Football pool

A football pool, often collectively referred to as "the pools", is a betting pool based on predicting the outcome of top-level association football matches set to take place in the coming week.

British pools

Several different companies including Littlewoods, Vernons, Zetters and Brittens have organised similar games, the most famous of which was historically known as Treble Chance. Competitors were given a list of football matches set to take place over the coming week, and attempted to pick a line of eight of them whose results would be worth most points by the scoring scheme, traditionally by crossing specific boxes on a printed coupon. A proportion of the players' combined entry fees was distributed among the competitors whose entries were worth the highest scores.

In 2007, Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters Football Pool companies came together to form The New Football Pools, now known as The Football Pools.[1] The new company provides classic football pools games alongside other pools variants with coupons containing a smaller number of football matches. These games are all offered on-line.

Entries

Entries were traditionally entered by post or via agents or collectors. Collectors walked a route door to door taking a percentage usually 12.5% of the money as a fee. Main collectors, who appointed them, delivered the forms and payments to a regional office, which were then dispatched to the companies central offices. Legally the football pools collectors were agents of the entrants, not the pools company. There have been a few cases whereby a rogue agent has fraudulently withheld players' stake money, even though one entrant had actually chosen a set of jackpot-winning fixtures. Business for pools collectors was sustained up by periodic canvassing, where company agents knocked on doors in an area of a town or housing estate.

These days, a variety of football pools games can be played on the Internet. These include the classic pools game that traditionally includes a large number of fixtures, spanning the weekend. New pools game variants include Premier 10 where the player must correctly predict home win, draw or away win for ten, mainly Premier League, football matches. Other pools game variants include Super 6, where the player must correctly predict home win, draw or away win for six football matches and Head 2 Head where the player must correctly predict which, if either, of the two teams featured on the coupon will score the most goals, be awarded the most corners and have the most shots on target in each half of the match.

The football pools coupons with the most football matches on them also have the biggest pool of money that is available to be won.

Scoring

Scoring schemes varied over the years. The current Treble Chance games use a scoring scheme which awards three points to score draws (matches where both team scored the same, strictly positive, number of goals), two points to no-score draws (matches where neither team scored a goal) and one point to both home wins (matches where the home team scored more goals than the away team) and away wins (matches where the away team scored more goals than the home team). The most famous historical scoring scheme differentiated between home wins and away wins, awarding one and a half points for games resulting in away wins. A scoring scheme used for only one year split score draws into two categories, awarding three points only for matches ending 1-1 and two and a half points for higher-scoring score draws.

The total score of each line would be calculated, up to a maximum of 24 points. The highest scoring line achieved by any player in that particular week's competition would be declared to be worth the top dividend, with a large proportion of the prize pool awarded to the players responsible for submitting the highest-scoring lines. Large football pools would award second and subsequent dividends, splitting smaller proportions of the prize pool among players who had submitted lines scoring nearly as many points; at its peak, the Littlewoods Treble Chance game would offer up to six dividends.

During the summer, when football leagues were not in operation in the United Kingdom, competitions were based on the results of football matches taking place in Australia. Matches which were postponed would often have their results adjudicated, for the sake of the football pools results, by a board known as the Pools Panel; which was formed in 1963 when a particularly cold winter scrapped football for three weeks running. The current panel members are Roger Hunt, Gordon Banks and Tony Green - all three have been on the panel for more than 30 years.[2]

The latest online pools games use a variety of scoring methods based on the number of football matches or match options on the coupon and the predictions required to enter.

Results

Before their popularity dwindled, pools results were published in most national newspapers a day or two after the Saturday on which the matches were played. Grids marking the points totals per game were sometimes published, against which your pools coupon could be aligned to read off the scores.

The BBC television programme Grandstand used to broadcast the winning match numbers and any Pools Panel verdicts as part of its "Final Score" segment in the late afternoon. Only three people have so far announced the classified football results on the programme since its inception in 1958 - Len Martin until his death in 1995 and, since then, Tim Gudgin. The Fall (band) singer Mark E. Smith read out the classified football results on the BBC's Final Score programme as a one-off, as his band's track Theme from Sparta F.C. was the programme's theme music. Pools news was also given out on the BBC radio programme Sports Report until May 2007.

With scores being read out on radio and television it was also common to relay the message "claims by telegram" for days when around eight score-draws occurred (and thus few players expected to achieve maximum points), through "claims by registered mail only" for days when rather more winners were expected, to "no claims" when there were likely to be so many claimants that the mail would have been overwhelmed.

With the arrival of Internet based pools games, the need for players to score their own coupons was removed. Automatic scoring and payout is now standard on all Internet based pools games.

Winning

Typically a fraction of a penny would be charged for each line entered, though players often had the option to play each line at a higher stake and so receive a higher share of the pool should their line prove a winner. Accordingly, players would usually submit many different lines in a single entry. Popular ways to do this were "full perm" entries, where 10 (or 11, or more) matches were selected and every possible combination of eight matches selected from the ten (etc.) was entered as a single line. As there are C(10,8) = 45 ways to select eight matches from ten, the cost of such an entry was 45 times the cost of entering a single line. Note that the term "perm" was used despite the relevant mathematical operation being combination rather than permutation, as the order in which the eight matches were selected was irrelevant. The pools companies, many daily newspapers, and the sporting press also issued "plans", which were subsets of full perms: these enable the punter to cover more matches for the same stake, with the proviso that even if 8 draws were in the selections, they might not all be in a single line of the plan (but well designed plans could give a guarantee something like 'if the plan hits 8 draws it must win at least a 3rd dividend').

