Spreadex Sports is a bookmaker with a real difference – the main one being that it is not chiefly a bookmaker at all.
Set up as a spread betting platform for the financial markets back in the 1999, Spreadex Sports is an offshoot of that initial business but allows punters to apply the same idea to sports betting.
This creates brand new markets you just can’t get at a traditional bookie, but since their sportsbook can flip between offering a spread of fixed odds, you get the best of both worlds – you don’t have to compromise.
In fact, you never have to use the spread betting side of things if you don’t want to, you could just stick to fixed odds, and since Spreadex have their own odds traders they have industry leading prices in certain areas too, with very low margins.
Those with a head for maths will no doubt get the best of this site though, since the financial market spread betting side of the business is still very much in operation, making it the ideal place for anyone who likes to dabble in the stock market as well as sports betting.
Backed up by excellent customer service and a long-standing reputation as a fair and friendly company to bet with, Spreadex Sports is a bookmaker that should be on more people’s radars.
- Spread bet on sports – Almost no other UK bookmakers offer this service.
- Unique bet types – Spread betting creates bets types that are impossible at fixed odds bookies.
- Award winning service – Spreadex have been repeatedly recognised for the quality of their support.
What is Spread Betting on Sports?
It makes sense to cover this first since it is such an important part of what Spreadex Sports are bringing to the table. If you already understand spread betting you can skip this section, but otherwise, read on.
In traditional fixed odds betting you stake an amount you are comfortable with and you know the amount you stand to win; these amounts will not change regardless of what happens, you either win or you lose.
Spread betting is a win or lose scenario too, but the amount you stand to win or lose can vary – sometimes wildly.
Here’s how it works.
Spreadex Sports will show you their spread, and you have to decide which side of it you want to go. Depending on the bet type, you either Buy or Sell.
- Buy – If the market is binary, so something like Correct Score, you would buy to agree with the bet. In this case, each side of the spread is a bit like your odds. If the market relates to number of goals, corners, cards, etc., you would buy if you think the result will be more than the spread.
- Sell – The opposite. So you would sell to disagree with the market, or if you thought the number of something (whatever that might be) will be below the spread.
After that, your winnings or losses are based on what happens, but they can keep going up or down depending on the accuracy of your prediction.
For example, if you want to bet on Total Goals and the spread is 2.8-3, Spreadex are basically predicting 3 goals. If you agree with them you wouldn’t bet at all, but if you think there might be more or fewer goals, you would ‘Buy’ for more, and ‘Sell’ for fewer.
The stake you set is the multiple used to determine how much you will win or lose, based on the eventual number of goals.
So if you bet £10, a 3-1 scoreline would mean you won £10, because the match saw 4 goals which is 1 more than the prediction of 3. If it was only 1-0 though, you would lose £20, because that single goal is 2 fewer than the prediction, and you chose to buy.
If you had chosen to sell instead, the win/loss would be the other way around.
In a market like Time of First Goal, this could get wildly out of hand if you bet too much as you can imagine. With every minute that ticked away costing you more and more money.
In a binary market (Chelsea to win, for example) things work a little differently, as the bet settles at 0 or 100 instead of using the spread.
In this case the spread might be 58.8-62.5, so if you thought Chelsea would win and placed a £2 buy bet, you would win £75 (100 – 62.5 = 37.5 x £2 = 75), but if you placed a sell bet for £2 you would lose £141.20 (£2 x 100 = 200 – 58.8 = 141.2)
It’s all about setting a sensible stake in the first place to control your potential losses, because as you can see, they can be scary.
If you are interested in giving it a go but feel wary due to the risks, bet on a market like total goals that won’t get too crazy, and only use the minimum stake. It might be 20p or something. That way, even if you are out by 7 goals you won’t lose more than a few pounds, but will get a better understanding of how spread betting works on sports.
Spreadex have their own ‘Training Centre’ too, so you can teach yourself how things work in there.
Using the Website and Betting Interface
By its’ very nature, Spreadex Sports’ website was always going to be more complex than your typical online bookmaker.
Immediately upon loading the page, you will notice something different about it, and this is because the fixed odds are shown alongside the spread.
This is necessary for the site to operate both fixed odds and spread betting services, but in terms of how the site looks, it makes the page feel busier, more complicated, and perhaps a little intimidating.
