RandoEFC

Rookie numbers. £10 returns £910. Have some of that!

I've seen a few people mention this. I think PSR was sold to the clubs as one thing and is turning out to be something completely different. The lack of a set in stone sanctions policy is on the clubs as well and it's been pointed out that Everton were one of the clubs that voted against having one so that cases could be handled on a case by case basis. Obviously that leaves some trust in the Premier League to act fairly and in good faith but I don't think we've seen that. It goes to show the people running these football clubs can't be trusted to have a say in the governance of the sport either so the sooner all this independent regulator goes through the better.

So Alex Albon destroyed his car in Practice, leaving the chassis un-raceable. They don't have a spare chassis so they've withdrawn Sargeant from the weekend to give Albon his car. Obviously no right-thinking team would do anything different but that's some kick in the teeth for Logan.

This is where I'm at. I love football and I can't stop following Everton, but I'm not just throwing a tantrum when I say that the Premier League has now completely jumped the shark in my eyes. People can argue about whether it's corrupt, I think it is to be honest, because the governing body should be placing sporting integrity above all else and they clearly have too many conflicts of interest to do so. If anyone doesn't think it's corrupt then they at least have to admit that it's uncompetitive, and the way this PSR era of the Premier League is playing out, it's becoming clear that it's uncompetitive by design. I'm done with the Premier League but unfortunately I'm one of millions of fans who is held hostage by what a train-wreck modern elite football has become because my football club happens to play in this league. It's why I said above that I could find many reasons to be grateful if I ended up supporting a Championship club. At least it's still vaguely "real" at that level.

I don't care what they've done to be honest mate. Every day now is PSR, PSR, PSR. Almost daily reminders that this is the new football. Accountants, lawyers, yawn, yawn, yawn. I think the Premier League have shown beyond all doubt this season that they're in no position whatsoever to be pretending they can implement these financial rules. I can see where this is going now. Nobody likes VAR but it gives everyone something to talk about and, most importantly of all, it gets clicks. The more VAR drama, the better, because it gets people on social media shouting about "the worst decision they've ever seen" and more people are talking about the Premier League. It's going to be the same with PSR. Let's find another way we can introduce financial charges to a club so everyone can keep talking about points deductions and appeals and how stupid the rules are because the only thing worse than people slating the Premier League is people not talking about the Premier League at all. I'm sure Leicester have a case to answer just like Everton and Forest did but you can see how the coverage has changed since Everton initially got the 10 point deduction. Things that would have been dealt with behind closed doors are now a spectacle that has to be played out in public over the course of several months, several meetings, and rounded off with a few journalists leaking the result before it's published accompanied by a bunch of emojis. I'm convinced it's all deliberate. All this "Forest are expecting a decision on Monday or Tuesday at the latest and maybe Sunday" is deliberately designed to get people spending three days refreshing their social media pages and searching for information. It's telling now that the national journalists have increasingly started tweeting out minor updates that would have been a footnote in an obscure article in the past. It's all about the buzz. Football is so fucked, man. If the Premier League want to be viewed as a credible enforcer of these rules then they'll start making a dent in Man City's 115 charges instead of going after a team that's already been relegated from their league. Low-hanging fruit. Of course 115 charges are more complicated but that's all the more reason to get started ffs.

The Premier League are massive cunts. Pass it on.

Pole Position - Which driver will post the fastest lap in Q3? Verstappen Podium - Which drivers will finish the Grand Prix in the top three positions AFTER MAX VERSTAPPEN IS REMOVED FROM THE RESULTS? 1. Perez 2. Leclerc 3. Sainz Random Driver - Predict the finishing position of this week's random driver, Oscar Piastri. 6th Bonus Question - Which of the Australian drivers (Oscar Piastri and Daniel Ricciardo) will qualify faster, and what will the margin be between their fastest laps in qualifying? (E.G. Piastri by 0.3s) - Anything within 0.1s of the correct answer will win 5 points. Piastri by 0.3s

