I have heard that the largest syndicate has groups that only cover one football team. I have no idea whether this is true or how/where you get the liquidity to justify this.
https://www.academia.edu/37585525/Flexible_Regression_Models...
I do generally find these top-down team-strength models quite primitive though. Teams are made up of players, plans, all sorts of under-studied interactions. I would also say that there are enough quant jobs in football now that you don't really need to gamble to make a living. :)
I would also think carefully about what you are doing and why. Most people fail because they try to bet on markets that are, for them, unbeatable (for example, football data is expensive). It is far easier to pick off obscure markets (I did not do this because I had a junior high school maths education and needed some guidance).
You also have the issue of modelling a bivariate as two independent univariates. The adjustments made by the authors were intended to get around this problem but there has been a lot more work on this aspect of the problem since then, and a few new solutions.
And you are right, expected goals was cutting-edge back in ~2011-12 but even some clubs have caught on now. Most gambling syndicates, afaik, actually produce their own datasets (the largest ones employ a huge number of people, I know one that started up five years ago and already has ~10 PHds on staff + traders + data people, etc.).
I will say though, it is surprising how inefficient betting markets were until recently. In the early part of the 2010s, I imagine that large syndicates were making, conservatively, 300-400%/year in the largest markets that were, apparently, "unbeatable". I am aware of very simple models, similar to DC, that could beat retail bookies on Brier for EPL as recently as 2017. And, ofc, smaller markets are far softer (or other sports). At the cutting edge, yes...it probably is complex (I have no idea). But a surprising amount is actually just doing the simple things well.