Winning Margin Bet in Football Explained

Winning Margin is a type of single sports betting market that focuses on the final goal difference. It has a lot of similarities to Correct Score due to the many possible outcomes and wagering options. Like Correct Score, though, it’s notoriously hard to get right – even more so if you want to be consistent. As a relatively niche high-risk bet, though, it can contain surprising value for the perceptive punter.

In this Winning Margin betting guide, we’ll take a close look at this often-overlooked market and consider if it’s worth your time.

What Is a Winning Margin Bet?

A Winning Margin bet is a type of wager that attempts to predict the exact difference in goals between the winning team and the losing team. ‘Exact’ is the keyword here because the possible options can be anywhere from 1 goal to 4 or more.

Obviously, this wager can be found in a variety of sports. Some sporting events offer ranges as possible selections, such as 5-10 in basketball. However, we’ll be focusing on Winning Margin bets in football. For our favorite sport, your options typically look something like +1, +2, +3, and so on.

We’ll wager you don’t need much of an explanation as to what these selections mean. A +1 Winning Margin bet simply means that the winning team will have 1 goal over their opponents at minute 90. This covers a range of possible outcomes for the match itself – 1:0, 2:1, 3:2, and so on. All of these would confirm your +1 Winning Margin football market.

However, notice how we didn’t say 0:1 would win the bet though. That’s because selecting the winning team is also a part of this wager. For example, let’s say you’re betting on a Premier League match between Manchester City and Liverpool. If you wanted to back the Reds for a +2 win, the full selection would be marked as Liverpool +2. In this example, your bet would win if the final score is 0:2, 1:3, 2:4, and so on.

As you may have gathered by now, predicting how a game will go with such detail is not easy to do. That’s why Winning Margin betting odds are often quite long, rarely going below 3.00 even for ‘safe’ options. As such, we don’t recommend burying them in Multiples of any kind. It’s also not the best market for beginners.

Variations

On the whole, the bet is specific enough not to warrant many variations. That said, some punters consider it a natural extension of Correct Score betting, but that’s neither here nor there.

There are, however, some markets that go hand-in-hand with Winning Margin betting. The first of these is the No Goal bet, which predicts that the final result will be 0:0. That feels more like Correct Score, though, so we won’t discuss it more.

You can also predict that the goal difference between the two teams will be 0. This is otherwise known as the Score Draw bet. However, since you don’t need to specify a team for Score Draw, it’s also functionally closer to a Correct Score. 

Whatever you choose, though, it’s important to keep in mind that the Winning Margin betting market only considers 90 minutes of the game. Extra time and penalties are not taken into consideration.

Winning Margin Betting Tips

This type of betting is not for the faint of heart. The reason we don’t recommend it to beginners is because of the in-depth research and insight required. Obviously, just picking margins at random is not likely to get worthwhile results. If you feel like you don’t have good reason to actually predict this exact difference, don’t be afraid to just play a different market.

That said, here are some Winning Margin betting strategy tips to help you understand what’s needed.

• Research Head-to-Head records. These are your biggest asset if you’re placing Winning Margin football bets. Usually, the two teams’ previous engagements are your best indication of how things are going to flow. Ideally, you want to have stats from multiple matches during the current season.
• Matchups with close games are slightly safer. You’re looking at +1 and +2 margins most of the time. In such cases, the biggest risk is that the team you’re backing will lose or draw. Games with high goal margins are often much more volatile and unpredictable, and this market is an exact science.
• Stay on top of current football news. Injuries and such details can throw the entire calculation of your wager off.
• Stick to the safer selections. Most of the time, options with shorter odds are shorter for a reason. That +4 margin on a Champions League match may look juicy, but it’s rarely worth it.

In short, you can profit with Winning Margin betting, but it’s not going to be easy. Some extra legwork, solid fundamentals, and a lot of research will go a long way, though.