Whatever Happened to the Football Pools? Littlewoods, Score Draws and the Pools Man
There was a time when Saturday football began several days before anyone kicked a ball.
Somewhere around Wednesday or Thursday evening there would be a knock at the door. It was the pools man, collecting another carefully completed coupon and a small stake from one of millions of British households hoping this might finally be their week.
By Saturday afternoon, people were waiting for the football results, hoping that a collection of score draws from places such as Rochdale, Crewe, Hartlepool or Scunthorpe might suddenly make them rich.
Winning the pools was once the British equivalent of winning the lottery. People talked about what they would buy if their selections came in, newspapers photographed winners holding enormous cheques and famous faces were sometimes brought in to present the prizes.
Today, the pools man has disappeared, the traditional classified football results have gone from television and plenty of younger supporters probably have little idea what “doing the pools” actually involved.
So, whatever happened to the Football Pools?
What Were the Football Pools?
The basic idea behind the Football Pools was fairly simple. Each week, players received a coupon listing football fixtures and tried to predict the results.
Unlike a normal football accumulator, where you might back several teams to win, the classic pools became closely associated with finding score draws. A 1-1 or 2-2 result was exactly the sort of thing players wanted to see.
The money staked went into a central pool, with prize money divided between those recording the best results. There were different games and different ways of completing the coupon, including the famous Littlewoods Treble Chance, introduced in 1946.
Some serious pools players studied fixtures and form, while others relied on favourite numbers, birthdays or the same selections they had used for years.
Then there were the permutations. People talked about “perming eight from ten” as though everyone naturally understood what that meant.
For decades, millions did.
The Football Pools Had a Terrible Start
The Littlewoods story began in the 1920s with John Moores, Colin Askham and Bill Hughes. They had heard about an earlier football pools business and thought there might be money in the idea.
The name Littlewoods came from Askham's family name before his adoption. All three men were employed elsewhere and did not particularly want their employers knowing about their new sideline.
Littlewoods Football Pool was created in 1923, but its early results hardly suggested that a national institution was being born.
In February 1924, the men printed 4,000 coupons. With no proper distribution network, Moores went to a football match and recruited boys to hand them out. Just 35 coupons came back.
The following week they tried again, this time printing 10,000 coupons. Only one was returned.
Askham and Hughes decided they had seen enough, but Moores thought the idea still had potential and offered to buy them out. For a while the business was run from his home with help from his wife Ruby and other family members.
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Slowly, things began to change. By March 1927, Littlewoods was receiving around 20,000 coupons every week.
A business that had struggled to find even a few dozen customers was on its way to becoming part of British life.
Why Did the Football Pools Become So Popular?
Timing played a huge part in the rise of the pools.
Football was already attracting enormous crowds, but the coupon gave people a reason to care about matches involving clubs they might otherwise barely have noticed. A late equaliser in a lower-division game hundreds of miles away could suddenly matter just as much as the result of their own team.
Playing was also cheap. Ordinary working families could put down a small amount for the chance of winning a sum of money that could completely change their lives.
By the end of the 1930s, an estimated eight to ten million adults were playing the football pools every week.
There was another reason for their success, though. The pools managed to become a form of gambling that often did not feel much like gambling at all.
You Weren't Gambling, You Were Just Doing the Pools
Britain had a complicated relationship with gambling during much of the 20th century. Millions enjoyed a bet, but gambling could still carry a certain stigma and betting shops as we know them today did not yet exist.
Before the law changed in 1960, off-course cash betting was heavily restricted. Street betting was illegal, while wealthier customers might have credit accounts with bookmakers. Plenty of betting still took place, but much of it operated outside the neat, regulated high-street system that later generations became familiar with.
The Betting and Gaming Act 1960 changed that, with licensed betting shops beginning to appear from 1961.
The Football Pools, however, had already found their way into millions of homes without requiring customers to visit anything resembling a bookmaker.
You could sit at the kitchen table, fill in your coupon and hand a small stake to the collector when he called. For many families it felt closer to entering a weekly competition than making a serious gambling decision.
