When it comes to betting, the football market is the most expansive. Getting the best bang for your buck by using different types of betting is a great way of using the extensive market to your benefit, so why not try out a different style of football betting and have a look at football spread betting? This is our guide on how to spread bet on football.
What is it?
Football spread betting is a way of betting on a specific market such as supremacy, total goals, corners, cards, team goal minutes and player goal minutes over the outcome of a specific event rather than on the normal binary outcome betting used. This means you are betting for the likelihood of something happening within a range of potential outcomes rather than normal betting which sees you win or lose explicitly. This stops you putting bets on these accumulators which sit at huge odds but have very little chance of coming in.
How does it actually work?
Now, this may seem a bit confusing at first so let's have a look at this style of betting further. Within football, this betting style means you could wager on the total over/unders goals in matches with a binary bet which will return winnings or losses reflecting the definitive bet put on. Instead, with spread betting, your winnings or losses will be calculated on how many goals were actually scored and how this reflected within your spread. The spread is two prices - one to ‘buy’ and one to ‘sell’.
Many people prefer this style of betting because it means you can bet on a lot of different outcomes and can make the match interesting till the final whistle.
Example of spread betting?
To better explain spread betting let’s take an example. Let's take Manchester City versus Manchester United. Say the price is sitting at 2.7-3 for total goals in the game. With both teams playing free-flowing football and scoring a lot of goals you can expect this match to be a high scoring game like 3-2 so you would bet high on the spread at 3. If the result was 3-2 this would mean you would win the bet and the difference in which you win will be the amount you receive in return. In this case you bet on the spread at 3 and the result was 5 goals in total (match result was 3-2), therefore your winnings will be 2x the stake you put on. Similarly if you bet on a spread of 3 and the match result was 6-1, you would receive a return of 4x your stake unit.
The thing with spread betting is that you can also lose if you haven’t put in your adequate research. It works in exactly the same way. For example, if you put on your spread bet at 2.7 goals in the game and there was only 1 goal you would be losing the difference (ie 1.7x) your stake unit.
List of best spread betting markets
The beauty of spread betting is the way you can use it across lots of different markets and types of bets. This means you can use it in most of the larger leagues and competitions in football as well as:
- Supremacy
- Total goals
- Cards
- Corners
- Goalscorers
- 1st and 2nd half betting
- Minute by minute betting.
Its versatility is one of the key reasons that spread betting has become so popular. Importantly, there are bookies which will specialise in spread betting and not all normal high street bookies will offer the style of betting.
