Football Pools

The football pools started in 1923 and for a long period it was the most popular form of gambling in the UK. By 1994 there were 10 million people playing the football pools regularly on a weekly basis.

The typical football pools games involved finding eight score draws from the weekend football match coupon.

The biggest win in football pools history ironically occurred on the first weekend of the National Lottery. A syndicate from Worsley, Greater Manchester won £2,924,622!

Today the number of people playing the football pools has fallen to something under half a million. The decline, while largely put down to the success of the National Lottery, has also been due to the rise of the much more cost conscious 'Betfair generation' who have avoided the football pools.