Oddschecker insights: World Cup 2018 in numbers
Oddschecker's head of commercial Guy Harding highlights the winners and losers of Russia 2018
As the tournament finishes and eyes turn to the forthcoming domestic season, Oddschecker takes a moment to look back on what has been a quite remarkable four weeks of football.
Despite the France v Denmark game being the only goalless draw (vs. 6+ in the last three WCs), and the favourites prevailing more often than at the last WC (+4pp), bookies still seem to have enjoyed a relatively favourable tournament.
England’s late exit coupled with Southgate’s men managing to win only three of their seven games in ninety minutes helped boost margins. This together with the advent of the request-a-bet mechanic meant that most operators exited the tournament with their noses in front. The fact that BetVictor’s winning ‘Million Pound Bet’ entry came it at odds of 17,042/1 just goes to show that the RAB-type offering is more akin to a lottery than a sports betting product at times.
Across the board operators priced the World Cup more aggressively than they did the Premier League; with a tournament 1×2 OR of 103.7% (22 bps tighter than PL 17/18 avg.) The business end (knock out stages) of the tournament was priced marginally more keenly; 4bps, than the group stages. One may argue that the high-margin RAB-type bets are being used to subsidise the more vanilla 1×2, FGS, BTTS offerings – hence why we may be seeing continued erosion to margins across these bet types.
Marathonbet offered the tightest priced 1×2 sportsbook of all of Oddschecker’s partners. This is illustrated on the graph below which shows price vs. clicks performance for the top 10 sportsbooks on Oddschecker. The graph excludes bet365 – who with a clickshare of 30% – would render the message from the rest of the graph unintelligible. For completeness bet365’s tournament 1×2 OR was 102.7%.
The incidence of penalties cost bookies dearly though. VAR proved an expensive development, as bookies were slower than punters to realise this trend. One would normally expect a penalty incidence rate of 0.2, i.e. one penalty awarded every five games, but this year we saw an incidence rate of 0.35. What started as a 3/1 shot pre-tournament was priced at 6/4 in the knockout stages.
Goal count came in at 2.64 per game; two short of the cumulative record (WC ‘14) but a new record in terms of goals scored in the knock out stages (45) – with yesterday’s 6-goal thriller being a bit of a spoiler to the bookmaker party.
The most popular new customer offer of the tournament was from Smarkets, who offered ‘Up To £70 Risk-Free On Your Team At The World Cup’.
For reference, pre-tournament France (fourth faves) were best price 8/1 with Blacktype (while Croatia were as long as 40/1 with Sky Bet). Interestingly France drifted before the knock out stages (most likely because they were in the tougher side of the draw), with Will Hill and Betway offering 9/1 (on June 29th) about Deschamps’ men lifting the trophy.