This Week in Football History: The 1915 betting scandal

Football was suspended during WW1

In today's look back at football history, Adrian North discusses the 1915 betting scandal which rocked English football's greatest rivalry and threatened the integrity of the game itself...

December 27, 1915 - Despite becoming the fiercest rivalry in English football, Liverpool and Manchester United once fixed a game.   

The biggest rivalry in English football remains Liverpool v Manchester United, despite the recent emergence of Manchester City. An intense rivalry in which Liverpool fans gloated over their northwestern neighbours for two full decades through the 70s and 80s, until Sir Alex Ferguson's United allowed the red half of Manchester to return the favour from 1992 onwards.  

It may thus come as a surprise that Liverpool and United colluded in the one thing that today would cause rioting across the Mersey and through greater Manchester - in 1915, during the last season of WW1 era football, the two clubs fixed a match between each other.   

By April of 1915 almost all avenues of entertainment were being suspended across the UK as the First World War was ramping up across Europe. On April 2, 1915, just one month before the Football League was suspended for four years, United beat Liverpool 2-0 in a game that would see the Red Devils stave off relegation by a solitary point.   

Reports of the game recount a distinct lack of commitment on the part of Liverpool, which included a second half missed penalty, and in the aftermath of the game the bookies noticed an unusually large number of bets placed on United to win 2-0, a scoreline that was running at odds of 7-1.   

Suspicions raised, the FA launched a formal inquiry and quickly discovered that seven of the involved players, four from Liverpool, and three from United, had met up in a series of meetings at a Manchester pub over the course of the previous month.   

Liverpool's captain, Jackie Sheldon, a former United player was the man with the plan and he, along with fellow team-mates Bob Pursell, Tom Miller and Thomas Fairfoul, along with United players Enoch West, Arthur Whalley and Sandy Turnbull agreed that United would win 2-0, with a goal in each half.  

This is exactly what happened, with United's George Anderson scoring both goals, and all seven players profited a nice sum of change from all the subsequent 2-0 bets that had been placed.  

Over the next seven months The FA pressed forward with an incredibly drawn out and seemingly pedantic inquiry that eventually found all seven players guilty of profiting from bets placed on this match, and on December 27, 1915, six months after League football had been suspended, the 1915 British football betting scandal came to a close as all seven men were handed lifetime bans from football for "undermining the whole fabric of the game and discrediting its honesty and fairness".

Somewhat ironically for the seven men, they were brought down from the inside as Liverpool player Fred Pagnam, who tried desperately to score for Liverpool in the final minutes, and United goalscorer George Anderson both testified against the seven soon-to-be guilty men.   

Of course, the bans were of little relevance in December 1915 as all seven men had been called up by the British military to aid the growing war effort. All of the men barring Enoch West, who unsuccessfully appealed his ban, had their lifetime bans rescinded after serving in the army during the next two years. Sheldon, Whalley, Pursell, Miller and Fairfoul would all pick up their boots again in 1919.

Sadly, Sandy Turnbull was  killed in 1917 at the Battle of Aras and his body lies somewhere beneath the fields of Northern France. A tragic ending for a man who was one of the very first Manchester United legends -  having helped them to their first FA Cup and league victories in the first decade of the 20th century.