Spain vs. Costa Rica odds, pick

Handicapping the early stages of the 2023 Women’s World Cup will be a tricky endeavor.

The sport has made massive leaps over the last 30 years, but there’s still a significant gap between the elite teams and the smaller nations that have benefited from the expanded field in this year’s tournament.

That theme will play out in a number of games in the group stage of the competition, including Friday morning’s tilt between Spain and Costa Rica at Sky Stadium in Wellington, New Zealand (3:30 a.m. ET). 

Costa Rica is a massive +5000 long shot to win the match — that’s right, they’re 50/1 on the three-way moneyline — and they’re not even the biggest underdog of the first round of matches (Vietnam is +5500 to beat the United States on Friday night). 

Spain vs. Costa Rica pick

When the odds get this ridiculous, handicapping becomes a lot more of an art than a science, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to find value on this contest. 

There’s plenty of eye-popping numbers when it comes to the betting market for this game.

The spread is Spain -4.5, they’re two-goal favorites on the first-half moneyline and there are eight different players on La Roja that are odds-on to score.

Four of them (Esther Gonzalez, Jennifer Hermoso, Alexia Putellas and Salma Paralluelo) are -225 or shorter. 

All of this tells you what we already know: Short of anything miraculous, Spain is going to rout Costa Rica.

So how should punters build a betting card for a match that is this expected to be a laugher?

In some cases, a game like this would be used as a way to pad your peripheral stats like goal difference and goals scored in case a tiebreaker is needed to determine who finishes first or advances from the group stage.

But those things aren’t likely in play for this match since Spain is a massive favorite to win Group C ahead of Japan, Zambia and Costa Rica. 

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Thus, I think we could see a situation where Spain builds a significant lead early in the first half and then eases off the pedal in the second interval.

There are a couple of ways to play this theory.

You could wait for Spain to score a few goals and then back the live under, you could play Costa Rica on the 2H spread or you could go with my favorite bet for the match — that the first half will be the highest scoring half of the match. DraftKings is offering that prop at +180 odds.

Our pick: Highest-scoring half: First (+180, DraftKings)