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Nobody could add up a football pools coupon until Saturday’s matches were over. Players marked their forecasts in advance, but the points came from what happened on the pitch, and a match that was never played left a gap that somebody had to fill.
That dependence on results shaped the British Saturday for decades: the Treble Chance and its hunt for score draws, the classified results at five o’clock, and a panel of football experts created in the frozen winter of 1962–63. Then, in November 1994, a very different kind of draw arrived.
The Treble Chance and the score draw
The Treble Chance arrived in 1946. Players picked eight fixtures from a list, hoping for draws. “We were all looking for eight draws, each of which would garner three points”, a Yorkshire Post writer recalled in 2010, and 24 points made a perfect line.
Other results scored less. When FourFourTwo explained the modern Classic Pools game in June 2022, its coupon listed 49 matches and counted each player’s best eight results on this scale:
| Result (Classic Pools, 2022) | Points |
| Score draw (1-1, 2-2 and so on) | 3 |
| No-score draw (0-0) | 2 |
| Home win or away win | 1 |
That is why the score draw mattered. It is the result worth most, so a perfect 24 needs eight of them. Players choose the matches, but the week’s football decides how many score draws there are.
Five o’clock and the classified results
BBC radio’s Sports Report, first broadcast in 1948, read the classified results in its 5pm Saturday slot for decades. John Webster, its first results reader, let his voice rise for a win and drop for a defeat, and the Daily Telegraph later explained that the varied intonation helped people “keep their eyes on their coupons”.
James Alexander Gordon used the same method on radio from 1974 to 2013. On BBC television’s Grandstand, Len Martin read the football results until his death in 1995, when Tim Gudgin took over. Pools players checked their lines against these broadcasts, or against the Saturday evening sports papers.
The ritual outlasted the pools’ peak. In August 2022 the BBC dropped the full classified read from Radio 5 Live’s Sports Report, saying results would still be given through the afternoon and on BBC One’s Final Score.
The winter that stopped the fixtures
The Met Office calls the winter of 1962–63 the coldest since 1740. It began just before Christmas 1962, and much of England stayed under snow every day until early March.
Football all but stopped. The FA Cup third round, due on 5 January 1963, took 66 days and 261 postponements to complete. 11v11’s match records show Bolton Wanderers playing on 8 December 1962 and not again until 16 February, and Manchester City going from 15 December to 23 February: a 70-day gap between matches in each case.
Birmingham City waited just as long, which the PA news agency describes as a top-flight record. Every call-off left a blank on the coupon, and the pools companies grew anxious about what the postponements were doing to their business.
How the Pools Panel worked
The pools companies’ answer, the Pools Panel, went into full operation on Saturday 26 January 1963. Its experts included the former England players Tom Finney, Tommy Lawton and Ted Drake, the former Scotland full-back George Young and the former World Cup referee Arthur Ellis.
Meeting behind closed doors at the Connaught Rooms in London, the panel decided a result for each postponed match, and its verdicts were announced on BBC television’s Grandstand. A Swedish pools firm, The Scotsman later noted, produced its missing results by random draw instead.
The panel lasted. The Scotsman reported in 2010 that it had once sat only from October to April, and only when many matches were off, but now sat all year, because weather or television postponed something almost every week. In March 2022 Rachel Brown-Finnis became the first woman to sit on it.
When the draw became a lottery
The National Lottery etc. Act 1993 set up the National Lottery, and its first draw took place on 19 November 1994, a Saturday. The opening draw was held live on television, and the official National Lottery Good Causes timeline says 22 million adults watched.
A lottery line needed no fixture list, no classified results and no panel: the numbers came out whatever the weather. Looking back in 2010, The Scotsman listed the National Lottery first among the main causes of the pools’ decline.
Lottery draws are the opposite of a coupon, with no form to study. UK online casino fortunegames.com has lottery guides on draw times and odds for Lotto, EuroMillions, Thunderball, Set For Life and UK Powerball, and in each of those games no system changes the odds.
The pools always depended on the football. When the fixtures froze, Britain did not draw the missing results at random; it asked football experts instead.
18+ only. Fortune Games is a UK online casino with no connection to The National Lottery or the football pools. Results in any draw are random, so decide what you can afford before you play. Free, confidential help is available from the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133.
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