Il Registro
What closing line value is, and how to check it against your own log
Comparing the price you took with the closing price answers sooner than return does. Across six weeks one operator's 1X2 margin moved 3.5 points: prices move, and by how much can be measured.
Pubblicato il 14 settembre 2026
Closing line value is the difference between the odds you bet at and the odds that outcome carried at kick-off. Take 2.10 when it closed at 1.95 and you beat the closing line; if it closed at 2.30, you didn't.
The idea behind it is simple: the closing price is the one carrying the most information, because it is the last, after everything knowable has entered the market. Systematically taking better prices than that is a sign you are arriving ahead of the information.
Why it answers faster than return
Return needs thousands of bets to separate from chance: at 2.00, roughly 9,600 for a true 2% edge. The comparison with the closing line doesn't, because it doesn't depend on how the match ended.
It is the same difference as between judging a decision by its result and judging it by what was known when it was made. A match result is a sample of one; the closing price is a summary of everything the market learned up to kick-off.
That prices move isn't an assumption: it's measured
From 30 July to 14 September 2026 we recorded one snapshot a day of each operator's median margin across the whole football listing. Forty-seven readings.
| Operator | Market | Lowest | Median | Highest | Range | Readings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Betsson | 1X2 | 9.13% | 9.82% | 11.20% | 2.07 | 42 |
| Netwin | 1X2 | 8.13% | 8.67% | 11.70% | 3.57 | 36 |
| Betflag | 1X2 | 8.34% | 8.80% | 10.22% | 1.88 | 42 |
| Betsson | Under/Over | 6.44% | 6.92% | 7.18% | 0.74 | 42 |
| Betflag | Under/Over | 8.23% | 8.58% | 9.78% | 1.55 | 42 |
| Netwin | Under/Over | 9.23% | 9.79% | 10.77% | 1.54 | 36 |
Median margin across the football listing, one snapshot per day between 30 July and 14 September 2026. ⚠ The five days on which the listing held fewer than 450 matches instead of the usual ~554 are excluded: on those days the median moves because the basket changes, not because prices change, and that is where the showiest part of the range came from. Netwin has six fewer readings because it doesn't appear in the archive on those days.
The same operator, on the same market, moved two points in six weeks. ⚠ Be careful about what that shows and what it doesn't: this is the median of hundreds of different matches each day, so it shifts even just because which matches are listed changes. It is not a measure of how much a single match's price moves — that would need the match-by-match history we don't keep, and it is stated in the paragraph below.
⚠ What we can't give you yet
To compute closing line value on one of your bets you need that outcome's price on that match at kick-off. Today we keep aggregated daily margins, not a match-by-match price history: so we can't make the comparison for you.
We write that instead of pretending. If you want to do it yourself, the route is to note the price you took and look again shortly before kick-off — the odds page shows it live, and it is a ten-second operation per bet.
How to read it, and how not to
- Read it as a frequency: on how many bets you took a better price than the close. Persistently above 50% is a signal; one in three isn't.
- Don't read it on a single bet. Beating the close once means nothing, just as winning one means nothing.
- ⚠ Beating the close doesn't guarantee profit: it guarantees you took a better price than the final one, which is a different and more modest thing.
- And it doesn't work on illiquid markets, where the closing price summarises very little because very little money went through it.
The comparison between operators on today's matches is on the odds page; the daily margin archive is public and citable with attribution.