World Cup Betting Guide
Team profiles for the eight favorites to win the 2022 FIFA World Cup (plus a bonus profile on the United States)
Before going any further, it is important to note a few things: Sports bettors can lose real money, and fast. While it sounds silly and obvious, since sports betting is all done online, it might be easy to forget that all the bets that are placed use real money. If you are not careful and don’t understand this, then it is easy to lose money fast. Sports betting can be an addictive habit. If this hobby turns into an addiction, it is important to seek help. There are a number of resources available to help anyone who struggles from gambling addiction. If you or anyone you know needs help, please call 1-800-522-4700 or refer to https://www.ncpgambling.org/
With more and more states allowing online sportsbooks, sports betting has soared in recent years. Whether it's a college student making a casual bet on a game that they have little interest in to make it more interesting, professional sports bettors using data and analytics to get an upper hand on large-money bets, or anything in between, sports bettors can be found in every corner of the country. Regardless of if you bet or not, the sports betting market can provide fans with a lot of insight. Whether it's on a per game basis or the tournament as a whole, a lot can be learned from the lines created by the sportsbook, as they use data and analytics to create the lines that bettors wager on. As we will examine later, one of the sad realities of the World Cup is that, in terms of the tournament as a whole, the underdogs rarely win. Usually, a team with top 4 or 5 pre-tournament odds ends up winning the whole thing. Over the course of this World Cup Betting Guide, we will quickly examine the history of soccer betting and world cup betting. We will also dive into the amount of money that has been bet on World Cup games in the past and projections for this year to show how big a market this truly is. Finally, we will provide you with profiles on the teams with the top eight odds.
The earliest soccer bet can not be traced, given that it was likely an underground, illegal bet. After all, sport betting didn’t become legal in the United Kingdom until 1961, which at the time was still one of the earliest places to legalize the activity. However, one of the earliest on record forms of soccer betting came from Littlewoods in 1923, a retail and soccer betting company founded in Liverpool, England. Littlewoods used the pool system, where “fans would be given a coupon outside of stadiums and fill in what they thought were the most likely scores or results.” As sports betting became more and more popular, these coupons were placed in newspapers, where anyone could fill them out and send them in. Companies such as Littlewoods, who controlled the pools, were able to maximize their profit through the pool system because they had complete, unregulated control on the payouts. They would collect all the money from the coupons, take their portion, and then pay out the remaining money to the winners. The coupons had a limited amount of options for what you could bet on in comparison to today's sportsbooks. Additionally, compared to the odds in today's sportsbooks, the odds and the payouts were extremely favorable for the companies that ran the book. Along with horseracing, soccer was the most popular sport bet on during this era in the United Kingdom. Due to the fact that the World Cup only comes around once every four years, it was a popular tournament to wager on. As betting became legal during the second half of the 1900s, more traditional “bet shops” were opened. While these shops offered a wider variety of things that you could bet on compared to the Littlewood coupons, it still did not reach the number of options bettors have today. Over the rest of the back half of the 1900s, the sports betting industry thrived. These betting shops offered legal odds on World Cup matches for the first time. Then, in 2005, the United Kingdom became the first nation to “legalize and regulate” online sports betting. With online betting making sports betting more accessible, more and more people started wagering on matches.
In the United States, there was a lot of corruption in the early half of the 1900th century, with coaches, athletes, and referees throwing matches. This led to George H.W. Bush signing the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in 1992, which outlawed sports betting everywhere except for Las Vegas, the gambling capital of the United States. However, underground bookies still found ways to illegally accept and payout wagers across the country. Then, in a landmark ruling in 2018, the Supreme Court ruled PASPA unconstitutional and determined that each state had the power to come up with their own sports betting laws. Since then, more and more states are making sports betting legal.
