RandoEFC

A least you weren't alone tonight . Thought evens was nice odds for this set of outcomes.

Just trying to choose winners that are pretty much 'nailed on' where the price for -1.0 is around 1.50 or better. Decent run of slow and steady profit at the moment but the problem with that strategy is a single loss can undo 2-3 "half wins".

Braga 3-1 Cherno More 2-1 Profit of £5.25

It is for Man Utd surely? They've been spanking away £70-80m on players every window and paying £300k a week to players who warm their bench or even don't play. If FFP has shown us one thing, it's that the already rich clubs can continue to spend whatever the fuck they want no matter how much of it they waste, and anyone who wants to progress from the chasing pack either has to make it into the Champions League off their first injection of £250m or end up having to sell off all their assets over the course of several transfer windows to balance the books and then take a 10 point deduction anyway for the privilege .

I only saw parts of the game tonight but Martial, Antony, Rashford must all be infuriating for Man Utd fans. Absolute shite defeatist body language. And that's not to mention Sancho who isn't even turning up at the moment. I think we've all been saying it for years now. Any successful Man Utd manager needs licence to bomb out this entire squad over the course of several seasons, stop signing wannabe galacticos, stop handing out 250k a week contracts until there's a team on the pitch that deserve to be valued that highly. For all the banter about the likes of Maguire and McTominay, those are a couple of the ones who actually have the professionalism and desire to form the core of a team the fans can actually identify with again. If this process means a few years out of the Champions League or even Europe altogether then so be it. It would actually do them good to become a less attractive destination for players because currently they're the place to go for players who want a 5 year contract on Man City wages without ever having to actually produce the Man City standards.

HOLD ON JUST A MOMENT We survive!

Got shafted a bit on this one. Cherno More were 1-0 up, took a late red card and then conceded a penalty in the 95th minute. Doesn't get much worse than that .

My pair for this week. Braga have cleared this line in 5 of their last 6 meetings with Estoril. They've won 9 of their last 12 home league games dating back to last season, 7 of these by 2+ goals. Estoril's 1-0 win at Porto was their first away win in months in the league. Before that they had 1 point in 11 games. Etar are rock bottom of the Bulgarian league with 14 defeats from 18 games. They've lost 8 of their last 10 home games and been beaten by more than one goal in 3 of their last 5. Cherno More are 2nd in the league behind CSKA Sofia and have only lost 1 of their last 9 on the road. I expect this to translate into at least a victory here, hopefully by more than 1.

The one thing Brexit achieved in terms of immigration is that France are now making even less effort to stop people jumping in the small boats to the shores of the UK than they were making when we were still in the EU with them because back then, there was a minimum amount of effort they had to be seen to make. I personally don't think immigration is a problem but those of us that are "left-leaning" and generally feel this way also have to admit that there is such a thing as "too much" immigration. I don't really think we've reached that point but I also won't pretend to know how much is too much. We obviously couldn't cope if a million people were arriving each month, for a silly example. The problem for me is that this debate is never had in good faith. Most of the people who shout the loudest about immigration and how it puts too much of a strain on the NHS or schools have another agenda. Usually they want low taxes either for selfish or ideological reasons. If we can blame immigration rather than a lack of government spending for long waiting lists and overflowing classrooms, then there's less pressure on the government to increase funding in these areas (which is what is actually needed) and therefore less need to raise taxes on the upper-middle class to super rich people. A lot of anti-immigration types like to use "look after our own" as some sort of attack line without acknowledging that if we reduced net migration to the UK to zero overnight, our public services would still be in dire straits and require a lot of investment. You don't really hear much from well-qualified academic types on the drawbacks of immigration or "too much" immigration and if you do, a bit of digging usually reveals that they're on the pay roll of some oddball think tank on Tufton Street who also contributed to Liz Truss' leadership campaign or something. Onto the Tories. They've spent the last few years since Covid on some real hair-brained schemes to be seen to deal with immigration without thinking about the political consequences when they don't actually follow through with some success. That barge thing and the Rwanda scheme have been a total waste of time and were at least partially designed to look cruel or "ruthless" because they think that appeals to their target voters but nobody seems to be buying it anymore. If they had spent that time working towards realistic and viable solutions to decrease net migration even by a little bit, then perhaps the people who, unlike me, think that's important, might have a bit more patience for the Tories now. One last thing and I know you haven't said it but I've always found the British dependence on the made up rule about "refugees are supposed to stay in the first safe country they reach" to be quite hysterical. If this was actually enforced then you'd just see Greece and Turkey being forced to harbour millions of refugees while France, Germany, the UK and the rest of Europe didn't lift a finger. Again, it's really hard to put any intellectual value in the anti-immigration argument when some of its acolytes rely on this as some sort of leg to stand on when it falls apart the second you point out that there is no such rule, and even if there was that would mean that the UK would never have to take any refugees ever unless they were coming from the Republic of Ireland or perhaps Iceland.

