What is a 3-way money-line in football?

If you were to look at the most popular sport to bet on across all of the best sports betting sites in the world, it would probably be football.

And within football, it would be the 3-way money-line. 

But what is a 3-way money-line, why is it the most popular market and how exactly does it work? 

What is a moneyline as opposed to a spread? 

A spread is a way of ensuring that, whatever happens, there can only ever be one winner from the two betting outcomes. 

The constant presence of a 0.5 in the spread is what ensures that there can never be a tie between the two, because there’s no such thing as half a point or goal in any sport, so no end result could still be a tie once the 0.5 is applied. 

A moneyline, on the other hand, purely takes the actual end result into account, without the use of any artificial head-start or handicap. 

Why does the moneyline have three possible outcomes in football? 

In US sports such as basketball or baseball, a game that’s tied/drawn after regular time goes to overtime until the match is won. 
In football, if the game is drawn after 90 minutes, that’s how it ends, so that’s why bookmakers offer three selections, rather than just two, on the football money line.  

At the end of the 90 minutes, the match will have resulted in: 
•    A win for Team A (the home team) – e.g. 2-0 
•    A win for Team B (the away team) – e.g. 1-3
•    A draw – e.g. 2-2 

In matches that go to overtime (and penalties if necessary) when drawn after 90 minutes, the match is settled as a draw by the bookies, irrespective of what happens after the 90 minutes. 

Why is the 3-way moneyline popular and why are the odds more varied than a spread? 

Given that the final outcome is the most important aspect of the match and more so than the margin of the victory, then it follows that this is what football punters most want to bet on. 

The presence of the third possibility, the draw, also means that it’s not a straight 50/50 (minus the house edge) shootout between the two in terms of odds, like a spread is. 

As a result, the odds on the three outcomes will generally be very different, meaning punters who like betting on favourites can do so by backing the favourite to win, those who like betting on outsiders can do so by backing the underdog to win, while the draw price is generally the middle price of the three. 

Over the course of 25 seasons of the Premier League, 27.5% of matches were drawn, so it’s certainly not an outcome to ignore.