Olympiakos VS Freiburg

Olympiacos and Freiburg lock horns in this UEFA Europa League group stage round 2 clash at Georgios Karaiskakis Stadium in Piraeus early Friday morning Beijing time. This is the second highest of UEFA’s club competitions after Champions League. The hosts are the reigning champions of Greece winning the championship by a whopping 19 points gap to PAOK. It is a fact that Greek football - both the Super League and their national team have been in decline during the past 10 or so years but Olympiacos are still a very good team for this competition! The German Bundesliga, where Freiburg play, is of course of much better level overall but Freiburg are not a traditional big team in Germany by historical success, financial resources or players’ total market value.. According to a well-known and respected German website Transfermarkt.com the visitors’ squad is valued at 150 million euros – not a big number by Bundesliga standards. The hosts’ players have a total market value of 111.25 million. The market values can of course be misleading, but the bookies and professional football bettors pay increasingly more attention to these numbers.. The football (players) market is, after all, a global one. However, if two players are equally good and one of them is 23 years old and the other is 33 years old the younger guy, of course, has a much bigger market value. I would say the 150 million is a bit too high. As for the Olympicos, the 111.25 is too low, in my view. I believe they are stronger on the pitch than the market value million would indicate and would set the fair value at 120-123 million.

Last season Freiburg surprised absolutely everyone be finishing in 6th place and I do not believe they will be able to repeat this success this season despite the pretty good start the domestic campaign. They grabbed some four points more than they would have deserved last season in terms of expected points. This season the situation is very similar – the number being three points. This probably is one reason behind the over-valuation here. Greek teams usually heavily rely on home games and Olympiacos have very loud and enthusiastic fans! The atmosphere at the stadium will surely be awesome here! They lost to Nantes, a pretty strong team in the opening round 1-2 away from home after a pretty lame performance but can surely improve, especially offensively. Freiburg too were disappointing last week despite beating a lowly team for this level, Qarabag, 2-1 at home as big favorites on the betting market. They were the better team,but the match was still more balanced than expected and Freiburg's defense looked shaky at times. Freiburg are a little stronger by pure class but the Greek hosts should be narrow favorites and with the recommended handicap of +0.5 goals on them my fans and I have a 67% chance of winning again!