We are good at math and our paid picks are doing great. To see the full list of value bets and mathematical football picks please login or create a Rowdie account and prepay the access to premium membership for only €19.99 per month. There are some leagues where we are doing great and there are leagues where we are… let’s say average. Only a handful leagues show really poor performance and that means we had to take a closer look. Please stay calm as we only show values in leagues and markets with a high predictability.

The benchmark

We are doing our best to bring the best results with our mathematical football predictions and we are proud to present our results. There is however one league that stands out. The group of friendly games in football where the math is simply not working.

We have been working hard over 2 years to fix that, but it is not possible. Friendly games have their own rules and their own math – a math without real mathematical laws. We have noticed so many crazy results and unexpected surprises that we ha to analyze the topic more deeply.

What is the reason for friendly games showing so many unexpected results?

There are more reasons and we have singled out the following main ones

Testing of new line-ups

What is a better place for testing new players, positions and strategies if not a friendly game? The results are simply irrelevant and coaches are taking the opportunity. Key players are not playing or are playing on a different spots – spots that are not natural to them. Key players are replaced by bench players and newbies, and this is all fine. This reason alone is good enough to screw up the football prediction math. There are 2 factors:

• different lineups bring unexpected results
• performance

Poor performance of the key players

Why should we expect a key player who earns millions to bring 100% performance during a friendly match? Every game holds a risk of a injury and the club officials together with the player know it. Can you imagine the headlines saying “Ronaldo injured in a friendly match”? This would jeopardize some positions.

Match fixing

You will most likely not find any signs of match fixing in the top European leagues. For that you have to go to lower leagues (maybe outside of Europe) and indeed friendly games. The reason for match fixing in friendly games is not so surprising. It is money. While the top leagues treat millions like peanuts, the poorer ones struggle to feed their families.

We can put it into numbers so fasten your seatbelts. 630 football players were chosen from different parts of Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. All of them were active or former players and 25.9% claimed that they were a part of match fixing activities in more than 2 football fixtures.

Who was the master brain? It was discovered that some club officials like coaches and managers had a significant role to play in manipulating the football results in friendly games. Not surprisingly 18.7% of such approaches were made by the officials alone while only 14.93% of the approaches came from players participating in the fixtures. It was also revealed that the club officials had a lot to gain. Yes, the coaches, managers and other club officials were those benefitting from match fixing the most.

For those who are good at betting might be beneficial knowing even the poor predictions. Maybe to bet against them so we will come back to this. This article is about to be updated.