Rating clubs from betting odds
Elo looks backwards. It moves when a result comes in. Bookmakers price a match before anyone kicks a ball, and this ranking turns their prices on European club matches into one strength number per club, without using a single scoreline.
What the odds know
A bookmaker who misprices a match loses money, so the three prices on a game carry a considered opinion about both teams. That opinion is formed before kick-off and does not care how the game then went. Our Elo ranking measures the opposite thing: it moves only once results arrive, and a club that wins ugly gains exactly what a club that wins well does.
The two therefore disagree in an informative way. A club the market rates above its Elo rank keeps being expected to win more than its record says it should.
What the ranking covers
Every match between European clubs that a bookmaker priced, over a rolling window of July 2024 to September 2026. That is 24,168 matches and 722 clubs. The window is long enough to give small leagues a reasonable sample and short enough that a squad from four seasons ago does not hold a club up. Clubs with fewer than 10 matches in it are dropped, because a handful of games pins a rating down too loosely to publish.
A club can only be placed on the same scale as another if there is some chain of matches connecting them. European domestic leagues are joined by the Champions League, the Europa League and the Conference League, and that is what makes a cross-league ranking possible at all. Where no such chain exists, any comparison would be invented, so clubs in a league with no European fixtures are left out rather than guessed at.
Reading the numbers
The published rating is a linear rescaling of the underlying strength onto the same range as our Elo points, so the two tables can be read at a glance without converting anything. Rescaling leaves the order untouched.
The Elo rank column takes our Elo ranking, keeps only the clubs in this table and renumbers them from 1, so the two columns sit side by side. The global Elo ranking covers around 7,000 clubs worldwide, and comparing a European rank against that would make every club here look under-rated.
Δ is the Elo rank minus the odds rank. Green means the market rates a club above its results, red the reverse. The clearest cases at the red end come from leagues a single club dominates: winning most weeks against weak domestic opposition earns Elo points, and bookmakers price those clubs on the level of the opposition they beat. At the green end sit promoted clubs, whose recent record is from a lower division while the market already prices them against their new peers.
Some clubs have no Elo rank. A club relegated to a second tier keeps an odds rating, because bookmakers still price its matches, but it drops out of the Elo table we publish. Both comparison cells stay empty for those clubs.
The model
How the prices become a single strength per club is not described here yet. The method is a club-football application of work that has not been published, and this page will carry it once that is out.
Credit
The method comes from In the Bookies' Net, a talk by Gordana Marmulla and Ulrik Brandes (Social Networks Lab, ETH Zürich) at Sunbelt XLVI in June 2026, which fits national-team strengths from World Cup odds. The application to club football is ours.