How to bet on corners, strategy, tips and statistics
Many bettors stick to traditional markets in football betting, such as the match odds, goals total or goal scorer options.
Greater value can often be found elsewhere. Bookmakers understandably pay particular attention to the most popular markets as they are where they stand to lose the most money.
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Inefficiencies are likelier in less well-backed markets. One of these is corners.
There are a wide range of options available, which vary from bookmaker to bookmaker. You can stake money on what the corner total will be (usually in the over/under format you see with goals), be that for the match or the first half.
Perhaps you’d prefer to bet on how many corners the home or away side will have, or which team will have the most. There are handicap options for the latter too.
It is even possible to bet on which side will have the first or last corner, or which of them will get to, say, five corners the quickest.
However, as with any wager it’s important to conduct research to ensure you are well informed about the likely success of your selection. You will struggle to find data for the more niche corner markets.
Read: What is cash out betting and how to get the edge?
Websites such as Football-Data.co.uk provide total corner statistics for matches going back seasons across multiple leagues, but they don’t tell you the corner count at half time or which team had the opening corner of the game.
Simply knowing totals for each side makes it easy to bet intelligently on numerous markets though. Let’s look at some important things to consider before making a selection, with some case studies from the 2024/25 Premier League.
Corner trends
Even if you don’t carry out in-depth research into corners, it’s important to be aware of general trends. There is unsurprisingly a high correlation between the number of shots a team takes and how many corners they have, with the same true at the defensive end of the field.
If we take the for and against figures for every Premier League club between 2017/18 and 2024/25, we have 320 sets of team data for corners and shots.
Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient gives the shot and corner statistics from this sample a score of 0.849 (where 1 is perfectly correlated and 0 shows no relationship at all). A scatter graph of the two metrics displays a very clear trend.
The Manchester City side of 2021/22 provides the perfect example. They had lots of shots and corners while restricting both for their opponents at the other end.
Not every team is a prime, Pep Guardiola outfit, of course. Tottenham had the fourth most corners in 2024/25 while also allowing the 10th most defensively, while Brentford were ranked 12th and third for those respective statistics.
It pays to dig deeper. While sports betting trends are useful, we’re not betting on the total corners a team will have in a season. We need to look at their figures from week to week.
Corner statistics by team
Spurs and the Bees provide excellent examples here. The average Premier League match in 2024/25 saw a total of 10.3 corners, a shade under the six-year average of 10.4. This is why for many games the over/under corner market will pivot at the 10.5 mark.
Tottenham’s matches averaged 11.8 this season, the most of any side in the top flight, with Brentford’s 11.1 joint-second alongside Newcastle. West Ham were at the bottom of this scale, on 9.6, with Arsenal and Wolves (both 9.7) just above them.
This means Spurs were the only side to stray further than one corner per game away from the average. Most clubs have very similar figures.
Again, a closer look is worthwhile. While West Ham’s matches saw the fewest corners, they were middle of the pack for games that paid out on over 10.5 corners.
Their fixtures saw anything from two to 18 corners, showing the importance of considering the match-up on which you’re betting, rather than taking season-wide averages at face value.
Corner wins, losses and handicap bets
As you can bet on which team will have the most corners it’s worth consulting the widely available data for that.
As it is a metric which correlates with shots, the table for whether sides won or lost the corner count in their matches broadly follows the league table.
As ever, there are exceptions. Nottingham Forest and Tottenham virtually swapped places with where they ended the 2024/25 season, for instance.
Handicap bet lines vary, but we can produce a similar graphic to illustrate how often teams won or lost the corner count by more than two (which is a frequently used line in this market). The standings are a little more jumbled than in our previous table.
Making a corner prediction for a match
If you want to make a very specific prediction, all we need is the home and away, for and against corner averages for each team.
We can then calculate their strength by dividing these figures by the league-wide averages. Let’s imagine the Tottenham vs Brentford fixture from 2024/25 as an example. Here’s a table of the figures we need.
Spurs average 7.2 corners at home when the Premier League average for a team at their own stadium is 5.4. Dividing the former by the latter gives Tottenham a strength of 1.3. We repeat this for their corners conceded, then do likewise for Brentford in away games.
We then multiply Tottenham’s for strength by the Bees’ against strength by the average corners for a home team to give us our prediction of 9.8 corners for Spurs. Repeating this for the Bees with the away average gives a forecast of 4.6 corners for the visitors, and 14.4 in total.
This would’ve proved remarkably accurate, albeit the fixture occurred in September 2024 when the data used covers the whole season. But Tottenham had nine corners while Brentford had four, giving us a total of 13.
A prediction inevitably cannot always be so accurate. For example, Southampton’s visit to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium only featured five corners when this system would’ve suggested 13 was the likeliest total.
It’s clear a little research and some basic calculations can help you potentially outsmart the bookmakers in the corners market though.
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Odds correct at the time of writing.
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