What is the biggest football bet ever won?

Many people dream of winning a life-changing amount of money from betting, but very few people actually manage to achieve that.

Placing incredibly ambitious football accumulators on Saturday afternoon is almost a tradition in the UK thanks to the multitude of games played in the Premier League and across all of English football.

Of course, the chances of winning a long-odds bet are represented in those odds, and Goal has taken a look at some of the bets that defied that and were some of the biggest winners in history.

The biggest football bet ever won came back in 2001 when Mick Gibbs, a roofer from Staffordshire, landed a £500,000 windfall after placing 30p on a bet with odds of 1.6 million to one.

The 15-fold accumulator had a 0.0000006 per cent chance of coming in and consisted of a host of outright winners as well as individual matches across 2000 and 2001.

Gibbs correctly predicted the winners of all four professional English football leagues and the Conference - as the National League was known at the time – as well as the correct winners of cricket’s County Championship and rugby union’s Premiership.

By May 2001, the bet only needed Bayern Munich to beat Valencia in the Champions League final and, after a 1-1 draw, the Germans won a marathon penalty shootout to ensure Gibbs won the bet.

This was not the first time Gibbs had hit an impressive nine-fold accumulator, having also landed a 62,000/1 shot two years prior which netted him £157,000 from a £2.50 stake.

The biggest single football bet ever landed was on the famous 5,000/1 offered by bookmakers on Leicester City winning the Premier League in 2015-16.

Claudio Ranieri’s men pulled off one of the biggest sporting shocks in history by winning the title, with one punter making over £72,000 from a £50 stake after cashing out in March.

Had the punter let his bet run for just a few more weeks, it would have paid out at £250,000.

Another backer of the 5,000/1 price, Leigh Herbert of Leicester, placed £5 on the unlikely event and cashed out £2 of that for £5,600 before the remaining £3 returned £15,000 in May – a total windfall of £20,600.