Betting Shops Put £50m Into Racing — What Happens If That Money Starts Disappearing?
There has been plenty of noise around betting shops this week, particularly following the government’s plans to give local councils greater powers over what opens on their high streets. Inevitably, that has produced the usual arguments from both sides, but buried underneath all of it was one figure that I thought deserved considerably more attention from racing.
Entain chief executive Stella David says the company’s Ladbrokes and Coral betting shops contribute around £50 million a year to British horseracing through levy and media-rights payments.
Whatever your opinion of bookmakers — and regular readers will know I’m certainly not here to defend everything they do — £50 million is a substantial amount of money for a sport that already spends a great deal of time worrying about its finances. More importantly, it exposes just how dependent British racing remains on an industry that is itself going through considerable change.
That’s the part of this week’s argument I think racing needs to pay attention to.
Racing and the bookmakers are still joined at the hip
We’ve been hearing for years that racing needs to become less dependent on bookmakers, and I don’t think many people would disagree with that. The problem is that saying it and actually achieving it are two very different things.
According to David, Entain’s retail estate alone contributes around £50m annually when levy and media-rights payments are combined. There are approximately 2,300 Ladbrokes and Coral shops, and those shops don’t simply provide somewhere to place a bet. They show racing throughout the day, pay for the pictures and keep the sport visible to people who might otherwise have very little contact with it.
That’s why I think the debate becomes much more complicated when we start talking about large numbers of betting shops disappearing.
It would be very easy for racing to stand on the sidelines and say this is a problem for the bookmakers. Unfortunately, it isn’t. If the bookmaker loses a shop, racing potentially loses part of the income generated by that shop as well.
And we’re no longer talking about a hypothetical situation.
Hundreds of betting shops have already closed since last year’s budget, and we’ve also seen bookmakers beginning to pull back their spending elsewhere. Long-standing race sponsorships have disappeared, marketing expenditure is being scrutinised and some of the concessions customers have taken for granted are becoming less generous.
None of those things happens in isolation.
This isn’t about defending bookmakers
I think this distinction is important because discussions like this quickly become polarised.
You can believe betting companies should be properly regulated, that customers should receive stronger protection where necessary and that local communities should have a meaningful say over their high streets, while also recognising that British racing has built a financial model that relies heavily on money generated by betting.
Those positions aren’t contradictory.
What concerns me is that we appear to be having a major conversation about changing one side of that relationship without hearing nearly enough about what replaces it on the other.
If taxation and regulation make parts of the bookmaker business less profitable, companies are going to respond. They might close shops, reduce sponsorship, tighten prices, remove promotions or cut spending elsewhere. We can argue about whether those responses are justified, but we can’t pretend they won’t happen.
We’ve already started seeing them.
For racing, therefore, the question shouldn’t simply be whether bookmakers are exaggerating the consequences of higher costs. The more important question is how exposed the sport would be if even part of what they’re warning about turns out to be correct.
Where does the replacement money come from?
This is where I think British racing has a much bigger problem than the current argument over betting shops.
Imagine that the number of shops continues falling steadily over the next five or ten years. At the same time, online operators face higher taxation, sponsorship budgets remain under pressure and customers become increasingly frustrated by restrictions, weaker promotions and less attractive prices.
Where does racing replace the income?
The obvious answer is that the sport needs to diversify, but we’ve been saying that for a long time.
There are certainly opportunities. Racing can improve the way it sells international media rights, make better commercial use of its data, attract sponsors from outside gambling, develop stronger digital products and, perhaps most importantly, build a much better direct relationship with the people who actually follow the sport.
But none of those is an instant replacement for tens of millions of pounds.
That’s why the £50m figure from Entain caught my attention. It gives us a glimpse of the scale involved from just one operator. If British racing genuinely wants a future in which it isn’t so dependent on bookmakers, it needs to start explaining what the alternative model actually looks like rather than simply agreeing that diversification would be a good idea.
The bettor shouldn’t be forgotten either
There is another part of this that I think racing sometimes overlooks: the person actually putting the money down.
When bookmakers face increased costs, those costs don’t necessarily remain with the bookmaker. They can eventually reach the customer through tighter prices, fewer concessions, smaller promotions or a generally poorer betting product.
We’ve already seen evidence that racing prices are becoming less generous. Analysis from the Horseracing Bettors Forum recently suggested that the overround per horse on UK racing has increased since July 2025, meaning that, broadly speaking, bettors are being asked to play into less favourable markets.
That matters.
If you continually make horse racing a worse-value product, people don’t have to keep betting on it out of loyalty. They can bet on football, play other products or simply spend their money somewhere else entirely.
For a sport that depends so heavily on betting-generated income, making its core betting product progressively less attractive seems a dangerous road to travel.
And this is where the interests of racing, bookmakers and bettors become far more connected than much of the public argument suggests.
Racing needs its own plan
The betting industry will obviously defend its interests. Entain doesn’t want shops closing, just as other operators don’t want higher taxes eating into their profits. Their warnings should therefore be examined rather than simply accepted.
But racing needs to do exactly the same thing for itself.
Instead of being caught between bookmakers and government every time taxation or regulation changes, the sport needs a much clearer idea of how it intends to fund itself over the next decade.
Perhaps that means a reformed levy. Perhaps international media income becomes more important. Perhaps racecourses need to become less reliant on betting sponsorship and more imaginative about attracting companies from other industries. Perhaps racing finally needs to treat its audience as customers worth building a direct relationship with rather than people who will simply turn up, subscribe and bet forever.
In reality, it will probably require a combination of all of those things.
What doesn’t look particularly sustainable is continuing to depend heavily on bookmaker money while simultaneously watching the traditional bookmaker model contract.
John Mills’ View
I don’t think the lesson from this week’s argument is that racing should rush to the defence of betting shops. That’s far too simplistic.
The lesson is that British racing needs to understand just how vulnerable its current funding model remains.
If Entain’s shops alone are putting around £50m a year into the sport, then any serious contraction of the retail betting market has consequences. Add reduced sponsorship, pressure on media-rights payments and bookmakers trying to recover higher taxes elsewhere, and the numbers can start becoming uncomfortable very quickly.
For me, that’s the conversation worth having.
Not whether bookmakers are good or bad. Not whether every betting shop deserves protecting. And not another round of the same tired arguments between racing, government and the gambling industry.
The question is much simpler:
If British racing wants to become less dependent on bookmakers, what is it going to become more dependent on instead?
Until the sport has a convincing answer to that, £50 million is a number it can’t afford to ignore.
John Mills Racing
