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Next Newcastle United Manager – You have to understand what the bookies are up to with these odds

2 years ago
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A lot of talk about who is going to be the next Newcastle United Manager.

A lot of nonsense talked.

All of the media fighting for your attention, all of them pretending that they have information on who it is set to be.

Reality of course is that this past week has proved that absolutely none of them have got a clue.

Of course Steve Bruce has to go and hopefully he has done by the time you are reading this.

However, it is all guesswork so far, as to who this next Newcastle United Manager is going to be.

One of the ruses used by journalists is to refer to the betting markets when running stories on who the next NUFC boss is going to be.

They will talk about tumbling odds and whoever is favourite BUT this past week there has been pretty much a different favourite every week!

The thing is, when it comes to something like the next Newcastle United Manager betting market, you have to understand what the bookies are up to with these odds.

With say a horse race, punters can put on as much cash as they want, within reason.

With next manager markets, or where a player is going to next, it is different.

The difference is because whilst nobody knows for absolute sure which horse is going to win any race, it is of course possible for somebody to know, for sure, who is going to be the next Newcastle United Manager. Or which club a player is going to head to.

Back in 2002 there was a betting scandal involving our friends down the road. The then Sunderland owner Bob Murray was in the process of appointing a new manager and at 66/1 two people in York placed £100 bets on Howard Wilkinson.

Wilkinson got the job…by sheer coincidence…Murray’s daughters went to a private school in…York. Turned out two teachers at their school had ‘somehow’ discovered Howard Wilkinson might be a decent bet and pocketed £13,200 winnings between them.

More recently, Daniel Sturridge was banned from football for four months after he had instructed his brother bet on him going to a particular club…

It is doubtful now whether you could even place as much as £100 on a next Newcastle United Manager bet at certainly most bookies, indeed you would probably be limited to far less at the majority.

So why do bookies bother with these markets?

Well, bookies also love free publicity and whilst not a lot of people bet on these kind of things, or not a lot of money anyway, football fans LOVE talking about it and the changing odds etc.

When the favourite has kept changing this past week, it is very very unlikely this has been down to purely money going on a certain potential manager. Instead, bookies will keep moving prices up and down to make a new story. They will then send that story around the media and BINGO! Next thing you have numerous newspapers and other medias saying the odds have ‘tumbled’ on whoever.

The only time you really should take notice of the odds is when somebody ends up going  massive odds on, even then there might be no substance in it happening. Certainly, if say a potential manager goes from 6/1 to 3/1 or maybe 4/1 to 2/1, it is all meaningless. It isn’t like normal betting markets on horses etc, where the amount of money placed on each horse, will continually be by far the biggest factor in terms of what odds are offered.

As an example of just how little the bookies (and journalists and punters) know and how little the odds are due to people betting most of the time with these bets, I have looked at the various bookies (1pm on Thursday 14 October 2021) and what odds are being offered on the next Newcastle United Manager market. These are the extremes offered at the various bookies, the lowest and highest odds offered currently:

Frank Lampard 9/4 to 3/1

Lucien Favre 5/1 to 6/1

Antonio Conte 5/1 to 8/1

Roberto Martinez 7/1 to 12/1

Steven Gerrard 8/1 to 12/1

Eddie Howe 9/1 to 20/1

Brendan Rodgers 10/1 to 14/1

I’m pretty sure ALL of the seven above have been favourite at some time this week, apart from maybe Eddie Howe.

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