Football Articles and Guides

Every UK bookie provides a book for football betting, this however by no means that you should place your footy bets with any old betting site.

In our football betting guide we recommend the best footy bookmakers for your needs, whether that be for offers and deals, odds, market depth, live streaming, live betting and more.

Make sure you are always getting the best possible value from your football wagers with OnlineBetting.org.uk.

Our detailed guide on how to bet on football describes all of the betting markets and lines you can expect to find both pre-event and in play.

Whether you want to place a simple win single, accumulator, goalscorer, correct score bet, scorecast and more we give you information not just on what’s available but how to get the best value out of these bets.

At the bottom of the page there is a full guide to bet types and how to place them.

The best offers and deals on football are available for the top events and tournaments. We list all the major matches and championships to look out for split into major international, European and UK club football.

Whether it is the World Cup, the Africa Cup of Nations or the UK domestic League cup find the details in our football events guide.

Scroll up and down to find more on where to watch with live streaming and in play markets.

Any referee at level 5 or above cannot place bets on football.  This isn’t just about match fixing but also insider information as obviously referees have privileged information about games they are involved with that the public at large or the bookies might not know about.

Referees at level 4 or below can place bets on football but not on the leagues and matches they were involved in.  They could bet on the Premier League for example.

The popularity on betting on over/under goals markets or the number of goals in a match has soared in recent years, thanks in part to the rise of bet builders that incorporate these markets.  Most people like to see exciting games and a disproportionate amount of people bet on there to be more goals than less, this is also because bets on no goals or a few goals can quickly go down whereas bets on lots of goals still stand a chance of winning until later in the game.

Here we look at what the actual average number of goals is in a Premier League game over a number of seasons to help you pick these bets more sensibly.

The both teams to score market in football and other low scoring sports has exploded in the last few years. A major reason for this is the extra value that these bets can add on their own or when combined with a win.

Bookies are competitive on this line so you can be sure to get great odds and offers. In our BTTS guide we discuss how to get the best out of these bets, how often both teams actually score, betting strategies, common rules and more.

It’s the richest, biggest, most watched and most prestigious club football competition on the planet, the UEFA Champions League.  The tournament has gone from a side-line competition in the 1950’s to the greatest football show on earth today.  Clubs and fans would give everything to win the pinnacle event and as we know this means betting sites take this event extremely seriously.

The Champions League attracts the best offers, biggest market range, best value odds and the best payout rates.  Every bookie provide CL markets but that doesn’t mean you should wager with just anyone, read our guides to the best Champions League bookies along with details about format, schedule, history, trivia and more.

The third most common bet type on football correct score is one of the most competitive betting markets available. Just because everyone offers correct score markets doesn’t mean you should place your bets anywhere.

We discuss the best bookies for correct score wagers as well as how likely various scores are to occur, what odds you should expect as well as strategies to get the best value from these lines.

Playing European club football is the dream for many fans but lots of people believe if their team plays in a European competition it will negatively affect their league performance, but is this actually true?

We look at some high profile seasons from both Liverpool and Real Madrid to see if in fact playing lots of European games does influence domestic league results, for better or for worse.

The Euros is no longer a second string tournament to fill the gaps between world cups.  In its own right it has become the best continental international football competition on the planet, and draws audiences and crowds to match.

The timing of the Euros also means there is not a lot else going on, this means it captivates the attention of both bookies and punters making it one of the best times to bet for value.  Read our guide for betting insights, offers and a full guide to the European Championships.

The FA Cup is the oldest domestic association cup in the world having been played since 1881.  Open to all of the top ten level of English football the competition has a magic like no other, giving even the most minor team a hope of beating the big boys and attaining instant legendary status.  Where else on earth could you possibly end up with a fixture like Hereford v Newcastle?

People love to bet on the FA Cup, largely because it is applicable to so may people.  It is one of the best football tournaments there is for accumulators and deals, but how do you know who are the best bookies to bet with?  In our guide we give you everything you need to know about the FA Cup and who to wager with.

Not everyone understands the basics of football, and not everyone is honest about how good their understanding of football really is. Be honest, is someone asked you to explain what the D is for would you really be able to answer?

Whether you unashamedly know nothing about the sport, whether you have always pretended to know the difference between direct and indirect free kicks, or whether you just want to test you knowledge, this FAQ covers all of the most basic questions about the game of football. Remember, there are no silly questions.

