It’s fair to say the Coral Cup was one of those races synonymous with the Cheltenham Festival – the annual four-day event in March and the highlight of the National Hunt calendar – thanks to Coral’s long-standing sponsorship. In fact, Coral has sponsored this Grade 3 contest over two miles and five furlongs since the handicap hurdle’s inception in 1993.
So, the news last week that the Entain-owned bookmaker was to end its association with the race was a blow for the Festival, as well as a warning sign of the belt tightening UK-licensed operators are having to perform in the face of upcoming hikes to remote gaming duty and remote betting duty.
To find out more about this move, EGR caught up with Simon Clare, group director of PR and sponsorship at Entain, but first we hear from Nick Mills, CEO of Racecourse Media Group, the umbrella company responsible for managing media rights for 37 racecourses, including Cheltenham, as to his thoughts.
EGR: How disappointing was the news Coral’s sponsorship of the race will come to an end after all these years, especially as you were employed by Coral in the 1990s?
Nick Mills (NM): I was personally disappointed, having worked at Coral for a long time and been involved in that sponsorship and seen it grow and develop alongside the Cheltenham Festival over the last 20 or 30 years. So yes, it was disappointing and a real shame.
I think the Jockey Club will be able to find a partner fairly easy for a race like that because the race and the exposure, as well as the interest in the Festival, is a fantastic opportunity for bookmakers. More generally, it is something we going to see more of. It’s really important we work closely with racecourses to make sure sponsorships – both within racing and racecourses – are as effective as possible.
EGR: November’s Autumn Budget put the squeeze on operators, as remote gaming duty is set to nearly double to 40% and sports betting will increase by around two-thirds to 25%. With Betting and Gaming Council members contributing around £350m a year to British horseracing in levy, media rights and sponsorship, what impact could this have on the sport?
NM: On the face of it, racing got away with no tax increase, but I think the level of remote gaming duty that bookmakers got from the Budget was a lot higher than everybody anticipated. That’s forced operators to look at discretionary spend, and sponsorship is part of that portfolio.
When I talk to operators, I think they are looking at what they can do internationally as well as looking at sports sponsorships as a whole and whether it still works in this environment. But I still think racing sponsorship is a really important asset to bookmakers, and that will continue, but the pressure on that spend is definitely bigger than it was.
EGR: Racing drew criticism for lobbying the government with its ‘Axe the Racing Tax’ campaign rather than speaking as a unified voice with the betting industry, with one industry veteran telling EGR the celebrating among certain industry stakeholders over racing escaping tax hikes was “myopic”. What did you make of this strategy?
NM: I think racing and bookmakers need to work more closely together. I’ve always felt that. In hindsight, racing did their thing and bookmakers did their thing [but] there could have been more of a coming together. We could have worked closer to get an outcome that was maybe different but, at the same time, racing obviously has to look after racing.
They did a good job of making the arguments about the cultural and social aspects of racing, which I think is important. On the one hand, racing had to look after their own house to some extent, but if we could have done that while working closer with the bookmakers, it would have been better. Similarly, the bookmakers could have reached out more to racing. So, there’s probably lessons we could all learn.
EGR: How concerned are you about shop closures and the impact this will have on the sport and the media rights generated for racecourses?
NM: Retail is a really important part of our media rights revenue. It’s a big chunk. What we’ve seen over the last few years is we have lost some betting shops – typically 200 or 300 a year for the last four or five years – but betting turnover and customers activity has held up really well in shops. Some customers have migrated to other shops, too. From our perspective, we launched a racing product in shops on SSBTs [self-service betting terminals] where you can bet on RMG content, and it performs really well. There’s lots of derivative bets and different betting options on every single race.
So, that kind of machine progress is important. And people still like going to shops […] but it remains challenging times. Although machines didn’t have their taxes increased in the Budget, the [business] rates relief has gone and minimum wage has gone up. We’ve not going to kid ourselves that it’s going to be easy for our colleagues in betting shops to succeed, but we are in a good place to support them.
EGR: Do shops account for nearly 50% of RMG’s income?
NM: Certainly 40%-50%, yes.
EGR: Betfred owner Fred Done has been locked in a battle with Arena Racing Company over media rights costs, the result being the company switched off pictures in shops and online. How concerned are you bookmakers are reaching a point where they scale back their products and betting on the sport?