Predictions - Australian Grand Prix We're off down under so don't go to bed on Friday night without making your predictions! @RandoEFC @Stan @MUFC @Tommy @nudge @Whiskey @The Palace Fan @Coma @DeadLinesman @OrangeKhrush Pole Position - Which driver will post the fastest lap in Q3? [INSERT DRIVER] Podium - Which drivers will finish the Grand Prix in the top three positions AFTER MAX VERSTAPPEN IS REMOVED FROM THE RESULTS? 1. [INSERT DRIVER] 2. [INSERT DRIVER] 3. [INSERT DRIVER] Random Driver - Predict the finishing position of this week's random driver, Oscar Piastri. [INSERT POSITION] Bonus Question - Which of the Australian drivers (Oscar Piastri and Daniel Ricciardo) will qualify faster, and what will the margin be between their fastest laps in qualifying? (E.G. Piastri by 0.3s) - Anything within 0.1s of the correct answer will win 5 points. [INSERT DRIVER AND MARGIN]

Results - Gameweek Five Casualties (1) Almeria strike again in this thread, finally taking their first win of the La Liga season with a 1-0 success at Las Palmas, who were backed by @Tommy, leading to our only casualty of the weekend. Bad luck to @Tommy, who dips out with 4 points in this round and an outside chance of a cheeky bonus point depending on how the rest get on next weekend. Survivors (4) Real Sociedad were the flavour of the week this time, backed successfully by @Michael, @Lucas and @Stan ahead of their relatively straightforward 2-0 success over Cadiz on Friday night. @Storts was the only person to go a different way this Gameweek with any success, as a first-half brace from Gorka Guruzeta saw Athletic Bilbao overcome Alaves by the same scoreline. Congratulations to the final four, who will progress to a sixth Gameweek once the international break is out of the way. Preview - Gameweek Six We have reached that point now where we have less than 5 players remaining, meaning that the tie break picks come into play in case nobody picks a correct match-winning team. Therefore, please make your three selections as follows. Which team will win (that you haven't already picked once before)? Which player will score a goal (from any fixture)? What will be the time of the first goal in the randomly selected fixture, Girona vs Real Betis? Below are the fixtures, good luck! Cadiz vs Granada Getafe vs Sevilla Almeria vs Osasuna Valencia vs Mallorca Barcelona vs Las Palmas Celta Vigo vs Rayo Vallecano Girona vs Real Betis Alaves vs Real Sociedad Real Madrid vs Athletic Club Villarreal vs Atletico Madrid

I just need to decide now whether I should go for a single bet at Evens or so that I fancy to try and pull back some respectability in that balance or just spend the remaining weeks chucking some correct score doubles at the wall at 100/1 or whatever on the off chance that one of them comes off and I win the lot. I know which option is more fun .

Everton got a very harsh punishment because they were essentially trying to "look hard" to stave off the potential independent regulator and keep the (gravy) train set to themselves. They might have reduced it to 4 instead of 6 after the public reaction of shock but they left it as 6 of the original 10 because they had to save face even though they'd realised they got it badly wrong. Now they've realised the prospect of the league table getting changed after the season is over, because of their scheduling of Forest and Everton's appeals against this breach and our breach being a week after the season ended, will make them look even more like shit. There was a Premier League board meeting last week where clubs put pressure on the league to make sure things are resolved before then so that the table isn't changed after the last match. Suspect therefore that Forest have been given a lighter sentence to dissuade them from appealing. Many suggesting there's been an "under the table" agreement where instead of getting 6 or 8 points deducted then reduced on appeal that they've been given 4 now under the agreement they'll take it on the chin. Obviously Forest might yet appeal which blows up this theory, but it's believable to me. It goes to show though that once again, the Premier League have put politics and perception ahead of sporting integrity and fairness and one club ends up getting treated less harshly than another. Yet again, wrong place wrong time FC are the party who suffer from it. If we get anything more than 2 points for the second breach *at the absolute worst* I'm afraid it can no longer be rationalised in any other way than the Premier League having an agenda against Everton for some reason. I've avoided that conclusion where many other Blues haven't for months, even years, but the evidence just piles up.

That's the worst of it. Nobody can describe in a sentence what these rules are supposed to achieve or prevent.

It's getting to that point. All three decisions so far have objectively been completely made up. They have no idea what they're doing. 10 points for Everton was absolutely incredible. Reducing it to 6 was still harsh but it at least gave them the opportunity to restore some credibility. I think Forest should be docked 8 points based on our punishment when you look at the size of the breaches. 6 would have been questionable looking at the numbers but not scandalous. Giving them less than us for a larger breach has just destroyed any credibility in this process that they might have won back. I fear that Everton as a football club don't have the backbone to do this but I think if they pursued proper legal action at this point you could see all of the punishments dished out over this period of time get nullified because of how inconsistent and amateurish the process has been at every turn. What's worse is that the Premier League explicitly said all along Everton gained no sporting advantage from their overspend. It was a technical breach. Forest have spent over £35m past the threshold and it's entirely down to player trading. Even if ours was from spending on players too, it would be absolute madness for them to get a smaller penalty for a charge twice as bad. The fact we've got 6 points for a £20m technical breach and they've got 4 for a £35m breach that's helped them on the pitch, I can't get my head around it.

