Every football match is different of course, but in each match the whole purpose is for each team to score as many goals as possible since the team with the highest score wins the game. The sport betting exchanges and bookmakers thus offer a market which centres on the concept of betting on the total number of goals in a game.
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You can place a bet on the actual eventual scoreline of a game such as 3-2, for example, and get good odds. Predicting an exact score however, is extremely hard since there are so many variables in a match. Too often I have seen a correct score bet ruined by a very late goal where one side is losing but desperate to at least get a draw and therefore throw everything they have into scoring one more!
Much easier, and hence more popular, is to bet on on either over or under 2.5 goals. This means betting either for two goals or less as under, or three goals or more if over. The 2.5 figure was chosen since statistics apparently show two to three goals scored per football game as being about average. You cannot have half a goal of course, so this simply sets the baseline for under or over. Some prefer to play somewhat safer and bet instead for over 1.5 goals in a match. This gives lower odds but a higher strike rate so can be an excellent compromise.
Employing this kind of bet is quite appealing since you do not then have to worry about which actual team wins the match but can concentrate fully on how many goals are likely to be scored. In this respect statistics relating to past form can be very helpful, and there is a wealth of information on the internet with websites like soccerstats.com, predictz.com, forebet.com, windrawwin.com, betegy.com, statarea.com, bethunch.com, ciwin.com, Sporita.com, soccervista, and more.
The other good source of information is the odds themselves. On Betfair, for example, if you take any football match and look at the odds for over and under 2.5 goals you can clearly see the collective opinion about this match. The odds on an exchange are determined by the mass of people betting here and the odds that they are prepared to accept. Therefore you may well believe, as I do, that they are more accurate than some put up by bookmakers who employ perhaps just one or two people to compile their odds. It might be, however, that the whole situation is actually more complicated since perhaps bookie compilers take their lead from exchanges like Betfair! It seems also to be the case that a bookmaker with large amounts of cash taken on one particular event will lay some of it back on the exchanges to minimize a loss for them on a bet that is likely to win. Who knows what goes on but it is fairly certain that if a football team is showing odds of well under 2 for the under 2.5 market, then they are most unlikely to score three goals or more in the match.
As you get more into betting on overs or unders you will notice that there are teams who regularly score a lot of goals and those who tend not to, so this helps to sort out your bets for the day. German and Dutch teams, for example, tend to be high scoring, whilst many South American and some Greek, Egyptian, and French teams are less prolific.
So betting on scorelines in football can be quite a good idea if you can spend some time and research the statistics because often high or low scores are easier to predict than which team will win a game.
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