We’ve always been told that new managers give clubs an instant boost and club owners clearly buy into this often sacking managers at critical stages of the season in the hope it can rescue a club or allow them to qualify for Europe, for example.

How true is the idea that new managers make teams win more?  Is it a genuine factor or is it a modern myth that has grown with little evidence? We have gone through some data to see if we can find an answer to this question.

It is true that most goals come at in the last 10 minutes of a game and this is due to a lot of factors such as fatigue and increased urgency at that time.  There are however other periods in the game when goals are more or less likely and this information can be very useful if you bet on scoring periods or the time of the next goal.

On our page we look at the Premier League and Championship, home and away, to show you when most goals happen, we also break this down by team to see if we can find any idiosyncrasies from one club to another.

First goalscorer and other goal scorer betting markets represent the second most popular football bet. This means cracking prices, great deals and good returns if you win since bookies compete in this area.

In our guide you can find out about the relative merits of the different bet types, the best goalscorer bookies as well as strategies to get the best value out of your wagers. We also discuss the rules of own goals, substitutes, red cards and no goal scorer vs 0-0 betting.

A referee scoring a goal is a ridiculous notion, right? Obviously, they aren’t supposed to touch the ball at all, so the answer to this question should be no, but what is the truth?

A rule change in 2019 made this already rare occurrence pretty much impossible going forward, but we have had a good 100 years of football to wade through before this rule change, and some of the mishaps and missteps that have led to disastrous positioning are unbelievable.

One of the most popular betting markets in the UK is to bet on first, last or anytime goalscorer and a lot of bookies now have promotions to encourage you to bet on it.  The most popular offer is to pay you extra winnings if your player scores a hat-trick, but the question is are these deals worth it, exactly how often is a player likely to score a hat-trick?

Of course it depends on the player, who they play for and the league they are in.  The short answer for the Premier League is around 3% of the time, but for other leagues it can vary a lot.  Read our page for a detailed breakdown on how often hat-tricks are scored.

Rarely seen as a good thing the fact is own goals are commonplace in football, occurring in around 8-9% of Premier League matches.  These days you can bet on own goals but even if you don’t they can be important as they affect other bets and different markets handle own goals differently, which is certainly worth knowing about.

An own goal can ruin the day for the team who concedes one, let alone the poor player themselves, but they don’t necessarily need to ruin your wager if you bet savvy.

In the old days the starting eleven would predominantly finish the game and subs when they were first brought in were designed for injuries only. Things have now changed dramatically and it would be highly unusual if you team now started and finished with the same 11 players as substitutions have become part of the tactics of the game of football.

The issue with subs is they can easily scupper a bet, here we look at how subs affect different bets and things to think about if you are betting on a substitute or a player likely to be subbed.

Football formations have changed drastically since the formation of the game in the late 1800’s, back then it was common to see up to 8 players up front with very few defenders.  Over time formations settled to be more defensive and for a long period of time revolved around 4-3-3, 4-4-2 and 3-5-1.

The modern game has taken this evolution a step further, these days the actual formation you read about before a game only tells you part of the story as there are now many ways to set up a team within a formation.  This has, therefore, affected player positions, which have changed a lot from their traditional roles.  This is all important to betting as understanding formations and player positions are important when backing goalscorers, especially.

Above we’ve looked at how good teams are at keeping clean sheets, here we are interested in when teams get a clean sheet and win, known as winning-to-nil.

We look at 5 seasons of data and 4,660 games to show that in the region of 40% of games end with a win-to-nil, however the more goals scored the less likely a team is to keep a clean sheet themselves.  There is an obvious home advantage, but this gets bigger in magnitude the higher the scoreline.

Clean sheets matter for all sorts of betting markets from both teams to score to bet builders but what exactly are the chances of a team keeping a clean sheet in any given game.

We look at the number of clean sheets by season and team along with other factors such as consecutive clean sheets and how likely teams are to not concede at home vs away from home. Generally it is the better teams that keep clean sheets, but it is not always the case.

You’ve likely heard the cliché that 2-0 is the most dangerous score in football, but is there any truth to the idea that teams are more likely to draw or lose when two-nil up? This is now important in the betting world as many sites now have offers that refund you or pay you out early if a team goes 2 goals up at any stage, so are these worth anything?

We look at case studies, famous examples and stats around the idea that teams are more liable to lose when two goals in front, and settle the debate over whether or not it is a dangerous score line.

