A History Of Football Betting

The history of football games cannot be mentioned without a brief history of football betting. Football games can be traced down to half a century ago, when people, listened to football games on the radio.

As far back as 1927, BBC for the first time aired professional football games, when Arsenal played Sheffield United. From then onward things took off quickly by the time it was 1931 over a hundred football games have been aired live per season.

This development led to a drop in attendance of football games in the stadium as criticized, causing a ban on all football fixtures. The ban was till after world war 11.

Unfortunately, there is no accurate explanation or data to back exactly when football betting began, however, some scholars have affirmed that it began with the advertisement of football on media.

Before the 1960s, betting was illegal and was only being indulged into by criminals in their hidings and streets,

Bookmakers, like Littlewoods, were among the first to offer pool betting services as far back as 1923. It differed greatly from what we have now. It uses the multiple scoring systems, that is the most popular points is awarded for each home win, draw and away if guessed right.

Alternatively, the weekly pool was also used then. This was introduced by Littlewoods and proved to be popular. These types of pools still exist till today and are quite different from the modern online betting we know and are used to. It was typically a point-based scoring system, where stakers are awarded points based on how close to the result up to 12 games was to actual score.

After the 1960 Gambling Act, all this change as the opening of betting shops began to spring up all over the country. At this juncture, gamblers could legally bet on football in other ways than just pool bets.

Betting was only still possible in the shop and politicians were making efforts to push it to the dark, making sure no awareness was created for its existence.

It was not until the late 1980s that the football betting began to enjoy popularity with the introduction of new legislation in 1986, which ensure that betting shops could now have brighter interiors and television for live matches.

The birth of online betting can be traced to the explosion of the internet. New school bookies such as Betfair and Bet365 began to spring up offering entirely betting operations.

Punter could now comfortably bet from their home.