Pork Scratchings and Prime Ministers

Somewhere in the next year the Prime Minister will stand in a pub holding a pint he isn't drinking, eating a pork scratching he didn't choose, and promising to revive the high street. Brant Dunshea will get a quip out of it, fair enough. But the joke lets racing off the hook — it implies the shop is a policy problem with a policy fix. It isn't. There were more than 9,000 betting shops in 2012; there are 5,669 now, falling every reporting period for over a decade, through around twenty three prime ministers and two gambling reviews, and it genuinely doesn't matter which policy gets the blame — nobody has ever slowed a tide by arguing about which wave did it. Campaigning to save the shop, at this point, is like campaigning to save the fax machine: sincere, well-organised, and beside the point of why nobody's sending one any more.

And even that gets the nostalgia wrong, because the shop racing keeps mourning isn't really racing's shop any more, and hasn't been for years. A betting shop used to mean three things: the dogs, the horses, and the football coupon on the counter. Walk into one today and it's a screen wall of in-play tennis, esports and same-game football multi bets, sitting alongside a bank of machines that, on the industry's own figures, now generates 48.2% of everything a shop still earns from betting — nearly half the room, before a single horse has been backed. Racing isn't being squeezed out of the shop by the internet. It's being squeezed out of the shop, inside the shop, by a fruit machine and a Bundesliga coupon. There's no version of "save the shop" that gives racing its floor space back — the floor was never reserved for racing to begin with. The usual list of what's blighting a struggling high street puts the betting shop right alongside the vape shop and the amusement arcade, as if racing and a bank of fruit machines were interchangeable moral hazards. Nobody ever adds the fourth charity shop in a row, even though there's barely a high street left without one.

The Cheque That Keeps Arriving Anyway

Here's what racing has actually got wrong, and it isn't shops. The Horserace Betting Levy — the 10% cut of bookmaker profit funding prize money, integrity services and the vet checking horses out of the paddock — hit a record £110m this year, entirely unbothered by the shop closures. Racing has spent three years defending a floor it barely occupies, while the real problem sat untouched: not the size of racing's slice, but that racing only ever gets a slice. Every pound staked on a horse passes through a bookmaker first, who takes their margin, pays shareholders, and posts a tenth of what's left back to the sport supplying the product. Racing doesn't set the price, own the platform, or hold the customer relationship. It gets a royalty cheque — and argues about the rate instead of asking why it doesn't own the shop.

Ten per cent of somebody else's profit is rent. It was never going to be a funding model.

Britain Already Built the Answer, Then Sold It

Britain already had the model it claims to need, and gave it away. The Tote was founded in 1928, under Churchill, as a state-owned pool-betting operator built for racing's benefit: punters' stakes went into a shared pot, and by statutory design the surplus supported the sport. It wasn't racing's corporate property, but its whole purpose was racing's benefit.

In his first Budget as Chancellor, June 2010, George Osborne announced the government would "resolve the future of the Tote" within twelve months — Treasury language for a sale. It went to Betfred in 2011 for £265m. Racing got a one-off 50% share of the proceeds, around £90m, into a new charity, the Racing Foundation — a legacy, not an income. The profit stream that had been racing's for eighty years became Betfred's outright.

In 2019 the Tote changed hands again, and this is the point worth being precise about: it did not come back to racing. It was bought by UK Tote Group, formerly Alizeti — a private consortium, not the BHA, not the Levy Board — for £115m. Its 150-plus investors are mostly racehorse owners and breeders, and the group pays racecourses a contractual minimum of £50m over seven years, renewed to 2030. Real money, friendly ownership — but a private company that reported an underlying loss as recently as 2023, answerable to shareholders first. Racing lost ownership of a pool operator, took a cheque, and has watched people who like racing try to make a go of the thing it used to simply own.

Racecourse Media Group is the contrast: genuinely racing's own, owned by its 37 shareholder racecourses, and it delivered a record £118.4m to those tracks in 2025 — more than the entire Levy — from selling bookmakers the rights to show the racing. RMG proves the model works when racing actually owns the thing. The Tote proves what happens when it doesn't.

Real Racing Pays Rent. Fake Racing Pays Nothing.

The deeper case for owning that infrastructure isn't sentiment. Putting a real race on screen costs a bookmaker the Levy plus RMG's rights fees — north of £220m a year for the actual sport. The industry's own literature is honest about what follows: sportsbook customers who also play the casino generate two to three times the lifetime value of sports-only customers. The sportsbook is "the acquisition engine"; the casino is "the retention engine" — the free sample at the door of a shop that makes its money at the till in the back. A third product, wearing racing's own colours, costs the industry nothing: virtual racing, computer-generated on invented tracks, needs no broadcasting rights and to this day pays no Levy, because it legally isn't horseracing. It once made bookmakers an estimated £700m in a single year; the BHA has asked, without success, for the loophole closed.

This is also why affordability checks and Gambling Commission thresholds land on racing as if it were a slot machine: on a bookmaker's app, betting is one undifferentiated product, and racing sits one tab from the games that actually drive problem-gambling statistics. A sport that wants to be regulated as the low-risk product it genuinely is cannot make that case while its own trade bodies sell its audience to operators who bundle it with the products causing the harm.

What Actually Needs Building

None of this requires reinventing anything. Betfair proved, from 2000, that a betting exchange — punters trading against each other, the house taking a commission instead of a margin — can be built into a business worth billions; Flutter owns it now, and racing owns none of it. The old Tote proved, for eighty years, that a pool operator run for racing's benefit can fund the sport directly. Racing needs its own institutions — the Levy Board, the BHA, the racecourses acting together, as they already do through RMG — to build or buy into a pool operator and an exchange of its own, with profits contractually racing's rather than a fixed sponsorship line from whichever shareholders hold the shares. That would do more for the sport's income in a decade than another ten years fighting a Gambling Commission threshold touching fewer than three accounts in a hundred.

Racing didn't lose its funding model, or its shop floor, to the internet. It lost the Tote in June 2010, when George Osborne put it out to tender, and it lost the shop floor to a fruit machine and a foreign football league, one row at a time, while fighting for a building both had already left.