Simon Trim, launch consultant to 10star lifts the lid on the headaches facing bookmakers as a new Premier League season starts and what they can do to separate the signals from all the noise.
If, as a famous saying goes, the thoughts of a young man turn to love in springtime, then at this point in the summer – at the start of the football season – it’s all about what bookmakers are going to lay.
For trading teams, there are a multitude of factors to take into account – the significant one being transfers.
New signings can generate a lot of excitement among fans in the same way that losing a key player can be a big blow. Tottenham have drifted by around 7% to finish in the EPL top four next season, largely on the back of Harry Kane heading to Bayern Munich.
While the transfer spending firepower of both the Saudi Arabia and MLS leagues and the subsequent means of offloading expensive unwanted players is good news for some Premier League clubs, it also adds a lot more volatility into which players are likely to be leaving before the transfer window closes.
At the time of writing, Mo Salah may be on the move to Al-Ittihad; Liverpool could look to replace him with a loan of Mbappe and PSG might have attempted to cover this by pinching Kane before Bayern came calling.
It’s an unlikely scenario, but it is an example of the type of transfer that can now happen and would cause multiple price moves in both short- and long-term markets – all moves that trading teams need to take into account.
Aside from transfers, early season form also causes a lot of uncertainty. Wrexham drifted by around 10% to win League Two on the back of a single opening-day defeat and it isn’t unusual for the “stalking horses” of the fallow summer period to become dead donkeys once the season is in full swing.
However, the last game a team plays contributes only a tiny part of their overall “rating” in models that use exponential smoothing – possibly less than 1%. But the impact a defeat can have on the price for that team in the market usually far exceeds this.
