The UK football pools company Sportech launched a major £5.5 million advertising and promotional campaign this month aimed primarily at driving traffic to its New Football Pools website at Football Pools.com.
 
Marketing manager Jon Sheehy says that the goal is to re-energise the betting pastime by capitalising on the trend toward social gambling developing strongly among 18 to 45 year-old males.
 
"We are confident we have everything in place to put the pools back where it belongs, at the heart of football in this country," Sheehy said.
 
Adding to the momentum, Sportech has secured an online distribution deal with the mass circulation daily newspaper the Daily Mail, joining it to the previously announced media partnerships with the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror, FourFourTwo and Footy Mad. The deal will see the Daily Mail website carry the two newest products from The New Football Pools gaming suite, Premier 10 and Footy 15.

The life of the pools shows just how far the goalposts have shifted. Back in 1961, the year that footballers' £20 salary cap was abolished and Fulham’s Johnny Haynes became the country’s first £100-a-week player, Viv Nicholson famously vowed to ‘spend, spend, spend’ the £152k won on the pools by her Castleford miner husband, Keith. That’d be £2.2m in today’s money. Viv spent half the money on parties, hairdos, cars and clothes. The rest, as George Best would have put it, she just wasted.

But nowadays, as the lottery vies with gambling websites, only 700,000 people do the pools. What was once a national institution has declined to such an extent that all three main pools operators - Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters - are now owned by one company.

It’s hoped the massive advertising campaign will help move the Pools back into the national limelight. A position it held solidly for the best part of a century.

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