Grounds for optimism in British Horseracing Authority's performance review

By Charlie Dear

The British Horseracing Authority (BHA) has reviewed the performance of its betting, attendance, viewer, ownership and competitiveness targets that it proposed in 2023.

The report details the first three quarters of 2024 and comes halfway through their two-year trial of fixture list initiatives designed to boost the appeal of sports to horse racing fans, customers and investors alike.

Despite these reports surfacing now, it won’t be long before discussions commence on the 2026 fixture list. These plans will be data-led and take into consideration the effectiveness of measures in place during 2024 and 2025.

The BHA emphasised that comparing Saturdays and the impact of the protected window ‘is not straightforward’, the group said they wanted total betting turnover on the 33 Saturdays with only three fixtures in this window to outperform the other 19 Saturdays by 6% to 7%.

“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,” the BHA 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." 

The BHA stated that when setting 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 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."