How to Bet on Football Internationals
When it comes to placing your football bets you may be finding international fixtures more challenging than betting on league football.
With league football such as bets on the English Premier League the statistics are simply incredibly and you can learn how the team works together and have historical data on how teams perform against each other and how they are performing in leagues.
Football internationals such as World Cup, Euros, Nations League and Friendlies aren’t quite so simple to create a strategy for.
Some teams in a World Cup haven’t played each other for a long time. So head to head information is effectively useless.
Another issue is an international team is often not as stable in terms of the starting 11. In competitions that cover a short period of time there can be suspensions and injuries as well as tactical substitutions and formation changes. So you may be basing your bets on a set of players that changes from one game to the next.
In short international football is harder to predict than league football.
You can either take an extreme approach and simply only bet on league football as the stats are better and more reliable, or you can change your approach.
Don’t forget the advantage of international football is that the bookies are also more likely to have it wrong so it is not uncommon to see upsets and if you have in depth knowledge or a certain theory sometimes you can improve your edge.
As with all football betting, getting value with your odds is key. An often overlooked value technique is to shop around at bookies and use free bets to give you a good head start. You can find free bets on the page here.
With the unpredictability of international football you need enough “juice” in the odds to have a chance. Betting on short priced favourites in my opinion is more difficult in tournaments.
With outright markets though my opinion is that an outsider doesn’t usually win a major tournament. The World Cup has only been won by 8 different countries in its entire history since 1930. That said who could forget shock outsiders Greece winning the Euro 2004 tournament at 150/1. So anything is possible, but in general history does repeat itself.
With harder to predict games its also extra important to bet safely and only what you can realisitically afford to lose. So please visit the gamble aware link at the bottom of this page if you are having difficulty with your bets.
Whether you decide to bet on internationals or not, keep it fun!