Football pools
In the United Kingdom, the football pools, often referred to as "the pools", is a betting pool based on predicting the outcome of association football matches taking place in the coming week. The pools are typically cheap to enter, and may encourage gamblers to enter several bets.
This article is about soccer pools. For pools as found with other football, see betting pool.
The traditional and most popular game was the Treble Chance, now branded the Classic Pools game. Players pick 10, 11 or 12 football games from the offered fixtures to finish as a draw, in which each team scores at least one goal. The player with the most accurate predictions wins the top prize, or a share of it if more than one player has these predictions. In addition, there is a special £3,000,000 prize or share of it for correctly predicting the nine score draws (draws of 1-1 or higher) when these are the only score draws on the coupon.[1] Players can win large cash prizes in a variety of other ways, under a points-based scoring system.
Entries were traditionally submitted through the post or via agents, who collected entries throughout a specific area. It is now possible to play online.
Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters were the largest pools companies. Littlewoods was the first company to provide pools, selling them outside Manchester United's Old Trafford ground in 1923. In 1986, a syndicate of players became the first winners of a prize over £1 million.[2] The football pools companies have traditionally had a charitable element, donating over £1.1 billion to sports-related causes.
The pools business declined after the introduction of the National Lottery in 1994. Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters were brought together in 2007 by Sportech under the brand 'The New Football Pools', now known as 'The Football Pools'. They offer other small stake, high prize games such as Premier 10 and Jackpot 12. In 2017 The Football Pools was sold to OpCapita, a private equity company, for £83 million.[3]
In the United Kingdom[edit]
Origins[edit]
Competitions for predicting the results of football matches are older than the football league itself. The Cricket and Football Field newspaper, in its edition of 10 September 1887, offered a prize of one guinea to "the Competitor who predicts the results" of four football matches to be played the following Saturday. Readers were invited to cut out and fill in a coupon printed in the newspaper, which had to be sent to the newspaper's offices by the Friday before the matches. If more than one "couponnier" predicted all four exact scores correctly, the prize would be shared between them. There was no charge for entry beyond postage; in fact readers were allowed to submit several coupons together, presumably in order to encourage them to purchase several copies of the newspaper.[4] By 1910, The Umpire was offering a first prize of £300 for predicting six results.[5]
In October 1922, John Moores, Colin Askham and Bill Hughes heard about John Jervis Barnard, a Birmingham man who had devised a 'football pool', where punters would bet on the outcome of football matches.[6][7] The payouts to winners came from the 'pool' of money that was bet, less 10 per cent to cover "management costs". It had not been particularly successful and Barnard was struggling to make a profit. Hughes obtained one of Barnard's pools coupons; the three friends decided they could do it better and, on 1 February 1923, launched the Littlewood Football Pool (as it was originally known). A small office in Liverpool was rented and the first 4,000 coupons were distributed outside Manchester United's Old Trafford ground before one Saturday match that winter.[8] Moores handed the coupons out himself, helped by some young boys eager to earn a few pennies.
It was not an instant success, as just 35 coupons were returned. With bets totalling £4 7s 6d (£4.37½), the 10 per cent deducted did not cover the three men's expenses. The winning dividend paid out £2 12s 0d (£2.60).[9] They decided to print 10,000 coupons, and took them to Hull, where they were handed out before a big game. This time, only one coupon was returned. Midway through the 1924–25 football season the scheme was still losing money. The three young men had already invested £200 each, with no imminent prospect of things improving. Hughes suggested they cut their losses and forget the whole thing and Askham agreed. They expected Moores to concur, but instead he offered to return the £200 they had each invested in return for their shares, and they accepted. By 1930, Moores had become a millionaire from the competition.[7]
In April 1929, Moores was prosecuted under the Ready Money Football Betting Act 1920. Following a court appearance, he was convicted. However, as his company never accepted cash, only postal orders that were cashed after the football results and the winning payout had been confirmed, his appeal was upheld.
