Whether you’ve just placed your first bet, or you’ve had an acca on every weekend for years but finally want to start taking things a little more seriously (and at the very least reduce your losses!), this is the place to be. Here is your football betting strategy guide.
In this article, we’ll cover the basic ways to improve you football betting strategy - show you how to get the most out of stats, how to avoid getting sucked into just backing a big name, and even which time of the season might be best to bet.
If you’re looking for explanations of more advanced football betting strategies like value betting, a detailed look at accumulators, as well as what to look for when finding a new tipster to follow, head transparentbets.com.
As with everything in life, before you dive right into something, it’s a good idea to do your research. Football betting is no different. In fact, it might be especially important.
Congratulations, reading this article is a good start. Doing your research doesn’t just mean looking into the stats and data for individual matches, it also means reading about betting strategies and money management. These are as crucial to successful betting in the long term as being an expert on the finer points of Pep’s high-press.
Before you bet, you should absolutely look at how a team or player has performed recently. This is true of any market - not just Win-Draw-Win. Bookies build their odds based on data, so you should be looking at the data too. Here are our top tips when looking at stats.
At KickOff we lay out our form stats so you get the most relevant stats for each market. For the over/under 1.5 goals market, you don’t care how many matches a team has won, you need to know how many goals they’ve scored and conceded. For the HT/FT market, what matters is whether a team was winning, drawing or losing at half time and then at full time regardless of how many goals had been scored or what the exact score was.
Let’s look at what stats we offer for over/under 1.5 goals and HT/FT, how they’re different, and what you can learn from them.
We show the following form stats for both teams over their last 20 games - these stats are given for their last 20 overall, as well as their last 20 at home if they’re playing at home next (and vice versa):
Crucially, at a glance, you’ll see the donut chart which shows how many of a team’s last 20 matches have finished with over (light green) or under (dark green) 1.5 goals. This is the most important metric really, and that’s why we make it so prominent.
This is because what you’re betting on is that the next match will finish with at least 2 goals. You don’t care if it finishes with 4 or 5 goals, just whether it finishes with at least 2. There’s more on this in the next section - looking at frequency over averages.
You can see immediately that the HT/FT form stats look completely different. This is because the market is very different, and you always need appropriate information. This graphic shows how many of a team’s last 20 games have been in each game state (winning, drawing, losing) at HT and FT.
It’s really important that you have specific data for the HT/FT market and don’t just go off wins, draws and losses. Just because a team wins lots of matches, you shouldn’t assume they’re a good WDW bet. They might prefer to keep it tight in the first half, before attacking in the second half. Or they might be really good at grabbing late winners - think Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson!
Real Madrid win a lot of their matches, and so for some it’s tempting, especially if they’ve been on a good run lately, to stick them to win on the acca every week. But it is important to think check the form of the team they are playing.
The team they’re facing this week might also be in good form, they might be having a really good season even if they’re not traditionally a “big name”, or they might be a mid-table side with a good record of sneaking draws against the big sides.
In fact, this situation where big teams attract lots of bettors - partly because of the behaviour outlined above and partly because they have big fan bases who want to bet on their own team to win - can actually make betting against these big sides a good bet in certain situations.
The idea that you need to look at both teams involved in a match should be fairly obvious in the WDW market, but can be even more important in markets such as over 3.5 goals. In that market, you’re not just looking for one team that scores and/or concedes a lot of goals. Ideally, you’re looking for two teams that both score and concede a lot of goals.
There’s also another step, which is to try to work out how these specific teams might interact. As we saw with frequency vs average, just because a team has scored a lot of goals on average, that doesn’t mean they have consistently scored a lot of goals in every game against all the teams. They might have won all their games against the relegation candidates 5-0 and then barely scored against good teams.
So how do you work out what will happen in this game between these two specific teams? There are a couple of things that can help.
One way to get a view on this is to look at the head-to-head history between the teams.
For example, Fenerbahce start as favourites to beat Alanyaspor. Fenerbahce are above Alanyaspor in the league, and have similar, if not slightly better, recent form. But Alanyaspor have won the last 2 fixtures they’ve played at home against Fenerbahce. This is something to consider when assessing this match.
However, you should also bear in mind that teams only usually play each other 2 or 3 times per year. This means that within a few fixtures you can easily be going back years, and the actual players and quality of the teams on the pitch might have changed a lot in that time. Some teams might not have played each other at all for years if they play in different countries or leagues. Head to head data can be useful, but it’s not the whole picture.
Another great way to assess a matchup is to use KickOff’s exclusive league table. Our league tables show the results of the two teams in an upcoming match against every other team in their league. This means that you can see how a team has previously performed against teams similar to the one they’re about to face.
They’re different for each market too, so for WDW it shows whether each game ended in a win, a draw or a loss, and for BTTS it indicates whether both teams scored or whether at least one team failed to.