FOOTBALL COUPONS.

Evening Star, Issue 20033, 26 November 1928, Page 6

FOOTBALL COUPONS.

Among a certain type of newspaper in Britain the football forecast competition has been used to an astonishing degree for the boosting of circulation. The amount of leisure time spent by the populations of the big industrial towns in filling in coupons for crossword puzzles and the probable results of sporting events of various kinds is evidently very great. The popularity of those competitions is anything but a good advertisement for the opportunities the big towns afford for the workers to obtain healthfhl recreation, or for tho ability of the average among the lower classes to find relief from the monotony of toil. Every week one Sunday paper published in Manchester has been issuing coupons giving a list of thirty-six Soccer games, and to the person who names the winners (or correctly forecasts a draw) of tho twenty-four games to which his guess is restricted a prize of £20,000 is offered. In ono week in October the full amount named was divided among 691 competitors, each of whom had made no mistake in tire twenty-four matches attempted, But tho following week tho highest number of correct solutions was only nineteen out of twenty-four, and hut three competitors achieved this, dividing £I,OOO between them. Mathematically tho odds against correctly forecasting twenty-four results are nearly 819 thousand million to one. The police, considering these! competitions a gamble, proceeded against ono newspaper in Sheffield and secured a conviction. The newspaper appealed, but the Court of the King’s Bench

Division upheld the magistrates, holding that the dement of gambling arose from the frequent purchase of newspapers solely for the sake of the coupons. The effect of this decision has been the general cessation of these competitions, and as a concomitant a lingo drop in circulation figures, showing how fictitious those latter have been because of tile big prizes offered for guesswork. In a recent issue of the ‘Printers’ Register,’ a trade periodical, it was stated that the ‘ Sunday Express,’ which does not adopt this means of boosting its net sales, turned on an accountant to deal with the chances of a coupon buyer to win the money. That gentleman reported that “ to make certain of giving all the correct results one must buy nearly 819 thousand million copies of one of these competition journals. The cost in twopenccs of these 819 thousand million newspapers, if printed, which they aro not, would bo nearly 7,000 million pounds.” As the result of later investigations the ‘ Sunday Express ’ says that hundreds of thousands of returned copies are being sold bo couponeers, not on Sunday, but on Monday or Tuesday, on trade terms or at even lower rates. It adds: “In Manchester many agents cut out the coupons for their customers and sell tho couponlcss copies in bulk to waste paper merchants. In Edinburgh a group of agents are soiling batches of twenty-five copies to single customers. In Brighton cases aro reported of one customer who buys fifty-two copies'of a coupon paper, one who buys seventy-eight, one who buys 101, one who buys twenty-six, and one who buys eighty. One customer buys 110 back pages, and the news agent sells the residue as waste, All over the country couponeers arc buying coupon papers in dozens and halfdozens. A hairdresser in Swansea buys coupons in bulk for his customers. His dealings aro on a large scale—more than 500 per week. In one case the news agent sent 250 couponless papers to the local workhouse!”