The beauty of spread betting is that it offers the gambler the chance to back a team and make money without them even having to win a particular match let alone a whole event. If they just do better than expected, you are in the money.
One of the other huge advantages of spread betting over most other forms of gambling is that it gives the opportunity to oppose teams and players, effectively meaning the punter is laying them as a bookmaker would. Rather than saying a team will do well, we can specifically back them to do badly, either in an individual game or over the course of a season.
So, for instance, if you back against a team in the FA Cup by selling their price in a tournament index, the effect is that you have every other runner in the competition playing for you. It is not just individuals or teams we can back against. “If it is a golden age for sporting excellence, it is also a golden age for gambling. Spread betting has come of age since the early 1990s at the same time as the advent of tax-free betting, credit accounts, one-to-one exchange betting and Asian handicaps.”