In 2010 a young Sky Betting and Gaming (SBG, Sky Bet) upgraded its headquarters from a small office space in Harrogate to Leeds’ thriving city centre. The move was partly prompted by a dispute with the operator’s landlord, but it also provided the perfect opportunity to gain access to an already thriving tech community in the Yorkshire-based city.
“We moved to Leeds sometime in 2010 and that was the one thing that, without a doubt, transformed the company,” says former SBG CTO Andy Burton. “I said it had to be no more than 10 minutes from the train station as we really wanted to be able to tap into that talent pool of people who could commute. So we moved into our first office in Leeds at Wellington Place.”
Burton recalls a conversation he had at the time with SBG CEO Richard Flint about bringing platform development in-house. OpenBet was powering both the back-end and front-end of the SBG offering, but Burton says he knew early on that they needed to take control of the product’s front-end.
“We didn’t have any people that could do that at that point because the tech team really was a bunch of infrastructure-type people and service management. There wasn’t any development capability at that point. It was all outsourced,” he recalls.
Sky Bet taps Orange’s development team
Burton was SBG’s technical director during the period. Upon moving the 150-strong SBG team to Leeds, he tapped into product specialists he had worked with at French mobile provider Orange between 2004 and 2008.
“[We started with] half a dozen really great technologists, engineers, architects et cetera. It was really small scale when we got started. We didn’t call them product owners at the time, but business owners,” he explains.
“At Orange they’d done a lot of web development and mobile development and I had managed that team. The ethos was always ‘we don’t need loads and loads of people, we just need really good people and let them get on with it.’
“We didn’t hire anybody from a betting and gaming background. [We knew] frankly the smart people would learn from working really closely with people in trading or gaming operations.”
In those initial stages, Burton chose to focus on building a scalable in-house platform for SBG’s Super 6 prediction game over the core gaming product. Super 6, a first-of-its-kind free-to-play prediction game, supercharged SBG to success after becoming hugely popular thanks to its tie-in with Sky Sports.
“Every Saturday a few tweaks [were made to Super 6] and a few more features [were added]. The business owners really understood the value of how important that was, so we went from there,” Burton says.
The next step was shifting the core Sky Vegas and betting products onto an in-house platform. Burton believes SBG was the first operator to completely own its front-end.
Spotify tribes model and maintaining agility
Burton cites Conor Grant as an integral player in the shift to an in-house front-end, coming into the business and understanding the value of owning its front-end. Grant was one of very few to have joined the business in its early days with industry experience. In 2010 he was hired as SBG head of sportsbook product management after spending three years as head of online for Boyle Sports.
“We didn’t see ourselves as a sports betting or a gaming company. We saw ourselves as a technology company,” Grant tells iGB. “That allowed us to appeal to technologists and we were bringing in some of the best that the north of England could offer.”
With that tech-first culture came ways of working borrowed from pioneering companies like Spotify. Grant cites the Spotify tribes model as a core principle for the business’ success. The approach sought to empower staff across the organisation, from product to marketing and beyond, helping them remain agile through extensive growth while carrying out thousands of releases a year. Grant reveals Sky Bet made around 30,000 releases in 2020.
Another huge asset for SBG was the £800 million acquisition by private equity powerhouse CVC Capital Partners in 2014, which helped fund the expansion of back-end and product teams.
While these elements powered SBG’s initial growth phase, Burton believes SBG’s ability to pivot and lead in certain areas helped maintain continued gains. One such area was responsible gambling. “To be part of Sky we had to maintain that reputation of the Sky brand,” he says.
By the time SBG was sold to Stars Group, it had scaled up its tech team to about 800 people, over a nine-year period.
Replicating the Sky Bet model
Today Sky Bet is lauded as a blueprint for success across the sector. When the US opened its doors to online sports betting in 2018, the phrase “Sky Bet model” was widely uttered by execs and M&A strategists as many sought to imitate the operator’s deep-rooted integration with Sky Sports and its lasting legacy in the UK sports and gambling sectors.
In 2019 Fox Bet even launched a Super 6-style prediction offering to drive customer acquisition efforts in the US.
But no one was able to successfully replicate Sky Bet’s media strategy across the pond and brands like Fox Bet and Barstool Sports fell flat, failing to engage the core audience of sports lovers.
Meanwhile in the UK, a much more mature and product-focused market, the onus for SBG’s peers has been on copying SBG’s unique technical strategy, which many agree was the force behind its dominance in the market.
In June, reports that Flutter was putting over 200 roles at risk across its UK operations emerged. Racing Post reported many of the redundancies would come from Flutter’s tech and product team at its Wellington Place headquarters in Leeds, many of which were brought over from Sky Bet when Flutter bought the business in 2020.
The decision follows its migration of SBG onto the Flutter Edge central platform, marking the end of an era for SBG’s legacy platform.
From SBG to FBG: Fanatics leveraging Leeds’ talent pool
But as they say, “one man’s loss is another’s gain” and a host of competing operators have reached out to these ex-SBG and Flutter folk to offer them roles elsewhere. Grant is among those leveraging Flutter’s outgoing technologists as he seeks to expand his 40-strong team at US-facing betting and casino operator Fanatic’s tech hub in Leeds.
Fanatics (FBG) is operated on a fully remote basis, but it maintains a number of core functions at its Leeds base. Grant, who acts as president of gaming for FBG, says the office is home to part of the trading business as well as casino, operations and wider technical staffers. Plans to scale the team significantly are currently under discussion. It is looking to increase its current workforce in Leeds by 10% and move into new office space at Richmond House.
“I know the market particularly well. There is a huge amount of talent in this area, in the north of England, with specific sector knowledge. My experience of technologists is they want to be working in fast-paced environments where they’re constantly releasing, being intellectually challenged and stimulated, and we tick those boxes by some distance in the way we operate. We’re a very lean organisation,” Grant says.
“A number of us think this is a really good strategy for us to build and develop at scale.”
Sky Bet’s Leeds legacy
He agrees Sky Bet built a foundation for sector talent in the city, but he acknowledges the rich history of digital transformation predating SBG in Leeds, including Orange and part of the NHS’ digital business.
“Tom Reardon, the ex-chief executive of Leeds City Council was really instrumental in trying to attract businesses to Leeds, but Sky Bet played a big role in that because we were excellent at raising the profile of the city,” Grant added. “A lot of the great people who came to Sky Bet went and then spread their wings.”
SBG certainly left its mark on Leeds and key personnel moved on to lead tech teams at Evoke. Former SBG head of technology Paul McCormick is Flutter’s UK&I CTO today, while Rik Barker, ex-gaming director and then CTO for SBG, today is group CITO across Evoke’s portfolio of brands. Another group of tech specialists from SBG started cloud digital transformation consultancy Infinity Works, which was acquired by Accenture in 2021.
“It’s gone full circle,” Burton concludes. “[Grant] was part of that cycle the first time around, where we hired loads of great tech people in Leeds and they’re thinking there’s an opportunity now with loads of people leaving Flutter, so let’s hire them.”
Tech continues to benefit from foundations laid by Sky Bet in Leeds 15 years ago. The sector is tapping into a thriving scene and building a legacy which now helps to power teams at Flutter, Fanatics and Evoke.