Bingoals: The Football Pools, Reinvented

Bingoals is Match Bingo’s Saturday game, and if you remember the football pools, the idea should feel pretty familiar. 

The pools gave you a coupon of fixtures to follow across the afternoon, so suddenly a score from a match you’d normally ignore could matter just as much as your own team’s result. Bingoals taps into that same feeling, but the game itself is much simpler. 

Your card has fifteen teams on it and you need every one of them to score. You’re not predicting results or trying to call the final score, you’re just waiting for goals to come in across all the Saturday fixtures.

How did the football pools work?

The football pools were based around a coupon of fixtures. Players made predictions across the matches before kick-off, then waited for the Saturday results to come in to see how those selections had done. Instead of following one game, the coupon gave you a reason to keep an eye on scores from all over the place.

That was a big part of the appeal. Your own team might have been playing at home at three o’clock, but whatever was going on elsewhere could matter just as much to the slip in front of you.

You don’t need to have actually played the pools to understand why the idea stuck around. Football already gives people enough reasons to obsess over Saturday scores, and a pools card simply added a few more.

Bingoals borrows that broad idea rather than the actual pools game. Match Bingo has no connection with The Pools, and Bingoals isn’t meant to be presented as the same product. The comparison is just a useful way of explaining it. 

How Bingoals works

A Bingoals card has fifteen teams, and you need every single one of them to score during the Saturday fixtures included in the game. 

They don’t need to win, and honestly, they don’t even need to play particularly well. A team can get battered 5-1 and still have done everything your card asked of them. A heroic 0-0, on the other hand, is completely useless.

That really changes who you end up rooting for during the afternoon. You might have fourteen teams safely ticked off while one stubborn side is still sitting there without a goal. That’s when your afternoon starts getting a bit tense.

Cards start at £1, and the prize pot grows depending on the number of people playing.

Bingoals is one of three ways to play on Match Bingo, alongside Live Games and Quick Games. You can see how they all differ on our games page.

Bingoals vs. the football pools

The old football pools were about predictions across a fixture list. Bingoals doesn’t ask you to predict the result of anything.

The card has already given you the teams, and all you need from each one is a goal. And that means the final score can be almost irrelevant. If one of your teams scores in the second minute and then concedes four, they’ve already done their bit as far as you’re concerned.

It also spreads the game across the Saturday fixtures rather than tying you to one ninety-minute match. There will probably be teams on there that you barely think about from one week to the next, plus the occasional rival you’d normally be perfectly happy to watch struggle, but for one Saturday afternoon, your allegiances may need to be slightly more flexible.

How to play

Find Bingoals in the Match Bingo app on Saturday and purchase your card. You’ll have fifteen teams on it, spread across the day’s fixtures, and you need every one of them to score.

As soon as one of the teams on your card finds the net, it’s marked off automatically and you’re done with them for the day. It doesn’t matter whether they go on to win comfortably or lose 4-1. That first goal is all you need from them.

The card can move pretty quickly once the Saturday games get going, especially if several teams score within a few minutes of each other. You don’t need to update anything yourself, so you can dip back in as the scores come through and see how many are left.

The aim is to get all fifteen teams on the scoresheet. Cards start at £1, and the prize pot grows with the number of people playing, so the amount available can change from one Saturday to the next.

If you want a look at how all Match Bingo cards work, our how it works page runs through the basics.

Download the Match Bingo app, see who you’ve drawn and settle in for a nail-biting afternoon where one goal can make all the difference.