Bookies reap rich harvest as favourites bite the dust

“This is just another frustration for us,” says Fortunato Guzman, a Buenos Aires sales clerk, whose day began at 3:30 a.m. with the start of the Argentina-Sweden match; it ended in a 1-1 tie. Packing away T-shirts with the blue-and-white colours of Argentina’s soccer team, he says, “The situation in this country is so dire.” Not so in London. When favourites fail, bookies gain. The United Kingdom gambling industry figures it will handle more than 200 million pounds ($294 million) in wagers during the month-long tournament — with most of the money riding on big-name teams that have flopped, leaving bookies with a big chunk of the stakes.

“We’re raking it in; it’s unbelievable,” says John Seigal, a bookie in Southend-on-Sea, England, for Coral Eurobet PLC, one of the biggest bookmakers in the UK.

Bookmakers manipulate the odds with the aim of attracting enough bettors — or punters, as they are called in the UK — on each side to make a profit of roughly 5 per cent no matter whether the favourite or the underdog wins, or it’s a draw. But sometimes even with extreme odds, the bettors keep flocking to the favourite. That is what happened last week, for example, when the US, a perennial soccer doormat, played powerhouse Portugal. Despite being offered odds of 7-to-1 by London bookmakers, few were foolhardy enough to bet on the Americans.

So the bookmakers’ neat 5 per cent profit projection went out the window. Now they were gamblers, too. Had Portugal won, they might have taken a loss – but the unexpected happened. The US outkicked the Portuguese and won 3-to-2. The bookies made a lot more than 5 per cent on the game, though they won’t say exactly how much more.

The bookies got lucky on the US and other upset matches, but they are seeing unexpected yields from some side bets, too. For instance, punters like to predict which player will score the most goals during the tournament. The favourite, at 10-to-1, was France’s Thierry Henry. But Mr. Henry, a spry 24-year-old attacker, stunned the soccer world by being sent off for a foul early in France’s second game, before he could score a single goal. With France now out of the contest, his count will hold at zero. The upshot for bookies: They keep all the wagers.

Unconventional bettors are faring well. Adrian Fitzpatrick, a flower importer in Birmingham, England, says he chats up flower-growers-cum-soccer-fanatics around the world for his information.

France and Argentina were overrated, his flower network told him. The French squad, which qualified automatically for the first round because it won the last World Cup in 1998 hadn’t prepared sufficiently. The Argentine players were too old.

“They just didn’t look good to me so I figured I’d go for something different,” he says. His choice: Spain, which rarely lives up to the hope of its fervent fans.

Bookies say this weird World Cup is helping them lure more customers than any international contest in recent memory. But the more the underdogs win, the less the bookies are likely to extend the current windfall.

“Slowly, you’re beginning to see more and more punters betting on the underdogs,” says Simon Clare, a spokesman at Coral Eurobet, the betting-parlour chain.

(Dow Jones Newswires reporter Michelle Wallin contributed to this article)