Odegaard scored, Arsenal won 1–0 in Naples, and nine positions in this book is exactly level. Tonight Como are 1.82 to lay on their European debut: €820 at risk to win €980.

Odegaard scored, Arsenal won 1–0 in Naples, and the lay lost the full €700. Four wins, five losses, nine positions closed, and the ledger reads plus €0 on €8,410 of risk. Nine days ago, one position in, it was up €980 and the return read thirty-nine per cent. It now reads nothing. Five of the last six have lost. That is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up, because it is the shape of the method rather than a departure from it: the win is capped at €980 every time, the liability is not, and it has averaged €934 across this book. A short run against you does not require anything to have gone wrong.

Tonight Como play the first match in the club’s history in the main stage of a European competition, and the exchange makes them favourites for it: 1.82 to lay, €820 at risk to win €980. That is still below the 1.98 pivot, so the ordinary geometry holds — but only just. The gap between what a win pays and what a loss costs has narrowed to €160. Break-even is 45.6%, and the draw alone is worth a shade under a quarter of the fair line, which on a lay pays in full. Strip the margin off the back column — 1.79 Como, 4.2 the draw, 4.6 Leipzig, an overround of 101.4% — and the fair prices read 55.1% / 23.5% / 21.4%. The two results that pay us add to 44.9%. We need 45.6%. Six tenths of a point against us, roughly €12 of negative expectation per €1,000: wider than yesterday’s, and pointing the same way every position on this book has pointed. The case for the price being short is the one the price steps over. Como finished fourth in Serie A last season, above Milan and Juventus, and have already won away at Napoli and away at Genoa this season. All of that is real, and all of it was earned in a competition that is not this one. The market has read that form straight across into a European tie at a ground that has never staged one, and priced a debut as an occasion rather than as a handicap. Leipzig finished third in the Bundesliga; 4.6 for a side of that standing is a long number.

The honest counter starts with our own ledger. This book laid Como once already, at 1.84 on 4 September, and Como won 4–1 at Genoa. Tonight’s price is two hundredths shorter and the reasoning against it is the same reasoning that lost then. Beyond that, Leipzig arrive under a new coach, beaten 3–1 at home by Werder Bremen, having lost their last three matches on the road and taken one point from their last six Champions League away trips. Como kept nineteen clean sheets last season. Read that way, 55% for the home side is not a market error at all — it is two teams priced correctly. We are six tenths of a point short of being right, and nine closed positions is not a sample. It is a start.