So, I'm finally writing the bloody blog

Right. I've finally done it. I'm writing the blog.

It's Sunday morning, the house is empty, I've got my feet up under the kitchen table, I'm wearing my Bristol City shirt, drinking tea out of my "Mr Blue Sky" mug and listening to ELO (My favourite band).

The family are out the house, which means I've got a rare bit of peace and quiet. No one asking me what's for lunch. No one asking where they've left something that is exactly where they left it. No cleaning-related arguments.

Just me, the laptop and a cup of tea that's already gone slightly cold because I've been staring at the screen trying to work out how the hell you start a blog.

I've been threatening to do this for years. Every now and again I'd say to somebody, "I should write all this stuff down." Then I'd not write it down. Then I'd say it again. Then I'd watch another football match and spend two hours talking to myself about why a manager had made a completely ridiculous substitution.

So eventually I thought, sod it. I'll write it down. At least now I have an outlet to talk about football, so I can stop annoying people I know who don't care.

I've got a bit of a football problem

I've always been like this. I don't just watch football. I watch football. There's a difference.

I'll watch a match and end up wondering why a team that looked brilliant for half an hour has suddenly decided to defend like they've only just met. I'll notice a midfielder dropping into a different position. I'll start thinking about whether a team's recent results actually tell us anything. I'll wonder whether a striker's scoring run is sustainable.

And I'll probably have an opinion on it. Usually several.

This isn't always appreciated by the people around me. My wife has heard me explain the same tactical point approximately 400 times. My children have developed the very sensible habit of leaving the room when I start saying, "The problem is..." They know what's coming next. A ten-minute lecture.

So this blog is partly for me.

It's somewhere to put all the football that's rattling around inside my head. I've spent years talking about this stuff with mates, family and anyone else who made the mistake of asking me what I thought about a match. Now I've got somewhere to put it.

You can read it if you want. You can ignore it if you don't. That's the beauty of the internet.

And yes, I'm a Bristol City man

I should probably get that out of the way early. I'm a Bristol City supporter. Born and bred around Bristol, and I've been through all the usual emotions that come with supporting a football club. Hope. Excitement. Delusion. Disappointment. More hope. More disappointment. And the occasional glorious afternoon where you remember why you bother with any of it.

Being a football supporter teaches you patience. Or at least it teaches you how to complain about not having enough patience.

I've had the usual experience of going into a season convinced that this might finally be the year. Then reality arrives. Usually fairly quickly.

But I wouldn't swap it.

That's the thing about supporting a club. You can criticise them all you like. You can spend ninety minutes telling the television that the manager hasn't got a clue. You can leave the ground wondering why you've spent your Saturday doing this to yourself. Then the next week comes around and you're there again.

Because that's what football does. It gets under your skin. And Bristol City has been under mine for a very long time.

My dad started it

That's where most of this comes from. My dad got me into football. I don't remember a single moment when I suddenly decided I was going to become obsessed with it. It was just always there.

Matches. Football conversations. Going to games. Watching games on television. Listening to people argue about players and managers as though they'd personally spent the week sitting in the training ground.

And then, as I got older, I started getting interested in the betting side of things too. At first it was pretty basic. A few quid on a match. A weekend accumulator. The occasional bet that looked absolutely brilliant when I put it on. And considerably less brilliant ninety minutes later.

I've had enough of those to fill a book.

I've made some terrible bets

I think it's important that I say this now. I'm not going to sit here pretending I've spent decades winning every bet I put on. I haven't.

I've made stupid bets. I've backed teams because I like them. I've backed teams because I don't like the other team. I've convinced myself that something was "obvious" when It wasn't.

I've looked at a price and thought, "That's free money." It wasn't. I've put together accumulators that needed about six things to go right and somehow convinced myself they were a sensible idea. They weren't.

And I've had plenty of weekends where I've watched five selections win and one completely ruin everything. Usually the one I described beforehand as the banker. Football has a very good sense of humour.

The older I've got, though, the more interested I've become in understanding why I'm betting something. Not just whether I think it'll win.

• Why do I think it'll win?
• Why is the price what it is?
• What does the underlying performance actually look like?
• Are the statistics telling me something useful?
• Is the recent form meaningful?
• Are injuries going to change things?

And perhaps most importantly: is the price good enough? That's a much more interesting question than simply asking who's going to win.

That's where the obsession really started

I became increasingly interested in the idea of value. You can correctly predict the result of a football match and still make a terrible bet. That's something that took me a while to properly understand.

If Manchester City are playing somebody and they're 1/10 to win, telling me Manchester City are probably going to win isn't exactly revolutionary. Of course they probably are. The question is whether the price makes sense.

That's what interests me. Trying to work out where the market might have got something slightly wrong. Trying to work out whether the odds reflect what I think the chances actually are. And accepting that sometimes I'll get it wrong. Because I will. Everybody does.

Football doesn't care how much research you've done. You can spend three hours studying form, injuries, statistics, tactics and everything else, and then a centre-back can score an own goal in the fourth minute. What are you going to do? Write to the FA?

Football is football. That's why I don't believe anybody who tells you they've found a way of making it predictable. They haven't.

Which brings me neatly to tipsters

There are an awful lot of football tipsters around. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are somewhere in between. And some seem to live in a completely different version of football to the rest of us.

You know the sort of thing. "LOCK OF THE WEEK." "STONE COLD BANKER." "THIS ONE CANNOT LOSE."

Whenever somebody tells me a football bet cannot lose, I become fairly confident that it can. Football is too unpredictable. That's one of the things I love about it. But it also means you need to be a bit careful about who you listen to.

