Football Bet Types You Should Actually Know About

Most punters start with the 1X2 market and never leave it. Fair enough, it’s simple. But the types of football bets available today go well beyond picking a winner, and some of them offer better value once you know how they behave. Among the many football bet types on a modern coupon, six stand out as genuinely useful once you understand the mechanics behind each: win to nil, double chance, both teams to score, each way betting, winning margin, and anytime goalscorer. Each has its own logic, its own traps, and its own kind of bettor who tends to love it.

None of these are exotic or hard to find. Every major bookmaker lists them somewhere among its types of football betting markets. The trick is knowing when a different bet suits the match in front of you better than a plain result bet does, and that’s really what separates casual punting from thinking about how to win football bets more consistently.

Win to Nil: Betting on a Clean Sweep

Win to nil does exactly what it says. You’re backing a team to win the match and keep a clean sheet at the same time. Two conditions, not one, need to hold up. A team can be heavily favoured and still concede a scrappy consolation goal in the 89th minute, and your bet dies with it right there. This is why win to nil odds are consistently longer than straight win odds, sometimes by a wide margin.

Best suited to:

• Strong home favourites against sides with poor away form and blunt attacks.
• Teams with settled, disciplined defences who rarely leak late goals.
• Matches where one side has nothing left to play for and may sit deep rather than chase the game.

Worth avoiding when: the favourite tends to ease off once a lead is secured, or the fixture involves two attacking sides likely to trade chances late on.

Example: Say Liverpool host a struggling side sitting bottom of the table, away from home, without a clean sheet of their own in six matches. Liverpool are 1/4 to win outright but a more generous 6/5 to win to nil. If their defence has been settled all season, the longer price on the clean sheet variant can be the sharper read than the near-even-money outright win.

Double Chance: The Safety Net Bet

Double chance covers two of the three possible outcomes in a single wager: home win or draw (1X), away win or draw (X2), or home win or away win (12). It’s the opposite philosophy to a correct score punt. Instead of narrowing the field, you’re widening it, and the odds shrink to match.

Best suited to:

• Cup competitions and knockout derbies, where an upset feels plausible but a draw is just as live an outcome.
• Backing a solid favourite while removing the single most common way “safe” bets get punished, a draw.
• Hedging inside a larger accumulator, where one leg needs protecting without abandoning the selection entirely.

Worth avoiding when: the match has a genuinely dominant favourite, since the odds shrink so far there’s little value left in covering the draw as well.

Example: A mid-table Premier League side travels to face a top-four club chasing a title race. The away side is 9/2 to win outright and 13/5 to win or draw. Given how often top-four sides drop points at home against stubborn opposition, the 1X price offers a more forgiving way to back the value in an upset without needing the away win itself.

Both Teams to Score: A Coin Flip With History Behind It

Both Teams to Score, shortened almost everywhere to BTTS, is a yes/no market on whether each side finds the net at least once. No handicaps, no scorelines to guess, just a binary outcome. It’s close to a genuine 50/50 proposition across a large enough sample, which keeps the odds honest compared to markets with more skewed probabilities. In the 2022-23 Premier League season, both teams scored in 52% of the 380 matches played, a figure that’s stayed roughly stable across most major leagues for years.

Best suited to:

• Fixtures between two attack-minded sides with leaky defensive records.
• Combining with a result bet, such as “BTTS and Home Win,” a common pairing that pushes the odds up while still backing a specific match read.
• Bettors who want granularity: some firms split this further into BTTS first half, second half, or both halves.

Worth avoiding when: one side is set up purely to defend a lead, or a cup tie has a team parking the bus to protect a slim aggregate advantage.

Example: Two mid-table sides meet, both having conceded in over 70% of their matches this season and both scoring freely at home. BTTS Yes at around 4/5 looks a stronger bet here than trying to call the exact scoreline, since the shape of the fixture, not the final number, is what’s really being backed.

Each Way Betting: Borrowed From the Racetrack

Football each way betting is more familiar to horse racing fans in its original form, but the sport has adopted a version of it, mostly around goalscorer markets. Your stake splits in two: half goes on the outright selection, half on a “place” version of the same bet, usually settled at a fraction of the outright odds, commonly a quarter. Applied to goalscorer betting, this typically means the each way part pays out if your player scores first, second, or third in the match, not just first.

