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Betting Data Firm Caerus Transfers Its Model to Soccer Clubs

brendan coffey
·4 min read

Michael Adams spent more than a decade developing data-modeling methods for sports books, including Bet365 and FanDuel, to hedge risk on soccer bets. Now he bets his rural-England-based firm Caerus Risk can offer teams data analytics to optimize on-field performance and maximize player transfers. He hopes his services can build up a team’s analytics smarts to rival that of Brighton and Brentford, two pint-sized clubs that have innovated use of data to cement themselves in the English Premier League.

“The core competency of our business is to predict the outcome of soccer games and create odds around the various markets that can be derived from those predictions and supply them to bookmakers,” Adams said on a phone call. “Over the past 12 months we identified—with the successes of Brighton, Brentford and their ownership—the applications of betting models to inform football club decision-making, to inform transfer strategies and increase likely success rates.”

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Since founding Caerus about four years ago, Adams and co-founder Harsha Srinivas have built systems to collect as much granular event data as they can on all the clubs of the top 100 soccer leagues worldwide. That information—from wind conditions to team travel distances to in-game information around player performance—allows the firm to provide superior odds insight for its clients.

Right now, Caerus supplies betting data for sports books including Pinnacle, BetVictor and Playbook Engineering. Its clients did $56 million in business on its odds last year. Adams says its clients have done especially well on its prediction for Club Bruges this year: Caerus had it as one of the two strongest teams in the Belgian Jupiler pro soccer league before the season, while other oddsmakers had them as dark horses, in part due to ignorance of some of the league’s quirks, Adams said.

Caerus has found that the same information it uses to form betting odds allows it to effectively compare leagues, and therefore teams worldwide. For example, LAFC, MLS’ most valuable team, probably would finish mid-table in the second division English league, the Championship, on par with Stoke City. Sticking with the Championship, Adams says that while Leicester City and Ipswich Town finished high enough to earn automatic promotion to the Premier League, Caerus data suggests Leeds United, which finished third and plays for promotion a week from Sunday, is the only Championship club that wouldn’t initially be among the Premier League’s three weakest next season.

Being able to compare teams means being able to project player performance, too.

“Clubs, when they’re doing interleague transfers like from Croatia to Germany or Ecuador to Peru, are using historic transfers that have gone the same route.” Adams said. “We can actually objectively quantify, to a more accurate level, the likely success. And this is what Brighton and Brentford have been doing for the last few years. And you can see the success and their results.”

Interestingly, Brighton’s and Brentford’s success also evolved out of exposure to the power of data analytics in sports betting. Brighton owner Tony Bloom made his fortune as a bookmaker and now uses in-house data to optimize the club’s player transfers—Brighton is believed to the only EPL club that has net-earned money on its transfers.

Brentford was in the third level of English football when it was taken over in 2012 by Matthew Benham, founder of SmartOdds, which provides statistical research for sports gamblers. The club was a feel-good story reaching England’s top league in 2022 but was widely expected to drop down quickly. Instead the club finished in the top 10 last season and is 13 points clear of relegation this year, relying on data from SmartOdds to inform its decisions. While Caerus doesn’t work with either club, former employees of SmartOdds are Caerus consultants.

So far, real-world success of Caerus’ transfer idea is to be determined. Adams just signed the first club that seeks to use its data for the upcoming transfer window—an Italian Serie B team that has asked not to be identified. But the partnership is already showing signs of what Caerus thinks its analytics can contribute to global soccer: The coaching staff is using Caerus’ ratings of attack and defense actions of the team to help focus player training, while ownership will be using Caerus’ projected team finish in the table as a benchmark to judge the effectiveness of the coaching staff.

“The next stage of this data evolution is the understanding of optimal decision-making through all the data that’s available,” Adams said. “When you look at the success of Brentford and Brighton and, if we project forward five years, they won’t be the minority like they are now. There will be a much, much broader implementation of this kind of decision-making.”

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