Betting on football can be as simple or complicated as you want. If you’re just after a bit of added excitement on a match, then backing one team to win is very straight forward. Just pick your team, decide how much you want to bet and away you go.
If you want to increase your potential returns, you can stack multiple matches together into one bet – known as an accumulator or acca. In order for an accumulator to win, all of your picks must be correct. This means that the more selections you add to your acca, the harder it’s going to be to win.
In terms of the fundamentals, that’s pretty much all you need to know to get started. Your chosen bookie will settle the bet once the match has finished, either as a winner or a loser.
What Bets Can You Place?
Whilst the result of the match is one of the most obvious things you can bet on, there are many other markets to choose from. Some of which aren’t even affected by who actually wins the game.
Match Bets
- Half Time / Full Time
- Handicap Betting
Scoreline Bets
- Both Teams to Score
- Correct Score
- Over / Under N Goals
Goalscorer Bets
- First Goalscorer
- Last Goalscorer
- Anytime Goalscorer
Corners & Cards
- Number of corners
- Number of cards
What About Betting on Leagues, Cups & Trophies?
Up to this point we’ve largely been talking about specific matches, but there is another whole range of bets that you can place on football that involve the result of a league or cup.
- League / Cup Winner
- Top Goalscorer
- To Be Relegated
- Stage of Elimination
One other thing to bear in mind is that during cups, some of the bets you can place are slightly different to normal league matches due to the addition of extra time and penalties. Whilst you can still bet on the full time result of the match just like you would any normal league match, this doesn’t necessarily tie in with the result of the game.
If, for example, the score when the final whistle blew in a cup match was 1-1, this would be considered a draw even though the game may continue into extra time.
Should you wish to bet on the true result of the match so that it takes into account extra time and penalties you’ll need to look at markets such as “to lift the trophy” and “to progress to the next round”.
Expected Goals (xG)
Football analysis is packed with a whole raft of stats and figures. One metric which has become extremely popular is Expected Goals, or xG for short, which gives a measure of how many goals ‘should’ have been by each team scored during a game.
This is given as a figure rounded down to two decimal places, with a number given for each team, 0.76 – 1.73 for example. The number is calculated by looking at not just the amount of scoring opportunities a team has had but also how likely those chances were to be scored. A 30-yard effort considered a low likelihood of creating a goal, whilst a shot blocked on the goal line given a much higher probability.
Football, as we know, can be a funny old game, and the only stat that really matters is goals scored. However, for betting purposes, xG can be very useful when looking at the recent performances of teams, allowing you to see where a side is playing better, or worse, than their results suggest.