What Happens When The Overwhelming Favorite Is Down At Half-Time?

This is an observation I had a while back but had no data to test it out. What happens when the overwhelming favorite like Man City or Man United etc. find themselves either down or tied at half time?The in-game odds would have moved in your favor and if you think about it, you're better off betting during half-time than accepting crappy odds before the start of the match.

Anyway, thanks to football-data.co.uk, we can test this out somewhat.

Data from the Premiership

For our purposes, let's define an odds on favorite being when the bookies have them on odds to win at less than 1.5. The data for this post is based on the first half of 2017/2018 Premiership season

Odds on favorite are the home team

There were 29 instances where the overwhelming favorites were at home and found themselves either tied or down at half time. In the end, they won 16 of these matches, or 55%.

What about only the matches where the underdog is up by one goal at half time? There were only five times this happened in the first half of the season. In 3 instances (60%), the favorite came back to beat the underdog in the second half, while the other 2 ended as draws.

What about when the overwhelming favorite is playing Away?

There were 9 times this happened in the first half of the season, and in 5 out of 9 instances (55%), the favorite rallied to win the match.

The takeaway

There appears to be a 55% chance that an overwhelming favorite will prevail in the end. If you get an opportunity where the odds of the favorite has improved to greater than 1.82, betting on them would have a positive E(X) based on the first half of the premiership season.

Just some interesting statistics that i thought was worth keeping in mind.