Finding The Right Football Bets: With so many matches and markets to choose from it can be easy to miss some great bets, writes The Ultra. Having a successful football betting strategy is the holy grail for most punters, but it takes a tremendous amount of work, time and discipline.
You need to put in a lot of work to be an expert football trader. Research plays a massive roll and with that in mind, I have put together my list of things to look for when finding the right football bets every weekend!
1️⃣ Pricing
Pricing is the most important part of betting, so it is always going to come first. You must be betting at value prices to win over the long-term. All your research and analysis must be geared towards finding value within the markets.
Creating your own prices can be difficult, however there are many helpful blogs on BETDAQ Tips. The more you practice, the better you’ll get. When Manchester United are at home to Leicester; you have to know whether they should be 1.9 or 2.0 for example. You can use all the available tips and tools below to help you, but ultimately it comes down to what you think is a value price and not settling for anything less than that.
2️⃣ Discipline
Discipline is very important when trading any sport, however it’s extremely important with football betting. There’s so much on offer it can be easy to get side-tracked and look at different markets than you’re used to. One of the hardest things with football betting is also to not commit at bad prices. Pricing is the number one, but if you priced something at 2.66 and the highest it hits is 2.64 – you have to keep your discipline. It’s not a bet at those prices.
3️⃣ Correct Analysis & Research
With so many stats in the football media, it’s hard to avoid the noise. You must focus on more important data like xG (Expected Goals), Home & Away form/league tables and even time of goals data for the goals markets.
I find xG to be the most helpful tool when betting on football. The full-time score might be 2-1, but xG could show that the away team “should have” won if they had taken their chances and this can be very valuable over the course of the season as the teams who create the most in terms of xG do better. It also shows who is playing the best football, despite the scoreline not reflecting that fact.
4️⃣ Team News
Team news is obviously a very important part of trading football. We can see some big price movements when the team sheets are announced. It pays to try and do some research prior to the team sheets being released and attempt to get ahead of the crowd.
A good idea is to check the xG of each player and really determine if a “key player” is indeed, a key player! That’s a good way of seeing what influence each player will have on the game and then you can decide if the market has reflected the facts. Remember, most markets tend to overreact so there is an edge there.
5️⃣ Tactics & Motivation
How a team sets up is clearly a very important factor. You won’t have any issues with this in the early part of the season, but motivation plays a big part for teams in midtable late in the season and when teams have won first legs in Europe, or when they’ve already qualified from the Group stages and have one game to play. Most managers will play the second XI in Cups but in the league, you will still get the regular XI. A team fighting to stay up can easily be overpriced against a mid-table side who have mentally checked out. These days that is factored into the market, but in certain circumstances can still become excellent value.
6️⃣ Current Climate
Lastly, current climate is everything that comes into effect on game day that can change daily. We might have very bad weather, bad pitch conditions (Cups), certain players tired after a big trip to Europe midweek and players who can’t play their normal game because of discipline issues (one yellow away from a ban).
These all are big factors that must be considered when pricing up the game. Weather won’t play too big a part unless extreme conditions; however we can see very poor pitch conditions in the domestic league Cups for example. A Premier League game at 12-30pm on Saturday after a very testing away trip in the Champions League on Wednesday night can also give an edge, while it’s always worth checking the booking situation for the back four before the game starts.