I've seen plenty of tipsters who seem to have an incredible record when you look at the winning bets they've chosen to show you. Then you start asking slightly awkward questions.

• How many bets have they actually made?
• Where are the losers?
• What prices were they backing?
• How are the results recorded?
• What happens when things go wrong?

Those are the questions I'm interested in. Not because I think everybody is trying to pull a fast one. I don't. But because if someone is giving you advice about where to put your money, I think it's perfectly reasonable to understand how they're making their money too.

"Some tipsters seem to live in a completely different version of football to the rest of us."

Which is one reason I'm doing this for free

I don't particularly fancy charging people for my opinions. Maybe I'm making a terrible decision. Time will tell.

But I like football. I like analysing matches. I like looking at the numbers. I like finding something that I think the market has overlooked. And I like talking about it.

So I thought I'd give the tips away.

That's really it. There isn't some grand master plan behind it. I'm not sitting in a dark room with six monitors and a complicated computer model telling me that Tuesday night's third division match has a 73.4% chance of producing exactly three goals. I'm sitting at my kitchen table just writing.

I watch a lot of football. I read a lot about football. I think about football far more than is probably healthy. And I've got opinions. So I'll share them.

You can agree with me. You can disagree with me. You can tell me I'm talking rubbish. Although if you do that, I'd prefer you to explain why. I enjoy a good football argument.

I'm not here to recommend bookmakers either

This is something else you'll notice around here. I'm not interested in telling you which bookmaker you should use. There are plenty of websites doing that already. And there are various commercial arrangements behind a lot of that stuff. That's just the reality of the industry.

I've worked in sales and account management for years, so I'm probably more interested than most in asking a fairly simple question: who benefits?

If somebody recommends something to me, I want to know whether they're recommending it because they genuinely think it's good or because there's something in it for them. That's not an accusation. It's just common sense. If somebody makes money when I sign up to something, I'd like to know that before I take their recommendation too seriously.

I'll talk much more about that in this blog because I think it's an area where punters could do with a bit more transparency. But I'm not going to turn every article into a rant about it. There are only so many times you can shout "AFFILIATE COMMISSION!" before people stop reading. And I've got football to talk about.

What I actually want to write about

This is the bit I'm most looking forward to. I want to write about football. Properly.

I'll talk about betting markets and explain them without making them sound like an advanced mathematics qualification. I'll write about value. I'll look at statistics. I'll talk about form, injuries, tactics, home advantage and all the other things that can influence a match. I'll explain things that I wish someone had explained to me years ago.

I'll also write about the psychology of betting. Why we chase losses. Why we become attached to certain teams. Why a winning bet can still be a bad bet. Why accumulators are so bloody tempting. And why a footballer can spend ninety minutes doing absolutely nothing and then score in the 94th minute just to ruin your evening.

Some of the stuff will be useful. Some of it will probably just be me having a moan. I'm particularly looking forward to the latter.

I'm not going to pretend I know everything

Because I don't. I'll get things wrong. I'll make bad calls. I'll occasionally watch a match and realise afterwards that I completely misunderstood what was going on. That's football.

The important thing, as far as I'm concerned, is being honest about it. If I tip something and it loses, it loses. I'm not going to pretend I never mentioned it. I'm not going to quietly remove it. I'm not going to find three other winners to distract everybody from it.

A losing bet is part of betting. If you're going to talk about football tips, you need to be comfortable admitting when you're wrong. Otherwise you're just selling a fantasy. And I'm not interested in doing that.

Outside football, I'm actually fairly normal

Well, mostly. I've got a family. I've got a job history that has involved considerably more spreadsheets and meetings than I'd like to admit. I play golf badly. I cook. I like a good curry. I like getting out for a walk. And I listen to an absolutely ridiculous amount of music.

ELO is probably my favourite. The Beatles are right up there too. I'll happily have music playing while I'm watching football, which my family thinks is slightly strange. They're wrong. I can concentrate on two things at once.

Although I will admit that when there's a penalty, the music gets turned down. I'm not a monster.

So, that's what this is

I suppose I should probably explain the name. Daily Football Tips. It's fairly straightforward. I'll be putting football tips together regularly, but the tips aren't really the reason I've started writing. The football is. The tips are just one part of it.

I want somewhere to talk about the things I've spent years thinking about. Somewhere to explain what I see when I'm watching a match. Somewhere to talk about the betting side of football without pretending that there's a magic formula. And somewhere to give people a few free tips along the way if they fancy having them.

That's the whole idea.

Anyway, I've probably said enough

I've just looked at the clock and realised I've been sitting here for ages. The tea is cold. The ELO album is nearly finished. I've written considerably more than I intended to. And I've still got a blank football spreadsheet open on the other side of the laptop that I promised myself I'd sort out this morning. Typical.

I've spent years saying I should start writing about football. Now I finally have.

So hello. I'm Theo. I'm a Bristol City supporter. I'm a husband, a dad, a golfer of questionable ability, a music obsessive and, apparently, a football blogger now.

I've spent most of my life watching football and an unhealthy amount of it thinking about football. I've made some brilliant bets. I've made some absolutely terrible ones. I've learned a lot. I've still got plenty to learn. And I'm going to write about all of it.

If you enjoy football, you're welcome here. If you enjoy betting, you're welcome here. If you know absolutely nothing about betting but want somebody to explain what all the bloody terminology means, you're welcome here too.

I'll try to make it useful. I'll try to make it honest. And I'll try not to take myself too seriously. Because it's football. It's supposed to be fun.

Right. That's enough writing. The family will be back soon and I've got a feeling somebody is going to ask me what's for lunch. I haven't got a clue. But I do know Bristol are playing Portsmouth this afternoon and I think we'll get the three points today.

Priorities.