The draw changes the math: how three-way prices work
A two-way market is easy to read: two prices, two implied probabilities, and whatever they sum to above 100% is the house margin. Add a third outcome and the same arithmetic still works — but the numbers it produces are bigger, and they vary between leagues far more than two-way markets do.
Three prices, one sum
Convert home, draw and away to implied probabilities and add them up. A margin-free market sums to 100%. Match-result markets rarely come close, and the draw is where most of the difference hides — it's the outcome bettors reach for least, so it's the one that can be priced hardest.
What we're collecting
Since 2026-09-03 a daily collector has recorded the match-result market across the major European leagues and MLS. It is not an unbroken series: 09-12, 09-13 and 09-14 collected nothing, so the first thirteen days hold ten. Between 09-03 and 09-15 the consensus margin averaged 6.02% in the Champions League across 36 observations, 6.40% in the Premier League across 40, and 8.28% in MLS across 59 — more than two points between the cheapest and the priciest markets in the same sport. A match is priced for weeks and recorded once a day, so those are observation counts, not match counts.
Shopping does more here, not less
Pricing all three outcomes at the best number in our study book set changes the picture sharply. Over the same window that averages 1.39% in the Champions League, 1.31% in the Premier League and 1.90% in MLS. The EFL Championship is the outlier at 3.24%: thinner markets, fewer books, less agreement between them.
Why this was missing from our vig study
Our published margin study covers two-way markets only. Soccer was excluded because the pipeline was capturing the two team prices and ignoring the draw, which made every soccer margin it produced wrong. That bug is fixed, the collection above is the replacement, and the study gets its three-way chapter once the sample covers a season rather than a fortnight.
Bankroll Guardian is a bet-tracking and analytics tool — not a sportsbook, and none of this is betting advice. Betting carries risk; please bet responsibly.