Best suited to:

• Matches expected to have several goals, where the chance of scoring at all is decent even if being first is a stretch.
• Confident goalscorer picks on players who aren’t the outright favourite to score, since the each way part cushions a near-miss.
• Punters comfortable staking double, since each way bets are two wagers bundled into one ticket, not one.

Worth avoiding when: the fixture looks tight and low-scoring, since there may not be a second or third goal for the place part to land on at all.

Example: A striker is priced at 16/1 to score first in a match both sides are expected to attack freely. A £10 each way bet, with terms of 1/4 the odds for the first three scorers, still returns £50 if he nets the game’s second goal rather than the opener, even though the first goalscorer part of the bet has already lost.

Winning Margin: How Big Will the Gap Be?

Winning margin asks you to predict not just who wins, but by how much. Typical options include a one-goal win, two-goal win, three-plus, or a draw as a separate outcome altogether. It’s a market that rewards genuine insight into a fixture rather than gut instinct: calling a heavy favourite to win is easy, calling whether they win by one or by four depends on squad depth, motivation, and how the two sides have historically matched up.

Best suited to:

• Clear favourites where the result itself isn’t really in doubt, but the scale of victory is.
• Bettors who’ve done the homework on a team’s tendency to keep piling on goals once ahead, rather than easing off.
• Fixtures with a settled squad, since injuries or rotation can swing a comfortable win into a narrow one.

Worth avoiding when: finishing quality is unpredictable, such as a side that dominates possession without scoring, or a match where an early red card could reshape the entire second half.

Example: A title-chasing side at home against the league’s bottom club has won five of its last six home games by two or more goals. Backing the “two-goal margin” bracket rather than trying to nail the exact 3-0 or 4-1 scoreline captures the expected shape of the game while still allowing room for how it actually plays out.

Anytime Goalscorer: The Most Flexible Player Bet

Anytime goalscorer is the loosest version of the goalscorer markets. You’re not tied to who scores first or last, just whether your chosen player finds the net at any point during the 90 minutes plus stoppage time. Score twice, and the bet still only pays out once, unless the bookmaker offers a separate “2+ goals” or hat-trick variant.

Best suited to:

• Strikers on regular penalty duty, or wingers who cut inside and shoot often.
• Players returning from injury with something to prove, provided they’re confirmed to start.
• Bettors who want to avoid the timing guesswork that trips up first and last scorer markets.

Worth checking before backing: confirm the player is actually starting rather than just named in a squad list, since a late cameo limits the chances of scoring considerably. Also check how the bookmaker treats own goals, which almost never count, and whether the player has been managed through fitness concerns lately, which often means an early substitution regardless of form.

Example: A club’s top scorer has netted in four of his last five home appearances and takes every penalty. Even if he’s not first goalscorer favourite at 11/4, the anytime price of 6/5 reflects how often he simply ends up on the scoresheet somewhere across the 90 minutes, whether that’s the opener or a stoppage-time tap-in.

Quick Comparison Table

Bet Type	What You’re Predicting	Best Used When
Win to Nil	Team wins and keeps a clean sheet	Strong favourite vs blunt attack
Double Chance	Two of three possible results	Unpredictable or cup-tie matches
Both Teams to Score	Both sides score at least once	Two attacking sides, weak defences
Each Way (Goalscorer)	Player scores first/last, or places	Games likely to have multiple goals
Winning Margin	Size of the winning gap	Clear favourite, uncertain scoreline
Anytime Goalscorer	Player scores at any point	Confirmed starter, attacking role

Putting These Bets Together

None of these betting types are meant to replace the classic 1X2 bet, they’re meant to sit alongside it depending on what a specific fixture calls for. A cagey London derby might suit double chance far better than a straight result bet. A one-sided European tie might be the perfect spot for win to nil or a wide winning margin. Match the bet to the match, not the other way around, and treat your types of football predictions as a toolkit rather than a single hammer for every fixture.

It’s also worth remembering that combining several of these into one slip, inside a bet builder for instance, multiplies the difficulty even if the individual legs look reasonable on paper. Each additional selection chips away at your actual chances of winning, regardless of how the combined odds are dressed up. Understanding the different bet options available, and where each one genuinely fits, tends to matter more than any single tip ever will.

• Also read: Asian Handicap Explained: Lines, Quarter Goals, Examples, and Draw No Bet Compared

Always gamble responsibly. Betting markets are volatile, and odds can shift quickly before kick-off.