Just weeks after they relaunched their decades-old brand, the Football Pools has been hit with a significant fine by the UK Gambling Commission.
The Liverpool based firm, whose revamp earlier in 2025 saw them take the plunge online, has been found guilty of breaching their licence requirements; specifically failing to uphold social responsibility and anti-money laundering requirements.
The breaches, which took place in 2022 and 2023 before the operator’s relaunch, have resulted in Football Pools Ltd agreeing to pay a £375,000 settlement, which will be donated by the regulator to socially responsible causes.
Significant Losses
After conducting a compliance assessment of the Football Pools Ltd’s operations, the Gambling Commission upheld a verdict that their online service – as opposed to their land-based ‘paper’ offering – had breached a series of their licensing obligations.
The regulator revealed their belief that the Pools’ anti-money laundering policy was too overly reliant on financial triggers in identifying customers that were wagering large sums of money in a short space of time.
The investigation also revealed that the firm didn’t have a ‘hard stop’ in place to immediately put a halt to the spending of customers that had been vetted for their course of funds – instead, they were able to keep betting until a manual review had been performed, which wasn’t always conducted in a ‘timely manner’.
The Gambling Commission also found the internal systems of Football Pools Ltd to be inadequate in flagging up customers that warranted safer gambling messaging and interaction.
They did, however, recognise that the operator had taken big strides forward in improving their back office systems, which helped to mitigate the scale of the sanction dished out.
The Commission’s director of enforcement, John Pierce, commented about the investigation: “This case demonstrates that the licensee’s approach to anti-money laundering risk profiling and monitoring was insufficient, allowing high-risk customers to continue gambling before completing necessary enhanced due diligence checks.
“In addition, the licensee was over-reliant on financial alerts that whilst preventing significant losses meant it failed to engage in a timely manner with some customers who were potentially experiencing other markers of gambling-related harm, such as time spent gambling and high velocity spend.”
Pierce and his team have been busy of late. The penalty handed to the Football Pools Ltd comes barely a week after the regulator sanctioned Corbett’s Bookmakers for a series of social responsibility and AML failings of their own.
The firm, one of the oldest betting brands still operational in the UK market, was hit with a £686,000 fine after a number of their customers were able to bet large sums in a short space of time with no intervention – including one punter that wagered £23,000 in just ten days and another who was able to stake £47,000 without any proof of funds documentation being taken.
Major Rebrand
The original Littlewoods Pools (Photo via Betting Sites Offers)
This should be a time of great celebration for Football Pools, who have revamped their service for the modern age and relaunched earlier this year.
This is a bastion of the British betting industry, established as far back as 1923. At one time, as many as 14 million people played the Pools every week, staking a collective £50 million on their coupons.
The object was to predict who would win a game: the home team, the away team or a draw (coupons covering correct score and both teams to score were later introduced). Players could pick out multiples and then win from the pool of prize money collected – minus a 10% ‘management fee’. In theory, the Pools’ business model was bulletproof.
But the Football League didn’t like the fact that people were betting on their games outside of recognised bookmakers, and so they stopped publishing their fixture lists – preventing the Pools from creating the postal coupons which were sent out to punters.
However, governmental support for the Football Pools ended the stand-off, and the company – and its rival pool betting operators – continued to thrive.
Even postponed games couldn’t bring down the Pools; a committee of experts, known as the Pools Panel, would adjudicate which results they would expect from abandoned matches – on one weekend in 1963, some 38 games were cancelled due to the weather, which saw the Pools Panel predict the outcome of each and punters paid out accordingly.
As with all pool betting operations, the success of the Football Pools lives or dies on the amount of prize money it can attract – although the Pools was most popular in the 1970s, eighties and nineties, one player in 2010 won a whopping £3 million when they were somehow able to predict eight 2-2 draws across English, Scottish and Spanish football.
The Football Pools has struggled to compete with traditional bookmakers after the explosion in online betting sites and apps, but a complete rebrand in 2025 has seen the company relaunched with their own website offering pools coupons and traditional fixed odds wagering.
