Welcome to another article about football betting stats. In a previous article we spoke about the importance of paying close attention to head to head records between teams. Read on to find out about more important football statistics you need to keep a close eye on to make better betting decisions.

In our first article we showed that bookmakers pay close attention to head to head records (Football Betting Stats, Part I ), for example when Atletico Madrid visit Barcelona for a La Liga match, the Catalans have pretty much always been the favourite. They’ve played 82 times over the years, winning 50, drawing 19 and losing just 13 times. Today we want to speak about Recent Form.

Like in all sports current form counts for so much. Remember Leicester City’s title winning league season?The bookies quickly realised something was happening at Leicester and their odds coming into matches crashed compared to the previous season. They did however lose out big time to anyone who took a season-long bet of the Foxes landing the title and well done to anyone who stuck with it and pocketed £500,000 from a £100 bet.

Much like in other sports, winning becomes a habit. Teams playing with confidence seem to stand taller, win the ball in 50/50 tackles and when previously a shot would whizz high above the bar now shots are nestle in the top corner. Football players playing with confidence are a different animal to those feeling sorry for themselves, gone are the days when ‘football men’ scoffed at the idea of having a sports psychologist on the backroom staff. Coaches and managers quickly saw that the teams who were employing such psychologists were reaping rewards and now you’d be hard pressed to find a top club without a player psychologist. Unlike your typical psychologist, a sports psychologist is on hand to both help players deal with personal problems and problems regarding how they’re playing as well.

Let’s have a look at a couple of upcoming matches on August 15th from the Bet Dynamo Insights page (Insights), and talk more about recent form:

On first glance these MLS games don’t exactly stand out for goal betting or betting on corners. There’s potential for laying the 0-0 halftime score though with both games involving teams that have seen 83% and 88% respectively of their matches not getting to halftime scoreless. We want to look at recent form though.

LA Galaxy are currently 1.92 to win their match, the draw is 3.74, Dallas to win is 3.61. Galaxy’s recent home form has been nothing short of mighty: nine wins from their 15 previous home matches, drawing one (winning it on penalties) and losing the other five.

Now we see a totally different picture, Galaxy have only won one of their previous five matches in normal time, needing penalties to beat Club Tijuana in the League Cup. Would you take the same odds of 1.92 now?

Well, you could because if you look at what we spoke about in a previous article about Head to Head stats (Football Betting Stats, Part I ), then we can see that in previous top tier meetings between the two teams, Galaxy certainly hold the upper hand, having played 38 times, winning 26, drawing 5 and losing 7.

In the Portland Timbers vs Chicago Fire match the story is a bit different. The Timbers are priced at 1.75 to win, the Draw is 3.88, Chicago Fire are 4.38.

The Timbers are on a great run of form and thanks to winning 7/10 previous MLS matches we can see why they’re priced as odds on favourites here. When you add in the fact that they’ve never lost at home to Chicago Fire then this looks more like the bet we should be looking at.

Does it represent value though? Read more about value betting here. (What is Value Betting? )

Images of courtesy flashscore and world betting.