In the world of football, you can place countless bets on matches, as we’ve looked at in more detail elsewhere on this site. There are also a wealth of bets that you can place on league or cup competitions, which obviously take a little bit longer to be settled.
One of the most straightforward wagers that you can place in that sense is the bet on the Winner, which is an outright bet on the team that will end up as the ultimate winners when all of of the relevant matches have been played. Sometimes there will be an obvious team to bet on, whilst others it will be a lot closer and you’ll have to take many things into account.
What You’re Betting On
If you’ve decided that you want to place a bet on the Winner of the FA Cup, say, or the Champions League, you’re saying that you think a particular team has the best chance of lifting the trophy at the end of the season. The same is true of a wager on the Premier League, La Liga or the Championship. It is different to a bet on a team in a given match because there are a lot more variables that need to be taken into account, even when it comes to the competition with the fewest rounds to be played. A bet on the League Cup, for example, needs to bear in mind which round the stronger teams will enter it.
Each competition will have its own unique foibles that you’ll have to bear in mind before placing your bet, but the simple fact is that what you’re wagering on is the team that you’ve selected winning the entire thing. It doesn’t matter how many matches they win in the competition, nor whether they continuously qualify for the next round courtesy of penalty shootouts. How many goals are scored by their top striker or how many times their goalkeeper is able to keep a clean sheet are both irrelevant. As long as they make it through to the final and then win, lifting the trophy, your bet on the team will be a winning one.
Each-Way Betting
It might seem odd to talk about Each-Way betting in terms of football rather than horse racing, but if you’re considering placing a bet on the outright winner of a competition then you might want to consider making it an Each-Way wager instead of a straight Win bet. When you make an Each-Way bet, your stake doubles, because you’re essentially placing two different bets. In the case of a cup or league competition, you’re placing one bet on the Win and one on the Place, which is why your stake ends up being double what you originally wanted to place. How it gets paid out will depend on your bookmaker of choice.
If your chosen team wins, the Win part of the bet will be paid as normal. A £10 bet on a team with odds of 10/1 becomes a £20 bet when you make it Each-Way, with a win resulting in the first part of the bet being paid out as 10x£10, seeing you get £100 in winnings and your original £10 stake back. A bookmaker might say that the Place part of the Each-Way bet is paid out to two places and 1/2 odds. In other words, if your chosen team wins then you’ll get 5x£10 and your stake back for the Place part of it, plus the £110 for the win for a total of £170. If the team reaches the final but loses you’ll only get the Place part of the bet paid out on.
Ante-Post Betting
One of the options that you have with a lot of competitions is to bet on a team to win it in the ante-post market. This is where your place your wager before you even know if the team in question has qualified for the tournament, which is obviously a massive risk.
The reason why it is worth doing, though, is that you will often get better odds from the bookmakers than if you leave placing your bet until closer to the competition’s start. The risk, however, is that you end up losing your stake because they don’t even make it into the tournament proper, so it is always worth weighing up the pros and cons of placing such a bet.