Betting on Offsides: Everything You Need to Know About The Newest Market
Quite recently, one of the major bookmakers, Bet365, added the ability to place bets on the number of offsides in any given game. As soon as we caught wind of this, we could not wait to bring offside statistics to FootyStats.
We’re delighted to announce that you can now view these stats for hundreds of leagues on the site, free for all members.
We have also put together a brand-new stats page where you can see a breakdown of all the teams, leagues and matches where offsides are rife. At the time of writing this, the Ghana Premier League has the most offsides per game, with 6.33. This page also allows you to see the top teams for offsides, with 200 teams currently recording 2.5 offsides or more in 82-100% of their games. At the time of writing, there is 55 teams that has two or more offsides in all of their games this season. Fulham United, from Australia, currently record 9.70 offsides per game. Maybe they have a very old Filippo Inzaghi playing for them who simply can’t get back! This stats page, and our other similar stats pages are really interesting to explore.
View our new page, created specifically for analysing offside stats.
It seems that leagues with most end-to-end action have a lot of offsides. Interestingly, 3 of the top 5 leagues are from South America. There’s also a good chunk of Nordic leagues in the rankings, as well as plenty of youth football, especially in Brazil. Fast teams and fast players are more likely to be caught offside, sometimes due to the linesman not quite keeping up with play, or the playing setting off on his run before he/she needed to.
Bookmakers, like Bet365, will usually offer a single market for offsides, located in the specials section. You’ll be able to bet on there being more or less than a specified amount in any given game. The works in the same was as the immensely popular Over/Unders market. The amount they allow is usually Over 2.5 or Over 3.5, but this can sometimes change in extreme circumstances. At the time of writing this, there is 26 leagues on FootyStats with an offside average of over 3.50 and 18 leagues with an offside average of 4.00.
It’s no secret that betting on offsides is not a popular market, but that could be about to change. People tend to stick to what they know, and with stats being available for goals there’s a good reason why that market has become so popular with online gamblers. However, now that we have offside data for thousands of teams, with heaps of value, we think that could change in the near future.