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Nor1 – As well as the bookmakers, horse racing is also funded by the owners of the racehorses. No owners….. then no horse racing.
Football is a major sport whilst horse racing is only a minor sport really and cannot attract the same level of tv revenue, attendances, sponsorship etc which football receives.Alan Ridley: Straight Answer.
Certainly, our new Prime Minister takes the matter seriously.
The last time we had a relationship of this kind was the relationship between the American mob and the U.S Government. A tricky one, in which we never quite knew who ran the show out of the two. Eventually one went to wipe the other out
If you’re talking about JFK, I think you’ll find that the lizards and not the mob was responsible for his assasination.
I will most certainly be voting for camp Cameron at the next election, which I presume gets on yours and a few other people’s tits
Camp Cameron? He’s a bit of a drip, certainly, but I’ve never noticed any campness. I will pay closer attention next time he’s on telly.
Since we’ve never met it’s rather forward of you to be talking about tits, but I will forgive you since you seem to be just the sort of eccentric loon that has helped make this forum what it is today.
A socialist government? Ho ho ho. Brown a communist? Stop it, please!
SwallowCottage
The racing of horses was a major sport. It goes back thousands of years when the horse was admired and the sport considered noble.
Consider racing’s standing today and how it’s marketed.
When televised, the screen continually shows the latest odds, blanking out views of the horses, and as if this wasn’t enough, we have incessant vocal communication about betting to go with it. Generally, very little is shown of all the horses, be they in the paddock, going down, or at the post. Football does it very differently.
Being a prior owner and not in a syndicate, I do know about the contribution made, which is why the reduction of prizemoney is not helpful.
As was alluded to before, unless wealthy or in a syndicate with shared fixed costs, losses have to be recuperated. I wasn’t interested in gambling, was prepared to lose a fixed sum of money, and was able to explore the inside of racing. I didn’t much like what I saw in some quarters.
My horse, still fit, well, and sound, was retired for hacking across the countryside.
Racing has been encouraged to mushroom in quantity. I fear a retraction is inevitable. The bookmakers won’t suffer. It will be the horses and the dedicated staff who care for them.SwallowCottage
Racing has been encouraged to mushroom in quantity. I fear a retraction is inevitable. The bookmakers won’t suffer. It will be the horses and the dedicated staff who care for them.Unfortunately you may be right.
I agree Nor .. it will be horses and racing that suffers after all of this silliness is over.
Glenn’s point is valid, addictive gaming machines should be taxed more heavily than other forms of less addictive gambling, I think this should also apply to scratch cards.
I have just returned from the evening meeting at Bath where I have not had a runner for 4 years.
Of interest to me was that there was a high percentage of youngish people – late 20’s to 30’s – both men and women all of whom had made a dress effort being universally in smart casuals with the ladies in particular dressing smartly.
The owners facilities have been improved with a very pleasant tent situated close to the paddock.
All in all the course had made an effort and were rewarded by large and happy crowd.( of course the lovely weather helped)
The prize money for the maidens, however, was comfortably under £3000 compared to a training fee of roughly £35 a day( I won my first maiden race over 40 years ago and thought the £1200 prize then – when training fees were £6 per day was fairly miserly) which got me musing on whom exactly profits from todays Racing.
The bookies certainly do with gross profits exceeding the total prize money fund by a factor of 8. The exchanges do even better.
The courses are certainly benefitting with racecourse attendance being at an all time high and the additional income from franchising catering, drinking aand sales of loosely racing related goods being considerable.
The losers undoubtedly are stable staff who now look after 5 horses on average as opposed to the 2/3 when I first had a horse in training and of course the owners who receive back about 22-23% of their operating costs. This does not seem to stop new owners coming into the sport which is a testament to the cache still attached to the sport (and the fact that they must still enjoy going racing) plus the huge amounts pumped into the sport by the big players.
How long we can continue to tap the apparantly endless supply of owners -who can say?.
I have posted before ( and no one replied) why cannot racing benefit from the huge success story of the betting exchanges? They pay, like bookies 10% of their gross profit but this is only 5% compared to the bookies gross margin of betwen 20 and 27%.
