World Cup 2014: Ratings can help the armchair fan to a profit this summer

Eto'o may be a class player, but the ratings suggest Cameroon will struggle, as will the other African representatives

A self-confessed know-nothing when it comes to the beautiful game, Jack Houghton is planning to demonstrate that, provided you use the right methods, a lack of knowledge can bring big profits, just as it did at the last World Cup...

Einstein apparently once said, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot." He was probably talking about nuclear weapons, or some such weighty thing, but I like to think that he might have had half his mind on punting, because over the last 15 years of being involved with the betting industry, I've known a lot of very knowledgeable gamblers who have consistently and repeatedly lost oodles of money. Especially on football.

Although I don't have any conclusive explanation as to why football is particularly fertile ground for money fritterers, my theory is that, perhaps more than any other sport, it attracts punters who are also fans, and fandom means having too much information and not knowing how to process it all properly.

Take the performance of African teams in the last World Cup. Fans had every reason to believe they would do well: Pele had predicted that an African team would soon win football's biggest prize; they had "home" advantage (because the continent of Africa is obviously so homogenous); so many African players were now playing in the top European leagues; and two decades previously African teams had enjoyed some World Cup success.

Yet, prior to the last World Cup, and in opposition to what most pundits were saying, I wrote, "I'm hoping to benefit from a trend I've noticed developing over the last few years... I'm certain that markets are consistently overvaluing the chance of African teams in international matches."

By opposing every African team in South Africa four years' ago, I made a tidy profit: of six teams from the continent who competed, playing 20 games, they managed only four wins, with one of those coming in extra time, meaning that I collected on 17 of those bets.

And yet, I know very little about football. I'm not a fan. I know a lot less than Pele. I couldn't name more than a few players who have featured prominently in the Premier League season just gone, I couldn't tell you the latest transfer news, and I have absolutely no view on the merits and demerits of the playing style of any national football team.

What I can do is use ratings to more accurately assess the correct odds for any team in an international match, and over the course of this World Cup I plan to demonstrate that, by using ratings, someone like me, who neither knows too little or too much, can use ratings to profit.

Ratings come in many different forms - some better, some worse and some terrible - and in the next few weeks I'll look at some of the approaches that can be taken to create reliable ratings, but in the meantime I hope to show that, with a little care, ratings can be used by the armchair fan to great effect: international football is an extremely profitable area in which to bet, provided you have some emotionally unencumbered ratings on which to rely.

To introduce the topic of football ratings, it's worth looking at the freely-available and widely-publicised FIFA/Coca-Cola World Rankings. The methodology by which the ratings are created is imperfect, leading to some questionable rankings, such as when Brazil dropped down to 22nd in the world in 2013, as a result of only playing friendlies, when all the other teams in the top flight were busy playing rating-enhancing World Cup qualifying games. However, the odd anomaly aside, they provide an interesting starting point for reappraising the chances of African teams four years on from South Africa.

On Betfair, you can currently get 1.192/11 on any African team reaching the knockout stages of the tournament. Yet, in those FIFA rankings, the best African team, Ivory Coast, come in at a lowly 21. And, looking at every group, of the five African representatives, three of them are worst-rated in their group, with two (Algeria and Ivory Coast) being third-best.

Those rankings can be criticised, but they tally reasonably accurately with my own (I rate Nigeria as having a slightly better chance; Algeria as having a slightly worse), so would you want to be taking such short odds about African teams progressing?

This might be the first time that anyone has bookended an article with quotations from Einstein and Samuel Eto'o, but here goes: "African teams are likely going to do well. In all major European championships there are always African players that play major roles. Africa will have its say in Brazil."

Perhaps, but the continent might not say very much.