Mastering football trading is one of the hardest skills possible. Most people who try football trading tend to dabble in well-known strategies such as laying the draw or trading the over/under markets and at first it can seem easy, but then the tough reality sets in when results go against them or something unexpected happens and the losses mount up. 

To trade the football markets successfully takes a great deal of skill, research and planning. It takes rigid discipline and sticking to a gameplan no matter what and very few do it successfully. 

There are some useful tools out there to help with trading football so you don’t have to just “go it alone” and try and figure it all out for yourself. We’ll take a look at some of the tools you can use as well as analyse the pitfalls to avoid and how you can become a profitable football trader.

Football Trading – The Basics

Just like any other form of trading, with football trading you are trying to back high and lay low to guarantee yourself a profit whatever happens. You are not interested in the ultimate result of a match, just the price swings that occur in it. 

To trade you will need to join an exchange like Betfair or Smarkets, both of which have a wide variety of markets to trade. Some of the most popular markets to trade include:-

• – Match Odds (1×2)
• – Over/under 1.5/2.5/3.5 goals
• – Correct Score
• – Half Time result
• – Half Time score
• – Both Teams to Score

It is best to concentrate on the markets with most liquidity if you are going to trade because you don’t want to risk your bets not being matched or give up value by taking prices that are worse than the odds should be. 

Obviously the factors that most affect the odds during a football match are:-

• – Goals
• – Red cards
• – Time decay

Essentially having so few variables makes football quite a predictable sport to trade. Prices will move in quite a steady way until there is a goal when they will change dramatically. 

Knowing how prices will move as a result of a particular event is crucial to your trading. You want to know exactly what the potential profit and loss will be from a particular trade and to work out the risk/reward on that basis. 

For example, if you are laying the draw between two fairly evenly-matched teams and the odds of the draw are 3.5 to start off with and there is a goal in the first half, the odds will normally move to around 4.5. 

Make sure you study the markets first and understand how prices will move before you start trading the football markets.

Where to Start From – Study the Stats

If you are going to trade football, a good point to start from is to study the stats. Certain leagues and teams have a tendency to follow familiar patterns which can make them good for trading. 

Websites such as flashscores and soccerstats have good stats databases for you to use as a basis for your trading. 

If you are going to be trading the unders early on in a match for example, it would be a good idea to look at teams who have a record of keeping things tight early on and not seeing too many goals. 

Or if you were looking to lay the draw at HT it might be an idea to focus on teams who score a lot their goals in the second half and therefore have a strong chance of breaking the deadlock. 

Spending even a short amount of time before a game studying the teams and their recent form can really pay dividends if you are looking to trade on the football. 

Best Trading Tools and Software

These days there are a number of top trading tools and packages that can really help with your trading and provide a path to profit. Here are the some of the best we have come across through our extensive testing and reviews:-

• Goal Profits – a multi-award winning trading service, Goal Profits combines trading strategies, guides on how to trade, stats, a chat room where you can follow along with professional traders, daily trade selections and top customer support together in one excellent package. It was voted Best Football System by our members in our annual awards and has won numerous other accolades. A hugely popular service and if you are looking to take your football trading seriously then this is a good place to start. 
• Trade on Sports – run by a team of professional traders, Trade on Sports is a service built on the foundation of a vast stats database that produces alerts you can follow via the messenger app Telegram. There are a few different alerts but the main one we followed in our live trial of the service was their HT Overs Bot, which made over £4,000 in our review. You can also make use of the stats yourself to create your own strategies and there is a lively chat community as well. One of the very best trading services we have come across. 
• If you don’t have the time to spend hours in front of a screen trading football matches then there is an excellent alternative in the form of Auto Pro Trader. It is a platform that allows you to follow professional traders automatically, with their trades copied onto your Betfair account. So you can go about your day and do other things whilst the pros trade on your behalf, creating a passive income opportunity. 

So if you are looking to get into football trading, these are three quite different but equally useful services we have tried and tested ourselves and found to be of considerably benefit. 

