You know sports betting season is going into full bloom when the calendar hits September. The English Premier League, as do all other major football leagues around the world, begins its season and comes just in time after the transfer window deadline, meaning that until January, rosters are set and football takes precedence above all else.
The opening of football means that betting on the sport is available again after a two-month hibernation that only included club friendlies, minor continental tournaments, and the occasional qualifiers. With a lack of games to bet on, sports betting sites refer to July and August as the off-season, an appropriate analogy considering that in the last few months, the most talked about line (the name of the royal baby) didn’t even involve any balls being kicked around a pitch.
But now that the calendar has hit September, sportsbooks are going into overdrive with the overflow of bets coming in from bettors who have probably saved up as much disposable income in the past few months in anticipation of the start of the season. In anticipation of this betting frenzy, sportsbooks usually use the months leading up to it preparing for and studying the offseason movement that will affect the makeup of certain leagues.
The transfer window is one of the biggest sources of information sportsbooks use in trying to determine which teams will be listed as contenders, sleepers, pretenders, and outright candidates for relegation. Using the transfer season as a source for determining picks is especially important because the sheer of unpredictability of players moving from one team to another more often than not affects the line of the team he’s leaving and the team he’s joining. There’s a reason why Chelsea, with its recent signings and the return of manager Jose Mourinho, was penciled in as a co-favorite to win the EPL title ahead of the start of the season even after it had a pretty underwhelming year on the pitch, at least relative to the team’s standards.
In addition to monitoring player movement, sportsbooks also take the time to go back to the previous season to see how it unfolded with the intention of looking for trends, moods, and performances and taking all of them into account when making lines for the new season. It’s a meticulous business that has no shortage of burning eyebrows, but all the effort and time put into it is geared towards putting up the most competitive lines once the season starts.
The same can be said for college football and the NFL, which also open their respective seasons in September every year. Unlike football (or soccer, if you’re getting confused), American football is an even longer wait for its bettors, stretching seven months from the conclusion of the Super Bowl back in February to the opening of the next season in September. With more time at their hands, books preparing for American football take a less feverish approach in setting up their sites for the onslaught of bets from bettors once the seasons begin.
Usually, preparation only begins sometime in June, or at least after the NFL Draft and the free agency period winds down. Similar to the approach in soccer, sportsbooks go through the proverbial wringer in studying up for the upcoming season. Everything is taken into account, often times even the most mundane of details. Whether its draft picks holding out, a player suffering an injury, or the yearly coaching carousel, sportsbooks leave no stones unturned when it comes to studying up on every aspect of the sport in preparation for setting up lines on college football and the NFL.
It’s no secret that the soccer and American football are two of the most popular and widely bet on sports in the world. Having little to no access to at least one of these two sports in the dead months of July and August will often leave bettors blue-balled and suffering from severe withdrawal symptoms. And we all know what happens we take something away and then bring it back: betting frenzy commences. Sportsbooks who spent the better part of the offseason preparing for this gambling rush are more likely to be better equipped to handle it than those who spent it dilly-dallying around.
Gambling season is back and bettors and sportsbooks, ready or not, are all back in business, preparing themselves for another season’s worth of triumphs, heartbreaks, and back door covers.
