Soccer is one of the most popular sports for spectators and players in almost all corners of the globe. But, you may not be aware of just how popular sports betting on soccer is. Every year, billions of dollars are bet on soccer games all over the world.
In this guide, we’re going to walk you through some of the key factors and decisions you need to be paying attention to when you’re betting on soccer. Winning betting on soccer is not easy, but it is certainly doable if you have the right strategy and you’re willing to put in the work. This guide is going to provide you with that information you need to get to the next level. As long as you’re willing to put in the work and do the research you need to, you’ll be well on your way to being a profitable soccer bettor!
Let’s get started.
The first decision that you need to make on your quest to being a profitable and winning soccer sports bettor is where you’re going to place your bets. This comes down to two decisions – live or online, and then which establishment or site.
The first decision of live vs. online is a no brainer and to be honest, shouldn’t even be a question. If you aren’t already betting soccer online, then you’re leaving money on the table. You can’t shop lines in person, it’s much more expensive (travel costs), and the number of soccer betting options you have is limited as well. When you bet online, all of these problems go away. We’re sorry to sound like fanboys and fangirls about online sports betting, but it really is a much smarter play not just from the convenience standpoint, but from the profitability standpoint.
This leads us to the second decision of what soccer betting sites to use. There are literally thousands of online sportsbooks that you can choose from that offer extensive action on soccer. The problem? Not all of them can be trusted. In the early days of online sports betting, there was a large percentage of sketchy operations. Thankfully now that the industry is several decades old, the “streets have been cleaned up” considerably, and the sketchy sites are fewer and farther between.
But that still means you need to make sure you’re at a top soccer betting site. One that you can trust your money is safe, offers a ton of different types of bets, and pays out winnings fast. If you’d like to see the list of the current top soccer betting sites, check it out below. Any one of these sites is a fantastic spot for you to take your action as they specifically cater to soccer bettors. Don’t give yourself a red card early by betting with a less than great soccer betting site.
The first bit of soccer betting strategy that we want to look at is how you analyze a team’s record. Most people are well aware of the fact that looking at a team’s past performance and successes and failures is a good way to start building a picture of what their future performance might be. But, you can’t just blindly look at their win/loss record and call it a day. You have to be willing to dig into the numbers and extract the necessary information. Below, we’re going to show you the things that you should be looking at during your research.
In a lot of soccer leagues, you’ve got your power players, and then you usually have some scrub teams. This is the case with almost any professional sport in the world. A win against a power team does not carry the same weight as a win against a scrub team. So, the obvious takeaway here is that you need to look at who a soccer team has their wins against and who they lost to.
But, you still need to go one step further. You need to either research or know if the teams they beat and lost to were at full strength or were missing a key player. If they beat one of the best teams in the league, but three of their stars were injured or suspended, does that really carry the same weight? Yes, this is a lot of research you’ll need to do or keep up with in real time, but it’s important so you can get the correct conclusions from their record.
While soccer is typically a low scoring game, and there isn’t always a huge variance in the margin of victory, you will still want to take a look at this when breaking down team’s records. Did a team barely win or get the victory from a fluke goal? Or, did they blow them out with a statement victory? These are things that you want to pay attention to when analyzing a team’s record.
We probably could have added a separate section here for method of victory. You’ll want to know how goals were scored and how they went about keeping the other team from dropping the ball in the net. This can tell you a lot about what their potential game plans moving forward to and how they do against certain types of attacks. If you can link up how they’ve done against certain strategies and you can predict their opponent’s potential strategy, you can get a really nice preview of what might be to come.
This might seem like common sense, but we’ve learned that common sense is not all that common sometimes when it comes to sports betting. When you’re analyzing a soccer team’s record, you need to give more weight to the more recent games as opposed to the beginning of the season or even games from past seasons.
An often overlooked aspect of a soccer game is the weather. The weather does not just impact the fan’s experience, but it also affects how the players play, how many goals are scored, and how effective different offensive and defensive strategies are. Let’s take a quick look at how some of these factors could affect your soccer bets.
When it rains, the ground gets wet. Groundbreaking information, yea? We’re just kidding. While we all know the ground gets wet when it rains, what we want to look at is the effect of water-soaked grass on the ball and the players and what that means for your bets.
The ball is not going to roll well when the ground gets wet. This means that passing will be negatively affected. Teams that rely on a lot of short passing are probably going to struggle. Teams that dump the ball deep with long passes will most likely have an advantage. Additionally, teams that rely on speed will be inhibited as it’s a lot harder to get traction when the field is water-logged.
In contrast to the rain, the wind is going to have a negative effect on the team’s that rely on the long ball and give an advantage to the teams whose offense is built around short passes. When the ball gets blasted (like with teams that dump and chase), you’re going to lose a lot of accuracy in your ball placement the stronger the wind is. This is especially true when the wind is swirling or coming from multiple directions. In heavily windy games, you may want to give a few advantage points to the teams that keep the ball lower to the ground to accomplish their offensive goals.
Be careful when you see teams playing in extreme heat that are not used to those conditions. The same goes for warm weather teams playing in the cold. The changes in temperature can have a dramatic effect on the team’s cardio and ability to push the pace throughout the entire duration of the game. Make sure you take notice of how you think a team is going to perform if they are competing in conditions that they are not used to. This is rarer in club soccer, but you can see it a lot during major tournaments like the World Cup where teams are playing in wildly different climates than they are used to.
