Forecasting sport: the behaviour and performance of football tipsters

Professional advice is available in several forecasting contexts, such as s hare prices, sales and the weather. English newspaper tipsters offer profes sional advice on the outcomes of English and Scottish football (soccer) mat ches. Such advice could potentially inform selections of betters in fixed o dds or pools betting. This paper investigates the effectiveness of the guid ance given by newspaper tipsters. Employing a sample of three tipsters and 1694 English league games, we find that tipster success rates are higher th an would follow from random forecasting methods. We identify some differenc es between the processes by which actual results and tipster forecasts are determined. Likelihood-ratio tests imply that the tipsters fail adequately to utilise easily obtainable public information on teams' strength. Further tests show that only one of three tipsters appears to make successful use of other unspecified information relevant to game outcomes. A consensus for ecast across the three tipsters appears to outperform any single tipster. ( C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.