Things You Never Knew...

Soccernet's latest poll involves guessing which of the final four will go on to win the Champions League. The current results are as follows:

Manchester United:51%
Liverpool: 24%
Chelsea: 15%
AC Milan: 11%

Now, I am not ordinarily a betting man, but for the sake of the math I checked out Ladbroke's (some online sports betting site) odds for each club winning. The results are rather surprising:

Manchester United: 3.00 ($3 for every $1 bet)
Chelsea: 3.25
Liverpool: 4.00
AC Milan: 4.50

Irrelevant - Strike! has ManU and Chelsea at 3.00, Liverpool at 3.60 and AC Milan at 4.10. What stingy odds. Don't ever buy strike! if you can help it. Either that or there are lots of Liverpool and AC Milan fans out there, which I find highly unlikely.

Okay, anyway, back to Soccernet's numbers. THEY MAKE ZERO SENSE. Singapore Pools is in the business of making money. If Man U are such firm favorites, the price for Man U winning should be a /lot/ less than Chelsea, who incidentally scored about half the votes of Liverpool but is priced less. Okay, even if you don't trust Singapore Pools' prices, Ladbroke's has been in the business for a long time - you'd figure they know what they are doing.

I'm not sure what I just proved, except maybe that Soccernet readers are all deluded and they (i) place more faith in ManU's ability (getting past AC Milan is no mean feat!) and (ii) underestimate Chelsea. By quite a fair bit. Liverpool? Pooh!

I was going to go into some detail about calculating odds based on votes and calculating prices based on votes but my brain is tired. Also, how the winner is determined over a series of two matches and you can also calculate the odds for those, but that would take too much math and time, so I decided against it. Maybe later.

Anyway, one last point.

THE MIRACLE OF ISTANBUL IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN AGAIN. NOT BY A LONG SHOT.

The miracle of Athens? Hah!