Backing Over 0.5 goals in the First Half

Betting on whether or not there will be a goal in a football match must, to many seem like a pretty sure thing. It is not until you start looking at the statistics that this may not be the cash cow it may look like. With average odds of over 0.5 goals barely reaching 1.15 for a full time result, to be in profit you must win at least 12 times out of 13. When you consider that the average percentage of games that end 0-0 is somewhere around the 8% mark then this doesn’t seem as inviting after all. I recently read on the OLGB forum of a “system” to make £50000 from £10.00 in 3 months making just 1 bet per day, while the maths is sound and the theory is feasible, in reality one game will wipe you out!! Just imagine you are on your last day and you risk your £46,000 and the game ends goalless🤑😭.
Backing over 0.5 goals in the first half provides better odds (averaging at about 1.5) but with this comes the added risk of the shorter time the teams have to score a goal.
If we look at the Spanish La Liga 2 and the games played on the 25th and 26th March 2022 there were 5 games, 2 of which ended 0-0 at half time. If we say that you put £10.00 on each game at odds of 1.5 then your loss would be £20.00 and winnings would be £15.00 leaving you £5.00 down.
As with everything to do with football betting the Bookies do their research and to level the field a bit it would be foolish to not do the same, otherwise you will be just handing over good money after bad. To this end I have created a series of excel workbooks that will hopefully take a bit of the guesswork out of selecting suitable games that have a higher probability of that first goal going in before the half time whistle.
It uses first half statistics from the football leagues and allocates a points system depending on various criteria ranging from time of first goals to number of goals scored in the half.
To demonstrate I have taken the 5 games played in the La Liga 2 on the 27th March :
Mirandes v Ponferradina OGS 10 mins
Burgos v Tenerife OGS 62 Mins
Alcorcon v Valladolid OGS 3 mins
Malaga v Huesca OGS 47 mins
Almeria v Girona OGS 13 Mins
(OGS = Opening Goal Scored)
As you can see 2 of the 5 games ended 0-0 at half time

If you look at the screenshot from the workbook pictured above you will see a score of 63/110. this was the highest score of all the games today and at half time the score was 2-0
The next highest score for statistics was the game between Almeria and Girona which was 53 points and the OGS was 13 minutes into the game.

With 52 points, the next game was Alcorcon v Valladolid and it took just 3 minutes for our bet to be settled

2 games had sub 50 scores Burgos v Tenerife (47 points) and Malaga v Huesca (33 points) and both of these games ended 0-0 at half time.

Even with these 5 games there is perhaps a pattern emerging. Games that have scores above 50 points might be worth considering but those games where a sub 50 points score should be discounted out of hand

Todays game between Las Palmas and Leganes carries a point score of 68 making this a definite consideration

I have produced a few of these workbooks so far and have provided download links below

To update these files you have to refresh the queries associated with the individual files. To do this simply open the data tab on the ribbon at the top and click the refresh button in the queries and connections box as shown below

There are 4 bits of information that needs to be added manually
These are

1 Half time back odds for the home team on the betfair exchange (insert into cell D15)
2 Half Time back odds for the away team on the betfair exchange (insert into cell H15)
3 The Half Time over 0.5 goals back odds on the betfair exchange (insert into cell D16)
4 Select the favourite team from the game in Cell J1 (this has only 2 options and is a drop list)

I have created and added more workbooks Below