The Football Pools Sold To Sportingbet Founder

One of the oldest sports betting firms, The Football Pools, is being sold to Sportingbet founding firm, Burlywood Capital. The deal is priced at £97.25 million and is a result of the Football Pools sliding revenue.

The Football Pools is 93 years old and was founded in 1923. It once boasted over 10 million customers. Their current condition, however, is far from good as they have only about 300,000 users. When it was started, betting pools were conducted manually with vendors giving out tickets in stalls and doing door to door rounds.

The introduction of the National Lottery affected The Football Pools greatly. With more and more companies going online, manual betting was no longer big. The Pools managed to transition to online methods but faced stiff competition from other companies. In the first half of 2016, they’ve created a revenue of only $18.5 million, which is a decrease compared to the same time period last year.

Sportingbet was founded by Mark Blandford in 1997 as an online gambling company in the UK. The bookmaker was then acquired by GVC Holdings and William Hill in 2013 to the tune of $650 million. Sportech, the owners of The Football Pools, announced that they had entered into an agreement with Sportingbet last week. Their current focus seems to be on the US gambling market where the largest gambling losses are recorded. On average, US citizens lose around $150 billion per year, compared to the UK where that number is a meager $25 billion.

Acquisitions and mergers have become a major part of the current betting industry. The biggest merger seems to be that of Paddy Power and Betfair earlier this year, for an estimated sum of $6.5 billion. The same month, GVC Holdings bought bwin.party for $1.7 billion. Ladbrokes and Gala Coral are also set to merge in the coming months.