The Peanut Roaster
Banned
This is from the Sporting life website.
It was with a slight sense of trepidation that I embarked on my punting activity in League One this season.
The 2008/09 season had been nothing short of disastrous as I suffered my worst campaign in any division since I started keeping records five years earlier and little happened during the summer to fill me with optimism that the path would suddenly be paved with gold.
It wasn't difficult to illustrate why the previous year had been so bad. All you needed was an ante-post coupon from August and a copy of the final league table in May.
The four teams who headed the outright market before a ball had been kicked were sitting pretty in the top four positions on the final day, with more than 100 wins racked up between them, while the three teams least fancied in the section were all relegated with something to spare.
However, this was only part of the story.
To fully appreciate why League One has become such a dreadful setting for punters duty-bound by culture to oppose favourites on a weekly basis, it was also necessary to have an understanding of a mathematical formula known as the Noll-Scully measurement.
The Noll-Scully is an economic tool for measuring 'competitive balance' - meaning the distribution of points throughout a league - and it's a popular mode of research among the major sporting bodies in America whose job it is to preserve the value of competitions where the concept of promotion and relegation doesn't exist.
It's something I've taken an interest in over the past 12 months in order to gain a wider knowledge where betting on football is concerned, because it's one thing to understand you can have good seasons and bad seasons but surely the next step is to try and understand why.
Anyway, according to the Noll-Scully, League One has been on a steady decline in competitive balance terms over the past five years with the 2008/09 season being the second-worst campaign since the turn of the millennium.
There are a couple of possible explanations for why this is the case and both of them appear to be valid.
For starters, it's clear that the lure of the Premier League is beginning to have a damaging impact much further down nowadays with the third tier being forced to accommodate an increasing number of clubs with budgets big enough to compete at the top end of the Championship.
That's not to say these clubs have been particularly well managed - hence they find themselves dropping out of the Championship unexpectedly - but their resources, regardless of debt, are such that they can hardly fail at this level once they've responded to the wake-up call.
Of course, there was a time when this division was a graveyard for any big club that had fallen on hard times but now it seems like the little clubs at this level have had too much of a good thing over the past decade.
The cup-final mentality created by the rarity of an opportunity for David to pit his wits against Goliath has dissipated with smaller clubs now pinpointing a handful of lucrative matches to look forward to when the fixtures are released each summer.
It's a situation that was hardly helped by the sight of Norwich, Charlton and Southampton dropping into League One last summer and that's obviously where my lack of optimism at the beginning of this season stems from.
And so it was that I simply couldn't look beyond the top eight in the betting when I wrote about the promotion picture in my ante-post preview last August, dismissing only Brighton as a team who didn't belong in the esteemed company they were keeping.
As it transpired, six of the seven teams I earmarked as candidates back then occupied places within the top seven after the final day's action last weekend, including Southampton in spite of their 10-point deduction, with only Swindon having muscled in on the act as the season's token surprise package.
However, most disturbingly, the Noll-Scully measurement for competitive balance deteriorated even further, hitting an all-time low since the introduction of three points for a win, as the chasm between seventh (play-off contenders) and ninth place (also-rans) widened to 18 points.
Judging by the general tone of this piece, you would be forgiven for thinking I actually recorded another loss at this level but it's a source of some satisfaction that I can report significant profits.
My League One match betting previews showed an overall profit of more than 45 points from an outlay of 173 points, which translates as a 26 per cent profit margin, so it's been a terrific season and it might confuse some readers as to why I seem so perturbed about the situation.
The truth is though, it's no fun the way things are in this division.
Betting shouldn't always be a battle to carve out results, that isn't what the Football League should be about. Our lower leagues should be oozing with unpredictability from every weekend coupon.
As such, my satisfaction in this instance comes not only from the fact I was alert to the bigger picture and learned lessons from the previous season, but also because it means I'm now in a position to have a good old moan about the state of competitive balance in League One and it won't be construed as sour grapes!
Sadly, the picture remains pretty bleak because there's at least half-a-dozen heavyweights already guaranteed to be growling at the starting line next term and only three can go up at a time, although ridding the section of Leeds and Norwich has got to be a step in right direction.
In the meantime, who fancies offering a decent price on a Southampton and Sheffield Wednesday dual forecast in 2010/11?
