Betting on sports is as old as man himself. Almost as soon as people began fighting, wrestling, or racing in chariots there would be people ready to bet on the outcome.
Football as the world’s most popular sport, naturally has more money wagered on it than any other, although the means of betting has changed substantially in recent years.
In the old days it was strictly ante-post. People would either go to a bricks and mortar bookmakers to place bets according to pre-calculated odds. Or they would fill in their football pools, send them off and wait by their radio or TV at the weekend for the results to come in to find out how they had done.
However, thanks to the internet and mobile technology all that has changed and it has transformed the nature of sports betting into the bargain. In-play betting has become the norm, and it has also created a whole surrounding industry to feed football fans with as much information as possible so they can make the best decisions when it comes to betting on the result of matches, next goalscorer, aggregate score, or whatever other permutation attracts them.
Now fans can put football prediction site in their search engine and can come up with a host of options. Nearly all will have their own dedicated app suitable for both Android and iOS devices, and whilst the odds are the most important content for some, the best sites provide much more than that.
In terms of odds whilst football betting odds used to be calculated by teams of highly trained analysts, they have largely been replaced by statistical algorithms that can analyse data to calculate the most accurate odds. The advent of Fintech developments like Big Data has also helped – the best football prediction sites are able to calculate vast amounts of data in a fraction of a second.
In terms of choosing a suitable football prediction site, key criteria to consider include:
- What competitions do they cover and in which countries? Just the major leagues or some of the minor leagues as well.
- How much past data do they provide to help the punter. For example, does thin cover recent form, the head to head record between both sides, home and away statistics, and records against similar sorts of teams.
- Does it give up to date information on injured and suspended players whose absence could have a major impact on the match?
At the same time, though, a certain degree of caution should be exercised because nothing comes for free in this world. Even the best football prediction site has a corporate owner, usually involved in the betting industry in some capacity, whose underlying motive is to make a profit.
They entice betters to spend more money than they would otherwise want to spend with enticing free bets and promotions, and it should always be remembered that there is always a house edge whatever the odds quoted.
Provided that those parameters are understood in advance, football fans wanting to know more should explore a few options.
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