Betting on Over/Under 2.5 Goals, Part I

While the Home/Draw/Away markets have reigned supreme in football since the first bet was ever placed on a football match. However, close on its heels is the Over/Under 2.5 goals market. The reason begin is that the average number of goals in a football match across the world has been around 2.5 goals for a long time now.

Us English speakers have a bias towards the Premier League and we like to think it’s the highest scoring of the Big 5 European leagues. Well, it’s not. Last season’s Bundesliga saw a whopping 62% of matches having Over 2.5 goals. The Premier League is second behind the Bundesliga with 54% of matches having seen Over 2.5 goals, followed by the Italian Serie A with 52%, France’s Ligue Un with 48% and the Spanish Primera League with 47%. It’s a pretty poor showing from Spain in particular, but the English Premier League too should be feeling a bit sorry for itself, it falls behind Germany’s second tier, Bundesliga 2 (57%), Switzerland’s Super League (60%) and the Dutch Eredivisie (66%). Top of the list though for the 2018/19 season was The New Zealand Premiership where a colossal 76% of matches saw Over 2.5 goals landing.

When you compare football to other international sports such as basketball, cricket, ice-hockey and rugby we can see that scores come in short supply compared to them and this factor is what makes football so exciting for us punters. It’s not nearly as difficult to score a point in basketball as it is to net a goal in football, so goals are rare and we need to be pretty analytical in our approach if we want to predict which matches will have Over or Under 2.5 goals.

The Bet Dynamo is a massive help here, we can very easily and quickly see on the Insights page the percentage probability of Over 2.5 goals occuring in a match. Let’s look at an example: Today, August 12th Odd II take on Mjølner in Norway’s second tier. We can see that the probability of Over 2.5 goals occurring is a staggering 92% and even though the odds of 1.57 won’t exactly mean we can pay off the mortgage, they represent a healthy dose of value. For a probability of 92%, we should be seeing odds of around 1.08, so we’re getting great odds. To read more on Value Betting go here: Value Betting

Don’t forget you can click on the wee fader/settings icon in the top, right side of the page and set up your own filters, here you can see we’ve set it to find matches with a probability of 75% or more of Over 2.5 goals occurring:

In the following article we’ll reveal a guide on how to calculate the expected number of goals for a particular match and how to convert them into odds. When you have the odds calculated you’ll be able to very quickly see if the odds on offer from your bookmaker offer value or not.