A gift from PaddyPower
July 10, 2010 by Ben Filed under: Football
Those whacky Irish bookmakers, Paddypower, always come up with weird and wonderful bets. Usually these are just to generate headlines and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. However, once in a while, there is a bet that’s worth taking.
Paddypower are taking bets on which British TV channel will get the highest peak viewing figures for the world cup final on Sunday. There are two choices, BBC and ITV. Both are being shown on their respective HD channels too. All things being equal you’d expect slightly less than evens for either channel to get the most viewers. However things aren’t equal.
Both channels are showing the exact same game but will have different commentators for the game and different pundits during the build up. Will people prefer Gary Linker and co or Adrian Chiles and his team? Well, I think this is where Paddypower’s odds setters got a bit confused. If that was the only criteria, then the opening odds of 1/5 for the BBC and 3/1 for ITV maybe right.
There is one big difference that Paddypower may not have not fully factored in. It’s the adverts. Given a choice, how many people are going to watch the world cup with adverts against those who are going to watch it ad free? By itself this would make it highly likely that BBC would get most viewers. Add to this the better punditry (IMO) on the BBC and the result is a no brainer.
Looking at the historical records, the last time these two went head to head to cover the world cup 2006 final the BBC beat ITV hands down. 13.9 million vs 3.4 million viewers. Assuming roughly the same amount of people are watching the final this time, it would take 5 million viewers to switch from BBC to ITV to make it even close.
Looking at the online polls it suggests that the BBC are going to win this hands down. The Guardian has BBC at 91.9% vs 8.1% for ITV. Which sane bookie would even takes bets on BBC winning? The current odds of 1/10 for BBC and 5/1 for ITV still look stupid. Barring the BBC’s coverage going down at some point, there is no way that ITV will win this. The public, given a choice, don’t like adverts!
Personally, if I was pricing this up, I’d not even take bets on BBC winning and offer odds of maybe 10-20/1 for ITV winning. Paddypower are still offering 1/10 for BBC winning though and it’s a bet I’d take all day and all night. Check out the market here (whilst it lasts).