You have got to ensure that you are using the right type of soccer bet when you are capitalizing on your game predictions. Too often, we hear about amateur soccer bettors who do nothing but get on game winners. While you can still make a lot of money doing this and you don’t have to diversify, there are a lot of times that the simple game winner bet is not the right pick.
What we highly recommend you do is take a few minutes and read through our Types of Soccer Bets guide and get a strong understanding of the different options you have. You don’t have to use all or any of these, but you need to know they exist to make sure that you’re leveraging your predictions properly. Failure to do so will result in lost bets you should have won and money being left on the table that you deserve to have in your bankroll.
If you’ve never played soccer, it might be hard to realize just how physically grueling it can be particularly from a cardio standpoint. You’ll find yourself running and sprinting for almost two hours without much of a break except at halftime. This requires a lot of stamina, and even the best in the world are subject to falling victim to fatigue. When a player is tired or unable to keep pushing at 100%, they get beat on plays, and that is how goals get scored.
What we’d like for you to do is know how to look for teams or players who might be more fatigued than normal in an upcoming game. This can have a huge effect on their success and their team’s success in a game, so it’s certainly something that you want to be all over if you want to be a profitable soccer bettor.
A lot of soccer players (especially the really good ones) will play for their club team but also their country team. The first is how they pay the bills and the second seems to be more of a sense of pride thing. Regardless, you need to be aware of when players have upcoming matches outside of the league that you are betting. If they are throwing in an extra game during the week that is normally their rest period, you need to know this as their performance is going to suffer somewhere and you don’t want to be expecting a 100% player when you’re getting something lower than that thanks to their dueling schedules.
Not all soccer games are equals. Some games are much less physical and require much less effort from the players to secure a victory. Other games especially against rivals or in important situations will be physical, grueling, and could push into overtime.
When analyzing the readiness of a soccer squad, you need to know how their last few games were. If they fit into the easy category, you can probably expect them to show up closer to 100%. If they had some hard-fought games recently, it might take a toll on their fatigue, stamina, and ability to perform. Yes, soccer players are professionals who know how to cope with physically demanding situations, but they are still human. They are susceptible to fatigue especially when they are pushed further than their opponents were in the past few games.
We’ve already pointed out that soccer is a physically demanding sport. This can take a toll on a player’s body with injuries being fairly common within the sport. Sometimes, though, these injuries aren’t really reported, and the players just try to work through them without alerting the other team that they are not at 100%.
You need to know when players are hurt or working on recovery from a past injury. This is easy when they are on the injury report, but it can be hard to diagnose when they are trying to keep things under wraps and just work through it. The best way to get this information is by watching games and looking for signs of injury or situations where they aren’t just taking a dive and popping back up, but they really did get hurt and are just playing through it.
The depth of a soccer team is going to be important for you to be aware of. How strong are there replacements that you’ll see subbed in late in the game? Are they good enough to be starters or are they just slightly better than an exhausted starter? Knowing this information is important especially when you anticipate a team dealing with fatigue. If they have quality depth and support from the bench, you can put less weight on the overall fatigue of certain players or the team. But, if they are weak on the bench and the team is fatigued, you may be looking at a bad bet or a bet on the other team that needs to happen.
You need to know what games are important and which games a team might be “sending it in” which is a fancy phrase for just showing up to collect a paycheck. Is the game a huge rivalry? Are there Championship implications? Is there any reason that the team would be more inclined to give it their all versus just going through the motions?
This isn’t something that is going to take you forever to explore, but you do need to have a clear picture of what is going on before you move forward with any of your wagers. Understanding the big picture is key to making sure you don’t make any silly mistakes or misread a value situation that is really just a reflection of the current situation.
When you’re looking at past performances to help you predict how things will go in an upcoming game, you’ll want to break down each team stylistically. Look at what sort of offensive and defensive schemes they run and how effective they are against the offensive and defensive schemes of their opponents.
Ideally, you’re going to want to try and get inside the coach’s head for both sides. Try and figure out how they are going to game plan against their opponent and then look to see which of those styles is going to be most effective.
This can be especially important if you are someone who likes to bet goal differentials, exact scores, or over unders. If you think that a team is going to try and get up a goal early and immediately start playing defense, you’ll probably want to steer clear of the over or picking them to win by more than one goal. If you think they’re going to come out guns blazing trying to make a statement for the full 90 minutes, then you may want to look at betting one of the over lines.
Do not let yourself become superstar blind. What do we mean? Yes, there are some players in soccer that seem to be able to make magic happen. They seem to always be in the right spot at the right time to score goals. But, that’s not just because they are magical and everyone else on the field is a schlub. The reason that the superstar gets to be as good as they are is because the support of the rest of the players helping them to shine is huge.
You have got to look at the support system that a superstar has. In other words, you need to look at the entire lineup and figure out how they are going to match up against the entire lineup of the other team. It is not a 1 on 1 or 1 on 11 contest. Make sure you are taking the time to look at the entire picture before placing any of your bets. It’s easy to get carried away when you look at the highlight reel of one superstar player, but that’s a bad road to go down when you’re trying to win your bets.
