Elo Rankings - International Football

We love a little bit of math down at StattoBets HQ. Excel is seen as a thing of beauty, and a good formula gets the juices flowing. We thought therefore today, a day that turns many punters off purely because assessing International teams who rarely play is basically very hard.

FIFA rankings cannot really be trusted these days as their mechanisms look to over react to certain criteria. Instead, we prefer to look at something called the Elo rating. This is a mechanism used historically to rate the comparitive strength of chess players, but can be applied to any sport.

Basically what an Elo does is to rate each side with a given rating - every time two sides play, they each put at "risk" a proportion of their rating. The winning side takes the points, and their rating goes up, while the losing side goes down. If a very good side plays a very poor side, only a small proportion of the "pot" would come from the poor side, the the good team would only improve their rating very slightly. If they poor team won however, they would improve much more measurably. Get it?

Well we wanted to give you something for this weekend, so here are the Elo ratings for all the internationals being played today.

Firstly, the Ranking the Elo system gives them - essentially an alternative to the FIFA Rankings.

This is useful, but what if the top 10 teams were vastly better than the 11th best team? The rankings wouldn't help us. Instead, we use a home and away adjusted formula to establish a win expectancy. You can read more about this in wiki or with a google search of "elo football ratings". This gives us a figure of how much more likely the home side are to prevail than the opponents.

We have to do some further work to establish the home price, but given a decent approximation on the Draw No Bet, its a quick way to draw up a shortlist of prices to explore further!

So who are our picks this week?

Well Wales get the nod to start with at a tempting 6/5. They have talisman Gareth Bale available, and take on an Austrian side who have only won two of their last 14.

A win is clearly an absolutely must get result for Wales, so despite their run of draws, we can't see them settling for a share of the points in this one. They are rated considerably higher than Austria (it would be roughly a level game if played in Austria) although that rating will be somewhat higher due to their performance in the European Championships. Nevertheless, Wales look a great bet at 6/5.

2.5pts Wales to beat Austria at 6/5

Turkey are a better side than Ukraine, and have an outsiders chance of winning their Group I clash. Only two points separate the top four in the group, so this is bound to be a colourful encounter. 11/4 is available on the Turks, and that looks marginally too lon about a side who have been excellent on their travels over the past couple of seasons.

Turkey have taken wins in The Czech Republic, Austria and Slovenia, as well as drawing in Croatia.

1pt Turkey to beat Ukraine at 11/4

#Football