Michael Adams spent more than a decade developing data modeling techniques for sportsbooks like Bet365 and FanDuel to de-risk soccer betting. He is now betting that his company, Caerus Risk, based in rural England, can provide teams with data analysis to optimize on-field performance and maximize player transfers. He believes his services will improve the team's analytical capabilities and put them on par with Brighton and Brentford, two smaller clubs that have innovated the use of data to establish themselves in the English Premier League. I hope it will become.
“The core competency of our business is predicting the outcome of soccer matches and creating odds for various markets derived from those predictions and providing them to bookmakers,” Adams said by phone. Ta. “Over the past 12 months, we have built on the success of Brighton, Brentford and their owners to develop betting models to inform football club decision-making, inform transfer strategy and increase success rates. We have identified the application of
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Since founding Caerus about four years ago, Adams and co-founder Harsha Srinivas have built a system that collects the most detailed event data possible for every club in the top 100 soccer leagues around the world. I did. That information, from wind conditions to team travel distances to in-game information about player performance, allows the company to provide superior odds insight to its clients.
Currently, Caerus provides betting data to sportsbooks such as Pinnacle, BetVictor, and Playbook Engineering. The company's customers achieved $56 million in business last year based on those odds. Adams says his firm's clients have done particularly well in their predictions for this year's Club Brugge. While Caels rated Club Brugge as one of the top two teams in Belgian professional soccer league Jupiler before the season, other oddsmakers saw Club Brugge as a dark horse. Adams said he was ignorant of some of the peculiarities of the league.
Caerus has discovered that the same information used to form betting odds can be used to effectively compare teams across the league and therefore around the world. For example, LAFC, MLS' most valuable team, will likely finish mid-table on par with Stoke City in the Championship, England's second tier league. Mr Adams was fixated on the Championship, with Leicester City and Ipswich Town finishing high enough to earn automatic promotion to the Premier League, but according to Caelas data, they finished in third place and are 1-1 from Sunday. It has been suggested that Leeds United are the only Championship club aiming for promotion in the coming weeks. Next season, they won't be among the three weakest teams in the Premier League initially.
Being able to compare teams also means being able to predict player performance.
“Clubs that make inter-league transfers, like Croatia to Germany or Ecuador to Peru, have taken advantage of historic transfers that followed the same route,” Adams said. “We can actually objectively quantify the likelihood of success at a more precise level. And this is what Brighton and Brentford have been doing for the last few years. You can see it.”
Interestingly, Brighton and Brentford's success also developed from their exposure to the power of data analytics in sports betting. Brighton owner Tony Bloom made his fortune as a bookmaker and now uses in-house data to optimize the club's player transfers. Brighton are believed to be the only EPL club to make a net profit from transfers.
Brentford were in the third tier of English football when Matthew Benham, founder of Smart Odds, which provides statistical research for sports gamblers, took over in 2012. There was good talk that the club would reach England's top flight in 2022, but it was widely expected to drop down the table quickly. Instead, the club finished in the top 10 last season and is 13 points clear of the relegation zone this year, relying on data from SmartOdds to inform its decisions. Caerus is not affiliated with either club, but a former employee of SmartOdds is a consultant for his Caerus.
For now, it remains to be seen whether Caelas' transfer proposal will be successful in the real world. Adams has just signed with the first club to utilize the data in the upcoming transfer window. He plays for the Italian Serie B team and wishes to remain anonymous. But the partnership is already a sign that Caelas believes analytical technology can contribute to world football. The coaching staff uses Caelas' ratings of the team's offensive and defensive behavior to focus player training, and ownership uses Caelas' predictions as a benchmark to judge the effectiveness of the coaching staff. We plan to use the team standings on the standings.
“The next step in this data evolution is understanding optimal decision-making through all the data available,” Adams said. “If you look at the success of Brentford and Brighton and project five years down the line, they won't be in the minority like they are now. This kind of decision-making will be implemented more widely. .”
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