The Early Kick-Off Curse In The EPL - Fact Or Fiction?
Published on 12 Mar 2025 | Last updated on 12 Mar 2025 | Reading time: 4 minutes
Opening Thoughts
If a cheeky football accumulator is a considerable part of your weekend routine, you’ll know about the early kick-off curse. In fact, you’re probably seething at the mere suggestion that it could be fiction. The early kick-off in the EPL has destroyed my accumulator on several occasions. So, although 95% of my selections kicked off at 3 pm, the early kick-off meant that I didn’t have any teams in the running by the time the main bulk of the acca kicked off.
Now, I’m sure I’m not alone in this one. The plight of the early kick-off regularly ruins thousands of accumulators. So, why do we continue putting the first game on our acca? They keep breaking our hearts, but we still keep running back. Is it because it’s merely a figment of our imagination, our superstitious ways, or do the facts breathe life into this theory and stack the odds against us?
What Is An Accumulator?
Sportsbooks offer such a massive range of markets that it can be tempting to combine odds. Accumulators contain so many moving variables and markets that many bettors simply stick to individual bets or outright markets. Thunderpick Sportsbook has developed a platform for football bettors who want to access these markets but with a different angle - you can use Bitcoin to place your accumulator.
That’s not likely to lift the early kickoff curse, but it gives you a different payment method if you're looking for something different when you place your bets. Ultimately, accumulators are just a combination of selections, and you need each selection to be successful for the bet to payout.
Not A Popular Kick-Off Time For Fans & Players
Sportsbooks offer accumulator bets right across the market. Theoretically, you can combine markets from multiple weeks and multiple leagues. Some sportsbooks will allow you to place an accumulator with 30 or 40 selections.
However, if you start with a double, just remember that each additional selection increases the unlikelihood of your bet coming in. By the time you get to the dozens of selections, the odds are astronomical.
This is the same in any sport; accumulator bets might multiply your winnings, but they drastically increase the statistical unlikelihood of the bet being a success. Professional video gaming, or eSports, takes a similar approach to same game bets, which cover a range of games across the same tournament. While they don’t have the early kick-off curse per se, the same principle applies as it is a bet with multiple selections.
We know some league managers have been anti-early kick-off for a long time. Jurgen Klopp was famously against the idea during his stint managing Liverpool. While it might not have taken much to get Klopp up in arms, he did have a point. Whether teams played in Europe the week before or in the cup, fatigue could carry into the early games.
Does The Theory Have Legs?
According to information from AI analytical company Stats Perform, which broke down the information from all the early kick-offs and how many shock results there were between 2016 and 2023, the data shows that there wasn’t any evidence to suggest that the early kick-offs were any less unpredictable than games that kicked off at 3 p.m. Surely not!
Well, that’s what the expert data analysts say. Perhaps the early kick-off failures stick in our heads more, as they always poleaxe our bet before they have even got off the runway. I still have night terrors about Brentford beating Man City at the Etihad in 2022 and destroying my tenfold accumulator before any other games from that matchday had kicked off.
Final Say
Ultimately, football betting is a widely unpredictable endeavour. Even if you are betting on an early kickoff, a game in another European league, or combining selections across various markets, the odds are always stacked against you.
Factoring in the early kick-off for teams who play midweek and pick up suspensions or injuries is probably a wise factor to implement into your betting strategy. However, for those bettors who completely avoid the early kick-off or believe it should not be included in your betting slip, there’s no data or statistics to back up your superstition.
If you’re like me, this won’t be enough. I’ll still avoid the early kick-off in my accumulator. But does this mean my accumulator succeeds when I only stick to the 3 pm kick-offs? Of course not.
So, while it might be a funny superstition or anecdote between friends or within sports betting communities, you’re just as unlikely to have a successful accumulator that includes an early kick-off as you are with one that includes it. It’s a game of luck. Even if the stats did pack it up, it would be purely circumstantial, and it wouldn’t mean you could leverage it to your advantage.
