Football is far and away the world`s most popular sport and, as the game has grown, so has the number of people placing bets on the outcomes of matches, particularly within the Premier League.

There are three main kinds of bet you can place on football games. The first is the result bet. This is where you wager whether a particular team will win, lose or draw their next match. You can also place a bet on what the exact score will be at the end of the game. This attracts higher odds than a simple results bet because there is a significantly lower chance of your prediction being correct.

The final type of bet involves attempting to predict the number of particular incidents that take place during a match such as corners, red cards, penalties or free kicks. The odds for these bets are usually higher still because whatever figure you come up with is going to be a complete guess based on nothing more than your own intuition.

Many bookmakers offer a huge variety of weird and wonderful bets around the issue of match incidents which are in reality little more than a ploy to attract more punters. For example, you can bet on what the total of all the shirt numbers of all the players taking corners during a game. Another bet involves taking the number of free kicks in the first half and multiplying it by the number of free kicks in the second half.

The great thing about match incident bets is that they sustain interest until the final whistle. While a correct score bet can be lost in the first minutes of a game and a win bet can seem like a lost cause if the other team gets too far ahead, match incidents mean your chances of winning remain alive until the very end of play.

The majority of such bets are placed on a simple fixed odds basis with a set payout for the winner. In recent years, however, spread betting has also become a growth market. This is a system where a points handicap is awarded to the stronger team and bets are placed on whether the team will lose by more than the handicap. The risks are higher – you can actually lose more than your original stake – but so are the rewards.

As with all forms of betting, doing your research is essential if you want to be in with a chance of winning. Thanks to the internet, a wealth of information about past performances and match incidents is available at your fingertips. With a little patience, you can identify which teams have a pattern of playing badly at which grounds, which referees give out the most yellow cards or which players leave a team significantly weaker if they are absent for a match or two.

You can find a host of football betting tips all over the internet and while the bookies have access to the same information, every now and then that information can give you the edge you need to really be on to a winner.