Football Betting

Football is the sport BetDukes is built around, and the one that needs the least introduction.

The book runs a long way past the Premier League: the four divisions beneath it, Scotland, the big European leagues, the three European cups and the international game, all priced from the morning the team news lands to the last kick of stoppage time.

A match can end with nobody scoring, so the draw is priced like the other two results, and one goal rearranges every number on the match. Most of what follows comes back to those two facts.

Match result, total goals and both teams to score answer most of what a viewer already thinks. The list behind them runs to corners, cards, named players and a Bet Builder, several picks from the same match combined into one price.

The competitions

English football is arranged as a pyramid, and the word is a description rather than a flourish: divisions stacked one on another, with sides going up from the top of each and down from the bottom every season.

Promotion and relegation tie the whole structure together, which is why a meaningless fixture in April is harder to find than a mid-table position suggests.

The week is built around a Saturday afternoon, three o'clock the hour everything else is arranged against, with midweek rounds folded in wherever the cups and the European calendar demand them.

• The English pyramid. The Premier League on top, then the Championship, League One and League Two, then the National League, the fifth tier and the top of the non-league game, with its North and South divisions a step below again. Places move both ways between every pair, by final position and through the play-offs. Lower league football in England takes the divisions under the Championship on their own terms.
• The FA Cup and the EFL Cup. Two knockout competitions run through the same season: one tie, the winner goes on, the loser is finished for the year. The FA Cup is open to every level of the pyramid, which is where the mismatches come from; the EFL Cup belongs to the professional divisions. Both open in autumn and end on a single final.
• Scotland. The Premiership is Scotland's top flight and keeps the same August-to-May shape as England's, with the divisions beneath it and the League Cup filling out the rest of the pyramid.
• The European cups. The Champions League takes the leading qualifiers from Europe's top divisions, the Europa League the strength below it, the Conference League the strength below that. Each runs a group phase through autumn and winter, matches played for points in a table rather than as ties, then a knockout bracket in spring where losing once ends it.
• La Liga. Spain's top flight, starting in high summer and finishing the following spring.
• The Bundesliga. Germany's top flight, on that same calendar from end to end.
• Serie A. Italy's top flight, the same shape again, with a domestic cup running beside it.
• Ligue 1. France's top flight, high summer to spring, and the last of Europe's big five.
• Everywhere else. The same thing happens in miniature across the rest of Europe and most of the world. The Dutch top flight, the Turkish Süper Lig and Major League Soccer all turn up on the football list, and which countries are playing at a given hour is whatever the calendar has reached rather than a fixed roster.
• The international game. The World Cup comes round every four years in the summer, and the European Championship fills the gap on its own four-year cycle. Between them runs the Nations League, which gives Europe's national sides a league table to play for instead of a run of friendlies nobody could take seriously.
• England. The England card opens the whole English list rather than one competition: the women's Super League, the EFL Trophy and the non-league steps below the National League all sit inside it.

The markets

Match markets

Match result is the three-way bet: the home side, the away side or the draw. The draw is a selection like the other two, not a near miss, and it settles with them on ninety minutes and the stoppage time added to the end of them.

Extra time and penalties, where a cup tie needs them, count for nothing unless the market says otherwise.

Double chance takes two of those results together, home or draw, away or draw, or either side to win, at a shorter price for the wider net. Draw no bet backs a side to win and hands the stake back if the match is drawn.

A handicap adjusts one side's score by a line before the result is read, so a team at plus one can lose by a goal and the bet still wins. The Asian handicap does the same without a draw to settle against, and a quarter line, plus 0.25 or minus 0.75, splits the stake across the two nearest lines.

A mismatch is only dull if you are betting on the winner.

Goal markets

Total goals is an over or under on what both sides score added together, with lines at 1.5, 2 and 2.5 on most matches. A quarter line splits a stake here the same way it does on a handicap.

Most of those lines sit under three goals, because most matches never get there.

Both teams to score asks only whether each side manages one, which makes it a bet on two defences rather than on a winner. A clean sheet at either end settles it as no. If the match is abandoned once both have already scored, the yes bets have won and stay won.

