Oodles of stuff here about the German elections these days, you’ll have noticed. Meanwhile, in our secret headquarters deep beneath Brussels, we afoers are sitting round enjoying fat Cohibas and lashings of ancient brandy in snifters the size of your head, talking about (what else?) football, when suddenly one of the technical staff rushes into the boardroom, all apologies at disturbing us but perhaps we’d better have a look at this item that has just come across his monitor:

EuroSportwetten has a unique 50-1 double-header for Hanover’s modest soccer club to beat German champions Bayern Munich on Saturday and Hanover’s best-known citizen, Schroeder, to be victorious the day after.

Schröder to beat Merkel and Hannover to beat FCB? At 50-1 those odds are far too short, surely. Daniel Davies is fascinated by electoral betting markets; perhaps he’ll want to look into the arbitrage opportunity here.