The Pools: Why Football Will Always Be a Predictions Game

The ways football fans make predictions have changed beyond recognition. The reason they make them hasn’t. Stefan Williams, Senior Product Manager at The Pools, explores an instinct that has survived generations and continues to inspire new formats.

Before a ball was kicked this season, millions of football supporters had already decided what was going to happen. League winners had been chosen. Relegation candidates identified. New signings declared either inspired or disastrous before they had completed 90 minutes.

A few weeks in, some of those predictions will look astute. Plenty more will have been quietly forgotten.

Supporters have never had more information on which to base those calls. Team selections, injuries, expected-goals figures and transfer news can all feed into a prediction before a match has begun. Yet none of it has curbed our inclination to call what happens next. 

Perhaps that’s because making a prediction changes how we watch. Once you’ve committed to an outcome, you have something to prove. 

The same instinct, new formats

Prediction markets are now among the industry’s biggest talking points. Their mechanics and commercial model are very different from our Classic Pools product, but their rise shows that people still want to form a view before an outcome is known.

Classic Pools has spent more than a century testing that proposition. What interests me isn’t that a game created in the 1920s has somehow anticipated every format that followed – it didn’t – but its central mechanic still needs remarkably little explanation. Pick the fixtures you think will finish as score draws, make your selections and see how the weekend unfolds.

The job today is not to make that prediction more complicated, but to ensure the experience around it reflects how people now follow football. 

People make their Classic Pools selections in different ways, and that variety is part of the appeal. Some take a considered approach, studying form, recent results and the fixtures before making their picks. Others rely much more on instinct, football knowledge or simply feeling a particular game “has a draw in it”. 

What do you change after 100 years? 

Managing a product with more than a century of history presents an unusual challenge. Some things belong to another era; others remain fundamental to the game. Knowing the difference matters. 

The paper coupons and collectors familiar to previous generations have given way to an online experience. Supporters also approach a weekend armed with far more information at their fingertips, while fixtures are spread across the week and results are available instantly.

But making your selections in advance and then watching the football test your judgement remains central to Classic Pools. How customers reach those decisions may have changed; the satisfaction of getting them right hasn’t. 

There can be a temptation in product development to equate innovation with adding more. This isn’t necessarily the answer here. Football consumption and player expectations have moved on, even if the central premise of Classic Pools has not. Removing friction and improving the digital experience can be more valuable than adding another layer to a game that people already understand. 

At the same time, we can offer players a more modern alternative through products such as Goal Rush. Rather than identifying score draws, players select fixtures where both teams will score. It’s a simpler concept but still draws on the same basic behaviour of Classic Pools, with players looking across the fixtures, making their predictions and seeing how the football unfolds.

The summer’s World Cup was also a useful test. Classic Pools had to work across a tournament very different from the domestic calendar, without the familiar rhythm of the football weekend. Yet the task for any player remained the same: work out where the score draws would come. 

We saw a number of new subscribers join during the World Cup, which was really encouraging. The focus now is on the building that momentum, keeping those players engaged while continuing to attract new players throughout the domestic football season.

The next prediction

Football will keep finding new ways for supporters to make predictions. Some will last, others won’t, and technology will change how those predictions are made. None of it, of course, will make football itself any easier to call. 

Classic Pools will have to keep changing too. We don’t know how supporters will be following football another generation from now, but they’ll almost certainly still think they can predict it. 

Most weekends, football will still have other ideas.