World Cup winners are bookies

Leading online bookmaker William Hill say the World Cup has smashed all betting records, “The tournament has produced the biggest betting turnover for any sporting event ever staged, with £1 billion gambled on the outcome’ said Hill’s spokesman Graham Sharpe.’This is double the previous record, gambled on Euro 2004, and was helped by a worldwide interest thanks to the internet.”

The tournament was very profitable for the bookies, largely due to the fact that the two heavily backed favourites England and Brazil were knocked out at the Quarter Final stage.
‘The two best backed countries were England – a huge patriotic gamble took place – and the hot favourites, Brazil,and when Portugal knocked England out they saved bookies from their biggest ever football payout of over £30 million, while the French win over Brazil confirmed that bookies would be coming out on top’

Eventual winners Italy could have been backed at odds of around 10/1 at the start of the tournament, and were not fancied by many punters. The last serious gamble of the World Cup was on Italy to beat France to lift the trophy and William Hill cut their odds from 4/5 to 8/11 after a string of huge bets, including one of £111,000 from a London-based businessman. It wasn’t all winning results for the bookies, though, and Hills paid one client £800,000 after he staked an accumulative bet on teams winning their first round Groups.

Bookmaker Paddy Power paid back over €1 million to their customers in refunded bets. The Irish online bookmaker refunded bets on certain games if a nominated player scored the last goal.

Blue Square must be one online bookmaker thankful that England were defeated, as they were refunding all losing World Cup bets had England won the tournament.

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