The Surprisingly Long History of Betting on Football
People tend to assume betting on football is a fairly modern habit, something that arrived with smartphones and in-play odds tickers. It's not, not even close. Go back to the late 1800s and you'll already find working men putting money on match outcomes in factory towns across the north of England, long before the game had anything close to the structure it has now. The relationship between football and gambling is almost as old as organised football itself, and it's worth actually tracing how we got from there to a modern sportsbook app.
The real turning point came with the football pools, which kicked off properly in the 1920s. Littlewoods and Vernons built entire businesses around punters trying to predict match results across a full weekend of fixtures, filling in coupons by hand and posting them off in hope of a payout that could genuinely change a working family's life. At their peak, pools coupons were being filled in by something like ten million people a week in Britain. That's a staggering number for a betting product with no odds boards, no live updates, nothing beyond a printed fixture list and a pencil. The pools weren't just a gambling product either — they funded huge chunks of Britain's sporting infrastructure for decades, which is a detail that tends to get lost.
Bookmaking itself has a messier history running alongside the pools. On-course betting had existed for horse racing long before football caught up, but street bookmakers were operating in a legal grey area for most of the early twentieth century, since off-course cash betting wasn't actually legalised in Britain until the Betting and Gaming Act of 1960. Before that, illegal bookies ran a genuinely enormous shadow industry, with "runners" collecting bets door to door and police mostly turning a blind eye unless something forced their hand. Once betting shops became legal, they spread fast — thousands opened within just a few years, and football quickly became one of the core products alongside racing.
What's changed most since then isn't really the appetite for betting on the game, it's the format. The move from betting shops to online platforms in the 2000s did to football betting what online banking did to physical branches — it didn't kill the old model overnight, but it made it optional for a huge chunk of the audience. In-play betting came next, letting fans wager on what happens in the next five minutes of a match rather than just the final score, which changed the entire pace of how people actually watch games.
Interestingly, the US went through its own version of this shift much more recently and much faster, after federal restrictions on sports betting were lifted in 2018. Where Britain took decades to move from illegal street bookies to a fully regulated high street industry, several American states went from zero legal sports betting to a fully-fledged, app-based market in the space of a few years. For readers curious how that newer market stacks up, there's a decent breakdown covering what US sportsbook is the best across the operators that have emerged from that expansion. A look at the National Football Museum's own archives is worth a visit too, for anyone wanting the fuller picture of how football's commercial side developed alongside the sport itself. For more on how the English game's finances evolved through this same period.
What hasn't changed, through pools coupons, betting shops, and now apps, is the basic instinct behind all of it — football has always given fans a reason to have something riding on the outcome, however small. The format keeps changing. That part hasn't.
©The Football History Boys, 2023
The real turning point came with the football pools, which kicked off properly in the 1920s. Littlewoods and Vernons built entire businesses around punters trying to predict match results across a full weekend of fixtures, filling in coupons by hand and posting them off in hope of a payout that could genuinely change a working family's life. At their peak, pools coupons were being filled in by something like ten million people a week in Britain. That's a staggering number for a betting product with no odds boards, no live updates, nothing beyond a printed fixture list and a pencil. The pools weren't just a gambling product either — they funded huge chunks of Britain's sporting infrastructure for decades, which is a detail that tends to get lost.
Bookmaking itself has a messier history running alongside the pools. On-course betting had existed for horse racing long before football caught up, but street bookmakers were operating in a legal grey area for most of the early twentieth century, since off-course cash betting wasn't actually legalised in Britain until the Betting and Gaming Act of 1960. Before that, illegal bookies ran a genuinely enormous shadow industry, with "runners" collecting bets door to door and police mostly turning a blind eye unless something forced their hand. Once betting shops became legal, they spread fast — thousands opened within just a few years, and football quickly became one of the core products alongside racing.
What's changed most since then isn't really the appetite for betting on the game, it's the format. The move from betting shops to online platforms in the 2000s did to football betting what online banking did to physical branches — it didn't kill the old model overnight, but it made it optional for a huge chunk of the audience. In-play betting came next, letting fans wager on what happens in the next five minutes of a match rather than just the final score, which changed the entire pace of how people actually watch games.
Interestingly, the US went through its own version of this shift much more recently and much faster, after federal restrictions on sports betting were lifted in 2018. Where Britain took decades to move from illegal street bookies to a fully regulated high street industry, several American states went from zero legal sports betting to a fully-fledged, app-based market in the space of a few years. For readers curious how that newer market stacks up, there's a decent breakdown covering what US sportsbook is the best across the operators that have emerged from that expansion. A look at the National Football Museum's own archives is worth a visit too, for anyone wanting the fuller picture of how football's commercial side developed alongside the sport itself. For more on how the English game's finances evolved through this same period.
What hasn't changed, through pools coupons, betting shops, and now apps, is the basic instinct behind all of it — football has always given fans a reason to have something riding on the outcome, however small. The format keeps changing. That part hasn't.
©The Football History Boys, 2023
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