The history of soccer betting games: From pools to fantasy football

The first football pools: a working-class invention

Football betting games are older than most people assume. The story starts in 1923 in Birmingham, when John Moores and two friends printed a few thousand coupons and handed them out at a Manchester United match. The format was simple: predict the outcome of a list of matches, post the coupon back, and share a prize pool with the other winners. Within a decade, Littlewoods Pools had become one of the largest private companies in Britain.

The appeal was easy to understand. Working-class fans could not legally place fixed-odds bets on football until 1961, so the pools offered a rare legitimate flutter on the game. A penny stake could, in theory, return a life-changing sum. By the 1950s, roughly ten million Britons filled in a coupon every week, which made the pools one of the most widely played gambling products in Europe.

The mechanic was also a clever workaround. Because pools paid out from a shared pot rather than against bookmaker odds, courts treated them as a game of skill, not a wager. That legal distinction shaped almost every football prediction game that followed.

Toto and the European model

Germany, Italy and the Nordic countries built their own versions in the 1940s. The German Toto launched in 1948 in Berlin, and the famous Toto schein, a paper coupon with thirteen fixtures and three boxes per match for home win, draw or away win, became a Saturday ritual in millions of households. Italy’s Totocalcio, introduced in 1946, ran on the same logic and at its peak generated more revenue than the league itself.

The toto schein development through the 1960s and 1970s tracks the spread of state lotteries across continental Europe. Most governments quickly nationalised football pools and ringfenced the proceeds for sport and culture. In Germany, a large share of Toto revenue still funds amateur clubs and the DFB youth pyramid. The product survived not because the odds were generous (they were not) but because it became part of the weekly furniture of being a football fan.

By the late 1980s, pools faced two structural problems. Fixed-odds bookmakers had opened up to football and offered faster payouts. Television was also changing how fans related to players, not just clubs. The stage was set for a different kind of prediction game.

Fantasy football is born

The exact origins are contested, but the version most historians cite is Bill Winkenbach’s 1962 American football league in Oakland, a hand-scored game built around individual player statistics. The football, soccer, equivalent took longer. The first widely played version appeared in 1991, when journalist Andrew Wainstein launched Fantasy League in the United Kingdom and persuaded The Daily Telegraph to run it as a newspaper game.

The mechanics were modest by modern standards. You picked a squad inside a budget, posted your team to a PO box, and waited for a weekly leaderboard printed in the paper. By the 1994-95 season, more than a million people were playing through various newspaper versions, and the format had a name that stuck.

The shift from pools to fantasy is the single most important moment in the history soccer prediction game timeline. Pools asked you to guess match results, an exercise in luck and form-reading. Fantasy asked you to assemble a team and manage it across a season, which rewarded knowledge and patience. The competitive surface widened from ninety minutes to nine months.

If you want to see how that distinction plays out in modern products, the comparison between fantasy formats and management simulations is a useful starting point. The two genres share a vocabulary but reward very different skills.

The internet rewrites the rules

The tipping game digital change began in earnest around 2002, when the Premier League launched its official Fantasy Premier League website. Suddenly transfers could happen in real time, scoring updated within hours of a final whistle, and mini-leagues let friends and colleagues compete inside a closed group. Participation numbers exploded. FPL crossed one million players by 2007 and passed eleven million for the 2023-24 season.

Online play also forced game designers to think harder about fairness and engagement. Wildcards, free hits, triple captains and bench boosts arrived as ways to keep casual managers in the race deep into spring. Picking the right week to use them turned into a genuine sub-game, and entire content categories grew up around chip timing and wildcard strategy as managers tried to squeeze a few extra points out of double gameweeks.

The other shift was data. By the mid-2010s, expected goals, expected assists and underlying minutes were public, free, and updated weekly. Fantasy managers stopped relying on form tables and started building spreadsheets. Communities on Reddit, Twitter and dedicated podcasts pushed the median skill level higher every season, which is part of why current FPL strategy reads more like portfolio management than fandom.

Daily fantasy, video games and the manager genre

While season-long fantasy grew, two adjacent genres pulled players in different directions. Daily fantasy sports, popularised by DraftKings and FanDuel in the United States from 2012 onwards, compressed the calendar into a single matchday and added cash prize pools. The format struggled to break through in European football because the regulatory picture was messier, but it reshaped how product teams thought about retention and weekly cadence.

The other pull came from video games. The Football Manager series, descended from Championship Manager in 1992, sold the deepest simulation in the genre. EA’s FIFA, now EA Sports FC, sold the broadest. For a generation of fans, the line between playing a club and managing one blurred. A reader curious about that side of the hobby can scan the Football Manager video game rundown for current options.

The evolution fantasy football has gone through is partly about software and partly about audience. Today’s player might run an FPL team on Monday, draft a daily fantasy lineup on Saturday, and play a save in FM on Sunday evening. The three formats compete for attention but rarely for the same hour of the week.

What today’s prediction games inherited

Modern products carry traces of every previous era. Prize pools and shared jackpots come from the pools tradition. Squad budgets and transfer windows come from the newspaper fantasy games of the early 1990s. Live scoring, chip mechanics and mini-leagues come from the first wave of online platforms. Expected-goals overlays and machine-learning projections come from the data era of the last decade.

The product map is now wide enough that choosing a game is its own decision. A survey of online fantasy and prediction formats shows how far the category has stretched, from free season-long leagues to short-form weekly contests to head-to-head draft formats with twelve managers and a snake order.

The thread that runs through

What ties a 1930s Littlewoods coupon to a 2026 FPL squad is not technology. It is the basic pleasure of having a stake in a match that does not involve your own club. Pools let a Wolverhampton fan care about an Aberdeen versus Hibernian fixture. Fantasy lets a Liverpool supporter cheer for a Brighton midfielder because she captained him this week. The toto schein and the wildcard chip are doing the same job a century apart.

That continuity is also why the genre keeps finding new players. Each generation gets a version built for the technology of its moment, and the rules keep adjusting to match how fans actually watch the game. Pools have shrunk, but they have not disappeared. Fantasy has grown, but the next format is probably already being prototyped somewhere. The history of soccer betting games is, in the end, a history of fans looking for one more reason to care about the second half.