Carling Cup Betting

The Carling Cup is the lesser of the two English cups and for a period wasn’t taken seriously with many Premiership teams fielding reserves or weakened teams. Football betting on the Carling Cup is still popular though, particularly amongst fans of the teams still involved in it. Carling Cup betting is offered by all good online bookmakers with a variety of Carling Cup bets available from who will win to results in the individual games.

About the Carling Cup

The Carling Cup is the Football League Cup, an English football league competition.

Known also as the League Cup, the competition is a knockout contest between the 92 clubs that make up the Premier League and the Football League.

From 1982 the League Cup was named after its sponsor of whom there have been several, the current sponsor being Carling. The League Cup final is traditionally played at Wembley Stadium for the Carling Cup trophy.

For some of the top clubs the League cup is less of a priority than other competitions such as the FA cup. For this reason some clubs use League Cup games as an opportunity to field younger less experienced players to give them a chance to play in matches. The weaker teams raise the possibilities of lower league clubs beating top-level opponents in “giant-killing” games.

The competition is played as a series of rounds with the losing teams from each match being eliminated from the contest. Not all teams are required to play all rounds from the start as some teams that have qualified for UEFA competitions receive byes to advanced rounds.

Tournament Structure

  • In the first round the participating teams are divided into northern and southern sections by region for convenience. In each section half of the clubs are seeded and then a draw is made to determine which of the seeded clubs will play home or away. Another draw then ties each seeded club with a non-seeded club according to the regional division. The ties are single matches with extra time and penalty shootouts to decide drawn matches. The winner of each match goes on to the next round.
  • The second round matches are likewise single-tie games and the winners go on to the next round.
  • In the third round the surviving clubs are joined by teams that received byes because they are competing in UEFA competitions. By this stage of the contest there are 32 clubs left in the tournament.
  • In the fourth round the remaining teams play elimination matches and these are then followed by another series of quarterfinal ties.

The teams that advance to the semi-finals play ties that are two matches one at each team’s home stadium and the aggregate score decides the winner. If by the end of the second leg match the two teams are equal extra time is played. If this still results in a draw then the team that has scored the most away goals qualifies, and if this is equal for the teams then there is a penalty shootout to decide the winner. The winners for each semi-final qualify for UEFA cup and play against each other in the League Cup Final.

The number of teams that play in the earlier rounds and those that are given byes depends on the total number of teams that are playing in European competitions and therefore varies with each season.

Bet on the Carling Cup with the Carling Cup Betting section of FootballBetting.net!