With seemingly every sport now available in the betting markets, there is a huge need to understand all the rules and options you have when looking to wager. Fortunately, we have you covered here at OddsShopper, and this is a quick primer on some tips and things to know when betting on soccer. Our sports betting experts and soccer betting tools can help you increase your ROI by finding positive expected value (+EV). Let’s answer the question of how to be a profitable soccer bettor by diving into the strategies for finding +EV on soccer.
Despite soccer (or fútbol)’s status as a worldwide game, it’s not the easiest betting sport to understand, especially if you are getting into it for the first time. With marquee leagues and tournaments running seemingly, all year it’s a great one to try and find edges in, but that starts with knowing what the markets mean. Here are a few quick tips to know if you are planning on venturing into soccer betting along with some of the ways I go about finding my bets each week.
How to be a Profitable Soccer Bettor: Finding Positive EV
How to Profit on Soccer Sides & Totals | Finding Positive EV
Want to up your soccer betting game? It’s not a cakewalk, but there are some tricks. Soccer betting is tough because everyone’s on it, making winning tough. But there are some numbers you can look at to get an edge, and just having an understanding of the game at hand is crucial — with so many different soccer leagues, tournaments and formats, being able to parse through them all is crucial.
Before we dive into the key pieces of context you need to be a winning soccer bettor, let’s talk about a simpler way to win: Portfolio EV sports betting tools. It’s a tool that helps you find good bets by comparing different sportsbooks, allowing you to easily spot positive expected value (+EV).
How to Use Portfolio EV to Find Positive Expected Value on Soccer
Here’s Portfolio EV’s model works. It indexes the odds across the market; adjusts them for hold, book sharpness, etc.; and generates a breakeven price point (called “true odds”) for each wager. But how can you know which lines are sharper, and how do you tell how much value you’re getting on a given line?
The answer to both questions is a lot of math. Fortunately, Portfolio EV’s soccer betting model crunches the numbers for you. Let’s dive into an example wager to explain how the magic happens:
Bet Size: The recommended bet size as a percentage of your bankroll. This metric is based on a fractional Kelly Criterion approach that leads to a reasonable balance of minimizing risk of ruin while maximizing potential reward.
xWin: The probability of winning the bet implied by the Sharp Sportsbook Algorithm true odds.
OS Rating: The OS rating provides a rating for each +EV bet. An OS rating above 20 signifies an exceptional bet. Ratings between 10 and 20 are highly favorable bets. Finally, a rating between 0 and 10 indicates a solid bet. We factor in the EV, expected win, bet size, and negative geometric drag to calculate this rating.
Hold: The synthetic hold across the entire market, which is the loss a bettor would sustain if he bet both sides of the market to win equal amounts. The larger the hold, the more difficult it is to beat that market. While uncommon, a negative synthetic hold is possible. Negative synthetic holds are arbitrage situations (also known as arbs) where a bettor can guarantee a profit by booking both sides.
True Odds: Odds that represent the real statistical probability of any outcome in a particular sporting event.
Line Shop | How to Find Positive EV on Soccer
No matter what sport you are betting on, you want to maximize your potential winnings while minimizing the amount you must pay for a given bet. That’s standard practice, but with soccer and the number of options on the board, it takes shopping to a new level.
Of course, using multiple books to get the best price is important, but even within the same book you can find discrepancies on certain bets, which is astounding. Here’s a quick example to illustrate that point with a game in the EPL between Brighton and Man City:
Here, you see a standard two-way line asking us to either lay a half-goal with Man City, meaning they must win the game, or take a half-goal with Brighton. You can see the line of Man City at -0.5, which means the same as “win the game,” will cost you -300. Now, let’s look at the three-way line on this game:
This market lets us choose Brighton to win, Man City to win or the game to end in a draw. One thing should immediately stand out, and it’s that Man City to win is now -270 instead of -300.
Now is -270 vs -300 the biggest difference in the world and one that will change your entire betting year? Obviously not, but you are crazy if you don’t maximize the potential return even within a single book.
Soccer offers these types of small edges, and at the end of the year. it can make the difference between being in the black or the red.
The easiest way to do this is to use an odds screen like OddsShopper has so you can see Soccer lines across multiple books or across multiple markets. To me, this is one of the most common mistakes I see new bettors make, and their bottom lines suffer because of it.
Understand the League Format | Profit on Soccer
My second note is a little more nuanced but is also crucial when discussing soccer. Unlike most sports where everything is about a single league, we have situations in soccer where teams are playing for multiple things at once.
Think of it like a situation where the Lakers in basketball were in the middle of the NBA season but also then flew to Europe to take on some of the best international squads. This scenario would raise interesting questions in terms of roster, rules and format of the league, and that’s where this comes into play in soccer.
A traditional league game would be just a normal format that could end in a tie and the score wouldn’t carry over, while a tournament setting might be a multi-legged game where a tie ultimately isn’t an option, and the game could end in penalty kicks.
Understanding the format lends us to understanding a team’s mindset as sometimes they head into a game knowing they need to push the offense or are content protecting a league from a previous leg. This can help us better gauge where a line is or should be at and if you are originating or projecting anything this is 100% a step that needs to be taken.
Don’t Be a Jack of All Trades, Master of None | Profit on Soccer
This is a tip that I’m taking from my time in college basketball, which is one of the sports I bet the most. In college basketball, you have 350-plus teams to handicap, and trying to keep up with every single one in every single conference is impossible.
Sure, if you have an overarching process, that can work, but truly being informed with that many players and teams is a recipe to miss key info that would make the difference. I strongly believe that it’s better to be an expert in a few leagues or even a few teams so you can accurately and quickly jump on exploitable spots.
This concept 100% translates to soccer where you have dozens of leagues across basically every country in the world. Once you drill down to a team level, you are talking about thousands of squads playing in all sorts of time zones, making it basically impossible to stay up to date on what’s happening.
Instead of chasing constantly, find a few leagues that fit your schedule and start to really acclimate yourself to the teams, formats, lines, and books that offer these games. This is the steppingstone to being able to accurately project and anticipate news, and the value you will get from being familiar with the teams will make all the difference.
I speak from experience here when I say knowing teams inside and out takes a lot of time, and it’s better to know a few than to have peripheral knowledge of many.
Overall, soccer is one of the biggest betting markets in the world, and being able to have it at your disposal can help your overall betting portfolio. It doesn’t mean that suddenly you need to become a soccer expert, but when the biggest events pop up on the calendar remembering these simple tips and tricks can make all the difference in trying to turn a profit on the pitch.
