How likely is it that your favorite sports team will win their next game? 

Whether you are looking for statistics for your blog post or you are doing research to see if a team is worth betting on – Win-lose-tie percentages are some of the most important stats in the world of sports. 

Win-lose-tie percentages are used by bookies, analysts, and coaches alike to work out how well a team is playing. 

Teams with high winning percentages and low losing percentages are playing well and will most likely continue to do so. Teams with the opposite percentages are having a bad season. 

It is also worth noting that teams with high winning percentages and high drawing percentages are still doing well. However, if they have high losing percentages coupled with high drawing percentages then you should be more concerned. 

If a team has little to no draw percentages then there is nothing to worry about. Draw percentages are sometimes useless statistics. 

How to work out Win-lose-tie percentages 

Step 1 – Decide if you are looking for an all-time Win-loss-tie percentage, or for just the current season. If you are looking at an athlete or horse, all-time will be very useful. However, if you are looking at a team, the most relevant information will be the current season. 

(The rest of this example will be based on working out the Win-lose-tie percentages for a sporting team’s current season) 

Step 2 – Work out how many games the team has played this season. You can do this by adding up all their wins, losses, and draws. OR by finding a ‘games played’ stat. It will also be useful to have the individual statistics for games won, lost, and drawn to hand. 

Step 3 WINS – Divide the number of games won by the number of games played. This will give you a number beginning with 0.??. You will then times this number by 100. This final number is the team’s winning percentage. 

Step 4 + 5 LOSSES AND DRAWS – The same process can be used to work out loss and drawn percentages. Replace the number of wins in the equation with either the number of losses or the number of games tied. 

EXAMPLE – 

In this example, we will use the results of soccer team Tottenham for the 2020-21 season for the Premier League. 

Tottenham played 38 games during this season. 

They lost 12. 

They won 18. 

They tied 8. 

To find out their win percentage we would divide 18 by 38. This gives us 0.48 (rounded up). 

We will then times this number by 100 – which gives us 48. 

This tells us that their win percentage for that season was 48%. 

Their tie percentage was 21%. 

Their loss percentage was 31%. 

Winning percentage and odds 

We can use a team’s winning percentage to roughly work out what the odds of them winning their next match will be. This is obviously excluding any external factors such as who they are playing and if it is a home match. 

Looking at our example the odds of Tottenham winning their next match are +200 (or 2/1 if you want to bet with a British Sportsbook). 

Using this sum in other ways 

You can use this sum to work out many other sporting percentages such as: 

• A team’s winning percentage against another team 
• A team’s winning percentage at home 
• A team’s winning percentage in certain competitions 
• A team’s winning percentage over the last decade 

Things you will need: 

Pen 

Paper 

Calculator 

List of past and future games –  here is one for the NBA https://www.fanduel.com/sbk/nba-futures