Over Christmas I got a chance to watch more football than usual. One innovation I spotted from Sky was how they now present Win Probabilities - powered by Oracle Cloud - as a match progresses. According to official website, these probabilities are calculated “using four years of match data, [and] shows the chance a team will win or draw by simulating the remainder of the match 100,000 times”
I was interested to see how the forecasts matched up with market odds. For the case below - Brentford vs Tottenham, I checked the betting markets the very second the win probabilities were presented by Sky.
There were differences. Controlling for the bookmakers take, there was ~18% chance of Brentford success. The bookies estimated a draw to have a ~55% chance and had a Tottenham win at ~27%.