Getting a free-kick near to the goal is seen as a dangerous situation but how often do team actually score from them? Given you can bet on almost any market these days, including next goal method, player to score a free-kick, etc., then knowing the stats behind the success rate could give you a leg up.

Free-kicks are a lot more subjective than say penalties, as distance, angle and other factors come into play but still there is information to be gleaned from the numbers. We also look at exactly what defines a goal from a free-kick and whether better teams and players score more often.

As a football fan or punter when your team is given a corner there is an expectation that they should be able to score from it but in reality what are the actual chances of scoring from a corner.  Evidence suggests it could be as little as 1.2% of corners that result in a goal with corners themselves making up around 5% of goals.

There is a lot more than the percentages to consider too, for example, are corners harder to score against better opposition and indeed what actually defines a goal scored from a corner?

In the days before VAR everybody wanted it, now we have it nobody wants it anymore, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  The fact is we now have VAR and it is the most radical shake up of football decision making in 100 years.

It not only can change the result of a game but it also changes the outcome of the bets many people place on these games.  Just how often does VAR change football outcomes and how likely is it to affect your bets, for better or worse.

Were not just here to give you guides around football betting, we also know a lot of our readers are interested in the rules of the game that we cover, and many want to get involved with the game.  If playing the game isn’t your natural talent you might want to get into refereeing instead.

With the game now larger than ever it is very easy to get involved with and while it takes graft and time to become a top professional the job can be rewarding in many ways, such as getting to work outdoors watching football.

There are more offers for goalscorer markets than any other football bet and that should tell you something about them, they are generally poor value high margin bets.  This is because they are complicated, there are 22 players on the pitch but there are other players that could come on as a substitute and score, this makes calculating margins almost impossible.

What you can guarantee is they are high, which is why bookies like you to place these bets.  Be sure you understand this before betting regularly on goalscorer bets.

We can all look at stats and form to make an educated guess at how a team might perform in a given match but every now and again things happen, such as a tragedy, that can potentially have an unknown impact on a teams performance.

We’ve looked at a series of high profile tragedies to effect football teams over the years and how this has influenced their results.  There is no clear answer, some teams understandably perform worse whereas others get a boost from the enhanced team spirit and support that often goes with these type of things.

Betting on the method of the next goal is now more popular than ever, driven mostly by the rise of in-play betting, which is where most people tend to place these bets.

We have therefore looked at the Premier League to see what goal methods are the most common comparing different seasons to see if this changes over time or stays fairly fixed.  One aspect that can be confusing is how goals are actually categorised, which has changed over the years.

A player being loaned out to another club used to be an innocent process designed to enhance the player’s abilities or get them back to full fitness, while at the same time giving a smaller club access to a quality athlete for a short time. However, while this is still a function of the loan system, things have changed a great deal over the last decade.

Now, players are used almost like poker chips, being passed around the table until they are worth enough to sell on, often making their parent club millions of pounds of profit without them having ever pulled on a shirt for them competitively. Some clubs even have official partnerships with others to facilitate this, while others still are part of multi club ownership groups who act as administrators for several teams and regularly swap players around between them.

The Premier League is the most successful national league in the world, accounting for over half of the bets placed on football in the UK.  The commercial success of the competition has exceeded even the most optimistic visions when it was created in 1992 and it is now the richest league on the planet.

To begin with the Premier League was fraught with controversy, and many believe still now that the league has lost its soul in favour of commercialism, but whatever you think it is here to stay and will likely only continue to grow.  Being the biggest league also means that every single betting site wants a piece of the action, meaning you can find value when betting on it you can rarely get elsewhere.

Scorecast, anytime scorecast, wincast, timecast and other related bets can add a huge amount of value to your bet if you think you know the result and who’s going to score. Things have moved on a lot from the original scorecast and you can now place multiple types of these bets with various betting sites.

In our article we discuss the betting sites with the best lines and odds as well as strategies you can use to get the most out of betting on these markets.

We all know that you can get a yellow card, two yellows make a red or you can just get a straight red card.  What we are interested in here is what the actual rules are for bookings and sending’s off and how far those rules go.

For example, bookings are not just restricted to the field of play.  Substitutes, managers, coaches and pretty much anyone associated with a team can be booked or sent off and receive fines or sanctions for doing so.  Players can even be booked or sent off before a game kicks off or after it has finished.  The rules are pretty expansive.