NM: Look, racing is obviously an expensive product to run compared to some of the other products. You’ve got to strike a balance between optimising revenue and turning bookmakers off the sport. There is a balance to be had and a point where if costs become too expensive, whether it’s taxes or media rights, bookmakers will look at their product mix and what they do around marketing and promotions. From an RMG perspective, we want racecourses to grow and succeed but do it in a way that doesn’t stop bookmakers promoting the sport. That’s what we all want to avoid.
EGR: How is RMG investing in the product to grow the sport’s appeal, particularly among the younger adult cohort?
NM: From our perspective, it’s not a case of, ‘Here’s the price, take it or leave it’. We want to invest in racing product, and we’ve done that a lot over the last two or three years. So, we built an in-play product, for example, and that goes to a lot of our digital customers including Entain, William Hill, BOYLE Sports and others. That’s quite a high margin product for bookmakers, which increases the appeal from their perspective, but it’s also a very engaging product for customers.
We’ve also built the SSBT product I referenced earlier, which has a lot of different bet types and in-play bets. We’ve also just completed a bet builder product. We’ve obviously seen the success of bet builder in football, and more recently you’ve seen bet365, Entain and William Hill launching racing bet builders. This is a service product we’re providing to the marketplace that should appeal to younger customers as well.
Attracting new fans is really important to the long-term good of the sport and for bookmakers. We’re doing quite a lot to get new fans in, while RMG accounts for about 60% of UK social media traffic around racing. Our ‘#raceday’ has been particularly successful at attracting a lot of young fans. We’ve had over a billion views of that hashtag in the last couple of years and it has grown a lot of momentum. It’s become extremely popular on TikTok and Instagram, etc.
EGR: What are the top priorities for RMG in 2026 and beyond?
NM: I’ve been in place [as CEO] since November 2024 and we’ve done quite a lot to look at our vision, which is working for racing’s future. It’s really important for us because all our profits go back to racing; we’re 100% owned by the racecourses. We want racing to succeed, not just this year and next year but in 10 years and 100 years. So, we’re taking a long-term view of the sport, and that’s reflected in the vision. We’re working closely with our racecourses and bookmaker partners to think about how we make racing relevant and exciting.
We did a deal recently with the National Trainers Federation to work more closely with trainers, and we very much led the ITV deal with racing, which was extended to 2030. That’s a great shop window and essential. We also think the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a great growth area for racing. We’re launching a racing service in Abu Dhabi this weekend, but the UAE could be interesting for racing going forward from a betting perspective. And as I said, we’ll continue with the social media, while you’ll see a lot more of our product [horseracing analytics platform] RaceiQ in 2026. That is there to engage younger fans with simple metrics and data to help them understand racing.
EGR: Simon, was ending sponsorship of the Coral Cup a difficult decision?
Simon Clare (SC): Yes, it was a very difficult decision. We have a long-standing history of sponsoring races, with our association with sponsoring Cheltenham going back to when [founder] Joe Coral sponsored the Golden Hurdle in 1974. In 1993, it switched and the Coral Cup was created, which was when we moved our sponsorship to that race.
So, we’ve effectively sponsored the Cheltenham Festival since 1974, but the trouble is the tax increases announced in November was an inflection point. The sheer scale of that increase in costs to our business meant we had to look literally everywhere at where we can mitigate. While UK racing itself wasn’t directly impacted by the tax increase, unfortunately, the areas I control on sponsorship, PR and social media have all had to take a hit. The decision to cut the Coral Cup was a public example of where we’ve had to tighten our belts.
EGR: Was this sponsorship up for renewal or have you ended it prematurely?
SC: We always honour contracts; that’s never even an issue. This was a sponsorship that was out of contract and up for renewal. To be honest, that made it vulnerable. This reflects a scrutiny we’re going to carry out across all our spend – not just horseracing – as to whether it’s delivering a sufficient return on investment and sufficient value to make it worth continuing with.
We are huge supporters of The Jockey Club and continue to be massive supporters of horseracing in so many ways, whether it’s media rights, levy, sponsorship, advertising. It’s a very important product to us. We knew we were going to get hit with a tax increase in November, but we never expected it would be the increase that was delivered. It was much bigger than we anticipated, so we have had to make some very difficult decisions in many areas. The Coral Cup is a big example of that.
