How to understand football Supremacy spread betting

Germany’s incredible 7-1 World Cup semi-final victory over Brazil was the perfect example of when a football Supremacy spread bet can pay dividends over a traditional football match winner fixed odds bet.

As the goals flew past Julio Cesar during a simply astonishing period of the first half, punters who had sold Brazil’s Supremacy on the spreads were cheering probably just as loudly as the German fans inside the Mineirao Stadium in Belo Horizonte.

You see with football spread betting, the potential winnings are not capped like a fixed odds bet, so the more your team or bet increases their winning margin, the more profit your bet makes.

For spread betters who had placed a Supremacy spread bet getting against the Brazilians with Spreadex, every goal that the Germans plundered increased their winnings meaning profits of six times their stake size at the final whistle.

However, it’s important to remember that unlike fixed odds betting, with spread betting you can lose more than your initial stake should your bet go against you. So those who had bought Brazil’s Supremacy at 0.2 would have been left feeling just as miserable as the host nation’s huge fan base as they lost 6.2 times their initial stake.

Football Supremacy spread betting v fixed odds Match Winner betting

For football spread betters, the Supremacy market is one of the most popular spreads to play on among the hundreds of prices on offer. But just how does the Supremacy spread betting maket work?

Let’s look at the Brazil v Germany pre-match betting in more detail to explain how to bet on this market and how it compares to traditional fixed odds Match Winner betting.

Before the game, Brazil – surprisingly to some perhaps given the absence of Neymar and Thiago Silva from their line up – were rated as very slight favourites by the bookies.

In fixed odds Match Winner market terms this meant Brazil were 8/5 to win and Germany were 15/8. This translated to a spread betting Supremacy price of Brazil/Germany 0 - 0.2.

So a £100 fixed odds bet on Germany to win at 15/8 would have returned £187.50 in profits (not including the original £100 stake), however a £100 sell of Brazil’s Supremacy at 0 would have returned £600 in profits ((6 – 0) x £100).

Of course, you can’t score 0.2 goals in a game; the spread here simply gives an example of how much stronger the spread betting firms think one team is over another.

So in a one sided encounter you may see a spread firm offer a Supremacy spread of Team A/Team B 1.9 - 2.1. This would mean the firm thinks Team A will win the game by about a two goal margin.

In each case you can play the Supremacy spread based on who you think will win the game. If you think a particular team will win by more goals than the spread or by less than the spread, or if you think the underdogs will win (when the market would end up with a negative make-up) you can buy or sell accordingly.

E.g. for the second World Cup semi-final, Spreadex has a Supremacy price of Argentina/Netherlands 0.1 - 0.3. Again this suggests, that Argentina are slight favourites, reflected in the fixed odds Match Winner prices of Argentina at 7/5 and the Netherlands at 11/5.

If you were playing the spreads and fancied Argentina to win by a goal, you would buy Argentina’s Supremacy at 0.3. If they won by a goal you would win 0.7 times your stake (1 – 0.3), if they won by a two goal margin you would win 1.7 times your stake (2 – 0.3), if they won by a three goal margin you would win 2.7 times your stake (3 – 0.3) and so on. If the match was a draw, you would lose 0.3 times your stake (0 – 0.3), if Holland won by a goal you would lose 1.3 times your stake (-1 – 0.3), if Holland won by a two goal margin you would lose 2.3 times your stake (-2 – 0.3) and so on.

The attraction to spread betters is that if you have a strong view that one team is going to be more dominant than the spread suggests, then you can potentially end up with greater profits from this type of bet than simply backing a strong favourite at very short odds.

The other reason that many punters love to play the Supremacy market is the ease of executing bets in-play. The Supremacy spread is constantly updated during a match so it will change after every goal to indicate the updated view of how many goals a team may end up winning by. It will also change every few minutes if there hasn’t been a goal scored to reflect the updated price.

For punters this means you can open or close bets at any time during a match to take a profit or cut a loss. For example, anyone who had closed out their Supremacy bet before Brazil scored their consolation goal in the final minute would have been able to take a price of 6.9 resulting in profits 6.9 their initial stake rather than the final 6 times stake conclusion.

So next time you take a look at the fixed odds Match Winner prices on a close encounter, before you instantly switch to Half-Time / Full-Time or Correct Score options instead, maybe bear in mind the spread betting Supremacy market for a different way to bet on which team you think will win a football match.