CREATING WINNERS FOR 95 YEARS
The Football Pools game has been transforming lives since 1923. Now it is targeting a new generation of punters with a score-prediction version called Footie5
IT’S a game that changed lives for as little as a few pence and became a Saturday ritual for millions. In its heyday The Football Pools saw millions of punters stake a bet to predict the scores of matches up and down the country.
In the days before the Lottery, doing the pools was the only chance for the ordinary man or woman in the street to win big sums of money.
Millions had a flutter each week dreaming of scooping their fortune. And some life-changing amounts were won from the very beginning, even though they don’t sound like an enormous amount today.
Edwin Dodd, his wife and their four-year-old son celebrated a £1,000 pools win in 1934.
Mr Dodd, 21, earned 48 shillings a week (£2.40p) as a pottery labourer in Stoke-on-Trent.
He was recovering from a major operation and had ignored doctor’s orders to go to work.
Almost 50 years later, Mr Dodd recalled: “The win saved my life because if I had not had the money, I would have carried on working. I would rather have died working than starve.”
With the money, Mr Dodd bought a family home and newsagent’s business.
In 1961, miner Keith Nicholson and his wife Viv of Castleford, West Yorkshire, won £152,000.
The raw figure may not compare with today’s enormous Euromillions jackpots but even then it was worth around £3.5million.
No wonder that when asked what she was going to do with all their cash, Viv famously replied: “Spend, spend, spend!”
And she certainly did – it took the couple just three years to blow their winnings after they splashed out on cars, furs, champagne parties and a ranch-style home.
But when Keith died in a car crash a year later, a huge tax bill left Viv bankrupt.
Her life story became a West End musical starring Barbara Dickson. Viv died three years ago aged 79.
AGROUP of nurses from Wiltshire scooped the first pools win of more than a million in 1986. And in September 1992, Graham Barlow from Leicester was just about to give up on his hopes of getting rich quick as his weekly stake was proving a strain on the family finances.
With wife Diane due to give birth, Graham planned to tell his father Arthur that he was throwing in the towel on their regular pools entry.
Instead, Graham decided to try his luck for one more week and the father-and-son partnership became pools millionaires, winning £1,120,705 between them.
In 2010, Michael Elliot, from Brechin, Angus, wrote himself into the record books when he became the first triple millionaire in the 87-year history of the pools pocketing £3,001,511 for a £2 stake.
But not every pools story had a happy ending.
Joe Bosher from Tyneside thought he had won the jackpot in 1986 when his selections came in. A pal lent him £50 to celebrate and he hit the town, only to find his wife crying her eyes out when he returned home.
It turned out that Joe had given his son Joseph, 14, the errand of delivering his coupon. But Joseph had binned
Littlewoods chief Sir John Moores the coupon and spent the stake on sweets.
Stories like Joe’s didn’t deter the punters, at its height the pools attracted 10 million players every
ARE YOU IN THE PREMIER LEAGUE WHEN IT COMES TO PREDICTIONS?
A NEW pools game, Footie5, has been launched to bring excitement to a new generation of football fans.
Not only can fans get their football fix on the big screen but they can now, potentially, win a major prize for their sporting passion.
Punters around the country place bets on the Premier League and now there’s a fantastic new option for football fanatics. Footie5 is now live. Here is a guide on how to play and get the best out of the game.
A football prediction game in which players (aged 18 and over) can win big cash prizes by predicting week. They also made a billionaire of the man who brought them to the masses, Liverpool businessman John Moores.
But the game wasn’t invented by the scores of five matches. If you correctly predict the results of five matches in a round then you could win £25,000.
If you are not so lucky there is the chance of winning £2,000 for predicting four games.
If more than one person bags the prizes then they are shared.
You can access the game at www.footie5.com. It’s free to register – just complete the simple registration form on the website. Once you’re set up you Moores himself. The original idea was thought up by John Jervis Barnard from Birmingham, who realised that most of his friends liked both football and placing will be presented with five matches taking place over the coming days and it is your job to predict the scores.
Once you have, hit the submit button and cross your fingers!
You can visit Footie5 at any time to see how you’re doing.
All entrants must be aged 18 and over. There are also two paid bet options:
● Pick any two correct scores based on your Footie5 predictions to win £15.
● Pick any three correct scores based on your Footie5 predictions to win £75.
Both betting opportunities have a £2 fixed stake and the returns shown are inclusive of the stake.
Good luck! bets. At the time, betting was legal only on racecourses, so he came up with the idea of punters guessing the outcome of football matches and collecting winnings from the “pool” of stakes.
He figured 10 per cent of the pot for his own management costs would give him a tidy income.
But he was ready to give up on the idea when he met Moores. It was he who saw its potential and took the idea back to Manchester.
He and his pals Colin Askham and Bill Hughes were constantly looking for money-making ideas.
They each invested £50 in the scheme, bought a cheap printing press, rented an office in Liverpool and named their business Littlewoods, which was Askham’s birth name before he was adopted.
THEY printed 4,000 coupons and handed them out outside Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground on a match day in 1923. Only 35 of their coupons were returned.
The project continued to lose money and Hughes and Askham were ready to quit.
Moores paid them both the £200 they had invested in the company so far to buy their shares after his wife said to him: “I would rather be married to a man haunted by failure than one haunted by regret.”
But there were to be no failures or regret.
The Football Pools eventually captured the imagination of the nation, with millions listening to the scores and results come in on the radio.
It was the ultimate gamble that paid off.
When he died in 1993 aged 97, Sir John Moores was estimated to be worth more than £1billion.