Underdogs have a history of having their day at finals

HERE we go. A first World Cup held in the northern Hemphishere winter, shoehorned into the middle of the domestic season, in which the majority of nations will have played no warm-up matches.

Pundits will no doubt tell us to ‘expect the unexpected’ and the good news for those who like their tournament football laced with an air of unpredictability is that the World Cup usually delivers on that front, regardless of what season it is being played in.

There are no such things as foolproof betting systems, but hopefully some of the trends highlighted in this piece will be of use to World Cup bettors, with the action set to comes thick and fast in Qatar over the next few weeks, with four games per day for the majority of the group stage.

The prices mentioned in this section refer to the 90-minute odds printed in the Racing Post on the day of each match for all group-stage matches at the last three World Cup finals (2010, 2014 and 2018).

That encompasses 144 matches in total and, while the underdog has won only 35 of those games (24 per cent), backing them to a level stake would have returned a profit of £31.58.

We aren’t dealing with a massive sample size but, as the first table below shows, underdogs have returned a profit in each of the last three World Cup group stages, winning a consistent 12, 11 and 12 games on each occasion.

If we then divide the sample by matchday we can see that the win percentage of the underdog rises slightly in the final round of games to 27 per cent, and that is also the matchday with the highest level-stakes profit (LSP).

Those figures are boosted by Germany’s shock defeat to 17-1 South Korea, who stunned the reigning champions in 2018 with two stoppage-time strikes as the