Good Morning ☀️,

It’s Lucas here, your Chief Predictions Officer at What Are the Odds?

With the middle of the week here, it’s time to start looking ahead to this weekend. But not without a little mid-week League Cup action thrown in for good measure. Let’s get into it.

What’s ahead in today’s edition of What Are the Odds?:

• This week’s Bundesliga, Ligue 1, and League Cup match schedule. 🗓️

• Our top three picks — out top play from each competition. ✅

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This week, we’ve got some great games coming up across the Bundesliga, La Liga, and the English League Cup. (Note: all dates and times are in CEST)

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 League Cup

Wednesday 09 September

• Postponed — Everton vs Wolves

• 21:00 — Chelsea vs Leeds

🇫🇷 Ligue 1

Friday 11 September

• 20:45 — Rennes vs Marseille

Saturday 12 September

• 17:15 — Strasbourg vs Monaco

• 20:45 — Auxerre vs Nice

• 20:45 — Le Havre vs Angers

• 20:45 — Lorient vs Toulouse

• 20:45 — Paris FC vs Lyon

Sunday 13 September

• 15:00 — Lille vs Troyes

• 17:15 — Le Mans vs Lens

• 20:45 — Brest vs PSG

🇩🇪 Bundesliga

Friday 11 September

• 20:30 — Union Berlin vs Schalke 04

Saturday 12 September

• 15:30 — Augsburg vs Bayer Leverkusen

• 15:30 — Borussia Dortmund vs SC Paderborn 07

• 15:30 — Freiburg vs Borussia Monchengladbach

• 15:30 — Hoffenheim vs Stuttgart

• 15:30 — Mainz vs Eintracht Frankfurt

• 18:30 — FC Cologne vs Werder Bremen

Sunday 13 September

• 15:30 — RB Leipzig vs Hamburg

• 17:30 — SV Elversberg vs Bayern Munich

Want to get the best odds on these matches?

⚽ Chelsea vs Leeds
🏟️ English League Cup
📅 Wednesday 09 September; 21:00 (CEST)

• Top 3 Stats:

  • Both sides are sitting on +3 after four games. Chelsea got there scoring 2.50 goals a game and conceding 1.75. Leeds got there scoring 1.25 and conceding 0.50.

  • Leeds have failed to keep a clean sheet in nine straight visits to Stamford Bridge.

  • Chelsea has never lost to Leeds in the League Cup, and has only exited at this round once in fifteen seasons. Leeds have failed to get past it in thirteen of the last seventeen years.

• CXSports says: At first glance, it looks like Leeds stands a fighting chance here. After all, they’ve only conceded two goals in four matches and are unbeaten on their run up to this point. They also manage to score 1.25 goals per game which, while not enormous, is backed up by an impressive concession rate of just 0.5 per game. And that’s left them with an identical goal difference to Chelsea at +3, with Chelsea getting there with more goals — 2.50 a game scored vs 1.75 conceded. And, if we look at each team’s League stats, the exact same patter appears again — identical goal difference, Chelsea doing it with more goals at both ends.
  
  So, in a way, Leeds look like they’re in with a shot at this. However, that gap in goals also suggests they’re a team that’s built with one thing in mind — to make matches “small”. And, they’re arguably very good at it, with just two defeats in sixteen competitive games since March. But there’s a cath — a small match is essentially a defensive act, and defensive acts often require the other team to cooperate somewhat.
  
  Chelsea, meanwhile, hasn’t been cooperating with anyone lately, and have consistently pushed games into the sort of messy territory where a Leeds-style approach can start to fall apart. For the record, they’ve scored ten goals in four games and conceded seven, beating Brighton 4-3 and Fulham 3-2. And, they’ve scored inside the first five minutes of every league game they have played. And that dynamic could strain Leeds, whose entire approach tends to depend on the first twenty minutes being relatively uneventful.
  
  Leeds also has a bit of historical baggage that it’ll have to overcome if it wants a result here — Chelsea has never lost to Leeds in this competition. Further, Leeds has never kept a clean sheet at Stamford Bridge in nine attempts. And the last five head-to-heads have ended in Chelsea winning three, drawing one, and Leeds only taking a single game.
  
  So how does this play out? Well, we expect Leeds to do Leeds like stuff — they’ll try to keep it tight, but will eventually find themselves overwhelmed and pulled into a messy scrap in the exact way Chelsea’s numbers suggest. And if Chelsea can pull that off with one of its signature fast starts, that might be all it needs to gain the momentum and take the victory here.

• Score prediction: 2-1 for Chelsea

Bet Option #1

• Bet: Chelsea Victory

• Odds Range: 1.39-1.64

Bet Option #2

• Bet: Over/Under (Over 2.5)

• Odds Range: 1.45-1.62

⚽ Borussia Dortmund vs SC Paderborn 07
🏟️ German Bundesliga
📅 Saturday 12 September; 21:00 (CEST)

• Top 3 Stats:

  • Paderborn have scored zero goals in its 180 minutes of Bundesliga football this season, and took no shots on target at all in the 0-0 draw at Mainz.