Correct score names the exact final score. Half-time markets ask the same questions at the interval, and half-time/full-time pairs the score at the break with the score at the end, which is where a side that turns a match round pays for it.

Beyond those sit the odder shapes: an odd or even number of goals, the winning margin, and which ten-minute band the first goal arrives in.

Player and event markets

Goalscorer markets back a named player to score first, last, at any time, twice or three times. The player has to take part or the bet is void, and an own goal never counts for the player who put it in, though it counts perfectly well towards the score and the total.

Corners are priced as totals, as handicaps, by half, and on which side wins the first. A corner awarded but never taken does not count, and one that has to be retaken counts once.

Cards settle on a points count: a yellow is one, a red is two, a second yellow for the same player is not counted again, and cards shown to a manager or an unused substitute are ignored. Player statistics run beside them, pricing one name's shots, tackles, passes or fouls against a line.

Outrights

An outright backs a whole competition rather than a match: a league winner, a cup winner, the top goalscorer of a division or tournament. Promotion, relegation and a top-half finish are priced the same way and stay open all season.

League outrights settle on the final table with no allowance for play-offs, so a side promoted through a play-off final has not won the division as far as the bet is concerned. Ties on a top-scorer market settle under dead-heat rules, which the football section of the rules sets out in full.

The Bet Builder

The Bet Builder takes several selections from inside one match, all of them markets the match already offers, and combines them into a single price.

It runs across the football list rather than only the flagship leagues, so a League Two Tuesday night is built the same way a Champions League tie is.

Say you like the home side to win, expect three goals or more, and fancy a particular striker to get one of them. Three views, three selections, one bet, and all three have to land.

That is the whole trade. A combination pays more than any of its parts because it is harder than any of its parts.

In-play

A football match is priced all the way through, and the numbers move as the game tells them to. Nothing moves them like a goal, and the fewer goals a match was priced for, the further that first one travels.

A red card does more than a goal. A side playing an hour with ten men is not the side you priced, and the market knows it inside a minute. A penalty moves a price the moment the referee points, before anybody has struck it.

Football adds its own stoppage time, so the last five minutes of a price can run longer than the last five minutes of the clock. A video review, the officials going back over a goal or a penalty on a screen, can hold a price up long after everyone has finished celebrating.

A substitution is the move the market reads slowest — a manager changing shape at the interval tells you more about the next half-hour than the scoreline does.

What to look at before you bet

• Team news and the bench. Who starts, who is rested and who is carrying a knock. A striker held back to half-fit is a different match to one starting fresh, and a manager's substitutes in the last half-hour often do more to the scoreline than the eleven who kicked off.
• Home and away. A crowd on top of the pitch still unsettles a visiting side, and the stretch of matches played in empty grounds showed how much of that edge was the noise rather than the ground itself.
• Form, the table and the run-in. Recent results tell you more than a league position, especially in the first weeks of a season and the last. The same fixture in December and in April is not the same match when one side still needs a European place and the other is safe from everything.
• Fixture congestion and European weeks. A club playing in Europe on a Thursday can name a different eleven on the Sunday. Cup replays and rearranged dates decide who is fresh more often than anybody's fitness does.
• A change of manager. A new appointment usually brings a different shape and a short run of results better than the squad deserves. It is worth weighing on its own, and it is worth remembering how quickly it wears off.
• Weather and the pitch. A heavy, rain-softened pitch slows the ball down and favours the side built to work it on the ground rather than through it, which says more about who wins than about how many goals go in.

The football quick guide

1. Read the team sheet before the price. An hour before kick-off, the elevens say what the form table cannot.
2. Ask what the match is worth to them. League points, a cup tie and a fixture neither side needs are played differently.
3. Pick the question you actually have. Who wins, how many goals and who scores are three separate bets.
4. Count the ninety minutes only. Extra time and penalties settle the tie, not the bet.
5. Wait for the bench in-play. Substitutions change a match before the scoreboard admits it.
6. Give the draw its own price. It is a result here rather than a consolation, and half the board exists because of it.

Football takes up more of the Sports Betting Rules than most sports on the site, which is what a simple game looks like once somebody writes down every way it can end, and the cards open the leagues and cups as the sportsbook lists them.