Beginner Football Betting Markets

For all the football fanatics wanting to get into betting, you’re in luck. When it comes to betting on football, we are really spoiled for choice as punters in many ways. There’s an endless variety of bookies and bonuses to take advantage of, but more importantly a wide range of betting markets within the footballing section of bookmakers. In fact, we have to say we’ve not come across a bookmaker as rewarding for betting markets as Smarkets, they have so many different bet types for you to choose from.

As a beginner, it can be slightly overwhelming with all the possible options and also a bit challenging deciding how to bet on football, what odds look good, what events are more likely to occur during the course of a match, etc. But in this article we want to run through the easiest football betting markets that you should be aware of and choose when you start out.

Best Football Markets For Beginners

Both Teams To Score

One of our firm favourites is both teams to score. This is such a regular occurrence and it’s also not too difficult to choose the fixtures in which you think will have goals on both sides.

There are a few tips and tricks that we will get into for both teams to score, also known as BTTS.

Firstly, do your research. Look at the recent form or the form for the whole season for the teams involved. This will give you an indication into the likelihood of these teams scoring a goal but also conceding a goal. Teams towards the bottom of the league are of course going to be likely to concede and teams at the top are going to be more likely to score, like Liverpool or Man City. But then you need to find a scenario where a team can do both.

We tend to choose evenly matched teams, so teams that are similarly positioned, concede similar goals and score similar goals. The chances are they will do both against each other.

Draw No Bet

This betting type is great because it offers you the chance to win your bet but also not lose anything in a certain scenario. There are only 2 possible outcomes for draw no bet and they are a home win or an away win, a draw does not count, hence the name draw no bet.

If you were to place a bet on a team to win and used this type of bet, with the end result being a draw, your stake will be returned to you. If you come across a fixture where you really don’t know which team will be victorious then this betting market is great.

We definitely recommend this to beginners, it’s worth your punt.

Over/Under

The Over/ Under market is exactly what it sounds like. You decide whether you think there will be over a certain amount of something, or under. The only difficult part is deciding what you are going to bet over or under on. 

Usually punters will decide to bet over or under a certain amount of goals, the reason being is this is the most enjoyable and exciting. So, if you come across a high scoring team against a team conceding a lot, then you might decide to be brave and bet over 4 goals for the better team, just as an example. 

Obviously, if you simply bet for there to be over 1 goal then the odds won’t be too great, but the more goals you add on over, the better the odds. Just like the lesser goals you add for under, the better the odds.

Anytime Goalscorer

The final market we want to go over is the anytime goalscorer market. This is where you predict a player to score a goal at any time during the game. The reason this market can be easy at times is because you can see who the top goalscorers are in the league and on average, how many minutes it takes them to score a goal. Therefore if they average a goal every game, or game and a half, etc you can work out whether or not to bet on them.

If they come up against opposition that concede a lot of goals then the odds will probably be short but the chances of that particular player scoring is highly likely. You could always add this into an accumulator bet for better odds.