Against All Odds: When Hopeless Soccer Bets Paid Fortunes

There are two types of people who bet on soccer: those who are passionate about betting, and those who are passionate about soccer.

The latter type, of course, bets with varied success - after all, their bets are placed with their heart rather than their head, based on enthusiasm rather than research and information.

Unfortunately, no matter how attractive the odds of Betway soccer betting may be, they have no way of influencing the outcome of a match (and the success rate of the bets).

There were, in turn, cases when bets placed seemingly at random, based on nothing but hunches and enthusiasm, have made the bettors rich - like in the cases below.

Well ahead of time (Manchester, UK)

There's no telling if it was premonition or blind luck but the fact remains: a Manchester-based football fan was made filthy rich by a few well-placed bets.

The anonymous punter placed a 15-way accumulator in August 2000, before the start of the season, on the winners of the biggest leagues in Europe: the five major English leagues, the three Scottish divisions, the Rugby Union championship, the Cricket County Championship, and the UEFA Champions League.

Based in Manchester, it was a bit of a surprise that he bet against United, the winner of the Premier League that year.

The punter placed a bet worth 30 pence (around N130) on the slip which, at odds of 1,666,666 to 1, put £500,000 (N220 million) in their pockets.

The fed-up housewife (Leysdown-on-Sea, UK)

No matter if they say otherwise, our wives don't like us constantly watching sports on TV. This was the case of an unnamed 58-year-old housewife from Leysdown-on-Sea, UK, who got fed up that her husband and son were constantly watching the Premier League every weekend.

Annoyed, she went to the local betting shop with her son, asked him to read out the weekend's matches, and picked 12 of them, apparently at random, for a 12-way accumulator bet of £1 (around N442).

Imagine her surprise - and the humiliation of her husband and son - when all of her predictions came true. The feeling of shame has probably dissipated quickly, though, at the sight of the amount she won: over £574,000 or N253 million.


In-game luck (London, UK)

Predicting the outcome of a football match may seem easy ahead of the game itself - there are statistics that you can look through and foretell the winner pretty accurately.

Predicting the outcome of a football match while it's being played is much harder - and doing so eight times in a row seems almost impossible.

Yet this is exactly what a lucky Londoner did in 2014.

The punter placed a total of £100 bet in the form of eight 7-way accumulators and one 8-way accumulator on the Premier League matches of the weekend just minutes before the kickoff, at total odds of 6542 to 1.

His win was decided by a match going into overtime: Coventry City's Jim O'Brien scored a goal in the 91st minute of the team's match against Leyton Orient, putting £650,000 (N287 million) in his pockets.