We could remove the anomoly of all of us who use the exchanges acting
as bookies without a licence by requiring Betfair to pay to the Levy Board £80 by way of licence for each punter on their books. They would fund this approximately £20 million- according to the last published profit figures I could find – by raising their commission rates to 6.5% which is surely not too much for punters to stand? and still a heck of a lot better than using bookies.Frankly even if commission rates went to 10% and racing benefitted by an extra 60 million I dont think this would be too much to pay.
Even then owners would still only get back about 30% of their costs but any fair minded person would conceed this is a more even handed split of racings ‘profits’ than the current one
Nicely put Galejade.
The only thing I would say regarding the prize money in relation to the cost of training fee’s is to ask the question, ‘is it really that relevant or important?
I ask that question 100% not knowing the answer. The reason I ask the question is becuase I wouldn’t understand why a new owner would buy horses and pay for the training fee’s as a form of ‘business’ and to make a ‘profit’.
I am completely of the view that most people would become an owner because they can afford to and they like the sport – and to most of them, it wouldn’t matter if they never made a penny out of their venture. Like I say, I could be totally wrong as I don’t know the real answer, but just speaking from a personal point of view, I would only buy a racehorse and put it into training if I could cover the costs without relying on the horse winning me any prizemoney – and I just think most owners are exactly the same.
Just my thoughts,
Mike
Oh dear……..
Increasing the take out doesn’t get you more if turnover goes down by more than the rake goes up. I was at Wimbledon dog track on derby night. Their management had gone to the Galejade school of economics and had upped the tote take repeatedly from 4% to 30%+ over the years. The result? Shirt buttons bet into the pool at a track on its knees.
Betfair horse racing turnover is already on the decline and this decline accelerated when BF instituted a price increase a tenth of that proposed above.
I’d like to see the start of an exodus of owners of moderate horses from the sport before increasd prize money was even considered. In fact I’d just like to see the start of an exodus of owners of moderate horses from the sport full stop!
When the BHB lost the court battle over data rights, their plans to secure future funding for racing suffered a huge blow.
What other areas of racing could help fund the sport?
Consider the enormous amounts of money paid for the purchase and services of some stallions; broodmares; and their combined offspring.
Is there a levy (tax) paid to the Horserace Betting Levy Board (HBLB)?Galejade
Betfairs latest set of accounts show a 36% growth in the last year and profits last year of 38 million up from 23 million and the largest flow of new members was during the Cheltenham festival.So whilst the figures look good any levy of £80 per member to go towards horse racing or an increase in commison to allow a 5% levy to go towards horse racing will just mean a large building in Hammersmith will be empty as they will move abroad to avoid it.
I wrote to betfair complaining when the commisson charges rose and they explained it was for the new innovations such as the radio service and more detailed cards with colours etc etc.
I know that there are some on betfair that pay many thousands a week in commision and that will never include me but I have paid enough for the service they offer.
If you write to them they will send a set of accounts showing all transactions and beleive me the commission charges do stack up.
Any charge of 6.5% or even the 10% would mean that 99% of members would leave the same day.
I pay my commission in order to get decent sums on without bother.
They provide detailed accounts which I like.
They give me the chance to trade in and out.
They show me market moves at a glance.I dont need the betfair games.
I dont need the radio service.
I dont need on line poker that they offer.This is worth paying for but not a fixed 6.5% or God forbid 10%!
For a start why dont bookmakers pay the millions they hold on ‘sleepers’ into racing?
With regard to stable staff Betfair have given £250,000 towards stable staff.
On the subject of stable staff is it such a bad job if one loves being with horses?
On some of the advertisements I have seen the money looks ok and there is normally housing provided.
There is also a share of the money that the stable wins.Barry Hills even provides a translator as many of his staff cant speak English!
Must be better than working on a pig farm or being a nurse in the local hospital where the pay and rewards are a lot less!
The main cause of horse racing being in the current state it is in falls down on the shoulders of Peter Saville.
Nice work, Galejade and seagull.