EGR: Is Entain still committed to sponsoring big races like the Ladbrokes King George on Boxing Day and the Coral Eclipse, a sponsorship deal that stretches back to 1976, when these deals come up for renewal?
SC: Horseracing has always been a really important product, which is why we’ve got such a strong portfolio of sponsorships, and have done so for such a long time – and that will continue. Because of the pressures from the increase in tax, you always scrutinise where you spend your money, and we always have. That is going to be even greater in a world where our budgets are tighter.
We celebrated 50 years of the Coral Eclipse last summer, which was probably one of our best ever in terms of activation and exposure. But there is no complacency. If we have to justify the sponsorships that myself and my team work on then we have to justify every last asset.
I’m really sad we are letting the Coral Cup go, but it shared the day where BetMGM was a sponsor of the feature race, the Champion Chase. And there are other betting sponsors across the four days – we don’t own the event or the day. The Jockey Club are great partners, and Cheltenham is hugely important to us. We’ll be promoting the hell out of Cheltenham because it’s the biggest four days of racing for us.
In no way does a decision to end the Coral Cup reflect the importance of Cheltenham to the business. Quite the contrary. It just means we’ll have to make cuts to our marketing across the board. We’ve committed to mitigate 25% of the tax increase, and marketing is a big chunk of that.
EGR. Though you can’t speak for other operators, do you expect rivals to cut racing sponsorships? And do you fear for the future of the sport if bookmakers pull back, plus shop closures impacting media rights, levy and prize money?
SC: I don’t know what other operators will do, butracing has always been gripped by a lack of self-confidence and doom-mongering. People were talking about terminal decline in the 1990s. But it’s an incredibly resilient and successful sport. It still operates 59 racecourses and has four huge sporting events with the Cheltenham Festival, The Grand National, the Derby and Royal Ascot.
It has more terrestrial coverage than any other sport, including football. It has Royal patronage, every demographic betting on it every Saturday, in betting shops and online, from the working-class man right up to the highest net-worth individuals. And there are celebrities who own racehorses.
It’s a sport than needs to start puffing out its chest and selling all its amazing plusses. But unfortunately, in the last few years, it’s been locked in lobbying the government for levy reform and more money from the bookmakers, which actually ends up accentuating the negative that it needs more money and is going to collapse if it doesn’t get help from the government. We want to work with racing to grow the appeal of the sport.
We have a hell of a lot to sell; it’s a marketing man’s dream to sell horseracing. It’s how we grow the pie, and racing will get a healthy share of that. Long term, the fact racing hasn’t been impacted by the tax increases happening this April and next April will be a strength. Racing has become less expensive than it was, but it still needs to grow its revenue and appeal to bring home the benefits of that. We are willing to be partners in that because we want racing to be bigger and better as we still take a huge amount of money on horseracing.
EGR: Was the backslapping among some racing stakeholders over the sport escaping a tax increase short-sighted?
SC: It was frustrating because we were clear all the way along as we lobbied government, with racing for a large part of it, that any tax increase would hurt everybody. I do think the majority of senior stakeholders and partners within racing did understand that. Unfortunately, there were some who didn’t. It’s tiresome but there’s a section of the horseracing community who seem to be still fighting a battle from the 1980s: bookmakers versus racing – bookmakers are bad, nothing they say is true and they don’t care about racing. It’s exhausting.
I’ve worked for a bookmaker for 28 years and 90% of my time has been spent promoting racing – talking it up in the media, sponsoring great races, taking on racing ambassadors, running social media teams to promote racing. I genuinely love racing. I won’t name them but there are people within racing who are still fighting a phony war against bookmakers.
Like it or lump it, this is the world we live in; bookmakers and racing are intrinsically linked. What’s good for one will be good for the other. We need to work together. There are so many doom-mongers but in no way is horseracing optimised commercially. [BHA chair] Lord Allen knows this and they’re trying to address it. We endorse that approach because it has so much more potential.
The post Coral ending its sponsorship of the Coral Cup “disappointing and a real shame”, says RMG chief first appeared on EGR Intel.
Racecourse Media Group CEO Nick Mills reacts to the bookmaker not renewing its decades-long association with the race at the Cheltenham Festival and if other operators will follow suit, while Entain’s Simon Clare explains the rationale behind the decision
The post Coral ending its sponsorship of the Coral Cup “disappointing and a real shame”, says RMG chief first appeared on EGR Intel.