EU referendum: Vote Leave offers £50m prize for Euro 2016 football predications

Brexit campaigners are targeting football supporters in a bid to outline how much it costs the UK to be part of the EU. Vote Leave are offering a staggering £50m ($73m) prize for whoever can guess the outcome of each game of the Uefa European Championships in France.

The free-to-enter competition (you must be 18 or over to take part) takes inspiration from Warren Buffett's March Madness basketball competitions in the US and Vote Leave are funding the prize via an insurance policy taken out with underwriters at Lloyds.

If no one predicts all the results, then the Brexit campaign is offering £50,000 for the person who gets the most consecutive games correct from the first game of the tournament that starts on 10 June.

"Every day we spend at least £50m on the EU – that's £350 million a week, which is enough to build an NHS hospital," said Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave.

"We want as many people as possible to know that we are sending life-changing sums to the EU every single day, so we're giving them a chance to win it. It's a bigger prize than any one person has ever won on the National Lottery.

"This is the chance of a lifetime − just imagine what you could do with the £50m we send to the EU every single day. We want everyone to have the chance to win the sort of money most people can only dream of, unless they are a banker or a Euro MP."

But Vote Leave's £350m figure has been contested, with pro-EU campaigners pointing out that it does not include the UK's rebate from the EU. With the rebate taken into account, Britain would spend under £250m a week on its membership of the 28-nation-bloc.

Sir Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the UK's Statistics Authority, has also stressed that Britain's £19.1bn contribution to the EU should not be considered a "net contribution."

In a letter to Cummings, he said: "The UK's official gross contribution for 2014 before the application of the rebate was £19.1 billion. As I have made clear previously, this is not an amount of money that the UK pays to the EU each year. The full £19.1 billion is not a net contribution."

UPDATE: IBTimes UK has spoken to bookmakers Ladbrokes about the competition.