It seems to be that punters are in a state of denial regarding the long term impact of exchanges for (quite understandable) selfish reasons. They are amazing for the punter, but are they any good for horse racing? No-one knows for certain.
The authorities need to fund a research project. Perhaps, seagull, they may conclude that an empty building in Hammersmith is not the worst scenario horse racing could face.
Has anyone ever come across The Tragedy of the Commons?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
"The Tragedy of the Commons is a type of social trap, often economic, that involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good"
Adopting this model depends on whether horse racing can be considered a finite resource, like cod in the North Sea.
Judging by some of the responses here – which seem to be more than a typical mid-summer reaction to racing’s silly season – then it may be appropriate to do so.
I can see your point Galejade, and was agreeing with your post up until the part whereby you suggested 10pc comms on the exchanges. Personally I don’t think it’s at all workable – it may be fine for the odd recreational punter paying 50p on their fiver bet but for those that punt seriously it would cost them thousands.
Also, realistically, why should punters pay for owners to have horses in training? Anyone who has a horse in training does it for the pleasures it brings and knows from the outset that it will only cost them, not make them, money. It is akin to being a hobby after all. By the by, anyone who does enter into racehorse ownership expecting to make money is an idiot who should be looking for something else to spend their money on instead.
Incidentally I’d like to add, before anyone starts on the old "it’s the owners that pay for racing, we pay £x per year to keep the sport going so you punters have something to bet on and watch, yada, yada….." that no, you don’t. You pay to have a horse in training so you can enjoy it. Oh sorry, that should be we pay – as I own shares in both a novice chaser and a 6f sprinter, and have a bumper horse outright.
it may be fine for the odd recreational punter paying 50p on their fiver bet but for those that punt seriously it would cost them thousands.
They wouldn’t pay 50p on their fiver bet only on the profit should it win. That’s the crucial differnce between exchange commish and the bad old days of 10% betting tax. The former is a tax on profit, the latter was a tax on turnover and for those attempting to eke a long term profit from the game an all but insurmountable hurdle to overcome.
Though for the reasons Glenn stated I think a commish hike is neither feasible nor wise.
I’d like to see the start of an exodus of owners of moderate horses from the sport before increasd prize money was even considered. In fact I’d just like to see the start of an exodus of owners of moderate horses from the sport full stop!
No doubt this was a bit of mischievous trolling but you raise an interesting point nevertheless.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that making racehorse ownership affordable to the ‘man in the street’ through the burgeoning population of poor/moderate horses bred from run-of-the-mill sires (who in times past would have probably – and properly – been gelded) does the sport and the breed no favours at all.
The ownership of something as special, beautiful, majestic and sentient as a Thoroughbred should be a privilege available to only those with a substantial disposable income and perhaps equally importantly to only those who can guarantee a safe, contented life to the horse once its racing days are over.
Am I the only one who fears what the fate of many of those currently trundling round in ever-increasing numbers in an ever-increasing number of crap races at an ever-increasing number of gaff meetings will be on retirement?
Can many of the less than well endowed – financially and landed – owners be expected to care for their old gelding for what may well be 15+ years post racetrack?
If not, are/will there be sufficient third-parties to take them off their hands be that for a new ‘career’ or as a ‘family pet’
Or will we see an increase in cases of neglect and/or good folk such as Carrie Humble being overwhelmed by offers of horses nobody wants or knows what to do with.
Breeding bad-to-bad and getting bad is, like the polar opposite, not a rule cast in stone but cannot in general terms be anything but detrimental to the physical and mental well-being of the thoroughbred as the gene pool of future generations gets diluted further by ‘bad blood’.
The breeding industry would be well advised to indulge in a period of reflection and navel-gazing to consider just what the consequences will be to this nascent ‘factory farming’ of the racehorse.
The fact that poor races fill to limit and some using this fact to justify increasing the number of these races as the ‘market’ demands it, is both misguided and deeply depressing.
Should make it clear that I welcome the growth in and popularity of Syndicates as this does indeed offer said men in the street an opportunity to own and enjoy the privilege of racing a well-bred pricey horse.
Kind regards
A man in the street
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