If you are over around the age of 40 you may still remember the football pools.  The much loved game of picking draws from the weekend football fixture list to win a life changing prize was the first means people had in the UK to bet on football.

Despite a demise in popularity in the modern day caused by betting online and the lottery you can actually still play the footy pools on the internet.  Read our football pools guide for the full history of one of the nations favourite and most ground breaking games.

The game of football is far older than the pastime of placing a bet on the beautiful game, although you might not think that looking at the sport today where gambling has become synonymous with the sport.  From the football pools, to licenced betting shops, up to modern in play betting with live streaming, football has in fact driven the betting industry just as much as the other way around.

Read about the history of gambling and football in the UK and how we became a nation who loves to stick a few quid on their team to win.

A relatively few people know about Opta and their stats and data service, yet this company plays a huge part in the betting industry and can even have the final say on your bet. The company are best known for their detailed football statistics and analysis, but they monitor hundreds of thousands of sporting events each year and record every last pass, shot, corner, throw, goal etc. that happens during them.

This treasure trove information, collected over decades, is extremely powerful in the right hands, and is used by not only bookmakers, but by broadcasters and even football teams themselves so that they can get a full picture of their teams performance as well as the individual players. Bettors will have used Opta’s data probably without even realising, every time they have used the free stats info or watched the match graphic during live betting.

Everyone has a ‘feeling’ on who they think will score the first, last or anytime goal in a match.  These markets are quite emotive and loved by fans and consequently are one of the most popular betting markets for football.

Goalscorer markets are however hard to price for betting companies and this means generally poor value odds, therefore, we look at the actual chances of scoring various types of goals to help you decide if the odds you are offered are fair or not.

Penalties are the best thing in the world when they happen for your team but how often are pens given and when they are how often are they scored? Conversely if a penalty is given against your team what are the chances that they player will miss, giving your team a reprieve?

We’ve analysed penalties in the Premier League to shed some light on the matter and as betting on penalty markets is very popular it is worth giving this some consideration before you place your bets.

There are literally thousands of different bets you can place on a game of football these days with an online bookmaker.  The number of options has exploded, especially with features such as bet builders where you can create your own bets.

Still, it seems the old ones remain the best and punters mostly still bet on the classic markets like the result, both teams to score, correct score and goalscorer.  On our page we run through the top 10 most popular footy bets.

Generally the way to spot markets with poor value is to look at what the bookies have offers for.  For example, there are more promotions for accumulators and goalscorer bets than any other markets, why, because the margins are high and the bookies make a lot of money from these lines.

Getting the best value from your football wagers is more about just shopping around for odds and deals, betting on the right markets in the first place is more important.

We all know managing football clubs in a precarious job at the best of times and most managers in reality don’t expect to be in the job more than a few years.

What is the average ‘lifespan’ of an professional manager in English football though and how has it changed over time?  Which leagues sack more managers than others and what is the trick to sucess for the longest serving managers?

Refs can go on a lot longer than players can, and it’s this maturity and experience that makes the top refs, those in the Premier League, the top performers that they are. They don’t have the same sort of opportunities after they retire as players, although you may be surprised to learn how much they can earn at a professional level.

Age catches up with all of us eventually though, whatever we do, so when do most refs hang up their whistle and what do they do for money once their officiating time is over?

Being a ref is a tough job, and quite often a thankless job too. It’s a gig that comes with a lot of grief but the best refs know how to deal with this sort of thing calmly and professionally, although, referees are human too, and we all have bad days.

That goes for players too, so sometimes personalities clash and one party or the other can lash out. It always gets attention when it happens, precisely because it shouldn’t, and this article covers many of most memorable referee fights.

The introduction of video assistant referees has seen the biggest shake up in the application of football rules in over 100 years, causing more controversy than the introduction of penalties and changes to the offside and handball rules in recent decades.

Here we look at where VAR came from, who’s idea was it and how did it go from a concept to being implemented across all major football now?  Who controls it and who is responsible for the rules.

The biggest global sporting event by a long way, the FIFA World Cup.  An instant success since its inception in 1930 the pinnacle of national football arouses passions in all people, even many who claim to not like football.

The prestige of the tournament means this is the most bet on competition in football and this means it is also one of the best times to get good value from wagers as all the bookies compete with each other.  Read our extensive world cup guide with details not just about how to bet but also covering stadiums, schedules, format, history, controversy and more.