Football Betting in 2023-34: How new injury time rules will influence the odds and your bets

There is nothing like the start of a new football season to get your hopes up - that maybe, this time, your club will fulfil its potential, only to see your hopes crushed in 90 minutes!

It's rare that much changes in a sport as popular and established as football, but in recent years we have seen some functional changes to the game, such as the offside rule and VAR.

Change means Opportunity

Most people dislike change, but change can be an excellent opportunity for the astute punter.

This season referees have been instructed to be much stricter with time-wasting. Additional time will be added to each half to reduce the time lost to these tactics.

To understand the impact of that, let's take a hypothetical example.

What added time means for your strategy

If we have a match that lasted 45 minutes and one that lasted 90 minutes, which match would contain the most goals?

It doesn't take a genius to work out that longer matches have more goals.

All betting markets work around somebody offering odds, and that is often based on a model. Within that model in Football, a key element is the time left to play.

So added time should mean more goals and an adjustment in odds for those goals and the added time. But there is a caveat, which we will explain in a moment.

Evidence-based approach

We have direct evidence of what happens when officials are instructed to add time to a match to avoid wasting time. The World Cup in 2022.

It was the first time we had this phenomenon occur in Football, and we have data from previous world cups to compare against. So we get some good hints about what is in store during the domestic season.

In the 2018 World Cup, the average match lasted 96 minutes. In 2022 that was just short of 101 minutes. So a game was 5% longer in total.

There has always been an anomaly with added time in that the first half always has less added time than the second.

At the World Cup, this was true again, but only 81% of matches had more time added in the second versus the first half. This was quite a drop from the 98.4% we saw in 2018.

At four minutes, the first half added time was double what it 'normally' was. Added time after 90 minutes was roughly seven minutes versus four, not quite doubling.

But the stark contrast comes when you look at the total match time - 45% of matches in the 2020 World Cup exceeded 100 minutes, versus just 1.5% in 2018.

How to change your strategy

The added time will see the over/unders odds re-priced. Trading and cashing out on the Betfair Exchange when the market adjusts its pricing will net a tidy profit for a few seconds of work and quite small risk.

From a trading perspective, if you can lay unders just before extra time is announced, the same is true but in the opposite way for overs.

Late goals galore

The extra time has also created an opportunity in the match odds market as this will also react to any additional time that the official's gift.

If the match is heading for a draw, then laying the draw in the match odds market will see a re-rating when a decent amount of extra time is announced.

While added time means more goals are likely, you need to put that into perspective.

The average number of goals in the Premier League last season was 2.86, and 2.47 for the Championship. If an official adds five minutes onto each half of a match, it will effectively add 10% to those numbers. Goals are more likely, but not inevitable.

In tight matches, extra time will give teams a final chance to throw the kitchen sink at their opponents. Laying the prevailing result or score will likely provide a much better chance of a payoff than before.

Focus on the game

When I compared the two most recent World Cups the amount of time added and the changes between the two competitions were obvious. However, outcomes often were not.

The time of the last goal and the number of goals didn't change much. So I dug around to find out why.

The impact of added time was much more apparent when there was a significant incentive to score. When teams were in a tight match, and a goal would change the result, the added time was a significant influence. But this was much less so when there wasn't an incentive to score.

So the upshot is to make sure you pick and choose your matches rather than make this a broad-based strategy.

Within the realms of any sensible betting or trading strategy, that makes sense.

90 Minute payout

While I'm confident where the opportunities will likely be, I'll watch the matches closely this season to see exactly how these new changes are changing each game.

Given the uncertainty around the end of a match these changes will introduce, you may want to check out a new promotional feature on the Betfair Sportsbook, which pays out at 90 minutes, regardless of added time. That looks like an interesting angle.

As the season starts to settle in, I'm sure there will likely be a few opportunities here.