Whilst football is recognised as easily the most popular team sport on earth, drawing television audiences of billions to its major events, relatively few football fans take the opportunity to place their football expertise to the test by firmly taking part in football betting.

For many football fans, being truly a supporter is all about backing one club for life, however football betting lets you add excitement to neutral matches by backing the club you rate as strongest. And if your team isn’t on an excellent run of form, placing a bet on the opposition can provide some consolation when your team loses.

Online betting is probably the best ways to become involved in football betting. Most online sportsbooks provide a huge variety of football bets from the world’s top leagues, all year round. What’s more, RTP Live could be set up in just a matter of minutes, giving you virtually access immediately to football betting markets.

Here are just some of the hottest football betting options:

Match betting – match betting is the simplest type of football betting. It involves betting on the results of a match, with each outcome coming in at specific odds. You can bet on a team or a draw. Typically the betting slip will carry the name of 1 team under ‘away’ and another under ‘home’.

When doing match betting also you can vote on a handicap bet which basically gives one team a one goal advantage or disadvantage before the game has even started. You then bet on the outcome according to a normal match bet.

Score betting – score betting describes a variety of betting options. The easiest is predicting the final score of a match, and tends to carry very high odds.

Another popular score betting option involves betting on who’ll score an objective. These bets carry high odds and come in several varieties including: first goal scorer, last goal scorer and anytime goal scorer.

Special bets – every football game will carry a multitude of additional betting opportunities, with each online bookmaker offering their own game specials. Literally every aspect of the overall game attracts odds, ranging from the number of corners in the game, to which players will undoubtedly be injured. These bets often carry a few of the highest odds.

Tournament betting – if you are a large picture punter you’ll enjoy tournament betting. Betting opportunities range between picking group and pool winners, picking the tournament winner and predicting the amount of goals a team will score in your competition. The limits to your tournament betting opportunities are defined only by the bookmaker’s imagination!