After watching an incredible World Cup, you’re into this soccer/football thing. With no more international excitement, you’re dying for a club in Europe to follow this season and possibly long term.
Ideally, you’d like to watch your club in Champions League, the top club competition in the world. I’ll get you a recommend for that in Part 2 of this series.
But first, let’s look at the most fascinating European club team from an analytics and betting perspective.
Haralabos Voulgaris is a legendary NBA bettor who earned $10M a year. He made a career using analytics and watching games to find inefficiencies in the betting market.
Voulgaris used his betting fortune to buy the Spanish football club CD Castellon in 2022. In four years, his team has risen from the third division to the playoff to make the top division this past spring. They didn’t win the playoff, but a promotion to La Liga feels inevitable.
Voulgaris uses a combination of analytics and strategy to build his roster. First, he has a player model that has guided the signing of players since he first purchased the team. With his background in betting the NBA, Voulgaris almost certainly supplements the analytics with watching matches.
Second, Voulgaris takes advantage of earning three points for a win instead of one point for a tie. Castellon uses a high variance strategy. Most likely, this means a high pressing approach in which the attacking players try to win the ball back near the opponent’s goal.
A high variance strategy has its downsides. Voulgaris discussed his approach in a February article in The Times while his team was in 2nd place. Castellon ended the season in 6th place because of the downside of variance.
Voulgaris must be a difficult boss. He asks his manager to submit a game plan before every match. In addition, he once used social media to quickly sign a player he wanted, a decision his manager only discovered later. A Netflix documentary on a CD Castellon season would be fire.
I had a brief encounter with Voulgaris a decade ago at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. I don’t remember what we discussed, but he ended our short conversation by saying “paired t-test” before walking away. His supreme confidence still stands out to me after over a decade in the sports betting world.
A unique owner only adds to the mystique of CD Castellon. How high can they rise?
Tony Bloom is bettor who bought Brighton & Hove Albion, a club in England. Over almost two decades, Brighton has risen from the third league to a regular mid-table presence in the Premier League. However, Brighton has only one European appearance after almost a decade in the top league.
Can Voulgaris do better than his friend Bloom, the person who inspired him to buy a club? Will he sell Castellon for a 10x profit when it becomes a mid-table La Liga club?
Smarter sports betting in less than 5 minutes
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5-Nugget Saturday is my curated list of tips and analytics. The bets come from not only myself but also other trusted sources in the industry.
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