Probably not the best option for those new to betting if I’m honest.
For everyone else though, especially those interested in trying spread betting, it’s a fantastic interface running on a solid platform that won’t cause you any problems.
The layout makes instinctive sense, you don’t have to search very long to find even the more obscure options you might be looking for, and they even have a link to their Trust Pilot reviews – how many other bookies have the gonads to do that?
There are usually one or two different ways to get to where you want to go, which does nothing to simplify the look of the site, but does mean you tend to get to your destination very quickly, and there are quick links and drop-down menus all over the place.
The grey, black, and red colour scheme enhances the more serious approach Spreadex Sports takes, and rightly so, but it also keeps the site looking balanced and hopefully helps to keep punters sensible too.
When looking at the home screen you will see the spread on the left and the fixed odds on the right, but as you navigate towards specific events, there are sometimes too many betting lines to display both. It just depends on the sport and the markets available.
In busier markets, like Premier League games for example, there is a toggle to switch between fixed odds and spreads, which helps keeps things clear and uncrowded.
I like the website a lot; it’s not showy or rich with snazzy features, but it is quick, reliable, adaptable, and has an old school vibe that inspires confidence.
What Markets Can You Bet On?
This isn’t a place for niche sports, as the sports list is kept to a sensible 20 or so markets, and they tend to be the usual headline sports plus boxing, cricket, UFC etc, although eSports is available.
In terms of global coverage, they have a good number of leagues from around the world with football understandably having the most depth, but horse racing from around the world is also available, as is greyhound racing and American sports which get good depth. There are a small number of politics markets too.
Sometimes only fixed odds are available on these markets, it just depends on what you are looking at, but often you can bet on the spread as well.
Fixed odds market depth per event is decent though, with around 340+ betting lines for Premier League matches, plus bet builders and cash out are available to use.
Of course, with the option to spread bet as well as bet on fixed odds markets, new betting lines become available.
These are probably not for the uninitiated, but a few examples might be Shirt Numbers or Goal Minutes. They usually follow the same pattern: adding things up to create a total that will land either side of the spread, creating winning or losing bets.
Using Shirt Numbers as an example; the number each goal scorer wears is added up at the end of the match to create a total, and this is what you are betting on. So if it was 2-1 and the number 11 and number 4 scored for Team A, and the number 9 scored for Team B, this would add up to 24. If the spread for that market was 16-19, anyone buying the spread would be winning 5 times their stake, while anyone selling the spread would be crying.
How Good are the Odds?
Being an independent company, Spreadex have their own traders who can pull together markets however they like.
This means that, if Spreadex want to be ultra-competitive on football markets, they can bring their margin right down to make their fixed odds prices much more attractive.
As an example, in the 2022/23 season, their average overround on the 1×2 market in the Premier League was just 102.1%. If you don’t know much about overrounds then read this, but in short, that’s pretty low.
Of course, this is just one betting line across one league in one sport, but it shows what Spreadex can do in terms of betting value when they want to.
Outside of this, I’ve always found them to be more or less inline with the best price available elsewhere, so you certainly won’t get a bad deal here.
Spread betting doesn’t use odds in the same way of course, but the fact that you can win more (or lose more) depending on how right or wrong you are about something also means that, effectively, your odds increase along with these winnings too.
Put plainly, you can stake less and win more by spread betting, but the same is also true about losses.
Betting Features
I have already mentioned the bet builder, but there are coupons available for lots of markets too, and plenty of cash out.
There is a blog that they regularly add articles to as well, not to mention a statistics tool to help with any research you want to do.
It’s all fairly standard on the fixed odds side of things, but when spread betting, there is a very useful auto cash out feature that could come in handy in certain markets.
Basically, you are telling them to end your bet when you hit a certain level of winnings, safeguarding any money you have made up until that point.
It’s not relevant for all markets, but say you were betting on the Superiority market in a football match (how many more goals one team scores over the other) and wanted to cash out if you got 3 goals ahead – well you can set this up at the time of making the bet, and the system will do it for you.
This means if the other team went on to score one back it wouldn’t impact your winnings as the bet would have been ended at the most profitable point.
Of course, your team could go on to score 2 more which is money you would be missing out on if auto cash out had triggered, but that’s all down to you and how much risk you want to take.
