In terms of sheer variety of bet types, no sport can compete with football betting. You’re basically free to be as general or as specific as you like here.
Generally speaking, your options can be broken down into three categories: match-wide bets (like Match Result), team props, and player props. In this article, we’re going to focus on one of the most popular examples of the latter – goalscorer bets.
Different Goalscorer Markets
For starters, goalscorer markets are exactly what they sound like. You’re simply betting on one player to score a goal in a particular match. There are a few different ways to go about this though, as we’ve outlined below.
Anytime Goalscorer
This is the most straightforward goalscorer bet of all, and definitely the safest. To win it, your chosen player simply has to score at some point during the match. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first minute, or the 90th – a single goal will see you winning your bet.
To Score First
This is a more specific alternative to the classic Anytime Goalscorer. Here, as the name implies, your chosen player has to score the very first goal of the game.
First Goalscorer bets are more random than Anytime Goalscorer, and therefore more difficult to actually win. In turn, however, you’ll get significantly better odds for them.
To Score 2+ Goals
If you think one player is really going to have some fun in a particular match, you can take them to score two or more goals. Technically some sites might let you wager on a hat-trick, but a simple 2+ Goals wager is more common.
Unlike To Score First, these goals can be scored at any time. Like that bet type though, these wagers are tricky to win, and therefore have higher odds than simple Anytime Goalscorer bets.
Are Goalscorer Props a Smart Bet?
Goalscorer props are definitely one of the more thrilling wagers you can place. Rather than backing an entire team to win, your hopes are resting on just one player. Every time he pulls his shooting foot back, or goes up for a header, you get that rush of excitement.
As to whether they’re smart wagers or not, that’s a different question.
Generally speaking, an Anytime Goalscorer wager is a medium-risk proposition. It’s not as easy to win as an Over/Under Goals bet, for example. But there are many, many games each season in which you’d be pretty shocked if a goal machine like Haaland, Salah, or Kane back in the day wouldn’t score at least one.
Taking the other goalscorer bets is far riskier.
It’s statistically much harder for a player to score two goals than one, however good they are. Even the best strikers around will usually have a conversion rate of less than 30%. They alone would need to take over 6 shots (which is a lot) on average, therefore, to get 2 goals.
As for To Score First, this bet is pretty random. Even if a player is his team’s primary goal threat, and his team’s likely to win, there’s absolutely no guarantee he’ll actually score first.
As with all wagers though, you’re ultimately weighing up value here. Let’s say Man City are playing a newly-promoted side. Even on the best sports betting sites, your odds for Haaland to Score Anytime are going to be pretty low – let’s say 2/1. Since he’s almost guaranteed to score at some point, if his odds to Score First are 8/1, it could definitely be worthwhile taking on a little extra risk, in return for significantly higher potential profits.
What we wouldn’t advise, however, is the outlandish props that bookies often push – a so-so midfielder to score 2+ goals, for example, or a To Score Anytime wager bundled into a multiples bet with 3 or 4 other selections. These props have high odds for a reason – there’s almost no chance they’ll actually win.
