ABSTRACT
There are 210 footballing countries in the world and most have punters betting on football in some form. However, very few of these countries have followed the private commercial approach that the British football pools, such as Littlewoods and Vernons, adopted. In many cases, the state set up some football scheme, although many restricted gambling on sport and football betting altogether. Many seem to have flourished but then declined because of three developments – the rising variety of gambling opportunities on sport, the creation of a national lottery and the rise of online gambling. As a result, from the 1990s, both national and international football pool betting, in all its forms, has declined rapidly. It is difficult to detect the influence of the business approach of the British football pools in most of these international developments because gambling and the football pools tend to have been shaped by the peculiar political and social features of the society in which they operate. This means that the system that developed in Britain was rare, though not unique, and one should not expect parallels elsewhere. The globalisation of football gambling and football pool gambling, in all its forms, owes more to football itself than to the example of the British football pools.
