At the start of every football season bookies are inundated with bets for outright markets, most commonly for the FA Premier League, UEFA Champions League and FA Cup. Other traditional markets such as top goal scorer and relegated teams have also been popular, but this year has seen a decline in popularity for special markets such as the managerial sack race or transfer speculation with fans wary of an increasingly unpredictable marketplace.

Only a few games into the season, the candidates for the managerial sack race began to take shape. With a disastrous start to the campaign for Steve Kean at Blackburn Rovers, many bookies had him as odds-on favourite to be the first ousted from his post. Not seemingly instilling confidence in the team, supporters or the press, Kean did manage to instil confidence in punters with record bets placed that he would be the first to go. Many bookies offered promotions like free bets on Stan James, confident that Kean would be out before Christmas. Confounding everybody, new owners Venky’s are sticking by their manager but many bookies see it is only a matter of time before he is pushed, with Kean remaining the favourite among most bookmakers. Few bookies or punters thought that Steve Bruce at Sunderland would be the first to be relieved of his post, though bets were soon off on his successor as Martin O’Neill quickly became an apparent shoe-in to replace him.

In the case of player transfers, the January transfer window is always rife with speculation among fans and members of the press alike as to which player will don the colours of a new club before the window closes. News sites fuel the rampant speculation with constant updates of rumours of transfers and loan moves, particularly with Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine coming up during the summer. Fringe players eager to catch their national team manager’s eye push for a move, and these bets seem to be safer in such an erratic market.

However, betting has been hesitant among fans over the increasingly unpredictable nature of January transfers. Shocking moves such as last January’s deadline day departure of Fernando Torres from Liverpool to Chelsea and Andy Carroll’s from Newcastle to Liverpool have created an air of uncertainty around those special markets, with nothing and nobody seeming sacred to fans. Those markets have cooled this January, with fans preferring to lean towards outrights as we get to the business end of the Premier League. With three teams in the hunt for the title and six with decent chances of Champions League qualification, there is plenty around which fans can speculate.

As for this summer’s UEFA showpiece, plenty of outright bets have already been placed with bookies with punters looking to get a head start on the rest of the betting public. Long prices for fringe favourites and guaranteed odds are making the traditional markets of outrights the most popular with punters, and with the hype set to ramp up in the coming months it looks to be an exciting summer if nothing else for football fans.