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Who’d have thought it? The Football Pools have made something of a comeback. Ed Hawkins looks back to the pools’ golden age, and discovers that their ‘new’ incarnation has finally got with the times
“Spend, spend, spend!” So said Viv Nicholson, a Castleford housewife, when asked what she would do with the money after she won the jackpot on the Football Pools in 1961. At the time it was a famous quote that would later become infamous.
Nicholson’s £152,391 win (the equivalent of £3m today) proved almost to be the ruin of her. After bankruptcy, five marriages, a stroke, her life story being made into a West End show and successfully battling alcoholism, Nicholson has made something of a comeback. A Jehovah’s Witness, 73-year-old Nicholson jokes that she should try to cash in on fame, which has lasted longer than the money. “Maybe I could have a TV programme, helping people with their sex problems.”
It is ironic that the story of the Pools has mirrored that of its most famous daughter. There was the boom up until the 1990s when 10 million dreamt of being the next Viv but when the National Lottery was launched in 1994, a British institution looked to be spent, spent, spent. Now for the comeback.
“Jesus! People don’t still play that do they?” said a friend in response to me telling him that I was working on this feature. They do. In decent numbers, too. The last count reckoned 700,000 had registered for the New Football Pools, a rebranding or relaunch, whatever marketing buzz term you want to use, which has appeared to have worked. And unlike Tony Blair and his party trying a similar trick back in 1994 there is more to it than just shoving the word ‘new’ in front of it.
It has been quite a task to ensure that the number of pools players in the last football season rose for the first time since the Lottery started. The journey began in 2000 when Sportech, a football gaming company with more than 86 years of experience, purchased Littlewoods Gaming. Two years later, Zetters, another pools operator, was bought up and in 2007 Vernons was acquired by Sportech for £51m. In between, Sportech terminated a loss-making contract with ITV and sold BetDirect, the bookmakers, for £12.5m.
That same year Sportech became the official licensee for the FA Premier League and Football League as well as the Scottish Premier League and Scottish Football League. The pools were back and were forced to the front of the football consciousness with an eye-catching television advert using presenter Tim Lovejoy. Lovejoy was a former front for Sky Sports’ Soccer AM show. It was cult programming for the football-obsessed male aged from 20-35 and Lovejoy was their God. The 30-second TV ad sees Lovejoy being transported back through the decades. From the post-war era dressed in a flat cap, through the Seventies with a ‘mullet’ to the modern day Premier League, Lovejoy extols the game’s virtues with the line: “Football just gets better and better; so do the Football Pools.”
In a stroke, the New Football Pools had targeted a more youthful audience while also doffing their own flat cap to its former players. “We wanted to stay true to its origins,” says Richard Packman, brand manager for the pools. “That’s why we’ve pulled together ... Littlewoods, Vernons and Vetters all under one roof.” Indeed, there are still 7,000 pools collectors around the UK, reliving the halcyon days when collectors walked a route door to door, taking a percentage 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 a central office.
The slick footballpools.com website is, of course, now the most popular way to play and it is incredible to think that the pools, under its various companies before Sportech emerged, struggled to make an impact online.
“I suppose people might have thought the pools had gone away when they saw the advert. But if you think about it, Hills and Ladbrokes have been around for ages but have only had dot coms in the last 10 years or so,” says Packman.
“We think that the people who use dot coms for betting or gaming do so for something different and hopefully they will remember their dad or granddad filling in the pool coupon. What we’re saying is we’re still here but we’ve moved on.”
They certainly have. While most of us will remember listening to the radio to hear the clipped tones of James Alexander Gordon reveal whether the forecast was “good” or “poor” for just the one type of pool game, there are two new varieties, the Super Six and Premier 10. The Super 6, with coupons for the midweek and weekend action, has a prize fund of £1,500. Players need to correct guess the results for the matches: win, lose or draw. Premier10 is the same concept but, obviously, for 10 matches. The jackpot prize is £30,000.
Fret not, however. The old classics remain. The original millionaire maker, Treble Chance remains with the opportunity, just like Viv Nicholson and the other 100 millionaires made down the years, to pick eight score draws to get you to 24 points and the jackpot. Today’s top prize stands at £3m. There is even a Spot the Ball competition, for the nostalgia lovers.
But are the new games any good? To find out, I parted with a hard-earned £1 on the weekend of 19-20 September to see if I could use my football knowledge to make a bid for the £30,000 on the Premier10 game.
Of course, registering a bankcard and making my selections with the help of football pundit Alan Hansen’s online advice could not have been easier. I predicted three away wins, five home wins and two draws from the nine Premier League matches and one Championship game on the coupon.
It may not surprise you to learn that I did not win. I got five results correct, four off the nine required to be ‘in the money’. A few hours after all the matches were completed, I received an email from footballpools.com to let me know the results were in. “There were 37 winners with 10 correct who won £811 each this week. There was over 500 winners with 9 correct who won £10 too, congratulations!” said the blurb.
Now the gambler in me knows that to get 10 correct scores and receive only slightly more than £800 is rank bad value. Had I gone to an ordinary high street bookie and placed a £1 accumulator with them I would have won more than £1,000 on that weekend’s correct results. Gamblers are, or they should be, cold beasts that have no time for history, tradition or emotion and the real punters will eschew the pools for the reason explained above. Granted, this may not be the pools’ most important audience but a gambling venture that fails to attract the sports betting hardcore is surely missing a trick. That is why the pools are no threat to the bookmakers’ football coupon. One knowledgeable insider at one of the Big Five bookies paints a gloomy picture: “Everyone knows that it is the lottery that killed the pools and not the football coupon but, even with the relaunch and some bookies having pools coupons in their shops, it is an irrelevance as far as we’re concerned.”
Packman strikes back. “Yes but with us you win if you get nine out of 10 right. If you get even one wrong with a bookie, they’re not going to pay out. If no one picks up the Premier10 jackpot then it rolls over to the next week. Hills or whoever won’t you give you better odds next Saturday.”
True. But of course the pools’ greatest threat remains the National Lottery. According to statistics generated by the Gambling Commission for the year up to June 2009, Lottery tickets accounted for 7.9 percent of the share of remote gambling users. The pools were worth 0.9 percent. The worry for the pools is that the Lottery, which now boasts seven games plus scratchcards, will only get bigger, producing an ever increasing variety of ways to win and further squeeze the share of smaller operators. However, footballpools.com does have something that the Lottery does not. Games can be played on a prize leaderboard and mini-league basis. With these two ideas the pools have grasped the very essence of sports betting.
It’s not how much you win but the elation that your knowledge has been proved superior. That is what drives the sports bettor against the bookie. Now you can do the same on the pools, finally showing that mouthy mate of yours that you know more about football than him. “The collectors were very much about community and the mini leagues are, too,” says Packman. “Don’t underestimate the power of showing off down the boozer.”
Even Viv Nicholson would agree with that. “Suddenly we had a lot more friends,” she recalled. “And my dad, who didn’t even like me, was out at the pub bragging about us all the time, happy that he had all the money he wanted for beer.” |
