During its glory years, the football pools was a form of betting that millions upon millions across the UK took part in every week. Today, many people do not even recognise the name. As well as giving a summary of the meteoric rise and relatively rapid demise of the football pools, in this article we will also look at whether you can still take part in this historic form of gambling.
How Did the Pools Begin?
Given how popular the football pools were for much of the 20th century, it is hard to believe they were initially something of a flop. The first man to come up with the idea of the football pool was John Jervis Barnard, based in Birmingham. The basic premise was that punters would try and predict the result of upcoming football matches on a coupon, pay a small fee, and the total prize pot would be divided among the winners, minus Barnard’s cut.
Despite the seemingly sound idea, Barnard struggled to make any real money from it. Seeing the potential in the idea though, the trio of John Moores, Colin Askham and Bill Hughes launched a football pool of their own in 1923, having acquired one of Barnard’s coupons.
The entrepreneurial endeavour began poorly though, so much so that it often did not even cover the expenses involved. On one occasion, the three men printed out 10,000 coupons and handed them out in Hull, only to get one back. The trio persisted for a while but by the time of the 1924/25 season, both Askham and Hughes wanted out. Moores kept his belief though and paid both Askham and Hughes the £200 back they had initially invested, in return for their shares in the business. What a move it proved to be too as just a few years later, Moores was a millionaire.
Rapidly growing in popularity, different football pools began to appear with Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters responsible for the largest of them. By 1936, £30m was being spent on football pools annually (over £1.6bn in today’s money) and it accounted for two-thirds of the postal packets sent within the UK. Part of the reason it captured the imagination of the public was that it wasn’t too expensive to take part, but you could potentially win huge sums of money. It was straightforward too as all punters had to do was select games from a list of matches they thought would end as score draws.
Do the Football Pools Still Exist?
Despite being such a key part of British footballing culture for decades, the football pools suffered a steady decline following the creation of the National Lottery in 1994. When the National Lottery first began the football pools had a player base of around 10 million people, by 2007, it had sunk well below one million. Various football pools businesses were sold off during this period but the game continues to live on.
What happened, in brief, was that the three major pools providers were all bought out by a company named Sportech and merged into one site, footballpools.com, which launched in 2008. Private equity firm OpCapita then bought the website in 2017 for a sum of £83m and their range of football pools games can be played at both footballpools.com and classicpools.thepools.com. As such, OpCapita’s offering can be seen as a continuation of the historic football pools that were founded in the 1920s and 1930s.
How Do the Pools Work Today?
Over the course of its long history, the football pools operated with varying scoring systems. Any score draw would almost always guarantee three points, the maximum score (one briefly tried system gave a reduced total for 1-1 draws) but how home/away wins, plus goalless draws were treated differently. The core of the football pools – attempting to pick out score draws – has not changed though and remains the case even today.
The modern-day football pools have expanded their catalogue of games, however, so you do not have to pick the traditional score-draws game if you do not want to. There are actually five games to choose from in total and you can read a brief overview of each below. All games permit multiple entries, much like with the lottery, should punters want to boost their chances of getting a prize.
Classic Pools
As the name indicates, with the Classic Pools game the objective is to correctly pick score draws from a list of pre-selected 49 matches. Punters are required to select 10 fixtures at a cost of £1 although it is possible to choose 11 or 12 fixtures at a higher price. From the 10 (or more) fixtures chosen, the ‘best’ eight are selected to award each user a score. The scoring system works as follows:
- Score Draw – 3 points
- Goalless Draw – 2 points
- Home or Away Win – 1 point
So, if you picked five score draws, two goalless draws and three home wins your total score would be 20 (3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1) as two of the home wins are ignored. In each round there will be a top prize and a consolation prize for scores one point below this. In some weeks a perfect 24 points would be needed for the top prize but in harder weeks with fewer score draws, something like 22 may suffice.
Goal Rush
This is where the football pools strays from its origins as with their goal rush game the objective is to pick matches in which both teams score. This is the only aim so the teams that ultimately wins the match is irrelevant. Punters have to make eight selections from a list of 35 matches. To get the top share of the prize fund, all eight selections must be correct but there is a consolation prize for anyone who correctly picks seven. It costs £2 per entry and there are typically between eight and 10 rounds per month.
Premier 6, Premier 10, Premier 12
With these games, players have a little more decision-making to do as they need to pick the correct result from either six, 10 or 12 matches. This means selecting a home win, draw, or away win. The basic cost per entry is £2, £1 and 50p, respectively, but this will increase if punters select more than one result in a match, as it means placing additional lines.
To win money, for Premier 6 and Premier 12, you must get all results correct, which is an extremely difficult feat in the case of the latter. For the Premier 10 game, however, there is a top prize fund for punters getting them all right and a consolation fund for those with nine correct picks.
Biggest Football Pools Wins
Part of the reason the National Lottery managed to steal much of the pools’ customer base was the huge jackpots on offer. Even by 1995, the year after its inception, the jackpot total would regularly exceed £10m, meaning it was producing millionaires on a regular basis. While you could win big with the football pools, they did not tend to produce many millionaires. In fact, the first only came in 1986 and that did not go to an individual, rather it was a group of hospital workers who played together.
The below table gives you an idea of how the largest football pools prizes have grown over time.
| Year | Winner | Amount | Milestone |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1957 | Nellie McGrail | £205,235 | |
| 1972 | Cyril Grimes | £512,683 | First win over £500,000 |
| 1979 | Irene Powell | £882,000 | First win over £750,000 |
| 1986 | A syndicate of hospital workers | £1,017,890 | First million-pound win |
| 1987 | Barry Dinsdale | £1,910,972 | |
| 1991 | Rodi Woodcock | £2,072,220 | First double-millionaire |
| 1993 | Judy Smith, | £2,077,683.60 | |
| 1994 | A syndicate from Worsley | £2,924,622 | First weekend of the National Lottery |
| 2010 | Michael Elliott | £3,001,511 | Current record holder |
Focussing on the current football pools jackpot record holder, Michael Elliot, his large sum came thanks to the fact he met the terms of a guaranteed jackpot promotion. At the time there was a £3m bonus available for anyone playing the Classic Pools, providing they met certain criteria. This he did, so on top of the standard £1,511 share of prize pot he was entitled to, he also enjoyed a huge seven fixture bonus.
It could be a long time before anyone tops Elliot’s huge win. The Football Pools do still run their £3m bonus on the Classic Pools game, which is available every round, but winning it is extremely difficult. It is only possible providing that out of the 49 fixtures, exactly nine of them end as a score draw and players have selected every single one of them. If there is any other number of score draws, or just one is missed out, then players are not eligible for the bonus.
The other element to consider is that this is a £3m promotional prize pot for any eligible winners, not for each individual winner. When Michael Elliot struck gold, he was the only player to qualify. In previous years though the large promotional jackpot has been shared. This happened in both 2010 with 14 players sharing £3m and again in 2011 when four winners shared £3m evenly between them.
If the Classic Pools jackpot seems a little too challenging, the Football Pools also has a promotional prize for their Goal Rush game. The enhanced reward here is £1m and to get your hands on this, not only do you need to pick eight matches in which both team score, but the eight matches that see both teams score in the fastest time.