It was with a slight sense of trepidation that I embarked on my punting activity in League One this season.
The 2008/09 season had been nothing short of disastrous as I suffered my worst campaign in any division since I started keeping records five years earlier and little happened during the summer to fill me with optimism that the path would suddenly be paved with gold.
It wasn't difficult to illustrate why the previous year had been so bad. All you needed was an ante-post coupon from August and a copy of the final league table in May.
The four teams who headed the outright market before a ball had been kicked were sitting pretty in the top four positions on the final day, with more than 100 wins racked up between them, while the three teams least fancied in the section were all relegated with something to spare.
However, this was only part of the story.
To fully appreciate why League One has become such a dreadful setting for punters duty-bound by culture to oppose favourites on a weekly basis, it was also necessary to have an understanding of a mathematical formula known as the Noll-Scully measurement.
The Noll-Scully is an economic tool for measuring 'competitive balance' - meaning the distribution of points throughout a league - and it's a popular mode of research among the major sporting bodies in America whose job it is to preserve the value of competitions where the concept of promotion and relegation doesn't exist.
It's something I've taken an interest in over the past 12 months in order to gain a wider knowledge where betting on football is concerned, because it's one thing to understand you can have good seasons and bad seasons but surely the next step is to try and understand why.
Anyway, according to the Noll-Scully, League One has been on a steady decline in competitive balance terms over the past five years with the 2008/09 season being the second-worst campaign since the turn of the millennium.
There are a couple of possible explanations for why this is the case and both of them appear to be valid.
For starters, it's clear that the lure of the Premier League is beginning to have a damaging impact much further down nowadays with the third tier being forced to accommodate an increasing number of clubs with budgets big enough to compete at the top end of the Championship.
That's not to say these clubs have been particularly well managed - hence they find themselves dropping out of the Championship unexpectedly - but their resources, regardless of debt, are such that they can hardly fail at this level once they've responded to the wake-up call.
Of course, there was a time when this division was a graveyard for any big club that had fallen on hard times but now it seems like the little clubs at this level have had too much of a good thing over the past decade.
The cup-final mentality created by the rarity of an opportunity for David to pit his wits against Goliath has dissipated with smaller clubs now pinpointing a handful of lucrative matches to look forward to when the fixtures are released each summer.
It's a situation that was hardly helped by the sight of Norwich, Charlton and Southampton dropping into League One last summer and that's obviously where my lack of optimism at the beginning of this season stems from.
And so it was that I simply couldn't look beyond the top eight in the betting when I wrote about the promotion picture in my ante-post preview last August, dismissing only Brighton as a team who didn't belong in the esteemed company they were keeping.
As it transpired, six of the seven teams I earmarked as candidates back then occupied places within the top seven after the final day's action last weekend, including Southampton in spite of their 10-point deduction, with only Swindon having muscled in on the act as the season's token surprise package.
However, most disturbingly, the Noll-Scully measurement for competitive balance deteriorated even further, hitting an all-time low since the introduction of three points for a win, as the chasm between seventh (play-off contenders) and ninth place (also-rans) widened to 18 points.
Judging by the general tone of this piece, you would be forgiven for thinking I actually recorded another loss at this level but it's a source of some satisfaction that I can report significant profits.
My League One match betting previews showed an overall profit of more than 45 points from an outlay of 173 points, which translates as a 26 per cent profit margin, so it's been a terrific season and it might confuse some readers as to why I seem so perturbed about the situation.
The truth is though, it's no fun the way things are in this division.
Betting shouldn't always be a battle to carve out results, that isn't what the Football League should be about. Our lower leagues should be oozing with unpredictability from every weekend coupon.
As such, my satisfaction in this instance comes not only from the fact I was alert to the bigger picture and learned lessons from the previous season, but also because it means I'm now in a position to have a good old moan about the state of competitive balance in League One and it won't be construed as sour grapes!
Sadly, the picture remains pretty bleak because there's at least half-a-dozen heavyweights already guaranteed to be growling at the starting line next term and only three can go up at a time, although ridding the section of Leeds and Norwich has got to be a step in right direction.
In the meantime, who fancies offering a decent price on a Southampton and Sheffield Wednesday dual forecast in 2010/11?