Some Basic Strategies to Get Going With

If you are looking to “go it alone” however and have a go at trading yourself, here are some basic strategies you could use to get you going:-

Lay the Draw – possibly the best known of all trading strategies, this approach involves laying the draw at the start of a game and trading out at some stage during the match. There are different ways to trade this strategy and we have outlined our own thoughts on it here.

Over/Under trading – another popular trading method involves trading the over/under markets. One way to do this is to back under 2.5 goals before the game and then to trade out after 15-20 mins. If there hasn’t been a goal then you will often get a nice move down in the odds and a good profit. If there is a goal you will need to trade out for a loss, so it is best to focus on teams who don’t tend to score/concede early if following this strategy. Another approach is to hedge with for example laying under 3.5 goals, then if there is an early goal you will be in fairly neutral position but if there isn’t you can trade out the 2.5 position for profit and leave the 3.5 to run.

Lay the Draw at HT – a variant on laying the draw at HT, this strategy involves laying the draw in games that are drawing at half time. It reduces the risk as the draw price will be much lower at HT than at the start and will also provide more profit if there is a goal. You can also hedge to a certain extent by covering the correct score, although generally you will need a late goal to generate a profit if doing so. 

Conclusion – Go Against the Crowd to Beat the Market

Winning at football trading is not easy and if you are going to make long-term profits it pays to do your research, use the best tools available and remained disciplined at all times. 

It also pays to go against the crowd and develop your own way of trading that not everyone else is doing. Find a niche and work on perfecting it as a good approach to all forms of betting and trading.

Whatever strategies you use, good luck with your trading and please gamble responsibly. 

The question of how much money you can make from betting on sports is a tricky one. It is rather like asking “how long is a piece of string?” 

However, there are some fundamental aspects to betting on sports you should take into account when considering this question. In a best-case scenario for example, the top professional gamblers in the world make millions from their betting, so in theory if you reached their level you could become very wealthy from it. 

Most people however would never be able to risk as much money as the top professionals, so a more realistic approach is to look at how much you could make from a reasonable starting bank of say £1,000 (or $1,000). 

With techniques like matched betting, arbitrage and value betting or following some top tipsters, it is possible to make a healthy second income of a few hundred pounds or dollars per month. 

Let’s take a deeper dive into looking at how much money you can make from sports betting and exactly how to do it.

The Best Case Scenario – The Big Shots

If you are really, really good at gambling then there is the possibility to make a very large amount of money from it. The likes of Bill Benter and Alan Woods have reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars from betting on the horses. They shared many similarities, both having an early fascination with the book Beat the Dealer, which applies statistical and mathematical probability to games of chance. Both also made their fortunes in Hong Kong, using computer models to extract extraordinary levels of profit from the racetracks there.  

Making such fortunes is a very rare thing of course and most people would simply not have the funds to bet at the level Benter and King did, wagering hundreds of thousands on a single race on a regular basis.

However, there are other successful gamblers who have made money from more realistic staking – notably the likes of Angus Loughran, Tony Ansell and Derek McGovern, who all reportedly made a good living from their betting activity. A word of warning though, Mr Loughran (also known as “Statto” from his days on Fantasy Football) was forced to declare bankruptcy a few years ago, so perhaps his gambling went through a rough patch at one stage.

Now of course there are a new breed of gamblers, those who make their living from the betting exchanges like Caan Berry, Kevin Haskell, Mark Iverson and many others. These individuals tend to trade the markets rather than gamble on them, but apparently make a very good income from doing so.   

Taking a Realistic Approach

Of course for most people the idea of giving up the day job and becoming a professional gambler is pretty remote and only a very small number of people have ever done so successfully. More realistically, if you are looking to supplement your income with some shrewd sports betting, how much could you plausibly expect to make?

Well, let’s have a look at some examples of some successful tipsters and systems and how much money you could expect to make from them given a certain starting bank.

