By Tony Attwood
Let me start by admitting that no one – not even the Untold Arsenal team – manages to call every game correctly in advance. But we do like to think we do a bit better than most, largely because we use the same system over and over, and it seems to work for us.
Indeed, if you were following us for the recent friendly against Milan, you’ll know that when it comes to crowing about our own abilities we are up there with the best of them. Because that time, as with some (but not all!) other games, we not only got the result right we also got the score right.
If you want to give it a try you can use Mobile Betting on Arsenal. But don’t forget, bet smart, only bet what you can afford, and as we all know being football fans, expect the unexpected.
So how do we do it?
Obviously, there are two ways of predicting results: pure emotion (as in “this one has draw written all over it” as they say on the radio) and statistics. We are very firmly in the stats department. Not in any way guaranteed, but better than emotion.
So let’s imagine Arsenal are about to play Brighton at Brighton’s stadium. What we do is build a simple table showing Brighton’s results this season at home, and Arsenal’s results this season away. It would look something like this
| Pos | Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
| 11 | Brighton and Hove home games | 7 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 11 | 6 | 5 | 11 |
| 1 | Arsenal away games | 8 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 14 | 4 | 10 | 19 |
That’s our starting point and clearly it shows Arsenal are better away from home than Brighton are at home.
But it also shows that Arsenal have played one more game away than Brighton have at home, and it can be worth making sure you compare like with like, by using “points per game” (PPG) as well as goals for and goals against per game.
| Pos | Team | F/PG | A/PG | PPG |
| 11 | Brighton and Hove Albion home | 1.57 | 0.86 | 1.57 |
| 1 | Arsenal away | 1.75 | 0.50 | 2.38 |
So what that tells us is that Arsenal score slightly more and concede slightly fewer per game when we compare Brighton at home with Arsenal away.
Comparing the two clubs we find that in three games out of the five Arsenal have scored one. In three games out of the five Brighton have scored zero or one.
Pull that together and what you get is a strong suspicion that either it will be a no-score or 1-1 draw, or on the other hand a 0-1 win to Arsenal. OK that is not telling you for sure what the result is going to be, but we’ve narrowed it down to the most likely results.
If you really want to go further you can then look at recent matches for each of these clubs and others in the same position.
Brighton have beaten Chelsea and Manchester United this season, but then of the big seven clubs those are the two showing the least amount of consistency, so I would suspect that sort of result is unlikely to be replicated. An away win it looks like.
But here’s the thing: this sort of system never gives you 100% accurate prediction, it is simply a way of narrowing the options down by looking at the facts concerning each club rather than working entirely on emotion.
And to be absolutely clear, I am not guaranteeing anything this week, next week, or any other week, this is just how Untold works out its predictions.
Better than guessing.