When you sit down to watch a game of football and have no particular affinity with either team, the chances are that you want to see plenty of action in both penalty areas and lots of goals to go with it.
There’s a particular type of punter that wishes for the same – they are the Both Teams to Score hunters, which remains one of the most popular football bet types available today.
This one is all about goals, goals, goals, so matches where you think either both teams are going to be finding the net or one team has no chance of finding the net are perfect candidates.
What Does Both Teams to Score Mean?
As the name implies, Both Teams to Score – or BTTS as you may see it written – simply requires you to pick out games in which you think that both sides will find the net.
It doesn’t really matter what the final score is for BTTS backers – 1-1, 2-2, 4-2, 6-3 – the object remains the same, and as ever your mission is to find the value odds where the chances of both teams scoring are represented by a meaty price with the bookmakers.
What Does Both Teams to Score No Mean?
On the flipside, it’s possible that both teams WON’T score – think of games that end 0-0, 1-0, 3-0 etc.
You can also bet on Both Teams to Score – No, which as you may have figured pays out when only one (or neither) of the sides involved finds the net.
What Other BTTS Markets Are There?
The possibilities with BTTS betting don’t just end with the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ style markets.
There’s also Match Result & Both Teams to Score, where you can attempt to pick the winner of a game (or a draw if you prefer) and then decide whether the BTTS line will be a yes or a no.
You can back Both Teams to Score in the first half, second half, either/or and even in both halves, while the various bet builder style tools offered online these days let you package BTTS with other markets – including Double Chance, total goals, cards, corners, first/anytime goalscorer and much more besides.
What is Goals Galore?
If you are looking for a slight twist on Both Teams to Score betting, it’s worth considering Betfred’s Goals Galore option.
This, which pre-dated BTTS, lets punters pick three or more matches from one of two coupons – the Long List or the Bonus List (this second choice features longer odds games).
The Goals Galore coupon offers fixed odds returns based on the number of picks you make. So, if you correctly select three BTTS games, you will be paid out at 3/1 on the Long List and 9/2 on the Bonus List. This increases to 11/2 and 9/1 respectively for four picks and so on, all the way up to 1,350/1 and 5,000/1 for 15 correct selections.
There’s another option too – Goals Galore No Draw. Here the object is to select games that you think a) both teams will score in and b) won’t end in a draw.
How Often Do Both Teams Score in Football?
To find out if BTTS is a valuable market or not, we first need to figure out exactly how often both teams score in football matches.
Here’s the data from the 2020/21 season for some of the world’s top leagues:
| League | BTTS Y | BTTS N |
|---|---|---|
| Premier League | 49% | 51% |
| Bundesliga | 60% | 40% |
| La Liga | 52% | 48% |
| Ligue 1 | 54% | 46% |
| Serie A | 60% | 40% |
As you can see, both teams scoring in a game probably doesn’t happen as often as you think, and the English Premier League was the worst of Europe’s top five leagues when it comes to delivering BTTS verdicts.
But in the German Bundesliga and Italian Serie A, as just two examples, you can see that the probabilities are in favour of BTTS – although these numbers alone, of course, don’t tell us which particular games to wager on, that comes through research and diving into the stats more deeply.
Both Teams to Score Tips
While you may go on to plough your own furrow as far as BTTS betting is concerned, there are two main strategies you can work with:
- Open, attacking games between two evenly-matched teams
- Where a favourite is expected to dominate and not concede (BTTS No)
In the first case, you can begin to explore the notion of value betting by performing some simple calculations. Let’s go back to the 2020/21 season, and imagine Manchester United are hosting Tottenham at Old Trafford.
We examine the stats, and find out that BTTS lands in 63% of United’s home games and 47% of Spurs’ away fixtures. We can work out an average – (63 + 47)/2 – and find out that Both Teams to Score is a theoretical 55% chance. In a perfect betting market, without the bookies’ overround, we know that an implied probability of 55% is reflected in odds of around 4/5 (1.82 for decimal users).
So, if we can source odds of 4/5 or longer from the bookies, we might consider this to be a value BTTS bet. If the odds are shorter than 4/5, we should ignore this particular game on our betslip.
Of course, this isn’t an exact science. Teams fluctuate in form, lose players to injury and suspension, change manager and so on, so the prior BTTS stats for that season are of only limited relevance. But when you adjust the odds based on player absences, form etc, you get a far better picture of what a value price might be.
With regards to backing dominant favourites in the BTTS No market, let’s work through a real-life example where we back this market at £10 but also dutch four correct scores together that are relevant:
- £10 on Liverpool vs Norwich – BTTS No (profit of £5.71)
- £2 on Liverpool to win 1-0 at 10/1 (profit of £20, minus £8 in other lost bets)
- £3 on Liverpool to win 2-0 at 13/2 (profit of £19.50, minus £8 in other lost bets)
- £3 on Liverpool to win 3-0 at 6/1 (profit of £18, minus £8 in other lost bets)
- £2 on Liverpool to win 4-0 at 8/1 (profit of £16, minus £8 in other lost bets)
As you can see, Dutching the correct score options is a more profitable venture than backing BTTS No. However, we lose our bets if the game finishes 0-0, 5-0, 6-0 and so on, so there is a decision to be made as to which is the best choice based on the information at hand.