SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
The British Horseracing Authority (BHA) has reviewed the performance of its betting, attendance, viewer, ownership and competitiveness targets that it set out last year.
The report, which looks at the first three quarters of 2024, comes as the halfway point of the two-year trial of fixture list initiatives – introduced to boost the appeal of the sport to racing fans, customers and investors – fastly approaches.
The BHA emphasised that it won’t be long before discussions commence in earnest on what 2026’s fixture list will look like. These plans will be led as much as possible by what the data says about the effectiveness of the measures in place during 2024 and 2025.
Firstly, the group said that it wanted total betting turnover on the 33 Saturdays with only three fixtures in the protected window to outperform the other 19 Saturdays by 6% to 7%.
Responding to this goal, the BHA emphasised that comparing Saturdays and the impact of the protected window ‘is not straightforward’ given that there are often differences in the number of meetings staged from Saturday to Saturday.
“The betting companies continue to support the concept of a protected window and spreading races more evenly across the day on Saturday, and there is data available to back that up,” it said.
“Firstly, we have compared betting activity on those Saturdays when there were just three fixtures staged during the protected window from 2pm to 4pm, compared with all other Saturdays.
“We have excluded the Saturday on which the Grand National takes place as that race alone heavily skews the data. It is interesting to see that the average turnover per race on those Saturdays with three fixtures between 2pm and 4pm has been 10% higher compared with other Saturdays.
“Secondly, during the summer racing period, we’ve had six Saturdays when the fixture composition was three fixtures in the afternoon, another starting around 4pm and two in the evening.
There have been six other Saturdays during this period when there were four fixtures in the afternoon and two in the evening. The average turnover per fixture at the former when the protected window was in place, was 13% higher than on those Saturdays with four fixtures programmed during the afternoon.”
Meanwhile, the BHA wanted to halt the decline in total attendances at Premier Racedays in 2024, hoping to increase them by 5-10% in 2025 when compared to 2023.
Unfortunately the BHA reported that at Premier Racedays, total attendances in the first three quarters have fallen by 48,400 or 2.9%.
In terms of viewership, the BHA said that it wanted to reduce the number of clashing races (defined as a British or Irish race running into a British race) on Saturdays afternoons (up to 5pm) in 2024 from over 8% to 5%.
Up to the end of October, the number of clashes on Saturday afternoon has fallen from 7.9% to 5.7% of all races staged.
Moreover, the authority also wanted to increase the number of horses that race in Britain by 2.5% by 2025 compared with 2023.
It explained: “This target is in relation to 2025 but the total number of horses that, up until the end of October, have appeared at least once on a racecourse has declined by 67, or 0.4%.
“Splitting this between codes (and noting that some horses appear under both codes), the number of horses appearing in at least one Flat race has increased by 1.2%, whilst the number of horses running in at least one Jumps race has fallen by 3.2%.”
Finally, the organisation was hoping to grow average field sizes at Premier and Core fixtures in 2024, the percentage of races with eight or more runners at Premier and Core fixtures in 2024, as well as those races with an odds-against favourite at Premier and Core fixtures in 2024, both Flat and Jump, compared with 2023.
“On the Flat, for both Premier and Core meetings, all three measures have improved in 2024 and are at least in line with the best they have been over the past four years,” the BHA explained.
“The same positive news can be reported for Core Jump meetings, but Premier Jump meetings are generally below where they were in 2023, although better than in 2022.
“We’ve explained in previous blogs that the Premier Jump racedays staged so far this year were largely held in the first four months of the year when the ground conditions were exceptionally soft.
“However, these meetings have also suffered as a result of the decline in the number of higher rated Jump horses around at the moment, which, as already mentioned, is something that we are working to turn around.”
Overall, the BHA said that when setting the measures and targets for the fixture list initiatives introduced at the beginning of this year, it was ‘inevitable’ that other factors outside of the fixture list would also influence our areas of focus.
It concluded: “Other sports and leisure industries are facing a battle to retain their customer numbers, and Racing is clearly no different. The noisy and difficult environment can make it difficult to be categoric about how different initiatives are performing.
“Whilst it is a mixed picture and clearly some significant areas of concern exist, there are also grounds for optimism when considering the data from the first nine or ten months of our trial. We’re learning lessons as we go and, as we turn our thoughts to 2026 and beyond, those will be invaluable in determining how the fixture list continues to evolve to grow the popularity of our sport for many years to come.”