Financial Markets
You will need a separate account for this if it’s something you are interested in doing, but betting on financial markets is what Spreadex is all about, so this is an extremely deep and robust service that they offer.
You can bet on the price movements of commodities like oil, cotton and corn; compare currency prices on the forex market including crypto; or ‘buy’ shares in publicly listed companies, indices, or ETFs (exchange traded funds) on the stock market.
This last option is what is most closely associated with spread betting, with customers betting a certain amount ‘per point’ on price movements up or down.
So you could bet £1 per point that the FTSE100 will go up, and for every basis point it increases you win a pound until you close out the trade. However, if the price moves against you your losses can pile up.
Spreadex have all sorts of tools people can use to help themselves out here, such a stop-losses (where the trade is automatically ended if the price moves past a point chosen by you, so no more money will be lost), as well as tools for researching and examining the price movements of companies before you bet, to see if you can analyse what is going on and what might happen next.
It’s incredibly complex and can take years to fully understand, which is why I won’t go into masses of detail here, as this website is about sports betting. There’s an awful lot to explore if you are interested though.
Live Betting and Streaming
Like many other areas of the site, the live betting interface might not look as technologically impressive as competing betting brands, but in terms of substance the in-play betting offering is excellent.
Access to live in-play betting is plastered all over the site, so you’re never more than a click away from it, and the layout is nice and familiar with the different sports represented by icons across the top, or the option to view the complete list of fixtures across all sports currently in-play.
There are a lot more personalisation options than usual though, with 3 different views available (simplified, tiled, or detailed) and the ability to filter fixtures by start time or league, which is really useful on big match days like Saturday.
When looking at an individual event you can view some interesting stats; football offers the usual sort of shots on target etc., but also team line ups, and also a chart showing momentum which I’ve never seen before – it’s a great indication of how the game has developed since it started, any shifts in form and how one sided the game has been. Elsewhere, in tennis you can see set by set information in quite a lot of detail, cricket includes score cards, run rates shown in several different ways, full team etc.
You can expect all the usual in-play markets you can find everywhere else, but of course you also have additional markets only available via spread betting that fixed odds bookies can’t provide, so there is more to explore at Spreadex Sports.
They do offer live streaming on many sports, and it’s free to watch in some cases too, even with an unfunded account. Greyhound and horse racing require a bet on the race to watch, but I was watching Australian football and tennis without a penny in my account.
Impressively, switching between fixed odds and spread betting doesn’t cause any sort of delay or reload in the live stream, it keeps playing smoothly throughout, making the user experience very satisfying indeed.
The only thing I would change is that while some live streams can be expanded to full screen others can’t for some reason, which I found odd, and it does make sports with larger teams more difficult follow.
About Spreadex Sports: A Brief History
Owned by Spreadex Ltd, Spreadex Sports is actually an additional product to the company’s flagship financial markets betting service.
That means that unlike any other betting site you will come across, sports betting is not their main concern.
Spread betting existed in the stock market long before it came to the world of sports, and Spreadex was set up by founder and ex city trader, Jonathan Hufford, in 1999 to make spread betting more accessible to ordinary people.
This was back in the days when investing and trading was done primarily only by the rich and those in the profession, it wasn’t something the regular guy or girl tended to engage in.
The company did incredibly well, and in 2006 they introduced spread betting on sports as an additional product.
It wasn’t until 2010 that their fixed odds betting service came along, but even then, it wasn’t really introduced to compete with traditional bookies, but to add value to their existing customers. They released an app in the same year and an online casino the year after.
Hufford understood that the majority of people would find the spread betting concept much too complicated, and noted that the crossover between those people using Spreadex to create a trading portfolio and those betting on sports or casino wasn’t huge, but also understood that a lot of his clients would bet on big sporting events, and wanted to give them the option to do it with Spreadex.
It also gave the company the ability to advertise more freely, as financial regulations did not allow certain types of marketing for financial services in the same way a sports betting company were allowed to.
In the following few years, Spreadex did well buying the customer databases of less successful sports spread betting companies that had tried to copy their model but failed, increasing their client numbers and therefore their turnover, at the same time as watching what minimal competition they had fall away.
The market for spread betting on sports still isn’t huge, but Spreadex’s time in the market gives them something of a moat when it comes to other companies trying to muscle in on their patch.
