Sixty races, and one Champions Day

Ascot staged racing's finest afternoon and the rights model buried it under 35 other races.

Champions Day at Ascot on Saturday 17 October offered seven races, four of them Group 1s and the richest, the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, worth £623,810 to the winner, a card to which the whole sport might have been expected to doff its cap and stand still. It did nothing of the kind. While the best horses in Europe went about their business on the Berkshire turf, 35 more races went off at seven other courses between Ascot's first at 12:55 and its last at 16:35, 60 across the day at eight meetings.

At 15:20 the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes was due away, and the programme had thoughtfully arranged six more inside 25 minutes: Catterick at 15:25, Limerick at 15:30, Stratford at 15:34, Newton Abbot at 15:37, Leopardstown at 15:40 and Market Rasen at 15:45, at gaps of three, four and five minutes. It was the Last Night of the Proms staged in a foyer where seven other bands were tuning up and the ushers were selling tickets to every one.

Nobody planned it, which is the charitable reading. The uncharitable reading is that somebody did, and that it is called the media rights model: transmit everything, all the time, and one race is bound to be popular. Ascot dressed the shop window with care and the sport then surrounded it with seven stalls, each with a man shouting.

On 3 September the BHA published the 2027 fixture list: 1,440 fixtures, 18 fewer than 2026, 52 of them Premier Racedays, and a volume of racing left largely unchanged. Richard Wayman, the BHA's Director of Racing, made growth his theme: "Our vision is for a thriving, growing sport." The supply chain shows little sign of it.

In my reading the decision had nothing to do with growth. It was a short-term defence of media-rights and levy income, which he says are "inextricably linked to the volume of fixtures and races", and the cost lands, I suspect, on thinner fields, stretched jockeys and breeders.

Racecourses drew 5.03 million people in 2025, while betting turnover finished the year 4.3% below 2024 and 10.7% below 2023. People come through the front door while the till empties at the back, for occasions rather than the daily grind.

The BHA blames affordability checks and the black market, and may be right. But each list is set to protect next year's income and the income keeps falling, which in my view is short-termism with a long-term price: managed decline, one fixture list at a time. It is the restaurant that answers falling takings by adding pages to the menu.

I found no evidence that adding fixtures raises turnover, and in the first nine months of 2025 turnover per race rose 2.7% at Premier fixtures and fell 8.6% at Core. The plan rests on faith, which is fine in a chapel but poor for a business distributing £194.7 million in prize money.

The balance of the books

Racing is paid largely through the betting channel, and three pressures are narrowing it.

A levy of about £110 million for 2025/26 shows one dependence and media rights another. Racecourse Media Group (RMG) paid its racecourses £118.4 million in 2025, Arena's Racing Partnership paid its members £51.2 million as long ago as 2018, the latest figure I found, and with the Sky Sports Racing deal and sponsorship I estimate the total above £200 million.

Three pressures are closing in, and none of them is impressed by volume. The first is regulation: in July the Gambling Commission confirmed financial risk assessments, starting at £5,000 of net deposits in 24 hours, which the BHA calls self-harm and the Commission says most customers will never meet. The second is tax: racing bets stay at 15% while online casino duty rises from 21% to 40%, and the BHA says a higher racing rate would cost at least £66 million a year. The third is legitimacy: a 2025 YouGov survey found 22% of UK adults oppose horses in sport and another 42% back it only if welfare improves.

Racing should plan as if betting will not regain its 2022 peak, and publish a target for cutting the share of income that depends on it.

1. Name the flagship, and announce it a week ahead

Every racing day needs a headline act worth £50,000 or more, and every audience needs to hear about it first.

In 2025, 59 meetings carried £600,000 or more in prize money and 767 races were worth £50,000 or more. Spread evenly that is about two a day (my arithmetic), though they cluster at festivals, so many ordinary days would need a race moved or topped up.

Give the flagship a fifteen-minute window in which no other British or Irish race goes off, in a late slot so the afternoon ends on its best moment. Anything less is following the FA Cup final with the pub quiz before the trophy has been presented.

Then tell people a week ahead, because the casual viewer is handed a fixture list and left to play Where's Wally with the best race of the day. Each flagship gets a 300-word preview in four versions: the pedigree question for the breeder, the economics of prize and cost for the owner, pace, draw and market for the punter, and the story for everyone else.

2. Give racing a day off

A fixed rest day makes the other six matter more, and gives people, horses and punters a break.

Take Monday off. The Almighty managed a day of rest, and He had no media rights to service.

The welfare case needs little argument: the PJA says the volume of fixtures puts enormous pressure on jockeys, their families and everyone who services the list. The case for punters is a hypothesis, and the test is whether Monday's lost betting reappears later in the week or leaves the system.

Monday's races should move, not vanish, and bank holiday Mondays should be exempt. The first number any trial needs is how many of the 1,440 fixtures fall on a Monday and what they earn.

3. Tier the sport, the way every other sport does

Racing sells all 1,440 fixtures as if they were the same product. Nobody else does.

Football has the Premier League and the pyramid beneath it, golf its majors, snooker its Triple Crown. Each presents its biggest events as such and still values the lower tiers, where talent is found and loyalty built.

