Lower League EFL Forecasts, February 5–6 2021

Football continues, and so there are games to predict. We can use our gut feeling, our intuition, we can rely on betting odds, and we can put together statistical methods to construct forecasts.

We’ve prepared some of the latter, and included average betting odds too (from Oddsportal), in the tables presented here for the English Football League’s League One and League Two. The acronyms are from Reuters for teams (look here if you’re confused), the expected goals produced by our model (it models the number of goals scored by each team hence produces a prediction for that), followed by outcome probabilities, score picks, the probabilities of the nine most common scorelines, and the bookmaker odds.

In League One, Lincoln already beat Gillingham last night 3–0, but other than that, the games have yet to occur. Here are our predictions:

In League Two, Walsall is the only clear away banker, with the rest of the matches either looking very close, or looking like home wins (e.g. Newport at home against Grimsby). Here are our predictions: