Excellence and enthusiasm: Which sports fans are most prone to betting
Did you know that over 28% of all Brits who watch football have placed a bet on it in the last 12 months? That is an astonishingly high figure! Think about how many people watch football every single week. It is millions and millions. Imagine just how much cash the gambling industry is making from those people alone.
According to a YouGov poll back in 2020, football fans are the most prone to looking for online sports betting sites, but other sports come pretty close too, with cricket, Rugby Union and motorsports not too far behind! Once you start diving into the figures, things get even more astonishing.
It is worth noting that the YouGov poll did exclude horseracing. We presume that they didn’t really class it as a sport. Plus, it is a gambling activity. We can’t imagine there are that many people out there watching horse racing for fun. If you’re watching horseracing, you’re looking to make some cash from it. So, if you want to get all technical and claim that horseracing is a sport, then 100% of horseracing fans probably gamble on it!
The top sports for sports gamblers
We’ll talk about football in a bit more depth shortly, but before we dive into that, we want to take a look at the other sports betting that made the list.
The poll question looked at how often fans of an individual sport had gambled over the last 12 months. You already know that football tops the list with 28% of watchers gambling in the last year. Here is how the remaining sports ranked:
- Cricket – 27%
- Rugby Union – 22%
- Tennis – 20%
- Motorsport – 19%
We do want to mention a small note here. This poll took place in 2020 while COVID-19 was sweeping the nation. There is a chance that the fact that because people couldn’t really interact ‘socially’, it may have led to more gambling, especially since many people couldn’t attend sports matches and gambling was their main interaction.
Even if the numbers from the YouGov poll are slightly swayed by the pandemic, it does show that a lot of people find enjoyment in gambling and watching a sport. We suppose it is something that makes the sport a whole lot more exciting for them. After all, if you are a Port Vale fan who has been to most of their all-time classic matches for example, you may not have much interest in watching Southend United vs Woking to see who finishes the season in 10th, but it gets a bit more interesting if you’ve bet on the number of corners in the match.
We can’t imagine people are gambling huge sums of cash on these events, but we wouldn’t be surprised if many people were chucking a couple of quid here and there just to make things a bit more interesting. In their minds, they understand the sport and thus there is a good chance of the bet coming good. Although, let’s be honest, many people don’t need to gamble to have fun watching a sport. You’ve probably watched countless games without betting, and betting on everything you watch could be an indicator of a problem.
Football – The fanbase most prone to gambling
This leads us to football, the not-so-surprising top of the list when it comes to sports fans being more prone to betting. As we said before, around 28% of all football watchers have placed a bet in the last 12 months.
Once again, there is a small caveat here. The poll was in 2020, and the Euros were played that year, with England v Italy in the final. Italy won, which could be a cause for celebration or sadness, depending on who is reading this.
Interestingly, YouGov claims that the vast majority of football betting in the UK takes place at physical betting locations. While we are sure that the numbers for online betting are on the rise, they still haven’t quite overtaken offline betting. This is one of the only things that surprised us about the poll. We are sure that many of you have seen your local High Street bookie close or seen them almost devoid of life on a regular basis. We suppose this trend may not keep up, and it may be swayed by the fact some stadiums have physical betting locations as well, but we expect there to be different poll results in the future.
Of the football fans that did gamble, around 2% of them gambled every single day, while 6% of people were gambling once per week. We assume that they were either betting on their favourite team or gambling on whatever was showing on Sky Sports on Sunday.
This poll did go to show that football fans are avid gamblers. Almost everybody was betting at least once per fortnight, with the numbers being incredibly low for once a month and once per year with around 1% apiece.
We doubt that this is something that is ever going to change. We are a nation of football lovers, after all. Everywhere you look, there seems to be an advert telling you to gamble on football. It is what online bookmakers seem to push the hardest. Plus, there are plenty of football teams that have gambling companies emblazoned across their shirts.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any data about how much is actually being gambled per person. We can’t imagine it is more than a tenner per person, so we wouldn’t really say that football gamblers have a gambling problem. What we will say is that it is clear that a lot of people have tied watching football to betting and that a rather sizeable portion of football fans in the UK can’t watch the sport without having a flutter on it.
The UK has always been a nation of gambling and football fans, so it is no surprise that football fans are the most likely to gamble on the sport. A whopping 28% of football fans have gambled on the sport at least once per year. Cricket and Rugby Union are hot on its tail though. We guess people really do enjoy gambling!