Racing has started with its 52 Premier Racedays and the Pattern, so the job is to finish it: full build-up and terrestrial coverage for the majors, the flagship slot in the middle, and at the base an honest pitch as the place where owners start and young jockeys learn. A grassroots race need not pretend to be the Derby, any more than a village cricket match must pretend to be Lord's.

4. Pay for quality, and for crowds

The rights money should reward a race worth watching and a course worth visiting, while protecting the base.

Core Jump fields averaged 7.63 runners in the first nine months of 2025, down from 8.52. A formula paid largely on turnover rewards staging a race, not making it worth watching, which is paying a chef by the number of plates leaving the kitchen and ignoring whether anyone eats them. The next deals should add a premium for fuller fields, better-rated horses and competitive markets, with a floor for each tier and a welfare safeguard, since a field-size bonus can tempt connections to run horses that should stay at home.

Then pay for the audience the deals ignore. The 5.03 million racegoers spend money that never passes through a bookmaker, yet as far as I can tell nothing in the formula pays a course for drawing them. Tie a share of rights income to attendance growth and first-time visitors.

I have not seen the formula, so this is a proposal, and it must bind both rights blocs: RMG (33 racecourse shareholders) and Arena's Racing Partnership, which sells with Sky Sports Racing, a joint venture of Sky Group (part of Comcast), Arena and racecourses. A formula covering only RMG would miss around two-fifths of that pot, on my estimate.

5. Use the front door

Terrestrial television is racing's best route to new audiences, and it is more fragile than it looks.

ITV's renewed deal runs from 2027 to 2030 and guarantees 117 days of live racing. Sky has agreed to buy ITV's broadcast and streaming arm for £1.6 billion, subject to approvals. The fragile part is the money: ITV's racing is supported by bookmaker deals, so tighter gambling advertising rules would hit the programme as well.

So use the window to sell the sport to people who do not already bet. Since 117 days is about a third of the racing year, ask for a free daily ITVX window built around the flagship, and keep the rights competitively tendered, since Sky co-owns Sky Sports Racing and could hold both the free window and a pay channel.

6. Talk to each audience in its own language

Scarcity will not win new audiences. Racing has to say what it is, differently to each generation it needs.

Each audience needs its own hook, built on one claim: an animal athlete bred for a purpose, a craft handed down through yards and studs, and places from Hexham to Listowel that no other sport can match.

For families, the hook is the horse: stable visits. The 211,447 under-18s who came in 2025 should leave knowing a horse's name, not a price. For 18 to 30-year-olds, it is the night out: a phone-first series following a dozen named horses, and Friday night meetings like Southwell's, which lifted 18 to 25-year-old attendance. For the time-poor 30 to 55s, it is the shared horse: cheap syndicates. Would-be owners need a ladder from club to syndicate to partnership, with honest costs and a decent sandwich.

Order every route so that betting comes last: watch free, follow a horse, visit a course, take a share, and bet only if you choose to. It also suits the 18 to 34s, whom the Gambling Survey for Great Britain found more likely to show signs of problem gambling.

7. Put the breeder, the pedigree and the numbers on screen

Breeding is racing's hidden story and the overround is its hidden bill. Show both.

The supply chain is failing. The PJA points to a declining broodmare band and foal crop, and 21,728 horses were in training at some point in 2025, down 2.3% on 2024. Every race on the fixture list depends on a decision a breeder took three or four years earlier, and, I suspect, often at a loss.

The breeder barely reaches the viewer. We are told a colt is "by a sire making a name for himself", which is the bloodstock equivalent of describing a stranger as quite tall. Name the breeder alongside the owner, trainer and jockey on every result and trophy presentation.

Pay them too: if breeders' prizes already exist in part, extend them to every British race and make them larger at the flagships, so breeding a winner is rewarded when it happens, not years later at the sales.

Then improve the data on screen: rating against class and the last-furlong sectional against the day's benchmark, interpreted by someone who understands them, not read out like a shipping forecast.

Show the overround too: the sum of the implied probabilities across the field, which is the bookmaker's built-in margin. A book at 118%, say, asks the customer to pay eighteen points for the privilege. Supermarkets must print the price per kilo on the shelf, while the margin on a race is kept in the arithmetic like a family secret. It needs a compliance review first, but it is consumer honesty.

Where this could be wrong

The objections that deserve an answer.

A protected flagship window could pull turnover from the rest of the card, and a Monday rest day could simply move bets to other sports or unlicensed sites. The strongest counter-argument is the board's own: volume funds prize money and breeding schemes, and the horse population is shrinking. That is defensible, and nothing above need cut the number of races.

Over to the people with the pen

Six months, three trials, one published result.

To the BHA board, RMG, Arena Racing Company, Sky Sports Racing and its parent Sky Group, and Horse Racing Ireland: run a flagship every racing day announced a week ahead, a Monday rest-day trial and named tiers for six months, and publish what happens. Ignore anyone who says it has never been done that way (it hasn't, which is rather the point).

The horses will run every four or five minutes whatever you decide. The only open question is whether anyone will be watching when they do.