What are you laughing at Stan? If there's one thing that everyone can agree on about the Nazis, is that the real problem was how woke they were.

Wouldn't it be novel if the people who have a problem with mass immigration actually paused and realised that 7 years after voting for Brexit and after over a decade of voting for the Tories because they'll be tough on immigration, that net migration has actually increased and that maybe the people who they ignored and wrote off as leftie Nazis or whatever I just read, who told everyone that Brexit wasn't the solution and that however much "Boris" seems like a good lad to go for a pint with (never really got it personally), making him prime minister would only make everyone's lives worse, might actually have had a point? Just a thought.

I've been using what's basically an algorithm myself. I just cycle through the leagues on bet365 starting with he Asian handicap/goal line market because those give a pretty decent idea of how the bookies have priced up a match so you can start identifying which prices don't really match up with how the two teams have been playing. The way the online betting markets automatically adjust their odds to assure that they make a profit when a lot of money goes on a certain selection, the bookies don't really need to be that accurate with their opening prices because they'll just adjust themselves to ensure they profit anyway, so I'm not surprised to hear that they're a bit lazy sometimes. If you can get in there early before masses of other people notice there's some value available in the 24 hours or so before a match, you can get nice prices. Last night I was on Angers who are 2nd in Ligue 2 with the best home record in the league at home to Caen who have 2 points from their last 6 away games or something and are hovering just above the relegation zone. I backed them last weekend at odds of about 2.25 and they were down to 1.70 at one point just before kick off. Angers won 3-0.

Skipped last year's FIFA, bought this and got bored of it in record time. Hopefully I'll remember in future that I once again regret spending £70 on it and don't make the same mistake again.

I don't agree with you on the overspend thing but I have nothing left to add to what I've already said so I won't repeat myself. I haven't mentioned City in either of my replies to you. It is valid for Everton fans to point at them and say "well you better sort them out too". You aren't wrong either that their case is separate. There are many other reasons for our grievance that have nothing to do with City though (again, see the earlier posts). The Everton response wouldn't have been much different if there was no noise around City at all. But, if we're honest, the reason you're bringing City up is a cheap point-scoring attempt and I can't be arsed joining in with that game I'm afraid.

Should have had a full winner here. Zilina played 45 minutes against ten men but only won 1-0. Slovan Bratislava won 2-0 so it's £10 > £16.25.

Yes because there's no way an overspend of ~£20m has gained us a 10 point advantage. If you want to be a part of the vanishingly small minority of people who think 10 points isn't at least questionable then fine, but you can park the nonsense about our fans being wrong to be outraged for our reaction for the reasons I've already explained.

The research for this: Zilina have won their last 3 games against Kosice by more than a goal. They've also won 6 of their 7 home games this season, 4 of those by more than 1 goal. Kosice have lost 9 on the bounce, 7 of which were by more than a goal. Slovan Bratislave have won 6 in a row vs Zemplin with 4 of those being by 2+ goals. They're on a 9 game winning streak in the league with 6 of those wins being by more than a goal. Zemplin have 5 points from 14 games and a goal difference of -20.

If they wanted a competitive Premier League they could just introduce a budget cap, but they don't.

I actually agree with OrangeKhrush to an extent because it has become clear now that the primary function of FFP, intentionally or not, is to keep the big six as the big six. Even if Everton had spent this money well, you'd be on the fringes of the top six at best, even now, and getting a 10 point penalty knocking them back into mid-table anyway. I don't know what will happen with Newcastle. It'll be interesting to see if they can establish themselves and make it a big seven. They have a better chance because they have owners in charge of the club who know how to "know the right people" and "whisper into the right ears" just like Man City's owners. Aston Villa have spent some decent money but they would be in the same boat as Everton if they hadn't brought a £100m player in Jack Grealish through their academy to make their books look miles better and that sort of thing happens once in a generation. Generally, everyone else can forget about it. That brings us to the problem of scrapping FFP. Apparently you have to get 14 out of 20 clubs to vote for a change like this, just as we saw the other day with the rule change about loans from affiliate clubs. The ban didn't go through because only 13 clubs voted in favour of it. There are six clubs in the league who will never, ever vote to get rid of the FFP rules, because they currently ensure that those six clubs are the only ones in the league who can realistically compete at the top of the league. All it then takes is one other club to vote with them. You only need to find one team further down the league who are currently doing pretty well for themselves but don't have that much more money to spend, so wouldn't vote to allow the richer mid-table clubs like Aston Villa, West Ham or Everton (five years ago) to just spend their way past them. These financial rules are here to stay. The whole point is that they don't want anymore Chelseas or Man Citys. The top table is full and they've settled on the group of clubs that are good for the Premier League brand. It's all eyes on Newcastle to see if they can make it seven instead of six.

