Football Spread Betting Explained: One of the most popular ways of placing spread bets is on football.
And there is no better league for variety of spread bet markets, than the Premier League.
In this spread betting explained guide we will be focusing on football. Placing spread bets on the Premier football is an entirely different experience to the normal fixed odds betting we have become accustomed too.
How Spread Betting Works
To show how spread betting works, I'm going to use football as an example. You can spread bet on numerous sports, statisitcal sports such as cricket are great for spread betting also. This cricket spread betting page can also be a useful resource.
There are two ways of placing a spread bet, they are to Buy or Sell.
Premier league spread betting can be done long term, like a season long bet. Or it can also be done short term, for example over a 90 minutes match.
Long Term Markets
If you are betting on the Premier League you will see that there are plenty of season long markets, such as Points, Outright (Winner) Index, Relegation, etc.
Points Market
Lets use Points for our example. Looking at the screenshot you can see Liverpool's spread is 86 to Sell, and 87.5 to Buy.
So if you believe Liverpool won't get 86 points, you would Sell them at 86. You decide to Sell them at £1 a point (let's play safe).
If Liverpool get 80 points, you would win £6. That's 6 points, at £1 a point.
If you Sell Liverpool's points at 86, and they go on to get 97 points, you would lose £11, that's 11 points, at £1 a point.
Times that by 10, and you can see the possible winning benefits, and the potential losses as well.
Premier league spread betting is a great alternative to conventional football betting. It is far more risky, which means a great deal more care needs to be taken.
Spread betting on the Premier League can be very rewarding if you get it correct, but can be costly if you get it wrong.
Outright Winner Spread Betting Market
Looking at the Outright Winner market, and you will see from the screenshot (directly above) that the winner gets awarded 60 Points.
Second place gets 40 Points, third place gets 30 Points, fourth place - 20 Points, fifth place - 10 Points, sixth place - 5 Points, and everyone else Zero Points.
So in this example, if you think Man City will win the league, you would Buy their points at 55, while if you think they won't win the league, you would sell their points at 52.
If City go on to win the league, you would get 60 points, meaning you would win 5 points.
Should they come second, you would receive 40 points, meaning you would lose 15 points.
And if City finished fourth, you would only get 20 points, a loss of 35 points.
Short Term Spread Betting Markets
Premier league spread betting also has plenty of short term markets for you too choose from. For example every Premier League match has numerous markets.
The main market is the win market.
Other popular ones are Total Goals, Shirt Numbers, Corners, Bookings, Team A Win Index, Team B Win Index, Rainbow Goals, Total Goal Minutes, and Goal Rush.
Taking Bookings as an example, and in a typical Premier League match you would Sell bookings at 31, or Buy them at 35.
For a Yellow card you get 10 Points, and for a Red card it is 25 Points (there is a maximum of 35 Points per player).
If you think it is going to a match riddled with cards, you would Buy at 35, and hope for - say - five yellow cards, giving us 50 Points, and a win of 15 Points.
You choose how much you want to buy a point at. It you Buy at 35, and there is only one yellow card, you get just 10 Points, losing 25 Points.
So as you can see from the above example, premier league spread betting - and indeed all spread betting - can be very volatile. You can win big, but you can lose big.
You really need to be sure of what you are doing before you get involved in spread betting.
Best Football Spread Betting Websites
By far and away the most popular spread betting website is Spread Ex. These guys cover all the major football leagues and tournaments.
With Spread Ex you can bet on the World Cup, European Championships, Copa America, etc, etc.
At European level they cover the Champions League, and Europa League.
Domestically, Sporting Index cover all four major English leagues, Premier League, Championship, and Leagues 1 and 2. They also cover the English National League.
North of the border and all four of the major Scottish leagues are also covered. That's the Scottish Premiership, Scottish Championship, Scottish Leagues 1 and 2.
Further afield you get all the major European leagues such as La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, etc. They even stretch as far as the Icelandic Premier League.
The lower the standard of the leagues, the less markets there seems to be though. Which in fairness, is understandable.
For example, you would get far more markets available in an English Premier League match, than you will in an Iceland Premier League match.