It was played by ten million people and was making a fortune for winners and donating millions of pounds to good causes long before the National Lottery. The army of people who collected football pools coupons on the nation’s doorsteps became friends to the families who huddled in front of the radio or television every Saturday teatime to find out the scores.

Jackpot winners became famous. Few will forget Viv Nicholson who in 1961 vowed to “spend, spend, spend” the £152,000 - about £2.2 million in today’s money - scooped by her husband, Keith, a Castleford miner. And spend she did, blowing half the money on parties, hairdos, cars and clothes.

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.

Today, those names will be consigned to the history books and relaunched under a fresh identity - the New Football Pools. Sportech, the company that has bought the three, will set the ball rolling tonight on a £6 million promotional campaign that will include pools advertisements on television and radio and in bus shelters and rail stations. It will also introduce two simpler games to run in parallel with the main 49-match draw. Premier 10 will give punters the chance to forecast the outcome of the weekend’s top ten Premier League matches, while Footy 15 will comprise fifteen leading fixtures from the Premier League, the Championship, the Scottish Premier League and the top European leagues.

Times Archive, 1967: After winning a pools fortune...

Mrs Vivian Nicholson was one of the few for whom a large win turned later into misfortune

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While the main draw will continue to offer jackpots of £1 million or more, the new games offer a much larger number of smaller prizes. Premier 10 will offer a £25,000 jackpot and Footy 15 will pay out a maximum £100,000.

Sportech has also increased the ways punters can play. In addition to the 11,000 coupon collectors, the company has teamed with technology companies, Scientific Games and Orbis, to set up a website, footballpools.com, while signing a deal to put pools on the website of 888.com, one of the biggest internet gambling operators.

Pools will also arrive in the high street via tie-ups with Ladbrokes, which will offer the game in more than 1,750 betting shops, and Pay-Point, which has payment terminals in more than 14,000 shops.

The global appeal of Premiership football has attracted interest in pools overseas. There are about 35,000 players outside Britain in such far-flung outposts as Mauritius and the Caribbean, and Sportech is in advanced discussions over a deal to take pools to Asia. Its deal with 888.com will also target an international audience.

In a nod to the syndicates run by lottery players, and fantasy football, the new pools will introduce private leagues, in which friends or colleagues can pit their match-forecasting skills against each other over the internet.

Another game that will move online will be Littlewoods’ Spot the Ball, which claims that it is already the world’s biggest such competition with more than 50,000 players a week.

Ian Penrose, chief executive of Sportech, said that the changes were crucial to the survival of football pools. “In its heyday, there were around ten million players every week - a third of the population. Within three weeks of the launch of the National Lottery in November 1994, some 2.5 million players had been lost to pools.”

One thing that will stay the same is the Pools Panel. Come rain or snow, the three wise men of football pools - the England World Cup winners Gordon Banks and Roger Hunt and the former Scotland player Tony Green - will continue to meet to debate the day’s postponed matches.

Draw days

1923 Littlewoods Football Pools founded

1925 Vernons Pools launched

1933 Zetters Pools begins

1963 Pools Panel sits for first time

1986 The first £1m jackpot

2000 Sportech buys Littlewoods for £161m

2002 Zetters is sold to Sportech for £1.35m

2007 Sportech swallows Vernons for £51m

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