Week 5 brings us our first London game of the year, with the Chicago Bears heading across the pond to face the Oakland Raiders. It’s the 25th NFL game being played in London since the league began scheduling regular-season contests outside of the NFL in 2007, but it’s the first at the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which has a synthetic turf field underneath the normal soccer pitch to be used for occasions like this.
With only 24 previous games in the United Kingdom, we don’t have a ton of data showing what to expect from a betting perspective. But if we acknowledge the danger of small sample sizes, there are a few trends to consider.
First, the favorite in all London games is 15-9 against the spread. Teams that are favored by more than a field goal, as the Bears are expected to be at close, are 9-4. The over/under is right at 12-12, but totals that close at 41 or less are 5-0 to the over. The total for Bears-Raiders sits at 40.5 as of Tuesday evening.