Why Do People Bet On Sports Like Football & Tennis But Not Cricket or Rugby?

For such a sports mad country, it has always seemed a little odd that there are certain sports that, no matter how popular, people just don’t seem keen to engage with at a betting site.

Rugby, League or Union, and cricket are both national obsessions and yet do not garner anywhere near as much attention as football.

This despite football and rugby being similar enough games, to rugby at least, that similar betting markets should, and often do, open up.

The popularity of horse racing, the third most wagered upon sport in the UK, is entirely understandable, as it pretty much exists for this very purpose, but then other racing sports do not attract a similar audience.

Is anyone betting on the Olympic races after all?

Some Sports More Popular For Betting On Than Others

You could argue that it’s possibly a class thing, with football fans and players often coming form more working class backgrounds but then so many sports in the UK are based around income and upbringing, not least of all horse racing otherwise known as the Sport of Kings.

Certainly, anyone looking to take up golf to a high enough standard might need to have suitably deep enough pockets to match their ambitions.

But golf still draws decent betting figures and is actually a great sport for betting on.

There aren’t many other sports, if any, where you can routinely get double figure prices on the world number one and, because of the huge fields of entrants each week and the bookies regularly paying extra places, there is a lot of each way value to pick up weekly without needing to back the winner.

Perhaps that’s why golf gets more bets than cricket.

That said, if tennis is the second most popular sport among UK bettors and you won’t be getting the same value on Novak Djokovic as you would Dustin Johnson, then what makes tennis so popular?

Tennis generates billions of pounds of betting revenue every year which, is good going for a game that only really comes into people’s conciseness during the four major tournaments of Wimbledon, the US Open, the French Open, and the Australian Open.

Why Does Tennis Get More Bets Than Cricket Or Rugby?

Out of the two, rugby generally does better than cricket, but they are both two of our most popular sports and both should, in theory at least be good for live in-play betting.

An early wicket could be significant in cricket and bettors might want to react to that where as rugby is a fast moving sport where the game could change in an instant.

And yet, while these markets are growing, people ultimately seem keener to bet on football or horse racing despite a lot of the time these being much harder to win.

Perhaps this is comes down to value which, although easier to win, is also hard to find in cricket and rugby where, although by no means unheard of, shock results are harder to come by meaning the value is harder to find for those that do not want to look around for it.

Of course, here we are looking at what most Brits bet on.  In other countries it can be totally different.  In India, for example, cricket is by far the most bet on sport.

Some Smaller Sports Are Big For Betting

Conversely there are some ‘smaller’ sports that do attract a lot of betting.  Darts is a great example of this.  This could again be a class thing with darts traditionally being a working class pub game.  Snooker on the other hand does attract a good number of bets but not as much as darts, with snooker tending to be a more upper class sport (thanks in part to you needing to fit a snooker table in your house).

UFC and MMA in general have become quite big for betting too.  They don’t get any where near the number of bets placed on a massive boxing match but there are more UFC fights and they happen more often, so overall UFC has overtaken boxing as the most bet on fighting sport.

There are also sports that are focused solely around betting.  Greyhound racing, for example, is not the national pastime it once was following the second world war but it is still one of the most bet on sports proportionally, i.e. most people that watch a greyhound race will bet on it.  In fact, many bookies actually own dog tracks and this allows them to stream the races on their sites.  They make a huge loss on running the course itself and very few spectators now attend, but this is far outweighed by the number of people that back greyhounds online.

Esports

For many years we have been told that eSports will be the next betting phenomenon, and if you look at east Asia then perhaps that is true.  Brits and Europeans, however, do not bet much on eSports, at least proportional to the number of people that watch them.

This is likely to do with the demographic of the people watching these sports.  Esports tends to attract younger people and as with other vices, such as alcohol, younger adults are partaking in these less than previous generations.  Younger adults also tend to have less leisure money to spend on things like gambling.

This will change in the future if eSports becomes more mainstream and also as the current audience gets older.  It certainly isn’t the phenomenon people expected though, so far at least.