Carlisle United are 6.50 with Sky Bet, comfortably the best price on the Oddschecker grid, for a Top 7 Finish in League Two this season. When looking for a price for this bet, we were hoping to get odds between 3.50-4.0 and would have deemed that great value, so the chance to back the Cumbrians at 6.50 was too good to turn down, an astonishing price.

Carlisle have started the season poorly, but with 117 points left to play for their position in the table is not a concern yet for this bet, they’re seven points off the top seven with 39 matches left.

United appointed Mike Williamson as their new manager last week, with the former centre back leaving MK Dons for the role, who were one of the favourites for the League Two title heading into the season, demonstrating how attractive the project is at Brunton Park.

Carlisle have one of the biggest budgets in the fourth tier and will be able to strengthen again in January should they desire reinforcements for a promotion tilt. A play-off push under Paul Simpson this season seemed on the cards, now they have replaced him with one of the most exciting young managers in the country it only feels more likely.

Williamson had a tremendous impact last season when he joined MK Dons in mid October. The 40-year-old took over with MK in 16th and improved them so much that they were firmly in the automatic promotion race come the final months of the campaign, before finishing fourth and losing in the play-offs. Finishing only behind Stockport, Wrexham and Mansfield – who have all made impressive starts to life in League One this season.

Going into this season it felt far more likely that Williamson would be poached by an ambitious Championship or League One club than by a fellow fourth tier outfit, this is a serious coup for Carlisle.

The Cumbrians endured an awful 2023/24 relegation from League One, but one of the main reasons for that was that their 2022/23 promotion via the play-offs came well ahead of schedule due to the remarkable job that Paul Simpson conducted. Their squad now looks much stronger than the one that kicked off in the third tier last season and the 15.4% chance that Sky Bet are giving them of making the top seven, in a far weaker edition of League Two than last term, is almost laughable.

At 6.50, we’re very confident that at the worst we get a great run for our money as Williamson guides Carlisle to a comfortable top half finish as a minimum.