Football betting odds are normally set based on two important criteria – what bookmakers consider the most likely outcome to be and what kind of money is being bet on a certain possibility in the market.
Apart from ensuring that you use the football betting best offers, you should also know how to recognise different profit opportunities, as and when they arise. Having said that, it is very important to stay rooted in the statistics and avoid falling for all kinds of commonly held football betting myths. Let’s take you through two such important Tmyths that you must constantly guard against.
Teams may be tired after playing all over Europe
Many UK based football punters fall for the myth that their favourite club team may be tired after playing an away Champions League match, and place bets against that club. This may not be the best strategy because even if a UK club team’s last match was held at an away stadium, somewhere in Europe, almost every European city is under 3 hours of flying distance (from UK); so the time spent in travelling doesn’t really count when it comes to physical exhaustion. Furthermore, if we bring the skilled support staff and advanced training facilities into the equation, there’s no reason to believe that any of the team players wouldn’t be 100% fit for the next match. Here’s a study on why English Clubs don’t do too well in Champions League.
Desperation to win will make them win
The strong belief that a team will win its next match simply because it needs to win to stay in the competition, is another commonly held myth in football. It proves to be very dangerous and unreliable in the realm of football betting. Kevin Pullein who authored “The Definitive Guide to Betting on Sport (2004)” carried out a detailed study on whether teams actually improve their performances because they need to win or not.
There are a couple of presumptions in this matter, first one being that the team which needs to win will definitely give its best. However, it implies that the team wasn’t playing to its full potential earlier, which may actually not be true. The second presumption is that players will automatically perform better under pressure. This hardly happens because players’ performances normally drop, sometimes getting even worse, under pressure. Pullein came to the conclusion that teams desperate to get promoted perform the worst in the month of May, compared to any other month.
How to bet on the season-end games keeping these myths in mind?
Bookmakers are known to register good profits whenever bettors don’t pay heed to statistics. Bookies are well aware of these commonly held myths and use them as an opportunity to increase prices of the teams that need desperate wins, often misleading football bettors and making them put plenty of money on certain markets.
It’s important for football bettors to keep these facts in mind and place their bets accordingly. Furthermore, football bettors should avoid cliches that rarely have any kind of statistical backing.
