Every May, one of the more reliable forecasting instruments in European public life turns out to be a betting market attached to a song contest. Eurovision odds, aggregated across dozens of bookmakers, have identified the eventual winner more consistently than fan polls, jury previews or streaming statistics. The market called Salvador Sobral for Portugal in 2017, Duncan Laurence for the Netherlands in 2019, Ukraine’s Kalush Orchestra in 2022 and Sweden’s Loreen in 2023, all as pre-contest favourites. For an event decided by tens of millions of televotes and the tastes of national juries, that record is genuinely strange.
Why the market knows
Eurovision is unusually information-rich for a one-night event. The songs are released months in advance, so streaming numbers, YouTube view counts and radio playlisting accumulate long before the final. National selection shows provide televised auditions. Then comes rehearsal fortnight in the host city, when each delegation performs its staging for accredited press. Odds move sharply on rehearsal reports, because staging wins and loses this contest; a song that charts well can die on a bare stage, and the market reprices within hours of the first run-through.
The structure of the scoring helps too. Since 2009 the result has been split evenly between national juries and public televote, and since 2016 the two are announced separately. That gives modellers two distinct populations to estimate, and the betting aggregators effectively crowdsource both. Academic work on prediction markets has repeatedly found that odds outperform expert panels at Eurovision, echoing findings from election markets going back to the Iowa Electronic Markets in the late 1980s.
The years it broke
The efficiency has limits, and the failures cluster in a recognisable pattern: the market reads the televote well and the juries poorly. In 2016, Russia’s Sergey Lazarev started as favourite and duly won the televote, but Ukraine’s Jamala took the trophy on combined scoring. In 2024, Croatia’s Baby Lasagna headed the market and won the public vote, only for Switzerland’s Nemo to overturn it on a dominant jury score. In 2025 the pattern repeated in mirror image: Sweden’s KAJ went off as one of the shortest-priced favourites in contest history, and Austria’s JJ came through with the juries. Three of the market’s most prominent misses in a decade all hinged on the jury half of the scoreboard, the harder half to model because jurors are anonymous until after the final.
Politics adds another distortion. The 2022 contest was less a music market than a geopolitical one; Ukraine’s price shortened dramatically after the February invasion, months before a note was sung in Turin, and the televote delivered the largest public score recorded to that point. The market was right, but for reasons that had little to do with staging reports.
A small market with sharp edges
Turnover on Eurovision is modest by sporting standards, concentrated at British, Irish, Nordic and Australian operators, but the market microstructure rewards attention. Outright winner is only the headline; books also price semi-final qualification, top-ten finishes, left-hand-side-of-scoreboard props and head-to-heads between countries, and these thinner markets are where pricing errors persist longest. Liquidity arrives late and unevenly, and exchange prices during the live final react to the jury sequence in real time, producing some of the most volatile in-running trading outside sport. How such novelty markets are compiled and margined is covered in the guide to entertainment betting.
There is also a regulatory quirk: several participating countries, including some with state gambling monopolies, restrict betting on the contest entirely, so the market that predicts a pan-European vote is itself only partly European. The aggregated odds that circulate each May are drawn disproportionately from UK-licensed books, whose approach to margin and market-making is described in the overview of betting markets in Canada and the UK.
None of this makes Eurovision odds an oracle. It makes them a well-fed statistical summary of everything publicly knowable about the contest, which most years is enough. The instructive part is the residue: the jury rooms, the diaspora televotes and the occasional geopolitical shock that no aggregator prices cleanly. The contest keeps a little chaos in reserve, which is presumably why people still watch the scoreboard rather than the odds screen.