Why pre-match betting models don't require 24/7 operations during a World Cup
Stefan Williams is Senior Product Manager at The Pools, the British football pools brand founded in 1923. He joined the company in late 2024 after four years in product roles, including a stint at LiveScore. SiGMA News spoke to him during the World Cup 2026, the kind of high-volume tournament that tends to expose weak points in any betting operator’s infrastructure, to ask how a business older than the concept of iGaming itself handles a global event built for products that didn’t exist when it launched.
Why a prediction-based product doesn’t feel World Cup pressure
What emerges first is what doesn’t happen: no war room, no overnight scramble, no engineer refreshing a dashboard as fixtures land across three time zones. Asked what operational challenges arise when a tournament throws multiple kickoffs a day at wildly different hours, Williams says the team simply doesn’t carry the same pressure other operators do: “We don’t have the same demand to operate 24/7, as Classic Pools does not require any in-play activity from our players.” By 6 a.m., the system has already automatically settled all results, checked successful predictions, and processed prize payments. According to Williams, the absence of operational strain reflects planning that began the previous summer, when the roadmap was locked in, well before a ball was kicked.
A product whose mechanics predates modern iGaming
The Pools launched in 1923, long before betting apps or even the concept of iGaming existed. Williams describes the job less as building something new than as adapting an existing format. Classic Pools asks players to select, from a fixed list of fixtures, those they believe will end in a score draw: where both teams score (such as 1–1 or 2–2, rather than 0–0). Eight correct predictions win the £3 million jackpot. The domestic calendar follows a consistent pattern of two or three competitions each week, amounting to around 120 matches a year, numbers that haven’t shifted much because the format doesn’t need them to. Williams explains it simply: “We present to our players a list of fixtures; all they need to do is pick which ones they think will end in a score draw.”
During the group stage, players received coupons consisting only of World Cup matches. Once teams started getting eliminated, there weren’t enough World Cup games each week to fill a coupon, so the team added regular league matches to complete it. The group stage itself, with so many matches happening at once, made it easier than usual to build a strong coupon.
Serving two very different generations of users at once
The tension Williams keeps circling back to isn’t the tournament; it’s that some Pools users have held a coupon for decades, while the roadmap also has to be built for people who’ve never heard of one. “Some of our players have been with The Pools for more than 60 years,” he says, and the balancing act that follows means testing takes longer than it might elsewhere: “It’s an area where we tread carefully with the utmost respect because both categories of player deserve that,” Williams added.
Williams says the company is starting to use AI, but only for parts of the business that are already digital, like the website and app. The traditional, paper-based way that many older players use to fill in their coupons is staying exactly as it is. “Our offline processes work well, and there is a familiarity there for those players,” he explains. The company frames this as a deliberate choice rather than a system it hasn’t gotten around to updating. So the company keeps both systems running side by side, each moving at its own pace.
Engagement is up, but the World Cup isn’t the only reason
William noted that engagement is up compared to June last year, and he points to two main reasons: more World Cup matches meant more material to build coupons from, and a campaign that brought back players who’d stopped using the product. He wants that uplift to carry into the new Premier League season, the closest he comes to identifying the real challenge facing any tournament-driven spike: growth generated by a global event doesn’t automatically survive the return to a normal domestic calendar.
He also raises the geography of this particular tournament. With the tournament being hosted across North America, a number of fixtures fell at what he calls “antisocial times for a UK audience,” the kind of scheduling problem that would ordinarily reduce engagement for a live betting product. Classic Pools sidesteps it structurally: all activity happens pre-match, so a UK viewer doesn’t need to be awake for a fixture to participate. “Our player activity is all pre-match, so our players can participate how they want, when they want.”
What the World Cup period seems to confirm, more than any single number, is that a pre-match, non-live model carries a structural advantage during exactly the kind of event that puts the most strain on in-play infrastructure elsewhere in the sector. Whether that advantage holds once the boost provided by the tournament and the reactivation campaign both fade, under a normal domestic calendar, remains to be seen. That question of durability extends to how the numbers themselves should be read: any account of rising engagement also sits within a tighter compliance environment, as remote operators have been required, from February 2025, to run financial vulnerability checks once a customer’s net spend exceeds £150 in a rolling 30-day period, part of the wider reform that followed the 2023 Gambling Act Review White Paper.
This article was first published on the Spanish SiGMA News page on 10 July 2026.
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