When should you trade on corners?

The corner kick is a staple event of a football match, with regular occurrences of it seemingly regardless of the action or momentum.

Many teams still utilise corners as a big part of their attacking plan. Some, like FC Midtjylland of Denmark, have mastered them in recent seasons and reaped the rewards.

However, for analysts and traders it can be quite difficult to judge games that are likely to have a high number of corners, especially pre-match. In this piece we will investigate a few standard ways of predicting corners.

Later, we will use an Asian Handicap model to see if games where one team is expected to dominate produce more corners. For now, let’s just look at the average corners per game across 7 leagues in 2014/15:

The rest of this blog post can be found on the StrataBet website - sign up is free and I recommend you follow them on Twitter @StrataBet

Scottish Premiership - Assessing Under/Over Performance

Data is becoming more and more available in football and is now largely accessible to the average fan. However, as is clear to most people, not all data is useful.

Shot data is a prime example of this.

The standard way of recording shots on target or off target can often give a misleading view of what happened during a game, particularly if you haven’t seen the shots in question.

In StrataBet, we don’t just record shots on/off target. We record the quality of chances.

Rich Huggan did an excellent job of explaining that here, but to summarise:

• A “Great Chance” is a situation that a player would be expectedto score from.
• A “Good Chance” is a situation that a player could score from but would not necessarily be expected to.
• An “Attempt” is a situation that a player would not be expectedto score from.

This is simple, but extremely effective.

Rich’s blog gave detail on the conversion rates of these chances. It showed a linear trend that provides an excellent basis to investigate which teams are over-performing or under-performing.

This season I have been working on the Scottish Premiership, so have taken the chance to look at which teams have been “good” and which have been “lucky”.