Even this is being generous when you account for their breach being almost twice as big as ours. It's mystifying.

The last I'll say but this is the worst bit. If the entry point and scale of the breach add up to 6 points, and the scale of Forest's breach is significantly worse than ours, where the fuck did they get 10 or even 6 points from for us? Based on this, Everton should have had 5 for the smaller breach at most. Then when the appeal panel found that Everton had actually acted in good faith throughout, we should have got the same -2 or at least -1 for mitigation and cooperation and ended up with a 3/4 point penalty. And that's being harsh on us! 10 points (and remember they briefed that they wanted 12) should never even have been mentioned. Their breach is twice as big as ours in absolute terms and three times worse than ours in terms of by what percentage they breached their threshold of allowed losses. Their breach is also linked to spending on players whereas ours is largely linked to stadium expenses. I can't see any defence of this inconsistency by the Premier League at all. None of it adds up. You can't apply a formula like this to one club that explains how they've ended up at their final conclusion and then not apply it to another. In a court of law, if two people commit the same crime and get slightly different sentences then you can argue it doesn't affect Person A at all what sentence Person B got but that doesn't apply when you're implementing inconsistent competitive sanctions to two different clubs competing in the same league against each other. I sincerely hope that Everton are considering legal action over our first breach now. We've clearly accepted 6 points as the final penalty for our first breach on the understanding Forest would be getting at least the same (Everton will have known how extreme theirs is).

After we lost to Man Utd we faced the prospect of Luton playing three times and Forest playing twice before the international break, and it looks like we'll actually be further from 18th than we were which is nice.

Yeah I mean come on now. What the actual fuck is this? They gave us 10 points and reduced it to 6. Then Forest get 4 for a breach that's "77% worse than ours"? This whole thing stinks (again). They're making it up as they go along. It should be an absolute scandal that these points penalties are getting applied when there's no published formula for working out how much. Unless there's some seriously good mitigation from Forest then by this point I think Everton need to be considering legal action, even if we don't get a further points deduction. Look at this from LAST MONTH as well .

Forest getting a smaller deduction than us seems like absolute horse shit for reasons I've already gone into. We need to be going all out to have our second breach thrown out entirely if this is the case.

I think I'm settling on Over X Asian Corners as my favourite market after all the stuff I've played around with this season. Starting to make a consistent stream of profit on it now. There's loads of games to choose from which means you can find a good volume of decent bets, the odds are always a bit better on the Asian markets, and you can rely on stats a lot more for predicting corners than you can on match goals and results, because those can be quite easily disrupted by stuff like injuries and the relative importance of a fixture for each team. If you don't have the knowledge about those leagues you're going to lose out sometimes. I've had good and bad patches on it but corners are generally more reliable, and I'm equally successful in leagues like the Belgian second tier or the South American leagues as I am in the leagues I actually know stuff about. I've given up betting on Unders though as it isn't fun when every notification is bad news and for whatever reason, I just don't seem to have as much joy. The other stuff I'm having joy with is correct scores. Putting small stakes on three viable correct scorelines for a match is proving to be profitable for me as well over a decent period of time now. I'm dabbling in corner handicaps as well because again, nice Asian odds and sometimes the stats defy the bookies' odds nicely, but they're also a pain to follow if you've got a few running because they don't show up on "live now" on bet365 and you can get fucked over more easily by unusual results such as an underdog team who get quite a lot of corners taking an early lead and then sitting back. I'll probably still bet on Asian handicaps and goal lines because it's a bit of fun but it's much harder to be profitable with a stats-based approach because if you think you've found an edge over the bookies lines then there's probably a reason for their odds that you don't know about if it's a league you're not an expert in. I tend to win as many as I lose or maybe win slightly more often but because the odds are 1.7-1.9 most of the time that results in little or no profit. As for this thread, I've had an absolute nightmare overall. Feel like I've been really unlucky on a few occasions. The biggest lesson of all is bet on singles rather than doubles when you've only got one shot a week .

