Americans love to bet, and they love to bet on sports. There is something about the competitive nature of sports that excites us. We see these top-class athletes compete with each other, and we naturally want to feel involved in some way.
Very few spectators, if any, are completely passive.
If you talk to anyone who watches a certain sport, they all have opinions, and many of these opinions are predictions. Sports betting at the top-rated offshore sportsbooks is an outgrowth of this natural disposition to form opinions about the sports one watches.
All of this expresses the connection that studies have shown to exist between watching and betting. We should expect that the sport Americans love to bet on the most is the same one that they love to watch the most.
Is this the case?
The Answer
Americans indeed love both to watch football the most and to bet on the football the most. The numbers differ depending on the time in which they were collected.
But essentially about 80 percent of sports bettors have wagered on the NFL.
This number is approximately 25% higher than the percentage of sports bettors who have wagered on the NBA.
Is This Misleading?
Now, people might say that this is trivially true. They might object in the following way: “of course, people have bet on the NFL. The Super Bowl is the most watched sporting event in the entire country.”
They object that the Super Bowl, a single game, accounts for much of the disparity between the extent to which people have bet on the NFL and the extent to which people have bet on the NBA.
Regularity
But the numbers also show that people regularly bet on the NFL the most. If you look at all of the sports betting wagers that have been placed in the United States, wagers on the NFL alone make up almost half.
The NFL and college football offer games every week, whereas other major sports offer games more frequently. Nevertheless, people wager the most on football.
Is Football Betting The Easiest?
Do people bet on football because it’s easier to make money off of than other sports? This question taps into the reason why people bet. Are they looking for profit?
Of course, people are risking their money and hoping to make a positive return. But concluding from this that people are primarily seeking to profit from sports betting is misleading. For many people, the question of profit is tangential to their endeavor to entertain themselves.
After all, 99% of sports bettors do not bet professionally.
While many hope to add to their bankroll by betting, they rely on more conventional means of gaining money. Because people are not living by betting, it would be too hasty to say that football is easier to profit from and that therefore people bet so frequently on it.
Football does seem to have less variance than, say, baseball or basketball.
In basketball, a team can be superior but simply struggle on a given day to get the ball in the basket.
Baseball, too, has its variance, as evident in stats like BABIP (batting average of balls in play) and the disparity between ERA and FIP (like ERA but factors out fielding). A team can often make hard contact at a high rate but still fail to get hits for several reasons, many of which are luck.
Variances In Football
But there is variance in football, too. This is why if two teams were to play each other ten times, the results wouldn’t always be the same.
Coaches are barely deciding to call one play over another. Offensive linemen are milliseconds slower in one game than in the rematch to react to a move from an opposing defensive lineman. A key pass barely gets tipped. Game plans can unfold differently than one thinks they should on paper, and coaches try to make a ton of adjustments.
For many reasons, games can fluctuate, and rematches often don’t look the same.
Football betting is difficult, but the matchup-related and situational opportunities are very alluring, and tons of people do profit from betting on football.
People do expect to profit from football.
But I struggle to see why something like baseball wouldn’t be easier at least in the sense of being less labor intensive.
Baseball matchups are simpler — one just considers pitcher versus lineup whereas in football one considers wide receiver vs. cornerback, running back vs. front seven, quarterback vs. defense, etc.
With baseball, there are also so many numbers out there to help bettors reach decisions without watching the games.
Labor of Love
While NFL betting is more labor-intensive, it’s a labor that people enjoy.
It’s fun to contemplate the various ways in which a game might unfold and to consider what the likeliest outcomes are.
We have typically a week to make these decisions, and it’s very possible in a given week and in a given season to decide correctly and profitably.
