have tested properly mostly came back no verdict: not enough data to call either way. One came back a flat zero — across 69,393 matches, a midweek kick-off moved the price by nothing you could pick out of the noise. The footer on the tool says which is which, and it’s worth a read before you put a big number on a hunch.
You get the market’s price, your price, and the expected value of the gap between them. If your stories don’t shift things far enough to clear the market’s own margin then there’s no value, and the tool will say so — which is the usual answer, and I’d rather it told you than flattered you.
Log a view if you want a dated record of it, or share it as a card.
Under the three match prices sit the goals markets — over and under 2.5, and both teams to score. They come off the same model as the win prices, so a story that shortens one lengthens the other, which is the point of pricing goals rather than pushing probabilities around by hand.
Some rows carry a model miss tag. Those markets are what the goal model was fitted to in the first place, so when it still can’t match one, the gap is the model failing to reconcile the book — not you disagreeing with it. I leave the number on screen, but that row can never be the pick: on a fixture where you’ve added no stories at all, a stale leg would otherwise be the only thing capable of producing an edge, and the tool would end up headlining a bet nobody had a reason for.
The panel also shows what the price implies about goals — how many each side is expected to score, read back out of the odds. That is not a prediction of mine, it’s the market’s own number, and your stories are what move it. Actual xG, the kind Understat measures after the match, only shows up once a match has been played.
Not advice, not a tipster, and not somewhere that takes bets or touches your money. Logging a view is really just evidence for your own forward test: a dated note of what you thought before the match was played, which is the only honest way to find out later whether you were on to something.
One cookie, set so the views you save find their way back to you on a later visit. The whole of it is on Privacy. For anything else, the address below reaches me.