How do bettors love football? Let us count the ways.

Billions of dollars will be wagered on the Super Bowl on Sunday, spotlighting the popularity of betting on football. A big part of the appeal is the scoring system, which was developed nearly 150 years ago by the “father of football,” Walter Camp, and is unique among the globally popular team sports.

Football allows scores of 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8 points, unlike sports like soccer and hockey, which allow only single points per score, and scores are low. In the 2022 World Cup, only 2.7 goals were scored on average by both teams in matches, and in the 2021-2022 NHL, the average was 6.2. At the other extreme, in the 2021-2022 NBA season, fans saw an average of 115 scoring events per game, for 1, 2 or 3 points each.

Now we get geeky. Rare events like soccer and hockey goals tend to follow a smooth curve called a Poisson distribution. Aggregations of many events tend to follow a different smooth curve called a Normal distribution. But football scores, with moderate numbers of different-sized scoring events, do not resolve to any smooth curve nor any standard distribution.

This means soccer, hockey and basketball games have a uniform feel. Teams play similarly – maybe a bit more or less aggressively – regardless of the score. The relative score moves up and down in uniform increments – a team cannot go from behind to ahead except in small steps, first matching, then passing the other team. It’s like watching a footrace.

Football, on the other hand, can move by leaps and bounds. There is enough scoring and enough different types of scoring that teams can make up deficits and produce final scores in myriad ways. Like soccer and hockey, but unlike basketball, a single event makes a material difference to the outcome. But like basketball and unlike soccer and hockey, there are lots of those events during an average game. Teams play radically differently depending on the score – passing versus running; field goals and punts versus fourth-down attempts; one-point conversions versus two-point ones. Moreover, there are many in-game situations – possession, yard line, down, distance – affected by every play; most of the other sports mostly have possession, which has only two values and changes constantly. These things make for spectator excitement and lots of good gambling opportunities.

Another way to look at it is the variety of final scores. In the 2022 World Cup, 64 games resulted in only 15 different final scores, and 70% of those games were 0-0, 1-0, 1-1, 2-0 or 2-1. In the 2022 NFL regular season, 272 games produced 181 different outcomes. The most common NFL score, 20-17, happened only eight times in those 272 games, while three World Cup scores happened more often in only 64 games (2-0 12 times, 2-1 11 times and 1-0 10 times). The NBA has plenty of different outcomes, 749 in 1,264 games in the 2021-22 season, but a 115-109 game is not much different from a fan or gambler perspective than a 116-110 game.