If I had to distil nine years of tournament betting into a single principle, it would be this: the team that wins the World Cup is almost never the one the market likes most in January. France were fifth in the outright betting before the 2018 World Cup. Argentina were third before Qatar 2022. The […]

I pulled up the World Cup 2026 odds boards from four different Irish bookmakers last Tuesday morning, laid them side by side on my desk, and spent the next three hours looking for discrepancies. What I found confirmed something I have believed through three major tournaments: the outright market is where the public money floods […]

I was fourteen years old when Senegal beat France in the opening match of the 2002 World Cup. I had no money on it — I was too young to bet and too naive to understand odds — but I remember the feeling in the room. My father, a man who had watched every World […]

In 2014, I sat down with a spreadsheet of every World Cup match result since 1930 and asked a simple question: are there patterns in this data that bookmakers consistently misprice? Two hundred and thirty hours of analysis later, I had three answers. Three historical trends that had generated a positive return across the previous […]

The Golden Boot market is the one I approach with the most scepticism and the most excitement in equal measure. Scepticism because the top scorer at a World Cup is notoriously difficult to predict — only twice in the last six tournaments has the pre-tournament favourite actually won the award. Excitement because that very unpredictability […]

At Euro 2024, I placed an each-way bet on the Netherlands to win the tournament at 12/1 with place terms of 1/4 odds for reaching the semi-finals. The Dutch made the semi-finals. They did not win. My outright bet lost, but the place part of the each-way returned a profit of three times my original […]

I have a mate in Cork who puts on a twelve-leg accumulator every World Cup. He has never won one. Not once in four tournaments. He picks it based on vibes, national anthems he likes and whether he has been to the country on holiday. And yet every four years, without fail, he slaps fifty […]

When FIFA announced the expansion to 48 teams in 2017, a veteran bookmaker I know in London called me and said two words: “More chaos.” He was not lamenting the decision — he was salivating at it. More teams means more matches, more matches means more markets, and more markets means more opportunities for punters […]