Had 17 of these on as singles yesterday. Won 10, which isn't brilliant but is profitable. Naturally, both of the ones I posted in this thread were among my 7 losses .

Preach.

Some stats now that I have a minute. Spurs away matches tend to see plenty of corners. Last ten: 15, 11, 13, 14, 18, 10, 13, 21, 10. Fulham have averaged 12.2 corners over their last 10 league games. Should be plenty here although 11.5 is a high line to clear. Salernitana concede A LOT of corners and I wouldn't expect Lecce to dominate them in the way that the stronger Serie A sides do. However, you see a lot of match corners in similar fixtures for them against bottom half opposition. Some of their recent home games have had 14 (vs Frosinone), 13 (vs Cagliari), 10 (vs Genoa), 12 (vs Empoli), 18 (vs Monza). Lecce matches see plenty of corners as well. Their last 10 in the league: 13, 7, 10, 11, 4, 7, 10, 17, 20, 17. More confident on this one.

If they get anything less than 6 points there'll be uproar from Everton. Their breach is supposed to be at least as large as our first one (if that's not true then I'll reassess) and their mitigation seems to be that they held out for more money for Brennan Johnson even though they knew they'd have to sell by June 30th for the sake of that financial deadline - not that I agree with this rule but that's what we had to do with Richarlison instead of bartering for more money to keep our heads above water the year before. I don't want to be a hypocrite on this but Everton had so many complications they couldn't have done anything about, alongside their incompetence, mainly the loss of loads of stadium funding due to the Ukraine war and sanctions on Usmanov. Forest threw so much money around last season that in the space of two transfer windows they signed more players than you can physically register in your squad. That's just mental and for me is a much worse offence as far as what these rules were supposedly designed to prevent. None of this changes the fact that I think these rules should be ripped up yesterday but under the framework we're working with here, Forest surely deserve at least as much of a punishment as Everton. After our appeal board ruled that it was inappropriate for us to get a larger points penalty than what you'd get for administration (9 points), I don't see how Forest will get anything over 8 if that but surely they can't get less than us.

My algorithm has been spitting out some good winners on corners lately so going for this double.

Results - Saudi Grand Prix Qualifying on Friday saw everybody take the safe, but correct route of a Max Verstappen pole position, setting everyone off on 5 points despite a decent challenge from Charles Leclerc. Before I go any further, I'll just clarify that anyone who had Sainz left in their final predictions saw him automatically replaced with Bearman. The race was more interesting as the "non-Verstappen" top three resulted in Sergio Perez in 1st ahead of Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri. @RandoEFC, @The Palace Fan and @Coma were the big winners here, getting two of the first three members of the "podium" exactly correct for 10 points. @MUFC wasn't far behind with Perez in the correct spot and Leclerc missing out by one place for 7 points. @Stan, @Tommy, @nudge, @DeadLinesman and @OrangeKhrush all scored 4 points with both Leclerc and Perez featuring in their top threes, but neither of them in the correct slot. @Whiskey was let down by Alonso and Russell and picks up just 2 points here for having Perez in his top three. Nobody had Oscar Piastri at all in their top three, so no points for anyone from him. On to this week's random driver, and we had a big hitter for the second week running in Charles Leclerc. @RandoEFC, @The Palace Fan and @Coma made further ground here with their prediction of 3rd matching up with their podium predictions and bagging them another 5 points. @Stan decided to hedge his bets with Leclerc's finishing position and where he missed out in the main podium prediction, he scores the full 5 points here as well. Everyone else was out by one position on either side, which is bad luck for them! Finally, nobody nailed the bonus question by predicting Haas to secure the highest finishing position outside of the "top five" teams. Alex Albon's 11th place was the highest out of the team's who saw any backing so @Tommy, @nudge and @OrangeKhrush collect an extra 2 points here for the best wrong answer. Here's what it does for the early standings: A middling week for @Tommy sees his lead slashed to 1 point as Saudi's 20-pointers @RandoEFC, @The Palace Fan and @Coma are hot on his heels. There isn't a lot of field spread anywhere at this early stage. This week's top scorers were Mercedes, and its enough to see @The Palace Fan and @MUFC rise to the top of the Constructors standings. A poor start for Ferrari, the lowest scorers in both weeks so far, sees them with work to do to catch up to the close pack of the other four teams.