In 2017 they were one of the 1,000 fastest growing companies on the continent according to the Financial Times, and they have also won countless awards for their platform and their customer service and still rake in the gongs to this day.
Customer service really underpins everything Spreadex does, and this comes from the top. Hufford has said is several interviews that spread betting is not a good idea for the majority of people, and he only wants to promote it responsibly. On the fixed odds side of things, he said he doesn’t like limiting customers and when it happens it tends to only be on horse racing.
Deposit and Withdrawal Options
| Method | Min Deposit | Min Withdrawal | Fees | Withdrawal Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Debit Card | £10 | £10 | 0% | 1-5 Days |
| Bank Wire | £10 | £10 | - | 2-6 Days |
This is one area that could put people off Spreadex Sports.
Since the company allow spread betting on financial markets, they have to be very careful about how they accept payments.
For this reason, you have to use a bank transfer, debit card, or cheque (who still has a cheque book!?) to deposit and withdraw funds.
Anyone who likes to use more anonymous methods won’t be happy about this, but it won’t be an issue for the majority, who can enjoy £10 minimums on the way in and on the way out, and in my experience, fast processing times.
I know they officially state it can take days but I have never experienced these sorts of time frames personally.
One other thing to note with Spreadex Sports, is that your spread betting account and your fixed odds betting account are actually separate.
This means you fund them individually, and if you only have money in your spread betting account you can’t place fixed odds bets without either depositing funds or transferring funds to that account.
It’s all made very easy to do, but it’s an extra step you don’t have the hassle of elsewhere.
Best thing to do is keep a bit of money in both accounts, but equally, if you only deposit when you are going to bet (like me) it won’t impact you anyway.
If there is anything slightly unusual about your betting, such as being a high stakes bettor for example, you might be best off talking to the customer service team to get the most accurate up to date information before going ahead.
You can see the win limits for the various different sports below, but they are pretty standard amongst mid-level bookies, and higher than most people will ever have to worry about.
Is Spreadex Sports Right for You?
I would say the more sophisticated and analytical bettor would be best suited to Spreadex Sports.
This isn’t an elitist thing by any means – you can bet using fixed odds here just like you can anywhere else, and in some markets the margins are very favourable – but in terms of who will find the most value in Spreadex, it’s going to be people with a head for numbers.
It’s probably best avoided if your risk appetite is low too, since spread betting by its’ very nature is much riskier than fixed odds betting, and you can end up losing more than you have in your account if you’re not careful.
For punters that like a challenge though, or those with a mathematical mind who can bet with discipline, Spreadex offers the opportunity for better rewards.
It’s the only place where sports betting and the financial markets combine in any real sense too, so if both of those things float your boat then it really is the go-to option.
Excellent Customer Support
One of the really beneficial things about betting with Spreadex Sports, is that because they also offer spread betting, their support team need to be far more clued up on the business and betting on the whole than your average teenager in a call centre somewhere.
Not only can you contact support via phone, live chat, email, or post, but you will be connected to someone with real knowledge who is not just reading you answers from a screen, or copy and pasting blanket responses from the FAQ.
I have found the service at Spreadex to be exemplary, as evidenced by their largely positive online reviews which, for a gambling company, is highly unusual, and the numerous customer service awards they have won.
The company started out as a financial spread betting firm, and in the finance industry the approach to customer service is very different, but it has carried across to the sports betting side of things here which is great news for punters.
The team are available from 7.30am until 10pm, and they work 7 days a week, and while some people might complain they are not open longer, I think this is fine. Any issues outside of these hours can be emailed in ready for the morning if it’s that important, and if not, they will be open again after you’ve had your breakfast.
Lastly, Spreadex are proactive in educating their customer base about spread betting. They have a whole training section dedicated to this, which includes examples and videos so that punters can get their head around how it works and try it safely.
Spreadex Contact Info and License
- Name: Spreadex Sports
- Registered Company Name: Spreadex Ltd
- UK licence ref/No: 8835
- URL: https://www.spreadex.com/sports/
- Live Chat: Available onsite
- E-Mail: [email protected] (sports) [email protected] (financials)
- Phone: 01727 895 000 (sports) 08000 526 570 (financials)
- Twitter: @SpreadexSport
- Registered Company Address: 26-30 Upper Marlborough Road, ST. ALBANS, AL1 3UU, United Kingdom