  • Dortmund lost only twice at home in the entire 2025/26 league season (0-1 to Bayer Leverkusen and 2-3 to Bayern Munich).

  • The last time Paderborn played at Signal Iduna Park in the league, they led 3-0 at half-time. But that was in 2019, and Dortmund eventually pulled it back to a 3-3 finish.

• CXSports says: In November 2019, the last time Paderborn visited this this same stadium, they were 3-0 up before the interval, and Dortmund needed a 92nd-minute header to salvage a 3-3 draw. Fourteen months later, Paderborn scored a seventh-minute-of-stoppage-time penalty in a cup tie here to force extra time (but then lost 3-2). So, in a way, the history between these two suggests this might not be the cakewalk the obvious "Paderborn’s never beaten Dortmund in any competition" reading suggest. With that said, the problem with the non-obvious reading is that Dortmund’s slightly more difficult these days. Notably, Dortmund only conceded 34 goals in 34 league games last season — the fewest in the division at exactly one per match. And, they only lost two home matches all year, to Leverkusen and to the eventual Bundesliga champions.
  
  Paderborn also isn’t exactly carrying much in the way of momentum. Its recent promotion to the Bundesliga has seen it hit something of a brickwall, becoming one of the only sides that’s yet to score even a single goal, with their best result being a goalless draw at Mainz where they couldn’t even register a single shot on target. So we can probably consider their 1.74 goals a game average from last season’s second division campaign to be more or less irrelevant here. Not that the relevance of a 1.74 goals-per-game average really matters here when Dortmund is currently averaging 2.5 goals a game and a straight run of victories in its opening fixtures.
  
  In reality, the only sliver of hope Paderborn really has to hold onto is basic scheduling. Dortmund played Villarreal in their Champions League opener on Tuesday night — a win, but a rather scrappy one — so rotation is more or less guaranteed. But that’s probably more of a recipe for keeping the scoreline “respectable” than it is for the visitors winning. So expect a potentially slow start from a Dortmund side that will eventually find the breakthrough needed to pull clear.

• Score prediction: 3-1 for Dortmund

Bet Option #1

• Bet: Dortmund Victory

• Odds Range: 1.13-1.28

Bet Option #2

• Bet: First Teams to Score (Dortmund)

• Odds Range: 1.18-1.30

⚽ Lille vs Troyes
🏟️ French Ligue 1
📅 Sunday 13 September; 15:00 (CEST)

• Top 3 Stats:

  • Lille’s better on the road than at home. Across all 34 games last season, they won 10 of 17 away and 8 of 17 at home.

  • Lille signed Japan international striker Ayase Ueda over the summer — a striker who’s scored 29 league goals since the start of last season (a total bettered only by two forwards across Europe’s ten biggest leagues).

  • Troyes have conceded 2.33 goals per game, although six of their seven conceded were shipped in their most recent match.

• CXSports says: Until last Sunday’s six goal concession fest to Strasbourg last Sunday, Troyes had only conceded one goal in its first two opening matches for this season. And sadly, while that result might look like an anomaly, it might also be an early tell that lets us see who they really are. That is, a side that won 60 goals’ worth of Ligue 2 last season and then somehow let the man who scored 18 of them leave on a free transfer while also selling their 19-year-old winger to Manchester City for €25m while banking a promotion and spending the proceeds on precisely… nothing.
  
  Lille, meanwhile, are an oddball when compared to most other clubs. It somehow managed eight consecutive Ligue 1 away wins (a club record with only Marseille’s nine in 2009 ahead of it). And, in its two away trips this season, it’s faced 44 shots, conceded zero, (including a Toulouse performance worth 3.45 expected goals). But then, when they come home, things start to get a little loose: 2-2 against PSG, and 2-3 to Real Betis on Tuesday with five goals conceded in two matches. And this isn’t just a case of early-season/low-sample-count anomalies being construed as a pattern. Last season they won ten away games against just eight at home. So, for whatever reason, Lille’s consistently worse at home.
  
  With that said, “worse at home” doesn’t mean “bad at home” when measured against a freshly-promoted side like Troyes. Their 1.67 goals per game against a defence that just leaked 6 to Strasbourg is about as straightforward of a mismatch as you could ask for. Particularly with the summer signing of Ayase Ueda (29 league goals since the start of last season across Feyenoord and Lille — a total bettered by only two forwards in Europe’s top ten leagues over that period).
  
  As such, the best Troyes can hope to get away with here is perhaps a single goal as a concession for a multi-goal Lille performance.

• Score prediction: 3-1 for Lille

Bet Option #1

• Bet: Lille Victory

• Odds Range: 1.32-1.43

Bet Option #2

• Bet: Both Teams to Score (Yes)

• Odds Range: 1.71-2.00

Make your sportsbook work for you!

That’s a wrap for today. We’ll be back later in the week with our final installment for the upcoming weekend of football as we look ahead to the Premier League action that’s coming up.

Until then, enjoy the football.