The largest prizes would be awarded when only one line was entered scoring the maximum number of points; typically this would occur when only eight or nine matches ended in score draws, so only one player would have the line scoring the maximum. These biggest jackpot prizes could be several hundred thousand pounds, sometimes even more than a million. Prizes depended on the number of players and the cost per line, which varied between pools companies and increased over the years; one winner, Viv Nicholson, gained notoriety by declaring she was going to "spend, spend, spend" after winning £ 152,319 in 1961. The story of her subsequent divorces, remarriages, extravagance and eventual bankruptcy was eventually made into a musical named after her assertion.

At the other extreme, payouts of less than a pound were quite common as lower dividends when many entries won. Most "punters" could expect to receive at least one low payout if they played for long enough.

With the arrival of the latest online pools games such as Premier 10 and Super 6, the overall pool size is less than the classic pools game, but the odds of winning a major prize are increased because fewer predictions are required to complete a coupon and, also, fewer inidividuals play each coupon.

Historic wins

Here are some notable UK football pools winners[1]

1957 Nellie McGrail, Stockport £205,235[3]

1961 Viv Nicholson, Castleford £152,319

1979 Irene Powell, Port Talbot, South Wales £882,000 - first win over £750,000.

1986 Syndicate of hospital workers from Devizes, Wiltshire £1,017,890 - first million pound win.

1987 Barry Dinsdale, Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire £1,910,972.

1991 Rodi Woodcock, £2,072,220 - first double-millionaire.

1994 Syndicate from Worsley, Greater Manchester £2,924,622 - Came on the first weekend of the National Lottery

2010 Michael Elliott, Brechin, Scotland £3,001,511 - Highest ever jackpot went to the prison officer by betting on eight 2-2 draws across Spain, Scotland and England.

History

Littlewoods football pools was founded in 1923 by John Moores, Vernons in 1925, Zetters in 1933, and Brittens in 1946. The Treble Chance game was also inaugurated in 1946.

The first football pools coupons were distributed to football fans outside Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground in 1923.[1]

The popularity of the Treble Chance game was due to the fact it offered a potential single large jackpot at a time when no other form of gambling in the United Kingdom did; premium bonds were not offered until 1957 and never offered a jackpot which was as high. The popularity of football pools in the UK declined dramatically after the introduction of the National Lottery in 1994, which offered larger jackpots still. Some football pools offer additional ways to win based on scores of football matches at half-time, or football matches in which particularly many goals are scored.

The football pools did not fall under gambling legislation 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 one half the entry fees taken would be returned to the players as prizes. Companies organising football pools were heavily taxed; in 1991, the level of tax levied was reduced from 40% of turnover to 37½% of turnover. Additionally, from 1975 on, 2½% of the entry fees went to form the Football Trust which distributed money to football throughout the UK, most famously to help clubs redevelop their stadiums in line with the recommendations made by the Taylor Report.

The Littlewoods Football Pools Collection which shows the history of the pools is held by the National Football Museum.

Competition from the UK National Lottery led to a rapid fall-off in players, from a peak of 10 million in 1994 to 700,000 in 2007.[4] Vernons closed its pools operation in February 1998, and ran a lucky-dip game called Easy Play with the National Lottery during the 1998-9 football season. It resumed its traditional business afterwards.

In 2000, Littlewoods Pools was sold for £161 million. The company is now part of Littlewoods Gaming, a division of Sportech plc. Sportech bought Zetters in 2002 and Vernons in 2007, and announced plans to rebrand the competition as The New Football Pools, launching online at footballpools.com during summer 2008.[4]

Other games

Other games offered by football pools companies take the form of "8 homes", "4 draws", "5 aways" or the like, where lines consisting of a smaller number of matches are selected and a line is deemed to have won if all the selected matches result in home wins, away wins or draws (irrelevant of the size of the draw) respectively. The cost per line is generally higher; because these attract far fewer players, prizes are generally lower. Some football pools companies additionally organised lotteries, betting on lottery results or spot the ball competitions at various points.

Charitable giving

The Football Pools have donated over £1.1billion to sporting good causes. During the 2009/10 football season a further £6 million was donated to football initiatives including the following[1]

The Every Player Counts scheme - to grow disability football provision across 44 Football League clubs in England and Wales and increase the opportunities for people with varying disabilities to access sports through their local Football Clubs

The Premier League Health scheme - to help tackle a range of men’s health issues including testicular cancer, depression and alcoholism

The Fit for Football, Fit for Life scheme - to help tackle serious health issues for young people across 30 Scottish Football League clubs

Continental European pools

Similar football pools competitions are frequently known as toto competitions on Continental Europe. While the principle of requiring entrants to predict the results of football matches in advance remains the same, the details are fundamentally different. The name toto derives from totalisator machines which are used to process the parimutuel betting involved.

Typically, a list of 13 matches for the coming week will be given. Pools entrants have to 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.

The Intertoto Cup competition was inaugurated by the football pools companies of central Europe to provide matches for their toto coupons during the summer months.