Ok, who was it?

[Rhiw-Blue]

"William Hill said its biggest winner was a Manchester punter who bet £20 for Leicester to win the league. He is now celebrating turning that into £100,000. The bookmaker revealed it had made a £2.2m loss on the Premier League."

And there are people out there who'll believe that.

That was my first thought, but....

http://www.theguardian.com/football/...ity-bookmakers

Yes and no it seems?

[The Lone Gunman]

Yes and no it seems?

It is feasible (just about) that some bookmakers may have lost money on the 'to win the Premier League' market, but the notion that they have lost on the competition overall is just nonsense. On the contrary, they have had a dream season.

The champions and pre-season favourites had a terrible campaign; the other three big guns look like finishing third, fourth and fifth, which is significant in terms of each-way bets; a rank outsider has won the league, while the probable runners-up were expected to be also-rans at best; two of the three sides who were clear pre-season favourites for relegation have survived comfortably and the third may yet also survive; and, of course, the results week-to-week were so unpredictable that they were usually a nightmare for the punters.

The bookies will have done very well for themselves on most ante-post markets involving the top flight. Even the favourite in the Premier League sack race ended up winning the league! They will have cleaned up on a wide range of pre-season bets such as forecasts, handicaps and the popular divisional multiple and accumulator bets (Leicester will have been a big saver for them on those, especially as Wigan won League One and Burnley look likely to be the Championship winners). That's without factoring in the mountains of cash they have raked in on a weekly basis.

The bookies now have the added bonus of thousands of punters backing teams at long odds in the Premier League for the next few years in the hope of finding another Leicester. I bet they can't wait to get the Euros out of the way so they can concentrate on drawing in the cash from bets on teams such as Bournemouth, Burnley and Watford.