In August, Manchester City and Tottenham were drawing 2-2 in the closing stages of a game at the Etihad stadium when City striker Gabriel Jesus snatched what he thought was a late winner.
But, after consulting VAR, the controversial video refereeing technology newly implemented for the 2019/20 Premier League, the goal was disallowed. Slow motion replays showed City’s Aymeric Laporte handling the ball. City and their manager Pep Guardiola waved goodbye to three points and, as the full-time whistle blew, their Premier League top spot.
VAR is the most significant rule change to the modern game since the backpass regulation of 1992. As well as potentially levelling the playing field for punters, it’s also changing the game for the football gambling industry, which generates around £1.4 billion a year in the UK.
After the goal was disallowed, fans were confused and players were livid, but the decision also proved costly for betting companies. “I think I took that one worse than Pep Guardiola,” says Joe Petyt, head of in play football at Sky Betting and Gaming. “That last minute ‘goal’ against Tottenham was a very costly one for us.” After Jesus put the ball in, SkyBet’s trading models updated their odds to reflect the fact that City were almost certain to win. Thousands of customers took the opportunity to ‘cash out’ their bets early, claiming a percentage of the total payout before the end of the game.
In the case of Manchester City vs Tottenham, in the minutes between the goal being scored and disallowed, many betting companies paid out as if Man City had certainly won. When it was ruled they hadn’t, it was too late. “Customers were so ecstatic when the goal was chalked off,” remembers Petyt. In light of this, SkyBet has taken a “defensive stance” on VAR, suspending in-game betting until a decision is made.
Football betting companies spend many of their millions implementing odd predicting algorithms, but these sophisticated systems are being hindered by VAR. “At a racecourse the bookmakers can see the finish line, so when they set their odds they can form a judgement on who could win a photo finish,” says professor David Forrest, economist and government advisor on gambling policy. “In a football match, bookmaker odds are set by an algorithm that hasn't seen a VAR incident, so the gambler immediately has an advantage; they can form a decision simply by reviewing it on TV.”
VAR also disrupts the chain of information being fed from pitch to punter. To determine odds during a match, scouts feed real-time data from inside the football stadium to an operator which interprets the message code. As the game progresses, this data influences forecasting models which adapt the odds of the final outcome.
This was a relatively straightforward process. Scouts had an unobscured view of everything happening on the pitch and, perhaps most importantly, in-game decisions were final. This season, VAR rulings are made by referees glued to remote TV screens, many of them found at the Stockley Park VAR HQ, found near Heathrow.
These decisions demand precious minutes – during the 2019 Women’s World Cup the average time for a VAR break was one minute 33 seconds. “Speed and accuracy are key elements to making [football betting] an enjoyable product,” says Petyt. “VAR challenges both of these and has given operators a real problem to overcome.”
Fans of other sports are used to video technology. In 2001, the Hawk-Eye vision processing technology was implemented to track balls with millimetre accuracy, and since then has been adopted in tennis, Gaelic football and badminton. But unlike cricket, where there is a natural break between balls, football is a much more fluid game, one that doesn't lend itself well to interrupted play. For betting companies, this works in their favour – but VAR could change that.
“Breaks in play are a sure fire way of driving customers away,” says Forrest. He explains that if a game is interrupted punters are more likely to lose interest, believing this to be a reason why betting companies first saw VAR as a “commercial threat.”
“People often find it difficult to withdraw from gambling situations,” continues Forrest. “But VAR is an enforced break. If you have to wait until a VAR decision is finished, you might just not bother anymore.”
For an industry built on data, further challenge comes in the fact that there simply isn’t much available for VAR. Jeevan Jeyaratnam, senior odds compiler for Abelson Odds, tentatively estimates that an adequate VAR sample size may take up to five years to build, but that “it's going to take time to see if VAR statistically changes betting markets.”
“There could be an increase or decrease in penalties, and if you have an allotted penalty taker the chances of them scoring needs to be adjusted,” Jeyaratnam says, but the betting companies are already three steps ahead. “Everyone was quick to spot that penalty takers are likely to get more scoring opportunities, so their prices are now considerably lower than last season,” tells Petyt. “There are certainly angles out there for a customer to tap into, the key is finding them before the bookmakers spot them.”
One of those customers searching for secret answers is Miguel Kellino, the Football Manager-inspired pseudonym of a Celtic supporter and gambler with a VAR-induced headache. “It’s killing my emotions,” he says. “I’ll think I’ve won, then a few minutes later the goal is removed. Goals keep getting chopped off and I’m losing my bets.”
He says this “hasn’t changed” how he bets but it “removes the fun” from it. This could be a good thing. Between October 2017 and September 2018, says the latest Gambling Commission report, the UK gambling industry grossed £14.5bn, but 2017 was also a record year for the number of people hospitalised because of pathological gambling addiction, and as BBC News reports, “the number of gamblers complaining about British betting firms has risen almost 5,000 per cent in the past five years”.
VAR remains experimental for betting companies and customers alike, but the fundamental rule applies – while the house may not always win, it mostly does. “If pro-punters establish analytical tools that beat what the operators have then perhaps there’s an edge there,” Jeyaratnam says. “But the way the industry works, anyone who's beating the mainstream sites will be closed down anyway.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