Due to the increasing legality and accessibility, the 2022 World Cup has been the most bet-on sporting event of all time, and it is only going to grow as the final stages progress. Bloomberg estimated before the start of the tournament that $35 billion dollars would be bet on it. For context, this is more than the GDP of the entire country of Cameroon and is 195 times as much money as was bet on the 2022 Super Bowl. One online sportsbook estimated as much as $1.89 billion would be bet with British bookmakers alone during the World Cup. In the United States, the numbers are similar. According to CNBC, “An estimated 132 million Americans now live in states where sports betting is legal, compared with just 10 million during the last World Cup four years ago. As such, 20.5 million Americans plan to bet a total $1.8 billion” on the tournament this year. ESPN estimates that at least 1 billion dollars will be at stake for every single game in the tournament
One issue that comes with betting is the possibility of corruption. While newer technologies and companies like Sportradar are devoted to preventing this from happening, this has not always been the case. For the first time at a World Cup, FIFA has assembled international agencies such as INTERPOL, the FBI, and Sportradar to monitor markets and the games to ensure that there is no match-fixing. However, many past scandals involving betting on soccer matches revolved around smaller clubs and less important matches. Italy, in specific, has seen an unusual amount of scandals. One time in the Serie C league, it was uncovered that the Paganese goalkeeper, Marco Paolini had spiked the water bottles of the opposition team. Paolini was suspended and it was later discovered that he was linked with a very wealthy Singaporean businessman. While no scandals around money and betting at the World Cup have ever been revealed, there was one blatant example of match fixing. Because of the way that the tournament works with goal differential often being a deciding factor in who advances from the group, final group stage matches are always played at the same time. This wasn’t always the case, however. In the 1982 World Cup, West Germany helped its neighboring country, Austria, advance to the group stage over Algeria by playing an intentionally low-scoring game. West Germany, Austria, and Algeria finished the group stage with 4 points apiece, yet the latter failed to advance on goal differential.
Finally, one of the sad realities of the World Cup is that, while there may be exciting upsets in group stage matches or even in the early games of the knockout rounds, the winner is rarely ever a true underdog according to pre-tournament odds. Even if you assume each team has equal odds to win any given game, the odds of this happening is roughly 3%, or ½*½*½*½*½ (50% chance to advance out of the group stage and then 50% chance to win each knockout stage game). Obviously, the true odds for underdogs is way lower than this. Historical data supports this notion. The biggest underdogs to win since 1986 was Italy in 2006, who had pre-tourney odds of +1000. For reference, this would be the 6th best odds in this year's World Cup. Besides the Italian side, no winning side has had pre-tournament odds worse than +700 since 1986. This would be tied for the 3rd best odds at this year's tournament. So while the early rounds are bound to produce underdog stories that can unite a whole nation, unfortunately these underdogs rarely, if ever, go the distance. Therefore, the following profiles only feature team with realistic chances to win this year's tournament (besides a bonus entry on the United States)
To follow along all of our picks for the tournament, please follow @WahooWCLocks on Twitter!
Brazil
Odds to Win World Cup: +333 (bet $100 to win $333)
Argentina
Odds to Win World Cup: +550 (bet $100 to win $550)
France
Odds to Win World Cup: +700 (bet $100 to win $700)
England
Odds to Win World Cup: +800 (bet $100 to win $800)
Spain
Odds to Win World Cup: +800 (bet $100 to win $800)
Germany
Betting Odds: +1100 (bet $100 to win $1,100)
Netherlands
World Cup Odds: +1200 (bet $100 to win $1,200)
Portugal
Odds to Win World Cup: +1400 (bet $100 to win $1,400)
United States of America
Odds to Win World Cup: +15000 (bet $100 to win $15,000)
Bibliography:
Botros, Alena. “Americans Plan to Bet $1.8 Billion on the 2022 FIFA World Cup.” Fortune, 22 Nov. 2022, fortune.com/2022/11/22/americans-betting-fifa-world-cup-2022-gambling-soccer-football.
Cronin, Benjamin. “The History of Soccer Betting and the Promise of Big Returns.” Pinnacle, www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/Soccer/the-history-of-soccer-betting-and-the-promise-of-big-returns/G5V2W8HCKZFNSLCZ.
J, Jonathan. “History of Sports Betting in the United Kingdom.” Anglotopia.net, 5 Oct. 2022, anglotopia.net/news-features/history-of-sports-betting-in-the-united-kingdom.
Legal Sports Betting. “Legal Sports Betting in UK | UK Sports Betting Sites.” LegalSportsBetting.com, 17 Oct. 2022, www.legalsportsbetting.com/countries/united-kingdom.
McNair, Kamaron. “Americans Plan to Wager $1.8 Billion on the First World Cup With Widespread, Legal Sports Betting.” CNBC, 19 Nov. 2022, www.cnbc.com/2022/11/19/fifa-world-cup-2022-americans-to-bet-1point8-billion-dollars.html.
Min, 9. “7 Of the Most Infamous Match Fixing Scandals That Shook World Football.” Sports Illustrated, 1 Nov. 2019, www.si.com/soccer/2019/05/28/7-most-infamous-match-fixing-scandals-shook-world-football.
Purdum, David. “2022 World Cup: How FIFA Plans to Combat Match-fixing in Qatar.” ESPN.com, 16 Nov. 2022, www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/35033837/how-fifa-plans-combat-match-fixing-2022-world-cup-qatar.
Times, The New York. “Betting Scandals Have the World Cup on Guard.” The New York Times, 8 June 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/sports/soccer/08soccer.html.
Wikipedia was used for general information about historical team performances at the World Cup