Midseason Variance Betting Analysis

I promised to do midseason Variance Betting analysis like I did last year, and the FA Cup gambling break finally gave me a chance to look at the numbers.

If reading about gambling stuff makes you feel squiffy, please go read this. I do this for very different reasons than almost everyone else, explained in detail in that link.

Headline Numbers

It’s obviously a new year, and it’s fun to look back on how we are doing, and where I am winning and losing money. Last season, the best trend you could find was fading Manchester City the moment Rodri went down, across every competition. This season? Well, we’ll get to that in a minute.

+123K (on 10K base bets each time)
+10.5* bets on EPL [I’ll explain what this means below]
81 bets. 863K wagered. 74.6K profit. 8.6% ROI/Hold
+8.5 on spreads. +2 on a small number of Totals bets

+9 on Eng Champ
101 Bets. 1.1M wagered. 57.4K profit. 5.2% ROI/Hold
+8 on spreads, +1 on a single Totals bet.

-.5 on UEFA CL
51 Bets. 561K wagered. -8.8K “profit”. -1.5% ROI/Hold
-2.5 on Spreads, +2 on 10 Totals bets

For comparison, this is what I wrote at this time last season.

Last season EPL was my worst full season league and the Champions League was the best in terms of ROI. This year it is reversed. Welcome to gambling, but also welcome to half-season statistics. Both of these have a chance to change a bunch before we’re done.

Note*: When I make a notation like +10.5 it means that we’ve won 10.5 more bets than we have lost. (You can win or lose half a bet with Asian Handicaps. We discuss what these are and why we bet them over on VB pretty regularly.) The reason we denote it this way is so if you were betting £10 per bet with no vig, you’d have won £105 (10×10.5) so far. Or if you were betting 100 each bet, it would be +£1050. After last season’s success, I noted my stake was back to a much larger 10K per wager. That’s still small compared to professional gambling syndicates, but fairly large for even someone like me.

The vig or bookie margin is always a thing though, and after I publish the column each week, the numbers on my bets seem to move a lot more than they did last season. It’s not ideal, but people are still winning fairly substantially, and anyone can pay for a subscription to Variance Betting. Even bookies!

English Premier League Analysis

I was not entirely expecting this, but Crystal Palace are the side I have bet on the most so far this season. And in the early going, they paid off fairly well, while in the last two months back Palace has mostly been terrible. That is one tired team.

Sunderland are the side I have backed the second most often, and they have been great for us, returning +5 on nine bets. The only Black Cat jinx there has been for people betting on their opponents.

Counter-intuitively to most people, the terrible teams at the bottom of the table have been decent value as well. We’ve been on West Ham twice and Wolves five times this season, and are up four units on those games too. In the land of Asian Handicaps, knowing when to bet on the bad teams is where you tend to see the most consistent returns year after year.

It never feels good when you make those bets, but it feels good when you win.

The other areas that have been fairly good were betting against Liverpool (especially at Anfield), and betting against Spurs at home too. It was clear in the numbers from early in the season that something was wrong at Liverpool, and we took advantage of that.

It’s not all been good — betting on Leeds games away from home has been, and the same can be said for betting on Spurs’ travels. Ah, and anything and everything involving Aston Villa and betting has been a toxic waste dump all season long.

English Championship Analysis

Birmingham good. Bristol City good. Coventry has been stonking (and we have yet to lose a Covs home bet).

On the less good side, we have yet to win a Sheffield United bet, and the same goes for Boro. Anything involving Wrexham for or against has generally been bad. Anything involving Sheffield Wednesday has been weird, which is why I basically stopped betting their matches.

That’s not to say ANY of this will continue — it’s just very useful to check and see if you have holes in your analysis. This season has been okay, but usually the Championship is the best returning league for me and this year it feels like a constant grind.

UEFA Champions League Analysis

CL betting is always small sample, and therefore more likely to vary than league betting. It’s also harder to handicap due to how much league strengths vary, and how much the teams themselves can vary season to season. Which is why it’s kind of weird I am at exactly the same spot in the CL this year as I was in 2025. From this point, we’d go on a huge CL heater where it finished as my best league, but past results are absolutely no guarantee of future results.

If I wanted to point at just one team that has laid the largest turd in the CL versus expectation so far, it’s Villarreal. But Qarabag has been a close second. Beyond that, there aren’t really enough bets to pull out the patterns. My hope is that the second half of this season goes just like the last one and we keep crushing from here out.

Conclusion

For those of you still here, I hope you have enjoyed this look into my predictions thus far for 25-26. It’s extremely rare for people who bet for real to discuss their results and process like we do over on Variance Betting, but the response from subscribers has been great, and I genuinely enjoy the puzzle and challenge of being a little bit smarter than the worldwide gambling markets every week.

—TK

If you enjoyed this newsletter, we’d appreciate it if you would forward it to a friend. If you’re that friend, welcome! You can subscribe to The Transfer Flow here. We also have a podcast where we go in depth on transfer news and rumours every week. We’re on YouTube here, and you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify by searching for “The Transfer Flow Podcast.” If you’re interested in football betting, check out this post on why we started Variance Betting.