Are you a soccer fan?

If you’re a North American sports bettor, the answer is probably no!

Sometime in the 2^nd year of our show Chris from TJ called in on a Saturday morning. This was when we were still on ESPN 1700 and before that station, along with its sister the Mighty 1090 which at the time was San Diego’s #1 rated sports station.

He talked about why soccer is the easiest sport to bet on ( bestsportsooks.co). The main reason is that there are 100’s of matches every day. The NFL has 16 games in a non-bye week. On any given weekend there will be 90-110 NCAA College games. If you check out FlashScore.com you’ll find page after page of countries with dozens of leagues and a full set of matches in each. There are literally close to 1,000 international soccer matches every weekend and many from countries most Americans have never heard of.

Many sports fans may not realize that the World Cup of soccer, held every 4 years, gets 20x the amount of money bet on a normal Super Bowl handle. Do the math. That’s 5x the sports betting revenue for 1 “Big Game” and that Sunday in the United States is a pretty big betting day. 

Chris’ logic was with all those opportunities it was easy to find a handful of games that were no doubters. Mind you that the odds on these games were often in the -300 to -500 range. Those are the type of plays that most novice sports bettors wouldn’t touch. However, if you’re laying $3,000 and 3 hours later you have $1,000 more you can see his point.

Sometime around 2017 we started getting calls from @PaoloVenetti from Greece. He became one of our regular contributors and is a very, very good handicapper. His attitude of betting on soccer mirrored that of Chris. Fast forward to the spring of 2020 in the middle of the worst pandemic the world had seen in over 100 years. Soccer was the only sports available to bet on and even those matches were mostly in countries run by brutal dictatorships where the teams were paid by the state and these teams had no choice whether or not they would continue to kick the ball around.

So, every single week, from March to May Paolo and I talked soccer. Week in, week out, the only games on the board were futbol and Sports Betting Weekly covered them on every show. Here’s some of the things that I learned as I made the transition from; “I’ll never bet soccer” to, “Wow, soccer is a really great sport to bet on!” These are my thoughts on soccer.

-Most sports have ties. Ties are usually a PUSH when you’re betting them. Not soccer! Draws are their own separate play in soccer which has 3-way betting and in games where the teams finish in a tie you lose, unless you bet the draw.    

-Multiple books are crucial. Especially now that many states are legalizing sports betting the quality of their offerings for soccer may be light. On most offshore books there will be as many as 440+ different plays or props you can make on just one soccer match.

-The Home Team is listed on top. Doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, right? Yeah until you screw up a play because you didn’t know that. (Thank me later)

-You’ll need to have a very high win percentage to make money. Normally, considering that most of the games that bettors play in the four major sports are traditionally odds of -110, winning 53% or so of your plays will get you to break even. In soccer you’ll need it to be closer to 75% because of the odds that both Chris and Paolo taught us about.

-Live Action is a must when betting on soccer. These guys run nonstop for 90+ minutes. That’s longer than it takes to run a 10k race. Towards the end of the match the odds can swing dramatically. We’ve cashed tickets for 8-1 on teams that had started the game at -350. That’s a big difference in your bankroll. Once the 60^th to 70^th minute rolls around you’ll sometimes see an explosion of scoring. (In soccer that means 1-3 goals but in soccer that is an explosion of scoring!)

If you’ve never placed a wager on a soccer match it’s time to go for it.

Get that whole lack of scoring thing out of your head. Last time I checked with the guy at the window cashing the tickets as long as the team you bet had one more point than the team they played, you’ll Always Be Cashing!