Somewhere in Britain this weekend, a parish hall committee will hold its AGM: fourteen people, a tin of biscuits, and a treasurer's report itemising £340 on hall insurance and a stern question about £4.50 missing from the raffle float. It will all be minuted, and available to anyone who asks. British racing moves £194.7 million a year and cannot manage that. Calling it a golf club is generous. A golf club at least lets the membership see the accounts once a year. This is closer to a manor: an estate worked by tenants who take all the risk, run by a handful of hereditary interests, and explained to the rest of us via a blog post from the estate office once the harvest is already in.

So Where's the Model?

That harvest report arrived on 27 August. Richard Wayman, the BHA's director of racing, announced the 2027 fixture list, 1,440 fixtures, eighteen fewer than this year, and explained that cutting further would cost "several million pounds" in lost media rights and levy income. Behind that figure, he said, sits "detailed modelling." He published none of it, not the assumptions, not the population projections, not a footnote. Every landlord is entitled to keep his accounts private. What is odd is what the model is apparently for. It forecasts one thing, and one thing only: the rent.

This is also where "detailed modelling" stops being modelling and starts being liturgy. A real forecast gets published, checked against what happened, and revised when wrong. This one has never done any of the three: say the same sentence about horse numbers every August, watch the numbers fall anyway, change nothing but the figures, and you are not modelling, you are reciting a loop of faith. A forecast with revenue as its only input is not cautious, it is structurally blind, and the dimensions it never modelled, welfare, population, the crowd, do not politely wait their turn. They arrive anyway, usually as a headline nobody in the estate office saw coming. That is what a rude awakening looks like from the inside.

None of this is a data problem. Proform has logged a field-by-field breakdown of every British race since 2004, sliced by field-size band, on a commercial server, doing quietly for subscribers the decade-view analysis head office has never published itself. If an independent platform can hold that history, "detailed modelling" was never short of raw material. It was short of the will to join population, welfare and revenue into one picture instead of three arguments that never have to agree.

Going For Growth, Whatever That Means

The same blog also introduced what Wayman calls the sport's "growth agenda," Going for Growth to anyone who prefers three words to fifteen. Growth, he explained, would come from a connected system, an integrated strategy, a focus on customers, continually improving welfare, and advancing regulation and sustainability: five warm nouns, read like the ingredients on a shampoo bottle, none numbered or modelled against the fixture-list decision two paragraphs later. The only line that got a number was the one protecting revenue, which rather gives away which bit of "growth" was ever going to survive contact with a spreadsheet.

Wayman also admits the process is still decided a year at a time, and that a proper multi-year approach is now "high on the agenda" of the incoming chair, Simon Cox, who has not started yet: a plan to have a plan, drawn up by the man who will not be drawing it up. The same blog even blames falling turnover partly on the financial risk assessments the BHA itself has spent two years defending, which have pushed punters into the black market. A growth strategy that lists its own policy among the causes of decline is not a strategy. It is a confession wearing a lanyard.

To be fair, the agenda is not empty of numbers: a £25,000 Pointing Bonus, a Go North Series climbing to £50,000 by 2028, and an Elite Mares' Scheme that has genuinely helped double top jump broodmares to just over 300 in a decade. Credit where due, somebody there can do arithmetic when the number is small enough. It is only the big ones, several million pounds of them, that never get shown their working.

What Happens to the Horses in Ten Years?

Nobody has published a model answering the real long-term question, which is not "will the rent hold" but "will there be a sport left to collect rent from." Field sizes fell to 8.90 runners on the Flat and 7.84 over jumps in 2025, both under the 11 to 12 Weatherbys says you need to keep the lights on. The foal crop fell 9.5 per cent last year alone, and 27 per cent since 2008. Run those lines forward for once, instead of only checking them backward: what does that population look like in a decade, and what does a fixture list built for a bigger one do to the horses left carrying it, more runs, less recovery, less depth in every field? Nobody knows, because "detailed modelling" was never asked. It exists to defend this year's rent roll, not to say whether there is a tenant left to farm it.

The BHA's own cheeriest number, six consecutive quarters of rising attendance, only sharpens the joke: a sport getting better at filling the stands has not been thought worth a forecast of its own, while a sport losing horses gets "detailed modelling" the moment money is at stake. Somewhere there is a spreadsheet that can price a fixture to the pound and cannot say what a growing, younger crowd is worth to keep.

Meet the Other Barons

Racecourses are the easiest target, but they are not the only barons on this estate; the fuller list of market interests with a stake in the rent roll runs to bookmakers, media-rights broadcasters and bloodstock sales houses, and every one of them gets modelled while the tenants below do not. Bookmakers hold a fiefdom of their own: Britain returns roughly 0.6 per cent of betting turnover to the sport generating it, against 8 per cent through France's PMU, a rent so low it would embarrass an actual absentee landlord. Media rights are a third fiefdom, split between two black boxes: Racecourse Media Group at least discloses its £118.4 million payout to shareholder tracks in 2025, credit where due; the Sky-backed TRP publishes nothing comparable.

The tenants get less, and the horses get nothing at all: no vote, no fiefdom, not even a starting stall with their name on the lease. Owners fund the enterprise and carry all the risk: 92 per cent never earn back what they spend, and only 28 per cent of yearlings turn a profit for their breeders, genuinely feudal terms, work the land and keep whatever the lord leaves behind. Punters pay the tithe, a compulsory levy on every bet, and get shown the door the moment they are good at their job. The body meant to represent the tenants has, on plenty of recent evidence, found it easier to argue the landlords' case than ask what its own members need. That is a fiefdom, not a members' club.

Who Actually Holds the Keys?

Who runs the manor house itself? Board minutes are not published in any meaningful form. The Audit Committee operates entirely out of view, answerable to the board rather than the tenants whose money it oversees. Ask for the minutes and you are told they are not for circulation; ask what the Audit Committee found and you are told the process was thorough. Even the promised fix, a proper long-range plan, has already been handed to the one man who cannot be blamed if it is late: he has not moved in yet.

So What Would a Modern Sport Actually Do?

Abolish the pretence that a single, unpublished, one-dimension spreadsheet counts as strategy, and build one system treating horse population, welfare and revenue as the same problem, not three arguments nobody has to reconcile. Publish that model in full, not a conclusion, the working, as a rolling forecast including injury data, retirement outcomes, and what a given field-size floor does to a shrinking foal crop, so "sustainability" means more than a word in a bullet point. Publish attendance and engagement projections that treat six quarters of growing, increasingly young crowds as the future rather than a rounding error beside the betting-turnover column. Publish board minutes, or at least an honest account of what the Audit Committee actually audits. And put a punter and a working owner in the room when the fixture list is set, since it is their tithe and their horses paying for the argument either way.

Do all that, and British racing might finally look like a modern sport managing a difficult patch, rather than a manor being run for whoever still holds the deeds. Feudalism, as a system of government, was abolished in England the better part of seven centuries ago; British racing has had rather longer than most industries to catch up, and has spent the time building a working replica instead. Until then, a parish hall treasurer somewhere is still explaining a missing £4.50. Try asking the BHA board for the same courtesy about several million, and watch how fast the tour of the estate ends.