I'm starting to switch my attention to options pricing and its application to some problems in the soccer world.  I came across this post from a blog called "less bel canto" originally written in August of last year on the use of Black-Scholes to predict a football club's performance over the course of a league season.  Apparently you could use that information to devise some options trading strategies in the same way you would for equities or bonds or other financial instruments. 

It's an interesting problem, but one of primary interest to the football betting community, so there may not be much interest from my American readers. 

Over the next few days I'll try to port the code over to Python or some other language and check it out.  I don't know Ruby, unfortunately, and I'm trying to learn too many computing (and human) languages already!

(There are some interesting posts on soccer betting and analytics on that blog.  And if you poke around I'm sure you'll find some more.)

UPDATE: I copied the code to my Linux box and ran it in the Ruby interpreter.  The script appears to model betting contracts for clubs in either the champions, promotion, or relegation slots.  What makes the problem tricky is that one needs to predict in what place the club will finish, not how many points the club will win.  I'll understand it better once I learn a little more about Ruby.  Yet another computer language to learn — curse you!!