The Football Pools business is the world’s oldest football gaming company.
The Football Pools is the UK’s leading football pool betting company, and we’ve been giving our customers the chance to win big cash prizes for over 90 years.
We are the original, the most trusted, the biggest and the best place to play football pool games! Our story is one of fame and fortune – over our 92 year history, we’ve paid out over £3.2billion to winners. In 1961, one of the most famous Football Pools winning couples, the Nicholsons, scooped £152,319.00 (equivalent to approx £3million today). Viv Nicholson declared that she would ‘spend, spend, spend” and as result of doing just that, they quickly depleted their fortune, becoming one of the most talked about Pools winners ever.
During the particularly harsh winter of 1963, the Pools Panel was born. Postponed or cancelled matches are adjudicated on by a panel of experts so that the customers can still be in with a chance to win! Previous panelists have included Sir Tom Finney, Ted Drake and Arthur Ellis with the current Pools Panel consisting of England World Cup winners Gordon Banks and Roger Hunt and former Scotland international Tony Green. The panel meet every Saturday morning in case of postponements or cancellations.
By this time, The Football Pools had become a key part of British life – families would crowd around the radio to hear the Football results and see if they had got a win! By the mid 80’s, Grandstand would feature The Football Pools results as part of their Saturday round up show and Saturday teatime became synonymous with The Football Pools.
In 1986 the Football Pools reached a fantastic milestone with the very first Football Pools millionaires. Nurse Sister Margaret Francis and ten of her colleagues from Devizes, Wiltshire, became the first Pools millionaires sharing £1,017,890.
In March 2010, The Football Pools celebrated its biggest ever top prize payout with a massive £4 million paid out in a single weekend of football. Amongst the lucky winners 14 customers shared a Top Prize of £3 million, each scooping over £214,000. One lucky customer also turned a 71p stake into a £1 million prize which highlights that even 87 years after it was launched, The Football Pools continues to turn small stakes into life changing sums of money.