Academic research into the history of the pools found that many customers saw them as safe and respectable, even though religious groups, anti-gambling campaigners and some politicians strongly opposed them.
Even Parliament sometimes reflected the softer attitude towards the pools. During a debate in 1963, they were described as “one of the most innocent forms of gambling”.
That distinction mattered. You weren't going down the bookies. You were just doing the pools.
Remember the Pools Man?
For many people old enough to remember the Football Pools at their height, one figure stands out almost as much as the coupon itself: the pools collector, or simply the pools man.
Littlewoods and its rivals built huge networks of local collectors and agents who went from door to door collecting completed coupons and stakes. Large workplaces could have their own pools agents, while groups of colleagues often played together in syndicates.
The collector might cover the same streets for years. Families knew roughly which evening he would appear, and the weekly visit became another small routine alongside the milkman, insurance collector and catalogue agent.
It was a remarkably effective system because playing required almost no effort. You didn't have to remember to make a special trip somewhere because the pools came to you.
At their peak in the 1970s and 1980s, the Football Pools had around 15 million regular players and a huge network of collectors.
It is difficult to imagine a modern betting company operating in quite the same way. A bookmaker sending somebody to your front door every Thursday to ask whether you fancied an accumulator would seem rather odd today, but for pools players it was entirely normal.
Saturday Afternoon Became About the Draws
Once the coupon had been collected, there was nothing left to do but wait for Saturday.
Matches usually kicked off together at 3pm and, for a couple of hours, players had little idea whether their selections were brilliant or hopeless. Then came the results.
For many families, listening to the football scores became almost as important as the matches themselves. Radio had long played a part, while television later turned the classified results into part of the Saturday afternoon routine.
Millions came to know the familiar rhythm of the scores being read out on BBC's Grandstand, with some viewers claiming they could tell whether a match was a home win, away win or draw simply from the announcer's tone.
Pools players had another problem. They did not necessarily care who won.
They wanted draws.
A lifelong Manchester United supporter could suddenly become very interested in whether Carlisle could find an 89th-minute equaliser against Chesterfield. The pools gave millions of people a reason to follow results far beyond the clubs they actually supported.
What Happened When the Matches Weren't Played?
The winter of 1962-63 caused a major problem for the pools companies. Britain suffered one of its coldest winters for generations and football was hit by hundreds of postponements.
The FA Cup third round alone took 66 days to complete.
Pools companies could not simply wait weeks or months for every postponed match to be played, so the Pools Panel was created. A group of football experts sat down and decided what they believed the results of postponed games would have been.
The original panel included former England players such as Tom Finney and Tommy Lawton, and their predicted results were used to settle the pools.
It sounds extraordinary now. Someone could have a fortune riding on a match that never took place, only for a group of experts to decide it would probably have finished 1-1.
Yet the Pools Panel became another familiar part of British football and continued long after the severe winter had ended.
Littlewoods Became Much More Than the Pools
Littlewoods became the company most closely associated with the Football Pools, but its success eventually produced a much bigger business.
John Moores became wealthy and began looking for other opportunities. In 1932 he started Littlewoods Mail Order, helped by the enormous customer base that the pools business had already created.
Littlewoods was able to ask those existing customers about the sort of shopping service they wanted, and the mail-order operation grew rapidly. High-street shops followed.
Later generations might remember Littlewoods mainly as a catalogue that seemed to appear in countless homes, or as a familiar name on British high streets. Yet the empire had grown from football coupons and the dream of finding enough score draws to land a fortune.
Littlewoods Wasn't the Only Name
Littlewoods dominated the market, but it was far from alone. Vernons became another major name in the pools business, while Zetters was also familiar to generations of players.
The companies competed for millions of customers through advertising, prizes and large networks of collectors.
Much later, the old rivals ended up together. Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters were brought under common ownership between 2000 and 2007, by which time the golden years of doorstep collectors and enormous weekly participation were already over.
When Winning the Pools Meant You Had Made It
Before Britain had the National Lottery, there was another phrase everyone understood:
“He's won the pools.”
It meant somebody had suddenly become very rich.
