The Origins Of Football Association And Football Betting
The modern game of football can be traced back to 1863, when the Football Association was formed and rules started being standardised across the country.
The game gained popularity with more and more teams joining the FA and various tournaments being set up. Just 8 years later the FA Cup was conceived, and over the next few years, with more and more teams wanting to included, the FA rules for football spread quickly and became the foundations for what we know and love today.
This led to the creation of the Football League in 1888, and the introduction of a second division in 1892 which started to get the game evolving into the beautiful game it is today.
Football started to become popular in Continental Europe and South America, and FIFA was set up to be the governing body for International football around the turn of the century. Shortly before the First World War FIFA expanded to include South Africa, South America and United States.
Fast forward 70 odd years, through numerous World Cups, European Championships, Domestic Leagues and Domestic Cups, and football grew in popularity and started becoming not only sport, but a multimillion pound industry.
Creation of the Premier League
Although England will forever be home to the beautiful game, when it came to European competition, English teams were falling short of their European counterparts. This led to the creation of the English FA Premier League, where the top twenty two clubs (reduced to 20 in 1995) in England broke away from the football league in order to sell TV rights separately and boost club revenues and exposure. This separation had a profound effect and led to a huge increase in worldwide prominence, accessibility of matches on TV and a huge influx of players from around the world coming to ply their trade in what was becoming known as the best league in the world.
An Introduction to Football Betting
As popularity of the sport has increased, compounded with the increased accessibility the internet offers, football betting has become bigger and bigger and gotten easier and easier. You now have the availability to follow any team around the world, read the latest articles, watch the best players and bet on hundreds of markets for hundreds of games on your computer and on your mobile. Let’s take a look at some of the more common betting markets on offer.
Outright Betting
This is a simple bet on the outcome of a particular football match. You have 3 options, Home Win, Away Win or Draw. This only applies to the outcome of the game within 90 minutes (plus injury time). In the case of a cup match where extra time is played in the event of a draw after 90 minutes, no matter the final outcome, the outcome of the bet is a draw.
Correct Score
Alternatively, or additionally, all football betting sites will offer you the chance to bet on the final score of a game. Naturally, as the ability to predict a correct score is harder than just betting on the outright winner, your odds for correctly predicting the correct score will be far higher, and so will your winnings.
Half Time/Full Time
In this market you can bet on which team you think will be winning at half time, and which team you think will win the game at full time. For example, if Manchester United are playing Norwich and you think the first one will get an early goal and win the game, you’d bet Manchester United Half Time, Manchester United Full Time. Again this will net you a higher return than if you just bet on the team to win after 90 minutes.
Football Betting Accumulators
Perhaps the best way to win big, Accumulators let you compound multiple bets, thereby giving you increasingly higher and higher odds.
If you bet on 1 match, and you win, your winnings will be based on the odds displayed. If you are looking for something a bit more exciting you can try to bet multiple games with an accumulator.
Your winnings from the first game will become your stake for the second game and so on, so eventually, if all your bets come in you’ll be walking away with a nice healthy balance, and far more than if you bet on each one of those games individually. However, the drawback of accumulators is that if just one of your results doesn’t come in, you will lose the entire bet.
Some football betting sites will offer you the chance to cash out early, so if you have won 4 out of 5 bets and the 5th one is still to come, they will pay you a lesser return than what you’d get for correctly betting 5, but you remove the risk of losing everything on the 5th game.
Goalscorer Markets
In addition to the outcome of the game, you can bet on who you think will score the first goal, who will score the next goal, or even who will score at any point during the game. Obviously forwards of top teams tend to have lower odds, but if you fancy the centerback coming up for a corner and scoring, you could be quite profitable.
Scorecast
Like above when you bet on a goal scorer, scorecasts allow you to bet on the first goal scorer together with a bet on the final score of the match. Again, the more variables in your bet, the higher your returns will be if you win.
In-Play Betting
Thanks to the internet and accessibility of placing bets on your computer or your mobile phone, most football betting sites now offer the ability to place a bet on an event already underway. So if its 20 min in and Aguero is playing a blinder, you can put a bet on for him to score the next goal, or for Manchester City to win.
In-Play betting can also help you hedge your bets. If you originally bet on Chelsea to win outright, but now that the game is underway they don’t look like they will, you can bet on the reverse and limit you original losses.
Many More Markets
There are many more markets for you to bet on, you can bet on the winner of a tournament or league, who you think will be relegated and even on the next manager to lose his job!
Sports betting sites are coming up with new, exciting and engaging ideas all the time so check out the brands listed above and you’ll discover hundreds of different markets on thousands of different games all over the world.