Football is the most popular sport in the world. Fact. Although, since you’re probably spending a good chunk of your time reading our football analysis, you probably already know that. Outside of horse racing, it is also one of the most popular sporting events worldwide to bet on. So, how did football betting get so popular? Why is it so popular now? We’ll look.
The Earliest Days of Football Betting
It’s hard to know exactly when football betting began properly. We assume that it was roughly around the time football became a properly organized sport (from the end of the 19th century to the Early 20th Century).
The reason why it is so difficult to know when people started betting on football is because there were no sportsbooks around at that time. If somebody wants to gamble at the sport, they’ll talk to their friend, and there’ll be some informal bets among people. It was hardly the most legal thing in the world, but people had to make do with what they were given.
It is even harder to know how many bets were being thrown around at this time since everything was below board, and not many records were kept. However, you can bet your bottom dollar that most of the ‘big’ games at the time probably had people betting on them. Chances are, the players were getting involved too (for obvious reasons, that’s a pretty big no-no nowadays).
As the 20th Century Rolled On
This is where things differ from country to country. Somewhere between the 1920s and 1960s, more formal betting started to happen. This meant that betting was legalized (although, remember that this happened far later in the US than in other countries).
When more organized sportsbooks started to appear, people started to dabble more and more in football betting. After all, gambling somewhere ‘real’ meant that you weren’t gambling with the local mob boss (which probably happened before), and you could gamble a little bit above board. Not to mention, you now had like-minded people to chat with when you were placing your bets.
Around this time, the whole gambling industry started to become so much more formal. Betting odds were devised, and new types of bets were invented (you try and tell your friend you wanted to place $10 on a parlay, with a minimum of 10 corners in a game, and he’ll tell you to pound sand, but a sportsbook would welcome you with open arms), and there was a lot more advertising of gambling.
Of course, in the US, football was a little bit slower. This isn’t just because sportsbooks were a bit delayed compared to the rest of the world, but there wasn’t much interest in football. People didn’t care. They would rather bet on things like horse racing, basketball, and baseball and invest more time into discovering the latest news across the NFL. A few football bets would have been placed here and there, but nothing too extreme. Those big changes would have happened near the end of the 20th century and certainly in the 21st century. We’ll chat more about that part soon, though.
Online Sportsbooks
This is where the whole idea of gambling did gather traction, particularly among Americans.
The move to online sportsbooks shook up all parts of the gambling industry in the middle of the 1990s (although the better sportsbooks didn’t come until the early 2000s and beyond). It allowed:
– People to make bets far easier. Gone were the days when people would have to walk to their local bookmaker (and there may not be one in their local area). They could place bets on football if they had access to a computer (and later on a mobile device).
– Access to a larger variety of bets. Most physical sportsbooks would have probably limited the gambler to some international events (and we are talking country v country) but would have mostly been domestic leagues. If you head to an online sportsbook nowadays, you can get access to hundreds, if not thousands, of games from around the world. Want to bet on the lower leagues in Norway? You can do that now. It would have been difficult before. The types of bets would have changed, too. Nowadays, you don’t just bet on the winners/losers of the game or maybe the odd futures bet. You can now bet on the game’s smaller, more refined aspects, e.g., first goal scorer, number of cards, fouls, etc.
– Better odds: since online sportsbooks have fewer overheads, the betting odds tend to be much better than their physical counterparts.
– Live betting: admittedly, this is something that came much later. However, modern online sportsbooks now allow gamblers to bet while the game happens. So, if you spend a lot of time reading our tactical analysis of the sport, you may get enough knowledge to start placing in-play bets on your favorite sport.
Of course, small refinements to online sportsbooks over the years have made football betting even more popular, e.g., mobile betting, sportsbook bonuses, etc. However, these have all been small changes that have influenced the popularity of online betting. Online betting as a whole has been a driving force for football betting.
Why Is Football Betting So Popular?
With a brief history of football betting out of the way, it leaves us with one major question – why is football betting so popular? Thankfully, that one is pretty easy to answer!
Football is the most popular sport in the world. Every week, millions and millions of people tune into their favorite games. Hundreds of millions of people tune into the World Cup every four years. The sport is massive, and the number of people watching it only grows. Since sports and betting go hand in hand, it is no surprise that football betting is wildly popular. You would struggle to find somebody over 18 who hasn’t bet on football, even if it is only dropping a couple of dollars here and there.
It is fun to bet on, too. The wealth of bets available means you can often find a bet that suits your reading of the game. For example, if you’re pretty new to football, choosing who you think will win the game isn’t difficult. However, as you become more advanced at reading the beautiful game, you can start to place those bets that require a bit more tactical nuance. It is always exciting to win on those bets since you know that your reading of the game has impacted that.
Football betting is only likely to get more popular, especially as betting starts to become legalized in the US, plus the rise of football there as a sport (particularly in the women’s game), so it will be interesting to see how things continue to develop from here on out. There might be more history to write. Who knows?
