Which Football Leagues Are Most Predictable?

Which Football Leagues Are Most Predictable? A Data Analysis of 62,000 Matches (2015–2025)

Football is very unpredictable and that is a fact because a single goal, or a red card, or an unexpected refereeing decision can change the course of the game. 

While that is true, any sport fan can agree that not all leagues behave the same way. 

Leagues are different in the way favorites play, in how often the game turns into a shock and more avenues. 

And then this begs the question:

Are some football leagues more predictable than others?

HelloPredict could easily give a straightforward answer by saying yes or no and just add to the voices that have been echoing the fact that some leagues are different and harder than others. 

That is not what we intend to do. 

For us to provide a clear and well informed answer to the question above, we have studied over 62,000 matches. 

These matches were played in Europe across major competitions and we analyzed them from 2015 to 2025. 

What we have done in this article is to show you the results of our research and our findings after conducting this decade long research. 

In this article, you are going to see:

1. What our methodology was 

2. Results from leagues 

3. Insights that bettors and analysts can use 

4. Some of the limitations that you should take not of

There are no “tips” here as we have only provided the results of data analyzed. 

Data Sources

We drew data from there different points. The first data source that we have is the match results - that is the home, draw, and away - the second data is the closing bookmaker odds and lastly we use league and season identifiers. 

Coverage

We covered 12 major leagues in Europe and we did so for 10 seasons starting from the 2015/16 season to the 2024/25 season. 

It is needful for us to state that we did not cover cup competitions. We only focused on the domestic league matches. 

Next, we took the odds data as close to kick-off as we can because we did not want to be dealing with early market movements - we wanted to see what the general market was about. 

Methodology

This is the process we used in analyzing the data to ensure that our findings are accurate and actionable. 

We converted odds to probabilities 

Our process began by converting the odds to probabilities. We did this by using this simple formula:

Implied Probability = 1 / Odds

We Defined what the “Expected Outcome” is

For every match, we defined the expected outcome. 

The way we found this was to decide that after our conversion, we looked into the outcome that has the highest implied probability. 

That is the one that becomes the expected result. 

Usually, this was a home win but then it did not always turn out to be a home win. 

The outcome with the highest implied probability was treated as the expected result

This was usually a home win, but not always. 

Scoring Predictability

The way we scored each football match was simple and what we were looking for was just one thing which is whether the match ended the way everybody expected or if it went in another direction completely and that is all we were really measuring here because sometimes it is not about the scoreline it is just about what should have happened and what actually happened.

So if the favorite team won that match the way it was expected to happen then we called that one correct and we gave it a score of one but if it ended in a draw or the underdog somehow won then we just gave it zero and left it like that because that one did not follow the normal prediction and that’s why it could not be counted as expected.

After we did that for all the matches we now took the number of times that the expected thing actually happened and then we divided that by all the total matches and we multiplied it by 100 and the number we got is what we used to call the predictability score for that league and it’s just to help us see how often the most likely outcome really shows up.

So at the end of the day what we are saying is this thing is not perfect and it’s not going to tell you the future but it is just to help you understand which leagues tend to respect the favorite and which ones can scatter your bet even when you were very sure before kickoff.

Results: League Predictability Rankings

Key Insights

The Bundesliga Is the Most Predictable

Bundesliga was different from all the others as it was the one league that was most predictable. 

The reason this was so is because the German Bundesliga had teams that had a difference in quality. Like it was clear to see the gap in quality between top teams and the bottom teams. 

Also, the league was very predictable because there were few teams that liked to play the low-block. 

And also the league had so many highscoring games and what this did was that it made it possible for patterns to be seen. 

The favorites in the Bundesliga always win and if there is a case where they do not win, you can easily tell why that is so. 

The Premier League is also very predictable but there were so many times where surprises happened to the dismay of our analysts. 

Notwithstanding, they were second in terms of predictability. 

The following were things we found out:

1. In the Premier League, upsets happened to different big teams at different times - it was hard to see it coming. 

2. Mid-table teams usually beat the top of the table teams 

3. Away wins are very common in the Premier League more than what is seen in other leagues 

Lower Predictability ≠ “Bad” Leagues

Another key insight is that lower predictability does not mean the league is bad. 

The Championship and Scottish Premiership are the lowest in our rankings and it is not to say that they are bad. 

It is actually because of things like the fact that they have a high squad turnover, they experience too much fixture congestion, the motivation for teams often change, and they are tactically averse. 

Home Advantage and Predictability

In all the leagues that we studied, we discovered that the home teams were expected to win in about 47 percent of the matches. 

The away team were expected to win only 18% of the time. 

And draws were expected in the remaining percentage. 

But then with leagues that you see strong home presence and atmosphere and those were the teams are far from each other so they have to travel long distances, we saw that it was easy to predict them and to back the favorites to win. 

Has Predictability Changed Over Time?

Yes, we believe that predictability has changed a bit. 

What we observed was that predictability reduced when COVID19 hit the world and we only saw a partial recovery when things came back to normal 

Also, we found out that because coaches became more tactically sound and needing their teams to play according to a pattern, it became harder to predict games. 

Football has become more competitive and then teams are rotating their squad more often than they used to before. 

What This Means for Analysis (Not Tips)

As a bettor or a betting analysts, you will want to know how this can help you. 

Well, what the findings we have made should tell you is that:

1. There are no guaranteed outcomes in football betting 

2. You cannot call any league an easy one

3. You can actually see what happens in a particular league and use that to make headways 

4. The context of each match matters more than league trends 

Furthermore, if you are an analysts, you should study leagues based on the parameters that they present. 

And avoid the one-size-fits-all way of doing predictions because this does not work. 

Limitations of This Study

Even though the study was a good and thorough one, there were things, certain limitations, that flawed it. 

Among the limitations are:

1. We did not take red cards into account 

2. We did not include injuries and injury concerns 

3. The odds clearly show what the market thinks 

4. We cannot factor in the tactical differences and challenges 

So because of that the result from our findings should be used as a context and not to be seen as a guarantee. 

Conclusion

We have seen that there are leagues that are more predictable than others and still there is no easy league to make use of. 

Which is why we believe that chasing “sure bets” is not the way to go. 

Instead we must see gambling as uncertain and do our best to just study the data for each game and interpret it based on the context of the findings in this piece noting that each game is different from the other and each league.