Let’s say for example you started off with a £1,000 betting bank and decided to follow a top tipster. How much could you expect to make?

At the high end, if you had followed a tipster like Quentin Franks since he started tipping in 2014 and bet just £10 per point, your £1,000 bank would have turned into over £15,000 in just five years, which is no mean feat.  

Similarly if you had followed Russell Blair Racing since he commenced tipping in 2015 and bet at £10 per point, you would have made over £19,000 in just over four years. 

Of course, these are the very top tipsters so you cannot expect other tipsters will match those levels, or even that these two tipsters will necessarily continue at such an exceptional standard – although we hope they will! 

More sensibly we would expect a good tipster to double their betting bank over the course of a year, so be able to turn £1,000 into £2,000 over the course of 12 months. That would be a strong return on capital compared to most other forms of investing.  

Following a portfolio of tipsters is a way of managing risk.

If you have a big enough betting bank to follow a number of tipsters at the same time then you could make a decent income from their combined profits. Tipsters Empire for example have a “Portfolio Package” whereby you can subscribe to five tipsters at once for a big discount. Following all five tipsters has made over £8,000 to £10 stakes at the time of writing, which translates into a few hundreds per month in extra income. Following a portfolio approach also spreads the risk in case one tipster has a particularly bad run, it would hopefully be balanced out by the others. 

Compounding Your Profits

One way you can really accelerate your profits is to use compounding, which Albert Einstein called the “eighth wonder of the world.” 

The above examples are all using flat staking of just placing £10 per point, but if you were to stake a percentage of your bank on each occasion, you could actually grow your bank much more substantially. Betting 1% of your bank using the above examples of Quentin Franks and Russell Blair would have grown your bank even more significantly than just using flat stakes and could have generated over £50,000 profit over the same period. 

At some stage of course you would want to take out some of your profits, so in most cases you wouldn’t have just let things run for that whole period. Even taking out some profits from time to time however, the compounding model can be very powerful. 

Reducing Risks 

Matched betting is a great way to generate low-risk profits on a regular basis.

At the other end of the scale of course it is important to recognise that you could lose money from gambling. No matter how well a tipster or strategy has performed in the past, there is no guarantee they will continue doing so in the future. That is why it is essential to set aside a betting bank that you can afford to lose and recognise that if everything goes wrong, you could lose the entire lot. With proven tipsters it happens rarely but is a risk. 

If you want to take a lower risk approach then you could try matched betting and value betting. Matched betting through a package such as Profit Maximiser can generate a very good regular income, with some people making up to £20,000 per year from it for very little risk.

Unfortunately matched betting is only available to people in countries that allow free bets and bonuses, which at the moment is mainly restricted to the UK and Ireland. 

If you live elsewhere then value betting is a good alternative through software such as Each Way Sniper. It identifies value each-way bets with the bookies whereby the odds of the place part of the bet are higher than the actual chances of winning. Some bets will lose but over time and the course of hundreds of bets, it is as close to guaranteed profit as you can get and many people make £500-£1,000 per month from it, which is a great additional income.  

The problem with both matched betting and value betting is that ultimately you are likely to have your bookie accounts closed or restricted by doing them, so both are somewhat time-limited. However, there are steps you can take to keep your accounts open as long as possible and maintain those profits for a good period.   

Conclusion

You can certainly make a decent second income from betting by following a portfolio of top tipsters or doing matched betting and value betting. 

How much you can make depends on how much you have to start with, but even with as little as £1,000 you can turn that into a decent revenue stream of a few hundreds pounds a month through smart betting. 

Matched and value betting is the safest way of doing this, but are both time-limited as eventually your bookie accounts will be restricted. 

Following successful tipsters is another good option but does come with risk, so always make sure you set aside a sensible betting bank that you can afford to lose and be prepared to stay patient and recognise there will be losing runs. 

With the right mindset and strategy though it is possible to make some good money from betting, even if you never end up making millions like pro punters Bill Benter and Alan Woods.