Having a ball: the nostalgia at the heart of The Pools’ revamp

For a brand that celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2023 and is considered a British institution, The Pools has been on quite the journey. It began life as Littlewoods Football Pools from a small office in Liverpool in 1923, which remains the location of its headquarters to this day. Three friends, John Moores, Colin Askham and Bill Hughes, each invested £50 to start a venture where punters completed coupons with their predictions for score draws from a list of football matches. The trio printed 4,000 coupons and distributed them outside Manchester United’s ground, Old Trafford.

Back in the day, entries were traditionally submitted via post or an agent, with Pools’ representatives going door to door collecting completed coupons. To keep players interested in new games, Littlewoods unveiled ‘Spot the Ball’ in 1973, which started out as a traditional newspaper promotion, where you had to guesstimate the precise position of the centre of a football in a pitchside photo with the object removed from the shot.

At its peak in 1994, The Pools had over 10 million players staking £20m a week. Although it enjoyed many years of success as the “original millionaire makers”, it suffered a hammer blow following stiff competition from the launch of The National Lottery in 1994.

In a bid to remain relevant and strengthen the offering, gambling supplier Sportech, which had bought Littlewoods Gaming in 2000, acquired rival pools firms Zetters in 2002 and Vernons in 2007 to create what was then known as The New Football Pools.

A decade on, in 2017, Sportech sold the business to private equity firm OpCapita. A year later, new brand The Pools was launched to provide a full digital experience to customers, including sports betting and casino games.

The premise of the Classic Pools game today involves players predicting 10 score draws from a coupon of 49 fixtures, with customers awarded points based on the score outcomes. The players’ best eight results are added up, with score draw games awarded the maximum points, and the highest point scorers share the cash prize. Other products from The Pools include Goal Rush, a ‘both teams to score’ pool, and Lucky Clover, a fixed-odds derivative lottery bet based on Ireland’s six-ball lottery.

Now in 2025, and with a digital transformation project underway, the company unveiled a rebrand and new marketing campaign on 26 February centring on the nostalgic nature of the product. The fresh identity and logo is supported by an out-of-home marketing and radio advertising campaign using ‘The Parents’ concept to appeal to a new audience, with a TV and video-on-demand (VoD) campaign to follow in March.

Creative agency Amigo Partnership, which The Pools CEO James Arnold worked with during his time at LiveScore Group, collaborated with the Liverpool-based firm on the new campaign.

The Pools also unveiled a new digital membership from 1 March that allows players to choose their preferred game and set a monthly spend limit of £10, £15 or £20. It also includes member benefits such as free-to-play games and free bets.

The marketing campaign and rebrand follow the completion of a major tech migration project, with the operator switching to GiG for its online sportsbook and igaming platforms in Decem­ber 2024. Last year, The Pools also began the move of infrastructure and business critical systems from on-site to the cloud, which is scheduled to complete this year.

EGR: As CEO of The Pools for over two years now, how have your previous industry positions, such as at Sportingbet, Betway and LiveScore, shaped your vision for where you are today?

James Arnold (JA): The Pools is unique in that it’s an iconic British brand. Our vision has always been to lean into that existing heritage while delivering the very best digital experience for the modern igaming player. My previous roles were very much digital-focused, and the success of those brands ultimately came from building the strongest teams and developing the best products and experiences for players. I’m passionate about working with good people and creating environments where those people can thrive, and that’s what we’ve tried to do [at The Pools] in the last couple of years.

EGR: Your LinkedIn profile says you are ‘leading the digital evolution of the historic Football Pools brand’. How are you able to honour the legacy of the company with your new multi-channel strategy?

JA: You really feel the heritage of the brand when you’re in Liverpool – it’s really loved by the people here. The Pools means so much to so many people. But we also want to engage with a new audience while remaining loyal to our traditional customer base, which is difficult. So, we’ve modernised our technical infrastructure and improved our product portfolio, which has led to several changes including a new gaming platform, a new website, a new brand identity and our new marketing campaign. The Pools has always been built on a joy of playing, the thrill of winning and celebrating both big and small successes. The new multi-channel strategy allows our customers, new and old, to enjoy a range of innovative products to play and win.

EGR: Last year the company’s technical infrastructure was modernised, culminating in the move to a new gaming platform, GiG. Can you tell us more about that?

JA: GiG is a huge part of it but it’s not the only thing. GiG was a strategic decision. Changing gaming platform is a big undertaking, but it was one we felt was necessary to realise our ambition. That delivers improved player experiences across traditional gaming products such as sportsbook and casino games. We’ve also had to invest in and modernise the technical aspects of our infrastructure. The business was traditionally all on-premises and quite legacy, some of it, so we’ve had to do a full technical lift and shift and move everything into the cloud to create a flexible, modern environment to give us strong foundations for growth.

EGR: Do you see much cross-sell from the traditional Pools offering into your other verticals like live casino or slots?

JA: This is a really interesting one because, again, it’s a key part of our strategy. Historically, the answer is no, the core Pools subscription business was predominantly offline, with very limited opportunities for customers to cross-sell to an online environment. The two were completely separate. There was the offline business and a small online business.

