Uh oh...

There’s column below, but first I wanted to do some housekeeping across the various streams we have going on around here.

I am off to Japan on Wednesday for a real holiday. Typically, I will work somewhat during my holidays, but given I completely burnt myself out working through the winter, this holiday is going to be off-off minus some picks on the VB side. On the flip side, you may get a disgusting volume of good food photos across my social media, so there’s that.

Avoiding burnout is crucial, especially with so many projects going and irons in the fire. You might not realise it, but in addition to producing the newsletter, and Variance Betting, and doing the TTF podcast + Patreon, we have also been rebuilding two women’s football teams. Saying “it’s a lot” is a massive understatement and sometimes a little more precarious to my sanity than I would like.

Speaking of projects… we have some fascinating stuff coming for the World Cup that you will all be able to participate in. Expect to have new things in your hands in about a month’s time, just before our conference in London. I will be giving a big talk at the conference, plus we’ll have great stuff from Hendrik Almstadt (AC Milan), Ben Levin (COO at Crawley Town and Crux Football), and Oliver Gage (Individual Development Coach for Premier League footballers).

On the Variance Betting front, it has been a tremendously frustrating season, and I can prove that to you in visual form. As stated at the start of the season, I was staking 10K per bet on my own action, and then tracking it publicly. The bankroll for these leagues was a total of 200K.

I had massive heater through November peaking at +$240,850. From there it's been an extremely annoying drawdown through the winter, with particularly ugly days on Jan 31 (-$67k) and Feb 28 (-$51k), But things have been good lately and we sit at +$72,050 as of April 12.

EPL has been great this season +$118k (it was basically flat last year), while the Championship (-$36k) and Champions League (-$20k) have been drags. Last season was the opposite! The total ROI is 1.75% per dollar wagered, while EPL is at 8.8%. Shrug, bleh, sigh.

MLS just started with 3 bets at +$10k, and we’ll continue that all summer, plus you’ll get all my picks for the World Cup, which is usually the most lucrative gambling event on the planet. If you’re interested in subscribing to the analysis, click here.

As you can see above, gambling life felt awesome in November and then considerably less awesome the first week of March. The interesting part is the losses haven’t been THAT bad in terms of losing bets — I think we peaked at like +27 picks and are now at +18 — it’s mostly been the vig grinding us to bits.

However, while we’re not quite done yet for the Euro season, but if I walked away now, I would have 36% return on my 200K investment, which is still really good, but OMGSODISAPPOINTING versus November. Welcome to professional sports betting: it’s pretty much always like this. It’s still much better ROI than my stock portfolio over the same time frame.

Oh, and in case you were hoping to offload all the analysis to the frontier AI models, let’s just say they probably aren’t there yet.

So we need to talk about Arsenal because they are slumping like no other right now in terms of results, and it deserves a little unpacking.

First off, I watched the match against Bournemouth this weekend, and thought the second half was terrible. This was a team that could not get out of their own half, but are somehow six points ahead in the Premier League, with the top goal difference in the league, and a likely-but-not-certain date in the CL semifinals looming.

tl;dr Arsenal were bad and Bournemouth were very good.

And Arsenal feel like they have been bad for a while. The last time they scored more than two goals in a match was against the woeful Spurs team at the end of February. Every match since then has felt like a grind, whether against the likes of Manchester City in the Milk Cup or against Southampton and Mansfield.

The tricky part to diagnose is why? And also, a little bit what? Because the PL trending remains good, actually.

Minus the terrible match against Brighton, they barely have a blip across the season where they have been beaten on expected goals. Even this Bournemouth match looked solid in the race chart, though it was aided by a penalty and Arsenal conceded about twice what they normally do per match.

I then decided to dig into the Set Pieces versus Open Play narrative to see if that bore any analytical fruit, but I’m not seeing much. Below you have a rolling 10-match OPxG in red and Set Piece xG in bronze, and they look stable and trending in the right directions, but regardless of the narrative, it’s not like they only create from dead ball situations.

So maybe this run of form is a sequencing blip on the results? Or maybe someone — check that… everyone — at Arsenal has the yips? Next on The Transfer Flow podcast, we have Blip or Yips!

The tricky part with yips is you have them until you don’t. Just ask Rory McIlroy, maybe the most talented, crazy yips golfer ever. And he definitely had them until he didn’t, at which point he was able to post back-to-back Masters wins this weekend.

In fact… Mikel… do LITERALLY THAT, right now. Ask Rory bloody McIlroy how you can help these guys (and let’s be honest, YOURSELF) get through the rest of the season without completely falling apart. Arsenal fans may literally die of stress-related heart failures if you don’t.

For those of you disgusted by the thought the normal PL roundup column turned into an entire Arsenal + gambling column… here’s City’s xG trending this season. It hasn’t quite been great, but there are signs of renewed life, just in time for the match at the Etihad and the final run-in.

Strap in folks, it looks like it’s going to be a bumpy ride. And the lords and masters at the Premier League wouldn’t want it any other way.

—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.