This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Last month I wrote about how racing misses so many opportunities to market the sport, usually focusing on anything but racing itself. Right on cue, here comes a new video from Great British Racing, the sport’s marketing arm. It’s part of a five-month, £3.62 million marketing campaign.
I can confidently assert that it’s the only video associated with racing — the only anything associated with racing, in fact — that begins with someone saying “Hey, girl”. And that’s the high point of the 40-second ad, which focuses on pretty much everything about a day at the races except what actually is the point of racing for most fans: horses and betting.
I’m being unfair to the people behind the ad because they’re hardly the first to ignore betting as one of the key drivers behind racing’s popularity as a spectator sport. Every year, over five million racing fans visit one of the 59 racecourses. Betting isn’t just the glue that binds fans to racing; it’s the lifeblood of the sport. Without the funding produced by the Horserace Betting Levy (10 per cent of bookies’ gross profits), racing wouldn’t exist. This year it’s expected to amount to £108 million.
But such has been the momentum and success behind the drive to portray gambling as inherently dangerous and wrong (I wrote in the May issue about how the public health lobby has got its claws into gambling), betting is treated as some sort of shameful secret by almost everyone involved in racing.
So-called “affordability checks” — in reality a series of barriers which make it as difficult as possible to place a bet online — have had a huge impact. Anyone who bets more than £150 in a 30-day period is now subject to credit reference agency vetting and has to submit bank statements and payslips to prove they can afford to bet.
The trajectory is devastating, like a meteor accelerating towards its target
As a result, betting turnover on racing has fallen by £3 billion in real terms over the last two years — a decline of more than 25 per cent. The trajectory is clear and devastating, like a meteor accelerating towards its target that will cause total destruction. Unless that meteor is diverted, I cannot see how racing will exist in anything remotely like its current form in a decade.
A central problem is that racing has allowed itself to be lumped together with all forms of gambling — especially online casinos, which is where almost all the actual problems with gambling stem from. Even on the Gambling Commission’s own figures for problem gambling (which are disputed as being slanted towards exaggeration), the rates for horseracing are the same as for lottery scratchcards — tiny, in other words. Yet racing is treated in the same way as online casinos.
This is in large measure the fault of racing’s panjandrums, who have both failed to grasp the existential seriousness of the threat and supinely failed to confront the utter unsuitability of those in charge of the Gambling Commission. Not a single member of its board has any experience or knowledge of racing.
The only worthwhile approach to the Gambling Commission is to face it full on as a deadly adversary. Racing should be using its friends in government, politics and public life to expose the Commission and demand a clear-out of the current members. It is objectively crazy that the quango which regulates the funding of an industry worth £4.1 billion a year to the economy, provides £300 million into the Treasury and employs around 100,000 people, has not a single member who has had any experience in or knowledge of that industry. It is instead comprised of people who appear to actively despise the punters whose bets provide that funding.
Now there is a further threat to racing, with the government consulting on a flat tax rate for all online gambling, scrapping the current recognition that for tax purposes, racing should not be lumped together with online gaming. They are different: gaming is about pure luck, whereas the appeal of racing betting is that it involves judging form, going, weather, track bias and odds. A flat tax would push bookies away from racing and further towards the very gaming that poses problems of addiction.
The way this is heading, it is difficult to see how racing will exist in ten years’ time.
