Peter Coates was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1938. The son of a miner, and the youngest of 14 children, his mother died when he was two. He left school to work in a branch of the chain restaurant Wimpy’s and, using the knowledge he acquired, set up a small business catering to football clubs. Nothing fancy: scran in polystyrene clamshells served through hatches. But it kicked off his career as an entrepreneur and he went on to establish a chain of bricks-and-mortar betting shops called Provincial Racing.
Provincial Racing’s virtual offspring, Bet365 started life in 2000, out of a portable building in a car park. Coates’s daughter, Denise, then 22, took the reins. Though her big idea to move betting online coincided with the dotcom bubble bursting, her foresight – including developing in-house software and in-play options – paid off big time. Today, Bet365 has an annual revenue of £2.8bn. It has 80 million customers worldwide, and operates in 200 countries, 17 languages, and 29 currencies.
Denise, who is the company’s co-CEO and majority stakeholder, paid herself £469m in salary and dividends in 2020 – or £53,500 per hour. Last year, she employed Foster and Partners – better known for building airports, opera houses, the Millennium Bridge and the reconstruction of Wembley stadium – to design a £90m glass-fronted house with artificial lake and sunken tennis courts on 52 acres of land.
The company is, for the most part, still based in Stoke (though there are also headquarters in the tax havens Gibraltar and Malta, common for betting outfits). Denise’s brother, John, acts as co-CEO. And Peter, the patriarch, is now joint chairman of his beloved local football club, Stoke City (who play in the Bet365 Stadium).
Former Stoke-on-Trent MP Tristram Hunt once said that the Potteries area took “immense pride” in the Coates family. Denise is the country’s biggest taxpayer. You might say that Bet365 represents a fantastic British success story. Except, of course, that its success requires other people to fail. Gains that are dependent on other people’s losses. Ninety-million pound houses built in part on evictions.
Beyond this not inconsequential quibble with the entire raison d’etre of bookmakers, Bet365 has been involved in multiple controversies. A 2014 investigation by the Guardian found that it was changing its domain names to sidestep Chinese regulators, leading to the arrest of some customers. In 2016, the company was fined $2.7m in Australia after a judge ruled its marketing misleading.
Bet365 is not an outlier. BetVictor, which operates in 150 countries and has its headquarters in Gibraltar, was fined £2m in February after the UK Gambling Commission found it failed when it came to “equitability, social responsibility and anti-money laundering measures”.
Genesis Global, owner of multiple casino sites, was earlier this year fined £3.8m, also for breaches of social responsibility and money-laundering checks. In one example, a customer was allowed to deposit £1.3m before any “source of fund” checks were carried out.
In March, another online casino, 888, was fined £9.4m by the commission for, among other things, setting a £1,300 per month deposit limit for an NHS employee whose known monthly income was £1,400.
In 2020, Betway was fined a record £11.6m, partly for allowing millions of stolen money to wash through the business. In September the company was fined more than £400,000 for advertising on webpages aimed at children.
These companies all cater to the staggering appetite for gambling in the UK. One of the largest gambling markets in the world, it generated a profit, before tax and operating deductions, of £12.7bn in the 2020-2021 financial year. A March 2022 survey of 15,000 people (by the UKGC) found that a massive 43% of respondents had gambled in some form in the past four weeks.
The future of the gambling industry is, depending on which side of the net margins you fall, bleak or booming. The Coates family certainly has much to be optimistic about. In the UK, a white paper with a view to reforming gambling laws – the culmination of a two-year review – was this summer delayed for the fourth time. Pro-reform Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith expressed disappointment, and Labour’s Carolyn Hughes, chair of a cross-party parliamentary group examining gambling harm, was clear that this further delay would “cost lives”.
Gambling is the number one industry offering gifts and hospitality to parliamentarians. In 2021, MPs accepted £225,000 in wages and gifts from gambling companies. One of the first sports to return to action during the pandemic was horse racing – a passion of then-health secretary Matt Hancock, and the recipient of thousands of pounds in donations from wealthy racehorse owners and trainers and whose constituency contains the Newmarket course.
Bet365’s Peter Coates is one of the largest donors to the Labour party, giving hundreds of thousands of pounds. In the mid-00s, he and other industry leaders made hefty donations in the wake of New Labour’s sweeping and disastrous deregulation of gambling – something a number of party grandees, including Harriet Harman, have since admitted was a mistake. Which it was, but is also a bit like Mercutio describing his fatal wound as a scratch.
Globally, bookmakers continue to win. In the US, the supreme court in 2018 overturned a federal ban on sports betting that had been in place since 1992. Since the ban was overturned, Americans have bet $125bn on matches. Bet365 continues its expansion into Latin America; Albania has legalised sports betting this year; the Netherlands, which legalised online gambling in 2021, now reports that punters spend €81m per month.
League One club Bolton Wanderers has responded to fan pressure and cut ties with all gambling firms
There is, however, increasing pushback from grassroots sports fans. This autumn, a fan-led group walked the breadth of the country to lobby clubs to cut ties with gambling companies. More than 20,000 Everton fans signed a petition objecting to their club signing a £10m shirt sponsorship deal with Stake.com, and Bournemouth supporters followed suit (neither was successful). While half of clubs in the Premier League are sponsored by betting companies, a third of fans are less likely to buy replica shirts if they carry their logos. League One club Bolton Wanderers has responded to fan pressure and cut ties with all gambling firms.
In recent years, the UK has seen some progress in gambling regulation. Former sports minister Tracey Crouch worked tirelessly to bring in legislation to limit the maximum stakes permitted on FOBTs, despite being fought all the way by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. She even, according to the archbishop of Canterbury, had God on her side. But the extremely slow progress – and an increasingly libertarian Conservative government – do not inspire confidence.
Sometimes, I wonder whether Denise Coates lies awake at night, in her glass-walled bedroom, and feels guilty. Or whether she thinks her chosen line of business is as ethical as any other in the leisure or entertainment sector; that it isn’t her fault that some individuals have no self-restraint.
Millions of people, after all, enjoy a harmless night out at a casino, or pick up a lottery ticket with their groceries. But just 5% of customers are responsible for 70% of betting companies’ revenue, and they are very much not the ones in colourful hats waving their winning tickets at Ascot on a day out with their friends. They are me, desperate and deluded, entirely numb to the outside world, watching their entire life fall apart.
by Hannah Jane Parkinson
Sun 20 Nov 2022 19.00 AEDT
Gambling and Addiction Blog 