In football competitions, most people know about the obvious bets like Top Goalscorer and betting on the Winner. What some people might not realise, though, is that there are other bets that can be placed on things that might not be so clear cut.
One of the best examples of this is the Most Assists wager, which does exactly what it says on the tin. It is the equivalent bet to Top Goalscorer, but the way that a player is about to win is by providing the most assists during the entirety of the competition in question. If they set up the most goals then you will win your bet, whilst if they don’t then you’ll lose it.
How the Bet Works
When you place a wager on the Most Assists market, you are saying that you think that a given player will achieve the most assists between the start and end of the competition. Some bookmakers will allow you to place an Each-Way bet on the market, which will usually follow the same lines as the Top Goalscorer bet, insomuch as it will pay 1/4 odds on the Place part of the Each-Way bet. Obviously, the important thing is to have a look at the rules of each bookmaker, given that they will all have slightly different ones in place for Each-Way wagers, such as whether it’s 1/4 odds or 1/5 odds, say, as well as how many places they’ll pay out on.
The important thing to remember is that you need your player to rack up the most assists in order for your bet to be a winning one. It doesn’t matter whether the play through-ball after through-ball that speedy attackers regularly get on the end of or they are the corner taker for their team and are able to deliver a cross in with pin-point accuracy, as long as it counts as an assist then it will count towards your bet. Usually, bookmakers have specific companies that they turn to to confirm whether something is counted as an assist or not, with the likes of Opta having the final say in order to keep things as fair as possible.
What to Think About
When it comes to placing bets on the Most Assists market, the key thing that you need to think about is how long the competition that you’re betting on lasts for. If you’re betting on the Premier League, for example, then there are 38 games in which a player can rack up their assists. It means that if they pick up an injury at any point then your bet is still likely to be live, given the fact that they could come back from injury and get straight back to getting plenty of assists. If it’s the European Championship or the World Cup, on the other hand, it is much harder for a player to still be part of the Most Assists conversation if they’ve missed matches through injury.
The good news is that there are plenty of places out there where you can find huge amounts of information around how many assists players tend to get and how they do for their teams. If you’re betting on a short-lived competition then you need to think about the likelihood of the team that the player that you’re betting on plays for making it towards the end of the tournament, given the fact that the more games they play the more likely they are to get assists. On top of that, if they’re progressing in a tournament then they’re likely to be scoring goals, with an assist-maker necessary for that to happen.