2016 Football Blogging Awards: Meet the finalists – Weekend Football

We’re now less than a month away from finding out which of our finalists will be named the Football Blogging Award’s Best Gambling Blog, as sponsored by Ladbrokes News. So to give you some insight into the day-to-day lives of each of our nominees, we caught up with them to ask them about all things blogging.

Today is the turn of Weekend Football!

Ladbrokes News: Describe a day in the life of a Weekend Football blogger

For large parts of the day we examine stats, analysis and form guides to add content to the Premier League, Football League and Scottish leagues on our app Football Coupon (footballcoupon.co.uk).

We also search for the best bets to share with our audience in our daily betting. We write up a range of blogs for the week’s football including:

-‘Daily Betting’ where we pick out our best bets for the day’s football.

-‘Coupon Busters’ where we try to pick out potential upsets for the weekend’s football and which teams or bets to avoid.

-‘Weekend Football Head-To-Head’ where three of us in the office take each other on with our own personal picks.

-‘Value Friday’ a campaign at the end of the working week where we pick out 4 or 5 Value Selections (usually above evens).

We’ll spend the day working on our content for the midweek nights/weekend before one of us will spend the evening on Social Media, mainly Twitter, interacting with our followers, keeping up to date with the bets that we’ve tipped and generally what is trending that day.

LN: Proudest blogging moment to date?

Being nominated for this award is certainly up there, but we also had really good feedback from followers on our previews for two of the biggest games so far this season (Man Utd v Man City & Liverpool v Man Utd).

We had a profitable couple of days in the October international week tipping up 23/1, 11/1 & 5/1 winners, one new Twitter follower that week backed all three bets and was £200 up over that period and thanked us for our tips on our blog.

LN: What makes you guys stand out from the competition?

We’ve always strived to innovate and to stand out from our competition since our inception in 1999. We were one of the first sites to compile odds on matches in the English, Scottish and European leagues spanning France, Germany, Italy & Spain.

We were also one of the first sites to launch an odds comparison app back in 2012 – which enabled users to include multiple selections in their bet.

We think it’s key for us to produce unique content which your typical social media follower or site visitor isn’t constantly bombarded with from all angles.

The chances are your followers follow various other ‘Footy Tipsters’ and visit other Gambling Blogs, so we feel it’s really important to have a slightly different edge to set us apart from all the others out there.

As a part of a weekly feature Laith, Matt & Frank go head-to-head with their weekly bets, we also pick out some short priced sides that could be likely to trip you up on the weekend in our Football Coupon Busters feature.

Our Picks section on the website and app finds the best value for the upcoming games whether it’s a jam-packed mid-week schedule or the regular weekend games, we do the work looking at the stats so our users and followers don’t have to.

Another feature that we feel helps our users is our ‘Analysis – Who’s Hot and Who’s Not’ feature on weekendfootball.co.uk and on the Football Coupon app.

We record a weekly Premier League Podcast looking at the weekend’s live games, picking out our best bets for each game, and this season we’ve added an extra incentive for our Premier League Podcasters to go head-to-head each week with a minimum bet of 10/1 from the four live games!  

LN: Best tip ever?

October marked the third anniversary of a very profitable week which saw us tip & win a total of £181,125 from a total stake of £200 across three accumulator BTTS+Result bets.

We backed Belgium to win in Croatia. Niko Krancjar bagged a vital (for us!) consolation goal for the Croats with just minutes to go (1-2) to start us off nicely.

Holland thrashed Hungary 8-1 to keep our treble, four-fold and five-fold alive.

Sweden then came from behind to win against Austria thanks to a late goal from Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Their 2-1 win landed the treble, winning £7875 from a £100 stake.

We called Israel to draw away at Portugal – which was a 7/1 shot. The game ended sweetly after an Israel equaliser with just minutes remaining (1-1). This landed the four-fold, and a win of £31,500 from a £50 stake.

To round off our bet we needed a Wycombe win v Torquay in League Two. The home side twice came from behind to clinch the winner with just over ten minutes remaining (3-2) – and more importantly, land us £141,750 as the five-Fold came in.

It won’t surprise you to know, we’ve struggled to top that since!

LN: If you had a £100 free bet on any Premier League outright market this season, what would you back?

Sunderland have been narrowly avoiding relegation for quite a few seasons now just as the likes of Wigan and Aston Villa had done previously before their inevitable relegations.

I probably would have stuck the free bet on Sunderland to go down or to finish bottom for some more value.

Luckily they’ve started the season badly and I just don’t think David Moyes can keep them up like others such as Sam Allardyce and Dick Advocaat have done in recent seasons.

LN: Which team always lets you down?

Easy, it’s Sheffield Wednesday for us.

The Owls were largely impressive at Hillsborough last season and lost just two in 23 there. However, they still managed to let us down on several occasions in really disappointing fashion against the likes of Rotherham (0-1), MK Dons (0-0), QPR (1-1) and Ipswich (1-1).

Because of it, I don’t think they’ve featured on a single bet of ours so far this season!

LN: Biggest near-miss?

Our biggest near miss was back on the first weekend of October 2013, a week before we won our biggest bet ever.

We regularly post out a PL6 and PL10 – two bets that consist of Premier League matches that we forecast for the upcoming weekend.

In our PL10 that week we picked 9/10 correctly – Man City, Liverpool, Fulham, Hull/Villa draw, Newcastle, Man Utd, Chelsea, Southampton, West Brom/Arsenal draw – our final selection was Spurs to beat West Ham on the Sunday.

Spurs lost 0-3 that day and cost us £129k from a £50 stake. We were not a fan of Andre Villas-Boas!

LN: Do you have any luck on any other sports?

The jumps season in Horse Racing is always good to have a bet on, especially the Cheltenham Festival.

One of us was £400 up on last year’s Festival, there’s always plenty of value to be had that week and one of the best punting events of the year.

LN: What advice would you give to new punters?

Keep gambling fun and don’t chase your losses!

Don’t forget to cast your vote for the Best Football Gambling Blog in the form below!

All Odds and Markets are correct as of the date of publishing