POOLS HISTORY

The football pools have a long history, and were started by Littlewoods Pools (founded by Sir John Moore and his brother Cecil) in 1923. The first ever jackpot (known then as a first dividend) was worth the princely sum of £2.60, which doesn't sound like much today but was in fact a pretty good prize at the time.

Although the football pools were popular with the people who played them, initially they didn't go down very well with the establishment. In fact, Ramsay MacDonald once said that the pools were "a disease which spread downwards to the industrious poor from the idle rich"!

Fortunately for us, that didn't stop the football pools going from strength to strength. Vernons Pools came on the scene in 1925 and eight years later, in 1933, Zetters Pools became the third company to offer footballs pools games to players in the UK. Then, in 1945, George Britten started his family football pools firm, Brittens Pools.

Playing the football pools before the internet came along involved manually completing pools coupons which were commonly available from newsagents and tobacconists. The main pools companies named previously also delivered coupons to players by hand thanks to networks of 'pools collectors' across the UK.

These pools collectors were basically door-to-door football pools company representatives, and their job was to act as middlemen between the players and the pools companies. A player would hand over his completed pools coupons (and the appropriate amount of money) to the collector and be given a fresh set of coupons for the following week in return.

After operating in this way for many years, the pools companies eventually decided that offering a postal subscription service was a better way to go, and pools collectors soon became far less common. That said, there are still a small number of collectors who operate in certain areas - usually for the benefit of players in particularly remote areas who aren't able to play in any other way.

When the National Lottery was launched in the UK in 1994 it was feared that the football pools would suffer as a result, but that hasn't happened. The National Lottery is a game of pure chance, and no matter how big lottery jackpots are, they don't make up for the fact that playing the football pools allows the player to increase his chances of winning with skill and judgement.

That said, the main football pools companies have updated the way that they operate in the internet age. Players can now enter the football pools online, which makes the completion of paper football coupons redundant. There is also a much wider choice of football pools games than there has been in previous decades, allowing players to pick the game that best suits both their aspiration and their attitude to risk.

As you can see from this brief history, the football pools have come a long way since 1923, but their core appeal - of giving players a chance to win big money by predicting results of football matches every Saturday - remains as strong as ever.