It's close enough to the deadline now that, realistically, they can't say "we've still got X months/years until we have to call an election so we can turn this around in that time". The polls haven't got any better for them really since they originally nose-dived in the later Boris Johnson days, and some models are even predicting that they could suffer an historic wipeout with Labour getting 400+ seats out of 650 and the Conservatives around 150. The by-election results over the last few months pretty much support what the polls have been saying as well, as far as you can read into by-election results. Therefore their strategy now is damage limitation, we're going to lose but how can we lose with 200+ seats and at least keep Labour below 400, rather than getting wiped out horrifically. As to the specifics of their strategy, I'm no expert on that. They'll presumably be looking at economic forecasts and if those are saying that inflation and interest rates might start looking better in the late Spring, they could see a slight improvement in their polls and approval ratings ahead of an election in the summer, for example. I've also read that there's data showing a winter election could be better/worse for them because certain demographics that might disproportionately vote for certain parties are less likely to actually going out to bother voting when it's dark and freezing. There's a lot to consider but if they no longer see a pathway to turning the polls around before the election becomes compulsory in Winter 2024, and they have reason to believe that a Spring/Summer 2024 election could see them win 200 seats whereas a Winter 2024 election could knock them down to 150, then they'll have it earlier than they "have to". Again, though, I'm not the person to ask about what the exact reasoning is behind why they may think that.

You don't half come out with some shite when it comes to Everton. I've seen probably not far short of a thousand people comment about this penalty including about 100 Reds on social media and those I know in person who aren't shy about sticking the knife in and you still manage to distinguish yourself as the only person who attempts to paint the fans as wrong for protesting. You answer your own question in one sentence. Everton have already spent years protesting this ownership. The bloke is already selling up and he's already got rid of the board who oversaw all of this shitshow. What's the point in still telling him to fuck off now? Plenty of fans have said it's the club's own fault for breaking the rules, which they have. Also "now the Premier League are corrupt". Forgotten have we that you and a slice of your fanbase said stuff like "the integrity of the Premier League is now in serious question" and "this isn't even just about Liverpool, all football fans need to come together against the officiating in this league" because *a single offside decision* went against you? God help us if this were to happen to your lot. Nobody sensible disputes the fact that Everton have technically breached the rules. That's on the club and the ownership who need to do better. But a 10 point penalty is totally disproportionate to the crime in question. If one of your players got sent off for an inoccuous trip in the middle of the field and got sent off for it, you'd blame the referee for dishing out an excessive punishment, not the player for committing a simple foul. If you got caught speeding at 63mph in a 60mph zone and ended up with a 10 year driving ban, you'd be pissed off at the judge who dished that out, even though you shouldn't have been speeding in the first place. If a kid in my class forgets their pen and I put them in after school detentions for two weeks, then I'm the dickhead. Etc. Etc. The punishment here doesn't remotely fit the crime. That's the thrust of the protests. And I really don't think it's that fucking complicated to be honest pal so I hope that clears it up for you.

I'm sure that 10 point slammer they dropped on Everton will prove to everyone though that the Premier League is actually an upstanding institution that doesn't need independent regulation . Also doesn't inspire trust in a government that are supposed to be setting up said regulator that they themselves have already intervened in the affairs of PL club ownership for political reasons.

The talk is that Chelsea paid off a bunch of agent fees and ex-managers using offshore accounts or something so that it didn't show as expenses on their books but as far as I've heard it's all to do with the Abramovich era. The lad on the podcast I listen to who is a reliable "in the know" character also suggested that Richard Masters didn't want Chelsea investigated all this time because they were good for the Premier League brand. How much that is actually true or how much of it was exaggerated due to the emotion of Everton's punishment, I don't know. What I will say is that it would also be total nonsense for Chelsea to take a sporting penalty now for how the club was run by their previous owner. If anyone should be sanctioned for it in retrospect, Abramovich should be. Likewise, it makes no sense for Everton's coaching staff, squad and players to be picking up the pieces for the actions overseen by Moshiri (on his way out), Kenwright (passed away) and the rest of their board (all no longer at the club). I get that investigations take time and this might not be a realistic shout but if a club has breached the rules, get it sorted at the time, and if you can't then don't punish the footballing side of the club if pretty much all of the people involved in the breach aren't even there anymore? I did at least read that if Moshiri sells the club to 777 and one of these other clubs manages to sue successfully for damages then he would have to foot the bill for it, not the club. Not sure how accurate that is though.