Where bookies lost ground during the World Cup

The “Over/Under 2.5” goals bet drove 2/3 of the World Cup’s bookmaker margin swing
Blask’s Match Profitability Index, published for the first time in the company’s World Cup 2026 Report, scores every match by bet type (1X2, total goals, and so on), not by who won the game. 



Across all 104 matches, the tournament came out net favorable to bettors: the Total Index closed at -56.91. Break that number down by bet type instead of by match, and the loss is not spread evenly. One bet type accounts for most of it.



How the index is calculated
Blask scores every match twice, using odds data collected from OddsPortal. A prematch read weighs the odds at kickoff, how they moved in the run-up to it, each side’s implied win probability, the bookmaker’s margin, and the match’s popularity. A live read tracks the most-traded in-play markets: 1X2, Total Over 2.5 goals, Team Total Over, Quick Goal, Goal after 75′, Favourite Comeback, and the 0-0 scoreline (Blask’s dashboard splits Team Total Over into a home and away reading, plus a combined average, for nine scored line items in total).

Each market is scored on the betting reaction it likely produced relative to a fair price, and the prematch and live scores are added together into one signed number per match. Positive means the bookmaker kept more margin than a fair line would predict. Negative means bettors won more than the market had priced in. Summed across all 104 World Cup matches, the tournament total came to -56.91.

Each match’s score already blends all nine markets into one number, with every market weighted equally rather than by actual betting volume. A real book takes far more action on 1X2 than on a 0-0 scoreline bet, so the index reads as a composite signal of which side the tournament favored across the markets Blask tracks, not an audited cash total. The figures below are index points, not currency.
Total 2.5 drove two-thirds of the index

The Total Over/Under 2.5 goals market scored -38.26 index points across the tournament, 67% of the entire negative total. No other market came close: 1X2 was the next-worst at -6.74, followed by Goal after 75′ (-6.25), the Total Over Average line (-5.50), Favourite’s Comeback (-2.95), Team Total Over (-2.87), and Quick Goal (-2.39). A second team-total-over market landed flat, at 0.00.

Only one market finished net positive for bookmakers across the whole tournament: the 0-0 scoreline, at +8.00. Every other market Blask tracks scored negative for the book in aggregate. The goals-total markets pulled the index down this tournament, not the match-result market.

The group stage did nearly all of it
Split the same index by stage and a second pattern shows up. The three group-stage matchdays (72 matches) accounted for -53.98, 95% of the tournament’s total deficit. The 32 knockout matches, close to a third of the entire bracket, came in at -2.92, close to breakeven.

The group stage got worse as it went: matchday 1 scored -14.29, matchday 2 -9.89, matchday 3 -29.80, the single worst matchday of the tournament, with Total 2.5 alone responsible for -18.27 of that.
Higher-scoring, higher-variance football pulled the index down more than any knockout drama that followed.

The knockout rounds run on a different mechanic. Total 2.5 still scored -10.50 in the knockouts alone, more negative than the entire stage’s total. Other markets scored positive enough to cancel most of that out, landing the knockout stage close to flat instead of deep in the red.

What this means for pricing the next major
Blask’s data draws a clean line between where World Cup betting margin leaked and where it held on the index. The 1X2 market, the one that decides who wins a match, scored a fraction of what the goals-total line did across the tournament, and other markets scored positive enough in the knockouts to offset Total 2.5 and keep that stage close to breakeven.

The goals-total line moved the most, and it moved mostly in the group stage’s run of higher-scoring fixtures. This is one tournament’s data, not a multi-year trend, but the pattern is worth watching at the next major: the group-stage totals line carried more risk here than the 1X2 line did in the final.

To unlock the full World Cup 2026 analytics, download the report