Soccer is the world’s most popular sport with an estimated 4 billion fans around the globe. So it’s only natural that bookmakers respond to that interest.
When you visit any of the top 20 betting sites, soccer is usually very prominent simply because of its global popularity.
You can find leagues and competitions from all over the world and for individual matches. It’s not uncommon at all to find more than 100 bet options for a single fixture from top competitions like the Copa América for example.
But the level of betting attention that is given to soccer by bookmakers is rarely seen in any other sports. Some in fact are a lot more limited, which raises the question of whether, in time, bookmakers will expand their coverage to give all sports the same degree of detail.
Why Soccer Rules
The math is pretty simple. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, and bookmakers want to make as much money as possible, so they provide the most betting options for the most popular sport there is.
There is always some professional soccer being played somewhere, no matter the time of the year. That leads to a high frequency of matches, so there are always opportunities for bettors to bet on the beautiful game.
That’s very different, for example, to the NFL. The American Football season shuts down for a good six months of the year, leaving a big void, and the sport doesn’t have the high level of support around the world that soccer does.
Modernisation of Markets
As time has progressed, the available markets for soccer have evolved greatly as well. Instead of just the Match Result, now you can find bets for everything, from the total number of corners, to how many assists a player will have, to which player will score the next goal or get a yellow card.
Not all bookmakers offer the same degree of markets, but overall, the number of soccer betting markets available is phenomenal. But few other sports get the same level of attention. Why?
Will Other Sports Catch Up
It’s not a question of data availability that’s holding back coverage of other sports. There are as many in-depth statistical insights available for baseball, rugby and tennis as there are in football.
There are more sources from which to find soccer data, but the information about all sports is out there and could be processed by modern AI to help with market analysis. Fans of rugby and basketball would probably like to see extra markets for betting variety, but will it happen?
Popularity
Bookmakers care about their profit and their risk exposure. They want as many people betting on familiar markets that they can then, in turn, control. A FIFA World Cup quarter-final match is going to attract more bets than a match from the Peruvian Liga 1 as the level of support is vastly different.
For many football leagues, the interest in the professional game doesn’t extend outside the country of origin, unless it’s extremely rich leagues like the English Premier League or Spanish La Liga.
Popularity therefore plays a part in what bookmakers do with markets. It’s not worth their time developing and hosting markets that are going to attract very little attention. Those present more risk to the bookmaker as well because there is less chance for them to offset risk because of so few bets. Popular markets are where bookmakers make their money, so that’s where their attention is.
Sport Itself
But there is also a bigger issue in that not all sports create as many betting opportunities. In soccer, there is a focus on individual player’s goals, assists, and cards for example, plus total goals in the match, in a half or per team and the list goes on.
But in something like horse racing, which is another major sport for betting, there’s simply less to bet on. Beyond the race winner and other finishing positions, there’s little else that betting markets could cover.
You can find some like winning distances for example and more complicated, exotic bets, but actual racing markets are extremely limited despite the sports’ huge popularity. The same is true in volleyball, for example. There are set points, total match points and player points, but where other markets can be created is very difficult.
Will Bookmakers Push On?
Bookmakers will go where the popularity is. They already know what works for them, so for the future of sports betting, there’s more likely to be some fantastic new soccer markets launched before other sports get deeper coverage of new markets.
