Pre-Season Matches: Bookies’ Quiet £50M Jackpot

Every summer, football fans take a breather. But for bookmakers? It’s open season. Pre-season friendly matches, meaning those seemingly casual games meant to build fitness, have quietly turned into a £50 million annual goldmine for UK sportsbooks.

How? We’ve been in those meetings. We’ve heard traders chuckle about “training ground money,” where results don’t matter but margins skyrocket. Pre-season friendlies are for sure chaotic, unpredictable, and often meaningless for clubs, but to bookmakers, they’re the perfect market storm. And most punters don’t even realize they’re walking into a trap.

At BetterGambling UK, we’re here to strip away the illusion and decode the logic behind the odds.

The £50M Goldmine: By the Numbers & Odds

Let’s get numerical so you can have a better insight. Here’s how the UK betting market breaks down pre-season revenue:

To give that context, the global sports betting market is exploding. As Grand View Research reports: “The global sports betting market size was estimated at USD 100.9 billion in 2024.”

But in the UK alone, Statista data shows online sports betting more than doubled between 2017 and 2023, growing from £2.29B to £4.21B. A big chunk of that growth? It happens quietly in the summer.

The Insider’s Cheat Sheet: Why Friendly Odds Are Bookmaker Heaven

Let’s talk tactics, bookmaker tactics to be more precise.

• Motivation Mismatch: Teams don’t care about winning. These aren’t points-on-the-line fixtures; they’re simply glorified cardio sessions.

Odds Impact: This makes setting accurate Moneyline odds incredibly difficult. A team priced at 1.50 (1/2) implying a 66.7% win chance might only have a 40% chance if their motivation is low.

• Experimental Lineups: You think you’re betting on Manchester United. Turns out, you’re actually betting on their U19s and a trialist from Norway.

Odds Impact: Bookies price based on the club name, not the actual players on the pitch. This leads to heavily skewed odds that don’t reflect the talent disparity on the day.

• Injury Risk Management: Star players hold back, and coaches protect their assets, so performances are lukewarm at best.

Odds Impact: Goalscorer odds, player performance props, and even Total Goals lines are hard to set accurately when key attacking threats are playing at 50% intensity or substituted early.

• Mass Substitutions: In what other match will you see 8 changes before halftime?

Odds Impact: This drastically changes the dynamic of the game, making pre-match odds on things like Half Time/Full Time results, Handicaps, and Total Goals highly volatile and often meaningless by the second half.

• No Real Incentive: There’s no league table. No trophy. No stakes. But yes, there are odds, and to be honest, they’re against you.

Odds Impact: The lack of competitive pressure removes a key factor bookmakers use to model outcomes in regular games, forcing them to rely more on public perception and build in higher margins to compensate for the uncertainty.

Bookmakers love this market because unpredictability gives them a really consistent edge. The odds might look sharp, but they’re built on volatility, not insight.

The Psychology Behind the Misleading Odds

Pre-season matches prey on what we call familiarity fallacy: and this means the belief that “big names” mean “big wins.”

Punter logic: “It’s Man City vs. Club Brugge. City must win.”

Bookmaker logic: “City’s playing a C-team in 38°C heat and already flew 9,000 miles this week.”

According to VSiN’s NFL preseason data (a proxy with similar dynamics): “Since 2010, 13 teams have been favored by more than seven points. Nine of these heavy favorites won their games outright, but they were 4-9 ATS (30.8%).”

Translation in plain English? Big names don’t cover spreads. They’re designed to attract emotional bets and not reflect real performance odds.

Insider note: The sweet spot range of -3.5 to -7 have been quite reliable, going 143-112-4 ATS for 56.1%. But you won’t find that pattern in public-facing odds; just ask any trader.

The £50M Training Ground: How Odds Are Manipulated

Behind the curtain, this market thrives on information asymmetry. Clubs don’t reveal squads, coaches keep strategies quiet, and updates suddenly appear minutes before kickoff.

For bookmakers, this opacity means higher profit margins because they can set odds based on less information than they’d have for a regular game. They can shade lines heavily and rarely get caught.

Worse, pre-season friendlies are loosely regulated. As highlighted by Legal Sports Report, and echoed by multiple analysts: “A lack of regulatory oversight puts friendly matches in football at greater risk of match-fixing.” Odds Impact: This means odds can sometimes be influenced by factors entirely outside of footballing merit, making them even less reliable indicators of outcome.

Insider markets are common. Goalscorer odds swing wildly with lineup leaks, and total goal lines adjust in seconds with no explanation for the public.

One operator insider told us that friendly matches are routinely offered on the gambling markets by both more responsible regulated operators and the unlicensed sector. Translation: it’s the Wild West with polished branding.

The Debugged Belief: “Pre-Season Odds = Practice Money”

If you’re betting pre-season like it’s Premier League Saturday, take a step back.

• The Myth: Pre-season friendlies are just soft warmups where skill decides the outcome, and the odds reflect that.
• The Reality: They’re structured chaos, generating tens of millions with odds that change and zero accountability if they are very inaccurate.
• Why It Matters: Knowing this gives you a tactical edge, not just against the odds, but against the house.

At BetterGambling, we don’t say “don’t bet.” We simply say: understand the machine you’re betting into.

Resources

• Grand View Research: Sports Betting Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Platform (Online, Offline), By Betting Type (Fixed Odds Wagering, Exchange Betting, Live/In-Play Betting, eSports Betting), By Sports Type, By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2025 – 2030
• Statista: Sports betting in the United Kingdom – statistics & facts
• VSin: NFL Preseason Betting Concepts for 2024
• Legal Sports Report: Sports Betting Revenue