Funny you should mention betting

If only xG related stuff could make people s**tloads. They even measured your criticism when a shot isn’t taken.

By the late Noughties, both companies were crunching the odds for dozens and dozens of leagues. The market partially wised up to their methods but Bloom and Benham stayed a few steps ahead by coming up with a way to measure the quality of a team’s chances, and chances conceded.

Expected goals (xG), the automated evaluation of shot quality, had not yet been invented, so the two companies did this manually. They hired an army of watchers who would keep track of a team’s chance creations, distinguishing between big chances, chances, half-chances and deliveries.

“It’s a very expensive and labour-intensive way of codifying a team’s performance levels ,but it’s still better than xG now because trained people see the game and can take into account situations that don’t result in a shot, which xG is blind to,” says the industry insider. (The expected goal value of a shot that does not happen is always zero.)

At Starlizard, bet units were called “stars”. At Smartodds, “moons”. By this stage, the average bet placed by the syndicates was about £500,000 ($670,000). During a World Cup, when liquidity was near-endless thanks to the participation of “the mug market” — big-time gamblers who trusted their instinct rather than the numbers — up to £5 million ($6.7 million) might be staked on a single game.

Posted By: SCC 28 on January 15th 2026 at 16:00:07

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