What Makes a Good Football Betting Site?

Football is the most exciting and popular sport in the world and has taken over from horse racing as the biggest and best sport for betting. With a wide array of markets, matches being played at every minute of every day across the world and a remarkable level of coverage from bookmakers large and small, we really are spoilt for choice when it comes to betting on the beautiful game.

So with so many bookmakers around all offering special offers and promotions to reel us in, it’s more important than ever that we make sure that we find and use only the best football betting sites.

There are many aspects that can decide whether a bookmaker is bad, average or up there with the very best around.

Reputation

Reputation isn’t the be all and end all of finding a betting site, but it can certainly bring us comfort to know that we are using a widely used betting platform when, at the end of the day, we are staking our hard-earned money on their sites. A site known as a good football betting site usually has that reputation for a reason, and that is because of consistent service and customer care that has led to punters coming back and recommending their friends to the site. Reputation isn’t everything, though, as often this comes through wide-ranging advertising as well as word of mouth, and often when a site is spending out on expensive advertising campaigns, it will mean marginally lower odds when it comes to placing your bets.

Security

Cybersecurity is becoming more and more important in the modern world, as we use web-based companies for more than ever before. That includes betting online, as we are making deposits using our credit card information and asking that website to store money on our behalf. Therefore, ensuring that the sites we are using are secure is vital when choosing a bookmaker. Bookmakers must adhere to stringent regulations when it comes to holding money on our behalf. Any information that you send to them, such as personal information and payment details, will be kept private on the vast majority of betting sites. You’ll find a security report on most web browsers, usually in the form of a padlock in the address bar (more on that in the next paragraph). The leading bookmakers should also be able to provide you with information about their security systems either through their help and support section or by request.

An important thing to look for to ensure that the bookmaker you choose is safe is that they employ the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, a cryptographic protocol for ensuring the security of internet connections. To know whether your chosen site uses SSL, look in the address bar of your browser. Is the URL preceded by the word “Secure” and a padlock symbol? If so, the site is using SSL. You can also simply check if the URL begins with “HTTPS” instead of just “HTTP”. Any genuinely safe betting site will use SSL for payment transactions.

Customer Service

Quite often we can spend a great deal of time using a sports betting site without experiencing any legitimate customer service, such is the nature of the online betting industry. Therefore, it can sometimes be an underrated aspect of choosing a football betting site. However, when you do need to get in touch with someone - for example, if you have a problem with a payout or a query with regards to an offer or promotion - it can be extremely frustrating when the customer service isn’t there. Any bookie worth its salt should provide a multitude of options allowing you to contact them in the event of a problem or query. Most offer means of contact such as:

• Live chat
• Telephone
• Email
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page

The most important is live chat, as this offers the quickest and easiest method of contacting a sports betting site. Not all of the leading bookmakers offer this service, so it can make a big difference to the quality of your betting experience down the line.

Types of Bet Offered

While almost every bookmaker in the country will offer some sort of coverage of football, given its popularity, the level of coverage isn’t exactly the same between bookies. Some types of bet are routinely offered by the vast majority of bookmakers such as match winners, total goals over/under and Asian handicap. Despite this, even between the biggest and best sites, there are often big differences between the types of bets offered, with some offering much better options within niche markets than others.

Examples of the types of bet which may differ wildly between sites include:

• Card markets
• First and anytime goalscorers
• Corners and corner handicaps
• Halftime markets
• Bespoke betting options

The latter on that list is a fairly new arrival in the football betting world, with many of the best and biggest bookmakers now allowing you to request your own bets using a combination of outcomes that you can choose, often using their social media platforms like Twitter. This opens up a world of opportunity for punters, but be warned that the odds won’t always be good value!

Special Promotions

While we want our football betting sites to have consistently good odds on a range of markets, it also helps when they give us special treats and bonuses to add extra value to our betting. With betting being such a large and competitive market, there are plenty of options out there and each bookmaker is trying to offer something unique to make you choose them over their rivals. This usually means special offers with promotions such as free in-play bets, free-to-enter competitions or unique money-back offers. Most bookmakers will offer something different, so it is definitely worth working out which offers would be most useful to you when choosing the best football bookie and working out how you can use these offers to win with your football betting.

Special Bets for the Biggest Tournaments

While betting on the Australian A-League and the Costa Rican Primera Division can be fun, most of us are much more interested in betting on football during the biggest football tournaments such as the Champions League or the World Cup. Bookmakers know this as well, and will frequently offer special bets and promotions when the biggest tournaments are around the corner. Whether those are ante-post offerings before the tournament starts, such as enhanced prices on a team to win the tournament or special prices for upcoming games, most of the biggest tournaments will see different bookmakers offering event-specific promotions. If you’re only interested in betting on the biggest events, then choosing a bookmaker that offers these sorts of promotions with regularity is a good idea.

How to Use Our Site to Find the Best Football Betting Sites

We do the hard work so you don’t have to when it comes to finding the perfect football betting site for you.

The first place to start is the main football page, where you can look through a table of the best sites as chosen by our experts and compare aspects such as minimum deposit, welcome bonus and an overall score out of 10 to help you quickly start using our favourite bookmakers.

If you want to delve deeper into what each bookmaker has to offer, then head over to our extensive reviews section, which gives in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of all of the leading sites, allowing you to compare anything from the site’s interface to their odds and promotions - making sure that you find the perfect football betting site for your betting needs.