Growth[edit]
Vernons' Pools was founded in 1925, also in Liverpool, and Zetters was founded 1933 in London. In 1934, the Football Pool Promoters' Association was formed: besides Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters, its members were the other large pools companies including Cope's Pools (based in London), W.S. Murphy (Edinburgh) and Western Pools (Newport).[10] A report by the Royal Commission at the time suggested that the football pools should be prohibited; the pools companies asked their customers to write to their Member of Parliament, which led to the proposals being withdrawn.[11] The Betting and Lotteries Act 1934 was passed on 27 March 1934 which included restrictions of pool betting. The football pools did not fall under gambling legislation (specifically the Betting and Gaming Act 1960 and its predecessors) because they claimed to be competitions of skill, rather than chance; however, their rules typically stated that all transactions were "binding in honour only". Typically, between one-quarter and half of the entry fees taken would be returned to the players as prizes.
In other countries[edit]
Outside the United Kingdom, similar betting games are frequently known as toto competitions; the name derives from totalisator machines which are used to process the parimutuel betting involved. While the principle of requiring entrants to predict the results of football matches in advance remains the same, the format is similar to the British Jackpot 12, Premier 10 and Soccer 6.
Typically, a list of 13 matches for the coming week will be given. Pools entrants select the result of each one, whether it will be a home win, an away win or neither of these, typically by marking each match with either a 1, a 2 or an N (sometimes X or 0). It is possible to enter two or three results for one or more matches, in which case the entry is treated as a number of separate entries for all possible combinations given; marking two possible results for each of five matches and all three possible results for each of four matches will result in submitting 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 32 × 81 = 2592 different entries. All entries submitting 13 correct predictions will be declared to have won the top prize; sometimes, prizes for fewer correct predictions are also awarded.
In 1946, Italy introduced a state-run pool for citizens to bet on football, called the Totocalcio. It was the only form of legalized football betting in the country until the late 1990s. For fans to win, they needed to correctly pick the outcome of 12 games.[42] A thirteenth game was added in 1951, and a fourteenth (but still called Thirteen) in 2003. Players can win with 9 or more correct predictions.[43][44][45][46][47] Outside the football season, it is renamed Totosport to include predictions for other sporting events such as Formula 1 and cycling.[48] The bets help finance the Italian National Olympic Committee for which it was awarded their Golden Star for sporting merit in 1997.[49][50]
The Intertoto Cup football competition was inaugurated by the football pools companies of central Europe to provide matches for their toto coupons during the summer months.
In Brazil, Loteria Esportiva was introduced in 1970 by Caixa Econômica Federal.[51] It was necessary to match the results of thirteen games. The competition went nationwide in 1972.[52] Between 1972 and 1980, there were 17 million weekly bets.[53] In December 1987, the competition increased to cover 16 matches but returned back to 13 in 1989 and was renamed Loteca.[53] It is currently based on 14 matches with the odds of predicting correctly being 1 chance in 2,391,485.[54]
In Australia, the Soccer Pools game, which ran until 2018, operated under a similar premise to traditional pools, but was instead played in a Lotto-style format. The numbers of the seven matches ranked "highest" in a list of 38 (with void games replaced by reserves if necessary) became the six winning and one supplementary (bonus) number respectively. Tie-breakers allowed all 38 games to be ranked in order, for instance preferencing higher-scoring draws (eg. 2-2 would rank higher than 1-1) with the final tie-breaker being match number itself.
In popular culture[edit]
The pools feature prominently in the British films Easy Money (1948) and Home and Away (1956) starring Jack Warner, the Italian films Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (1959) and Al bar dello sport (1983), and the Spanish films La quiniela (1960) and Jenaro, el de los 14 (1974). In "The Football Pools," the final episode of the fifth television series of Hancock's Half Hour (1959), Tony Hancock has picked seven draws and nervously attends a late-kickoff match with the eighth draw and top dividend on the line. Viv Nicholson's life after her win of more than £152,000 in 1961 was made into the musical "Spend Spend Spend". Charles Causley's poem Timothy Winters begins "Timothy Winters comes to school, With eyes as wide as a football pool". This was used prominently by Christopher Eccleston's character in Hearts and Minds, a 1995 television series.[55]