When it comes to tournaments that pit clubs against other European teams, there is sometimes a sense from certain parts of the media that everyone should want the English sides to do well. The problem with that is that you’re going to struggle to persuade Liverpool fans that they should want Manchester United to succeed, or get Tottenham Hotspur supporters to cheer on Arsenal.
Whilst you might want your team’s rival to fail, you can also admit that they might have a good chance to win. One of the ways in which you can try to cover for your potential disappointment is to bet on them to finish as the Top English Team in the tournament.
What You’re Betting On
When it comes to the likes of the Champions League or the Europa League, the Premier League tends to have several entrants into the competition. As a result, you will often see numerous English teams pushing to do well in the tournament, hoping to reach the final and lift the silverware at the end of it all. Whilst you will obviously hope that that is the team that you support, should they be lucky enough to have qualified to take part, you might also have a sneaking suspicion that it isn’t going to be. You might believe that a team like Real Madrid, Borussia Dortmund or Juventus are going to win the thing outright, but you can still have a bet on the English sides.
Most bookmakers will offer you odds on the English team to go the furthest in each competition in which there is more than one English side taking part. What you’re betting on is which team will make it to the furthest stage of the competition, as opposed to whether or not your chosen side will win the tournament overall. In other words, if you bet on Liverpool to be the Top English Team, your bet will be a winner if the Merseyside club makes it to the semi-finals, say, and no other team makes it past the quarter-final. They don’t need to lift the trophy with this bet, they just need to make it further than anyone else.
What Happens If There’s a Tie
Given the nature of a competition like the Champions League, it is entirely possible for more than one team to crash out at the same stage of the tournament. In the 2023-2024 season, for example, Arsenal were drawn to play against Bayern Munich in the quarter-final, whilst Manchester City had to take on Real Madrid. The two teams were in the same side of the draw, meaning that they would face each other if they both made it through their quarter-final draws. In the end, both teams were knocked out by their respective opponents, meaning that a Top English Team wager on either of them wouldn’t have been won outright.
Each bookmaker will have its own rules around how it treats such wagers, but the likelihood is that the majority will employ Dead Heat rules. When it comes to Dead Heats, it is usually the case that the bookie will divide the total stake that you placed with the number of teams that have tied with each other. To put it another way, if you’d backed Manchester City to be the Top English Team with a stake of £10 and odds of 6/4, your stake would be divided by two, given that’s how many teams made it the same stage, making your bet £5 x 6/4. That would see you get a return of £12.50, including the £5 of your stake with the other £5 lost.
What to Think About
Whilst it would be easy enough to assume that the team that is going to do best in the Premier League would also be the side that will finish as the Top English Team in any given competition, that isn’t necessarily true. In the 2004-2005 season, for example, Liverpool finished fifth in the English top-flight but won the Champions League in improbably fashion. Their poor form in the Premier League might have seen you get good odds in the Top English Team market. If you’d have known about the Merseyside club at the time then you would’ve known that they had employed a manager in Rafa Benitez who knew about European football.
That is the sort of information that it is always worth thinking about before looking to place a bet on the Top English Team market. It is also worth remembering that when the phrase ‘English Team’ is used, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the side in question has to be English. Instead, it is a reference to a team playing in an English division, so a bet on the likes of Cardiff City or Swansea City is likely to stand, even though they are Welsh sides. There is plenty of information out there about how each team tends to perform in Europe, so make sure to do your research before you place your bet on this market.