Premier League and Championship players have been out of action for three long months, but one three-man team has never gone away. In fact, these three former footballers – Ian Callaghan, David Sadler and Tony Green – have never been busier. Football was halted in March, but the pools panel have continued to meet every week to predict the results of all of the postponed fixtures.
According to the panel’s predictions, Liverpool would have won eight of their remaining nine fixtures, only dropping points in a draw with their closest rivals, Manchester City. The panel thought Liverpool would have won the league with 107 points, beating the record tally of 100 points City set two years ago. At the other end of the table, they forecast that Norwich, Aston Villa and Bournemouth would be relegated, with Watford surviving in 17th place. They thought Leeds and West Brom would earn automatic promotion to the Premier League, with Fulham, Millwall, Nottingham Forest and Brentford entering the play-offs.
“We are presented with stats, recent results, home and away form, and you also have your own feel,” says Callaghan. “The hardest dilemma is when you have two teams which are fairly equal. You take a lot into consideration before you make a decision. But then the classic example is Liverpool losing at Watford 3-0. Liverpool have had a record-breaking season, on course for the league and they’ve been playing brilliantly, with Watford fighting relegation. You look at the stats and everything points to a Liverpool win and yet you get a 3-0 home win, which just shows how unpredictable it can be.”
Forecasting results is near impossible, but the three men on the panel know the game more than most. Callaghan, whose 857 games for Liverpool between 1958 and 1978 make him the club’s all-time appearance holder, won five league titles as well as two European Cups. Sadler won two league titles and one European Cup with Manchester United in the 1960s.
The third member of the group, Tony Green, had a shorter playing career, but his life experience is no less impressive. The former Albion Rovers, Blackpool, Newcastle and Scotland player was only 25 when an injury ended his career. He ripped the cartilage and ligaments in his right knee and his recuperation was not helped by the club insisting he continued training in a splint, running up and down the terraces at St. James’ Park. Having studied maths at the University of Paisley while on Albion Rovers’ books, he took up teaching and had a 30-year career in education. He has been on the pools panel since 1976.
The pools go back much longer than that. They were were launched nearly a century ago, in 1923, when the only legal way to bet on sport was through a bookmakers at a racecourse. The concept was simple – a list of fixtures was printed on “a coupon” and punters had to choose eight matches they thought would end in score draws. Three points were awarded for each score draw, two points for a scoreless draw and only one point if the match was won. The money collected was put into “a pool” and those with the highest points would win the prize money – after the pool companies took a 10% levy.
At their height in the 1960s, around 14 million people played the pools every week, but the launch of the National Lottery in 1994 dented their popularity dramatically. As many of the people who took part in the pools had little interest in football, simply choosing their numbers randomly, the lottery provided a more accessible way of winning life-changing sums of money. For those who selected games on the basis of their football knowledge, online betting dealt another major blow to the fortunes of the three main pools companies: Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters. The pools have tried to change with the times, going online and developing more sophisticated games, but only 250,000 people now play regularly.
The pools have survived various bumps in the road – including one that led to the establishment of the pools panel. When hundreds of games were called off during the Big Freeze in the 1962-63 season, pools companies faced the prospect of losing business so decided to introduce a panel of experts who would forecast how the games would have finished had they been played. The awful weather played havoc with that season’s FA Cup, which suffered from a scarcely credible 261 postponements. The third round was not completed until the middle of March and the Birmingham v Bury tie was postponed 14 times. With so many games postponed, the pools had to react.
So, on 26 January 1963, the first pools panel met in the swanky surroundings of the Connaught Rooms in central London. The panel included former players Tom Finney, Tommy Lawton and Ted Drake as well as former referee Arthur Ellis. Using the collective know-how of people who had been involved in the game at the highest level for many years made sense, but there were also places on the panel for people from outside the world of football.
Captain Douglas Bader, who lost his legs while flying yet went on to become an RAF hero during the second world war, was on the original panel alongside the flamboyant Conservative MP Gerald Nabarro and, perhaps most surprisingly, John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon – the First Baron Brabazon of Tara – who made his name as a pilot, was the first holder of a flying licence in the UK and was in Winston Churchill’s cabinet during the second world war.
It is not clear why this Tory grandee qualified to sit alongside Finney and Drake. He was certainly not chosen for his diplomacy or belief in the concept of the pools panel. At their first meeting, he declared that forecasting results was “a farce”.
Despite Brabazon’s early reservations, the panel has continued to operate every season. Indeed, they have been meeting more regularly in recent years, now in a solicitor’s office in Liverpool. The group convenes not just when bad weather intervenes, but also when TV dictates that any fixture is moved from its traditional slot on a Saturday afternoon.
World Cup winners Roger Hunt and Gordon Banks were regulars on the panel for three decades, serving alongside various football outsiders. The Marquess of Bath chaired the group from 1967 to 1987. In the 1990s, Lord Peston – an economist, Arsenal fan, member of the House of Lords and father of ITV’s political editor Robert Peston – was chairman. Callaghan joined the panel last year, just in time for Liverpool’s push for the title this season. It is apposite that Liverpool’s first Premier League title has been predicted in an office in the city by their record appearance holder. Now the team have to go out and prove him right.
Richard Foster’s new book Premier League Nuggets is out now and you can follow him on Twitter.