Pre-season football matches: food for thought? 1xbet app betting online

Whether it is worth drawing any conclusions about the form of teams based on pre-season football matches, and whether their results are food for thought when predicting the opening games of the calendar is the topic of our article today.

In recent years how shown 1xbet-app, football clubs, including leading ones, have been holding many pre-season matches – both in the format of friendly matches and in the framework of all kinds of tournaments, sometimes with a very solid prize fund. Bettors quite rightly ask themselves what is more important in such games – the desire to win or just to earn some money? Accordingly, the next question suggests itself: how seriously should we take the results of these matches, and should they be taken into account when placing bets on official matches of the new season?

Many bettors underestimate the importance of the "pre-season", and they have their own, quite reasonable reasons for this. It is obvious that many football clubs sometimes travel to distant corners of our planet more for advertising and commercial purposes, and the main thing in such tours is to attract the attention of new fans. It is also worth remembering that it is unlikely that the football players themselves will go to tough clashes and roll in such matches, risking getting an injury that will force them to miss the beginning of the season.

On the other hand, there are certain grounds to believe that the good form of players in pre-season matches directly affects their fitness at least at the start of the season. In turn, experts have long noted that based on the results of the first six official matches, one can judge how a particular team will perform throughout the calendar cycle.

Positive impact of the pre-season

The following information is interesting. Before the start of the 2015/16 season, Leicester City had four wins and one draw in five friendly matches, while the previous season's English champion Chelsea failed to win any of their four friendly matches. We remember the results of that season well - modest Leicester won gold medals for the first time in its history, while the "aristocrats" slid to tenth place, and even experienced a change of head coach on the eve of Christmas. But are all these events interconnected?

It is worth remembering that Leicester played mostly against minor teams, while Jose Mourinho's men faced such giants as Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona (as part of a pre-season tournament called the International Champions Cup). Incidentally, when Leicester played in this tournament a year later against the same PSG and Barça, they lost to both superclubs: as a result, their results in the 2016/17 season were no longer comparable to the champions (12th place).

The conclusion is obvious: confident play in pre-season matches against opponents of any level, and especially big clubs, indicates the good form of the team as a whole and the majority of its players, and it is unlikely that this team will fail the start of the season (with all the consequences that entails).

Information from preseason matches

This study was conducted about three years ago, so the figures and statistics we present relate to that period, but do not think that the information is outdated – the same trends can be seen in subsequent seasons. So, in 2016/17, nine teams in the English Premier League (EPL) scored more points than in the previous season. At the same time, seven of them had a much better pre-season in the summer of 2016 than the year before.

In particular, Crystal Palace, which has not been a star for many years, was among the middle-of-the-packers in the 2016/17 season, but it started off brilliantly, occupying seventh place after six opening matches (1.67 points on average per game against 1.11 the season before). This is not surprising: in eight pre-season matches, the club won five times and suffered only one defeat.

But let's throw in a fly in the ointment. That same summer of 2016, another underdog, Sunderland, also had a more than successful pre-season (four wins and two draws in friendly matches), but after six opening games of the calendar, they were able to score only one point, and at the end of the season, having taken the last place, they were relegated to the Championship.

Conclusions

The examples we have given show that the proponents of the concept of using the results of the pre-season when forecasting the opening games of the calendar have arguments "for", but no fewer arguments "against". Indeed, there are more indirect factors influencing the results of teams in pre-season matches than in official ones - here is a possible desire to "save the legs", and the long distance of flights, and acclimatization, and the testing of new football players, and completely different levels of opponents.

Therefore, our advice is not to rely entirely on the results of friendly matches before the start of the season, but you should still take a closer look at them: this information will certainly not be useless.