The Curse of Beating the Old Firm?

Old Grandfather Selectabet once told me ‘Any team that beat the Old Firm never win their next game’. For years it seemed to be true as team after team appeared to lose their next game – although I never actually put any money on it! A couple of results this season, Hearts defeat at Inverness after a 4-2 win against Rangers and Hibs losing to Motherwell following a 3-2 victory over Celtic prompted me to delve a bit deeper to see it this was indeed a trend worth backing or was a complete myth. This weekend (20.10.07) sees Hibs play Motherwell at Fir Park, following a 1-0 win at Ibrox. Is the trend worth backing?

Some Ground Rules

Ok, so I couldn’t get access to all the European results so have kept this to domestic games. It doesn’t include Old Firm games and it doesn’t include friendlies either. I was able to get access to the last 10 season’s results but didn’t go back any further. I checked season by season and was also able to find odds on most of the results, therefore able to calculate how much you could have won or lost by betting £10 on the team to lose their next match. The full data is available here to download in an excel spreadsheet.

The Research

Starting with this season (2007-08), between them Celtic and Rangers have lost 3 times. The Win-Draw-Lose record of the teams that defeated them in their next game reads W0-D0-L2 (with Hibs playing Motherwell tomorrow). A £10 stake on the two teams to lose their next game would have you in profit to the tune of £59.50. So far, this looks like a trend I could follow.

Results for the last 10 seasons are as follows;

 

Season	W-D-L	Profit to £10 stake
2007-08	0-0-2	£59.50
2006-07	5-3-6	£44.70
2005-06	4-1-4	£14.10
2004-05	1-2-2	-£8.30
2003-04	2-2-3	£1.20
2002-03	2-0-3	-£2.20
2001-02	0-0-2	£25.70
2000-01	3-4-1	-£61.10
1999-00	6-0-4	-£9.00
1998-99	1-3-6	£72.50
Total	24-15-32	£139.30

So as you can see, more often than not the team that defeats the Old Firm does not win their next domestic fixture, in fact this happens a surprising 66% of the time. They actually lose their next game 45% of the time and by betting £10 on each team to lose you would be in profit by £139.30 which isn’t a bad return.

Then things start to get interesting

OK, so 45% isn’t a bad return but not really enough to say that a trend is apparent, although it would have resulted in a tidy profit. But dig a little deeper and there are more profitable trends to take notice of;

• When teams played their next game at home the overall performance was an unimpressive W16-D9-L10, earning just £5.40 profit in 10 years
• But when they played away in their next game after beating the Old Firm, a staggering 61% of them lost. This would have returned a profit of £133.90 in just 36 games. A profit per game of £3.72
• Both Rangers and Celtic lost a similar number of games over the 10 years (36 & 35 respectively). Teams who beat Rangers lost just 39% of their next games, whereas with Celtic it was 51%
• But the most significant trend to emerge was when a team beat Rangers and their next game was away from home, they won just 17% of the time. They lost a total of 11 matches out of 18 played, so your £10 stake would have returned you £84.50, averaging £4.69 profit per game.

Summary

So I think Grandfather Selectabet was right! Most teams don’t win their next fixture. In fact when a team plays away from home after beating Rangers, there’s actually a 83% likelihood that they won’t win their next game.

Hibs are away to Motherwell tomorrow. Back Motherwell to win at 11/5 with Stan James or on the Asian Handicap (0. +0.5) at 47/50 with Ladbrokes.

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