What Premier League Betting Markets Reveal Beyond the Match Winner

The final score is obviously the most important piece of information about a soccer match. If it’s the only thing you know, you might not be able to fully fathom what actually happened on the field and how that score line came to be. The list of stats and parameters that describe the performance of both teams is long, causing some casual fans to ignore it altogether and just keep track of match winners.

They would be wise to copy a page out of the book of sports betting fans, who take note of countless details and try to predict a wide variety of outcomes. The following aspects of the game are well-covered by betting offers which signals their importance as well as variance.

Goal Dynamics

Team scoring remains at the centre of attention in the betting markets, including in ways you might not expect. Over/under bets targeting total scoring by both teams are very popular, and they can be predicted for the whole game or any half. Markets of this type also include Both Teams to Score bets which are based on the estimated defensive and offensive abilities of the teams in question. Some experts believe that such wagers are less exposed to the impact of random chance, and thus easier to predict correctly based on previous performance. For non-betting fans, thinking about general scoring tendencies adds another dimension that deepens their understanding of the matchup.

Individual Achievements

Soccer is a team game, but the results are largely driven by extraordinary feats of individual players. That is reflected in the typical offer of sportsbooks listing EPL odds in Canada, which include a lot of markets tied directly to how a particular player fares in a match. Such predictions are commonly known as ‘proposition bets’ or ‘props’, and they are among the most volatile markets related to the Premier League. In translation, guessing which player will score is much harder than correctly anticipating the match winner. This goes to show that individual performance varies greatly from one match to another, and team fortunes are determined by a team effort rather than pure brilliance of its star player.

Power Rankings

To account for uneven strength of different teams, many sportsbooks allow so-called ‘handicap betting’ where the weaker team is given an advantage. For example, if the handicap is -1 on the favourite, the favoured team must win by a two-goal margin for the bet to be successful. There are multiple ways to calculate handicaps, but the point is always to level the playing field and provide a stronger incentive to back the underdog. The reason why this betting mode is so widely accepted is that it fixes a known sore spot of the Premier League – the gap between the elites with international ambitions and teams that are just happy to keep their spots in the highest tier of competition. 

Season-Long Placement

Some football fans skip the single-match bets altogether and try to make long-term predictions about the final placement of EPL teams at the end of the season. Since this type of prediction (known in betting parlance as ‘futures bet’) involves a long stretch of games, it won’t go under based on a single disappointing result. Of course, looking that far ahead carries risks of its own, as an injury to a star player or a mid-season managerial change can knock a team off its course. Futures are popular among diehard fans who know soccer, which implies that focusing on the outcome of a single match is short-sighted. A season lasts for months and teams have plenty of time to correct their shortcomings and go on a winning streak when they need it the most.