However, enabling cross-sell into a digital world is a big part of our strategy, and this was one of the reasons why we migrated to GiG. GiG’s technology has helped us create a digital environment that we think honours both the traditional business by allowing customers to continue to play The Pools products they know and love but also delivering a world-class digital experience on the igaming side. That ability to enable cross-sell easily and efficiently is a really important part of our strategy going forward.

EGR: How are you investing in product innovation to appeal to the younger, digitally native generation?

JA: That’s a question we focus a lot on. Everything we’ve been doing over the past two years has been designed to modernise the offering of The Pools while staying true to the history and heritage of the brand. We have some hugely popular Pools games, but we’ve focused on how to digitise these games, essentially for the first time. This has led us to reposition the traditional Pools ‘subscription’ in a digital environment as The Pools ‘membership’. It will enable existing customers to manage their games and subscriptions online, cross-sell into a host of igaming products and enjoy exclusive membership benefits such as weekly free bets and access to exclusive free-to-play games.

The digital membership has been built to coincide with our marketing campaign. It’s a core part of our strategy and something we’re really excited about. It’s taking the existing concept of subscription – which The Pools has done for tens of years and is quite unique in the industry – and developing that into a digital environment and modernising the offering for a digital, tech-savvy customer.

EGR: At the end of 2024 you announced key senior appointments, with Chris Williams joining as head of product and Matt Knowles as head of CRM. How will this new team help The Pools achieve its 2025 digital transformation plan?

JA: I’m a huge believer in the importance of good people, and that’s been key to my strategy since coming in. In addition to those you mentioned, there’s also Sharon Wright in marketing and our COO Steve Talbot. We’ve had a real investment in people within this time. And under that team, we’ve migrated to a new platform. We talked about GiG, but we’ve also moved to a new CRM platform [with Xtremepush in August 2023] and launched a new website in January. All of these people have a lot of industry experience and knowledge, which allows us to hit the ground running and get up to speed quickly and efficiently.

EGR: How has the appointment of Sharon Wright as marketing director, with her background working for sports brands such as Nike and Reebok, helped drive the vision of your new marketing campaign?

JA: I’ve purposely bought in a lot of industry experience because there’s been a lot of technical challenges where we need to be able to quickly identify issues and solutions and run very quickly. At the same time, I’ve been aware that you don’t want to stack the deck too heavily with people who look and behave exactly like yourself and have the same experience. So, there was a very conscious decision that on the marketing side we wanted to bring in somebody with fantastic experience but not necessarily with gaming experience, to give us a broader view on what can be done.

Also, I looked at this brand in a different way to some of the other brands I’ve worked with; it’s not as large and the products are different. Therefore, I wanted to take a different approach on the marketing side, and that led us to want to invest more heavily in brand because there’s a real story with The Pools. The brand is iconic, and there’s a lot you can do around storytelling and building on that existing brand affinity.

In the two years I’ve been here, I’ve never known a brand where whenever someone says, ‘Oh, I remember The Pools because of X’ or ‘I know it because of Y’, I’ve only ever heard positive brand sentiments, which for what is essentially a gaming brand is really, really rare. It just seems to hold a very positive and quite nostalgic place in people’s memories, and I think that’s predominantly because a lot of people’s memories of The Pools are linked to their parents.

EGR: What inspired ‘The Parents’ theme of your new campaign?

JA: When researching the campaign, we identified two clear target segments of potential customers. Firstly, the over-35 cohort, who will have some knowledge of or affinity with The Pools products and brand. Even if it’s not a direct experience, it’s often via memories of their parents playing the game or filling out the coupon together. Then there’s the below-35 cohort who will have no knowledge of or affinity with the brand. So, we knew those groups are two quite different targets. The theme came from working with our agency, Amigo, that came up with this concept to unlock the power of the brand; this brand affinity that exists and reminds people of those experiences and memories with their parents. It was a really strong way to go. We’ve been incredibly pleased with the results of the campaign and are really excited to see how it does.

Our rebrand is looking to appeal to a new generation of customers, and that means both of those cohorts I mentioned. It leverages our unique place in British cultural heritage while also establishing an approach for 2025 and beyond.

EGR: What is the thinking behind the new brand mark, The Play Maker?

JA: The Play Maker is the name we’ve given to what I call the ‘graffiti X’ next to the brand name. It’s critical to the rebrand, and it’s also the link to our heritage because customers used to play the Pools with a paper coupon which they would mark with an X. The Play Maker is a direct reference to that traditional way of playing but it feels fresh and modern.

EGR: What’s next for The Pools in terms of growth and expansion?

JA: The Pools is a British institution. It’s over 100 years old – I don’t think there’s any other gaming company that can say that. There are no brands out there in the industry with the same history and heritage. We’re confident that this relaunch will generate growth and expansion. Our TV and VoD campaign is coming in March, which we think will further broaden the scope and appeal of the brand. We will also be leveraging our new membership proposition, which I’m very excited about, and I think that is something that, again, is quite unique within the sector.