Bookies Blog

It’s often useful to look back through the pre-season betting to see what value you could have had if your crystal ball had been working at the start of August 2008. Seeing where the winners came from – and what the odds were – often helps clarify betting strategies for future seasons.

It was no great surprise to anyone that the Premiership favourites, Manchester United, won the title again, which was a 6-4 chance at the start of the season. You could have had odds of 12-1 that Manchester United finished top with Liverpool second while the MU-Liverpool-Chelsea tricast was a 18-1 shot, which looks pretty generous now.

Everton were 6-1 to win the ‘without the top four’ market, while in the top six market you could back Everton at 9-4 and Villa at 12-5, which in retrospect look fat prices for something that in retrospect was fairly predictable.

In the relegation market no team that went down was odds-on to be relegated; West Brom could have been backed at 6-5, Middlesborough at 9-1 and Newcastle at 22-1. There is a strong lesson to most punters there – betting the short price teams for the drop in the Premiership is a fast way to go broke. West Brom were 15-2 to finish bottom, which again shows why swerving the obvious choices of Stoke and Hull was the shrewd move.

The same is usually true of the top goalscorer market. Nicolas Anelka won the Golden Boot with 19 goals – he was a 25-1 shot at the start of the season. In second was Cristiano Ronaldo on 18 goals, who was offered at 7-1, which Steven Gerrard’s 16 goals took third place; he was a 66-1 shot pre-season.

Bookies also offer handicap markets in which clubs are given various points starts over Manchester United and Fulham and Stoke topped the tables, depending on which bookie you bet with. In order, the top five were Fulham, Stoke, Liverpool, Manchester United, Hull, Everton, Wigan and West Ham. These markets are almost always won by a team that the bookies expect to be hovering in or around the relegation zone who outperform all expectations.