Pools winners regularly appeared in newspapers, often posing with enormous cheques. Famous entertainers and sports stars were sometimes involved in presentations, adding to the sense that an ordinary person had suddenly entered a very different world.
Few pools winners became as well known as Keith and Viv Nicholson.
In September 1961, Keith correctly selected eight score draws on the Littlewoods Treble Chance and won £152,300, 18 shillings and eight pence, an enormous fortune at the time.
When Viv was asked what they intended to do with the money, her answer became part of British popular culture: “Spend, spend, spend.”
Cars, clothes, holidays, horses and a new home followed. Their story later became a book and inspired the musical Spend Spend Spend, while images of Viv were also used on releases connected with The Smiths.
The story itself was not a particularly happy one, but the fame that followed shows how important the Football Pools once were. A big pools winner could become a national talking point.
The Football Pools Were Everywhere
The pools regularly appeared in films, television, newspapers and comedy because writers did not need to explain what they were. Almost everyone already knew.
A 1959 episode of Hancock's Half Hour was called The Football Pools, with Tony Hancock anxiously following his selections as he appeared to close in on the top prize.
Films used pools wins as plot devices, comedians made jokes about coupons and newspapers regularly reported the latest big winners. “Winning the pools” became shorthand for suddenly becoming rich, much as “winning the lottery” is today.
The giant cheque became part of that culture too. Pools companies understood that photographs of ordinary people suddenly receiving huge sums of money were extremely good advertising. Every winner offered millions of other players the same thought: perhaps next week it could be me.
The Beginning of the End
For decades, the pools survived political criticism, higher taxes, legal betting shops and growing competition. But in November 1994, the National Lottery arrived and changed the market almost overnight.
The timing was striking. On 19 November 1994, a 24-person syndicate from the Yew Tree Inn near Manchester shared Littlewoods' biggest ever pools prize of £2,924,622. That same day, Britain held its first National Lottery draw, with one great British jackpot game hitting a record high just as another began to take its place.
Did the National Lottery Kill the Football Pools?
Not by itself, but the arrival of the National Lottery was a major blow.
In many ways it offered much the same promise as the pools: a small weekly stake and the chance of winning a life-changing amount of money. The difference was that it was much easier to play.
Within five years of the Lottery's launch, Littlewoods had reportedly lost around 70 per cent of its pools turnover. Before the Lottery arrived, Littlewoods alone had attracted more than six million players every week.
There were other changes happening at the same time. Betting shops had become an accepted part of the high street, satellite television brought far more live football into people's homes and football betting itself became easier and more varied.
Then came the internet. Fans could place bets from home, compare odds and eventually bet while matches were taking place. Against that sort of competition, the traditional football pools began to look increasingly old-fashioned.
The Disappearance of the Pools Man Mattered Too
The decline of the doorstep collector probably mattered more than it first appears.
Habit had always been one of the great strengths of the Football Pools. If somebody knocked on your door every Thursday night to collect your coupon, it was very easy to keep playing week after week.
Once that weekly visit disappeared, customers had to make the effort themselves. Something that had been built naturally into the week became something people had to actively remember to do.
The pools man had been more than a way of collecting money. He was part of the system that kept millions of customers returning.
So Whatever Happened to the Football Pools?
The surprising answer is that they never completely disappeared.
The old Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters operations eventually became part of The Football Pools, and the traditional pools moved online. In 2025, the Liverpool-based operator said around 300,000 people were still playing each week, far below the numbers seen at their height but still a substantial audience.
What really disappeared was the routine that surrounded them. The coupon on the kitchen table, the collector calling at the door, the workplace syndicate and the wait for the Saturday afternoon results all slowly faded from everyday life.
For millions of people, doing the pools had never felt like serious gambling. It was simply part of the week, a small stake on the chance that a handful of score draws might suddenly change everything. That habit was gradually replaced by the National Lottery, online betting and other easier ways to chase a big prize.
So whatever happened to the Football Pools?
They are still here, just on a much smaller scale. What really vanished was their place at the centre of British life, when filling in a coupon was as familiar as checking the football scores and every Saturday carried the faint possibility that this might finally be the week.
