Pre-Match Football Trading Strategies For Betfair Revealed... -

Pre-match trading on Betfair is an excellent option for trading football. There are a lot of football trading strategies around, but trading before the game kicks off has a huge amount of positives.

To start with pre match markets are way less volatile then in-play!

You are never going to have a period where the odds radically change. In comparison to a goal or red card in the live markets. This means you can trade based purely on volume, market sentiment and new information as it becomes available. With the right strategy is can be one of the lowest-risk ways to trade football.

In this article I’m going to give you the best strategies to put into practice pre-match, covering;

The best low risk pre match football strategies!
What you need to know when trading pre match!
How to implement your pre match football trading strategies effectively!

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Pre-Match Football Trading Strategy

Pre-match trading is known as a low-risk football trading strategy for a simple reason. In the major football odds generally do not have massive movements.

For example, in horse racing, you can see a horse start at odds of 34.00 in the morning and by start time the same horse could be odds of 5.0. This is unheard of in football.

There are mainly two big events that can move the market, and it’s good to be aware of these before going any further. The first is team news – for example a key player is injured in training and will miss the upcoming match. The second is an event that will affect more then one member of the team – an example would be a sickness bug in the camp, food poisoning or a manager deciding to rest players.

One of the most famous examples of a big pre-match move in football was when Jurgen Klopp decided to play the Liverpool under 21s squad. This was in the League Cup because of a fixture clash which would see his team play two games in short succession. Due to this we saw Aston Villa trading at 1.2 to beat Liverpool which was crazy.

What causes pre match odds movement in football?

Aside from those rare moments, generally, we only see big movement pre-off when a key player is missing. Any good pre-match football trading trader will know that team news is released an hour before kick-off. You can find the official lineups for team on twitter now know as X.

When lineups are released you will usually see an immediate reaction in the betting markets. For the average football trader, it’s a case of faster fingers first when reacting to this news.

It’s also good to be aware that some members of the press room might get the information early. A tactic I like to employ when pre-match trading on Betfair is to look closely at the traded volumes 10-20 minutes before the team news – often you can start to get clues on where the market is going to move.

Given that nine times out of ten, you’re only looking at the market moving a handful of ticks, pre-match trading is very low risk. You won’t lose ten ticks for example, and you can often run a profitable position for a little longer when you see the volume pouring on either team.

Trading The Football Fans…

If you’re a Betfair user, you will be well aware of the crowd mentality or “the herd” mentality as it is also known.

For those of you that have never heard this saying let me explain. It is basically a way of saying that a few people move early and the rest will follow. A lot of money that moves a market is basically just chasing a price – panicking about trying to get their bet matched. This is also known as the phenomenon of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

Smart football traders use this to their advantage. The best football trading strategies always generally involve momentum – riding that momentum in the market to your advantage.

Low-Risk Football Trading Strategy – Opposing Form

Another good trading angle is looking at the confidence in how a side is playing. For example, let’s say Brentford arrive into a game with Bournemouth after putting five impressive wins in a row together, and their xG figures have been very impressive.

Confidence is high in the team and football fans believe that the form will continue. It all comes back to the herd mentality. It only takes that two/three tick movement to see people chasing the price after an impressive run from one team. The average sports bettor believes they are “going to win easy next match” as they are “playing so well.” Don’t discount the fact that football fans are really straightforward in their thinking; indeed most sports fans are.

Look at how fickle sports fan are in boxing, they are either a warrior or a bum – there’s no in-between!

As sports traders, we absolutely know that there is an in-between. There is a lot of variance in sports and one team can look completely different one week to the next. Look at Man Utd for example in 2024, they had their worst Premier league season of all time with 14 losses in total. Then capped off the season by beating arguably the best team in the world Manchester City to claim the FA cup!

That is the unpredictable nature of football, knowing this can give you an edge in the market.

Once you gain some experience in the football betting markets. You can start to see when odds get backed in too much for the average football fan. It can become clear by looking traded volume on the Betfair graphs, the trend eventually stops and you see a build up of lay money.

Best Pre-Match Football Trading Strategies

There are a lot of football trading strategies out there. We can see multiple markets on every game – Match Odds, Over/Under 2.5 goals, 1.5, 0.5, Correct Score, Cards and Corners to name a few. There’s pretty much something for everyone when it comes to football trading.

A nice angle to look at is goal times (it’s well worth reading that link). I have discussed these at length in my Football Trading Course. However to touch on the subject briefly, by researching the goal times you can see how the market might react to certain events.

If you want to stick to low-risk football trading strategies and stick to pre-match football trading. Goal times are a great football strategy to start with. Let me give you one example – let’s say both sides playing have an average first-goal time of 40 minutes. That is quite late and it’s obvious they are both slow starters.

This data suggests we might see a cagey start and could be a nice in-play trade on Under 2.5 goals. We could easily see that come in a few ticks before the off as football traders try to get ahead of the crowd. If everyone expects a slow start, you get that herd mentality again, and you can profit from a few ticks before a ball is even kicked.

Pre-match trading on Betfair is a great way to start as a beginner. It can be very low risk so you’re very unlikely to lose your bank, you can make a few mistakes and they won’t be that costly. Most importantly it can help answer a lot of questions about how the markets work.

How the football markets move?
What factors cause them to move?
What time frames are best for trading?

I hope you have learnt something about pre match football trading from this article. If you want to continue building your knowledge on football trading we suggest reading the next article below.