Remote Gaming Duty went from 21% to 40% back in April. Remote Betting Duty, the tax that actually applies to sports wagers, doesn’t rise from 15% to 25% until April 2027.
On paper, operators have had months of breathing room before the change that hits their core sports betting business actually arrives.
In practice, the money has already started moving, and sport is where it shows up first, though not always in the direction you would expect.
Betfred’s retreat runs deeper than the high street
Betfred is closing 132 shops, around 10% of its UK estate, putting roughly 600 jobs at risk. Chief executive Jo Whittaker pointed to the combined weight of the tax rises, higher employer National Insurance and wage inflation, and founder Fred Done, who is the UK’s biggest tax payer, described the closures as “like killing your own babies.” That much has been well covered.
Betfred is not on its own out there either. Paddy Power has since announced plans to close up to 100 betting shops by the end of the year, putting around 400 jobs at risk, and William Hill owner Evoke closed 270 shops of its own following a strategic review prompted by the Budget.
More significant for sport, is what is happening to Betfred’s marketing budget. The company’s near-decade run as title sponsor of Rugby League’s Super League is understood to be ending when the current deal expires after this season, with no renewal agreed and no replacement sponsor yet found.
Betfred’s rugby league involvement has never just been the men’s top flight. It has stretched to the Challenge Cup, the Women’s Super League and Wheelchair Rugby League too, and if the title deal genuinely goes, the funding gap does not stop at the Super League name on the trophy.
It runs through an entire ecosystem that has relied on one sponsor’s money for the best part of a decade.
Horse racing was called the spared sport. It didn’t feel that way
When the Budget landed, horse racing’s own betting duty stayed untouched at 15%, and plenty of headlines framed the sport as the one winner in an otherwise grim announcement for the industry.
Racing’s own experience since then tells a different story. Sponsorship budgets do not run on a sport-by-sport tax rate.
They run on an operator’s total margin, and that margin is being squeezed everywhere at once, racing included.
Coral ended a 52-year association with the Cheltenham Festival in January, walking away from the Coral Cup, a race it had named since the handicap hurdle’s inception in 1993.
Entain, Coral’s parent company, was blunt about the reason, citing “the sheer size of the government’s recent tax increase,” and has separately guided to an earnings hit of around £100 million in 2026, rising to £150 million a year from 2027 once the sports betting duty rise lands in full.
bet365 followed, ending sponsorships that had run for decades: 23 years backing the Old Newton Cup and Lancashire Oaks at Haydock, and its title backing of Newmarket’s Craven Meeting and July Festival, in place since 2017.
Racing was exempt from the headline tax rise. It has still lost two of the sport’s most recognisable operator names inside the same twelve months.
Not every operator is retreating
Where Coral and bet365 pulled back, others saw an opening.
BetMGM picked up the naming rights Coral walked away from, and the race ran this March as the BetMGM Cup.
Betway went further still, taking on the entire slate of Jockey Club fixtures bet365 vacated at Newmarket and Haydock, including the Craven Meeting and the July Festival’s fixed odds betting partnership, ten days of racing across three tracks in a single deal.
Betway did not stop there.
In July, the operator announced it would become principal strategic partner of Towcester Racecourse, which closed in 2019 after financial difficulties, funding refurbishment works worth more than £2 million ahead of National Hunt racing’s return under a new name: Betway Towcester Racecourse.
It is a genuinely rare move in this market, a betting brand putting real capital into building racing infrastructure back up rather than simply buying naming rights to an event that already exists.
Betway and BOYLE Sports are betting big on football too
The same appetite has shown up in football.
Betway signed a reported £20 million-a-year, multi-year deal to become Manchester United’s training kit partner, described as the biggest football sponsorship in the operator’s history.
BOYLE Sports has moved just as aggressively, becoming Leeds United’s official UK and Ireland betting partner and hosting the second edition of the BOYLE Sports Cup, a pre-season friendly between Manchester United and Leeds United at Croke Park in Dublin, shown free-to-air on ITV with the operator’s branding across the broadcast and stadium.
Many operators have already shifted their football spend toward sleeve deals and training kit partnerships in recent seasons, Betway’s own Manchester United deal being the clearest example.
What BOYLE Sports has done with the Cup is different: rather than buying a fixed piece of shirt real estate, they built a standalone, nationally broadcast event and put their name on the whole thing, a route very few operators have tried and one others are likely to copy.
Both moves also happen to be the clearest illustration of how operators are navigating the new front-of-shirt gambling ban, which took effect this season.
Eleven Premier League clubs carried a gambling logo on the front of their shirts last season, but only a handful of those deals were with UK-regulated operators, most were white-label or overseas-facing brands.
The ban has forced a genuine reshuffle. Tottenham switched their training kit sponsor from BetMGM to Betano.
Nottingham Forest, one of the few clubs whose front-of-shirt deal was with a UK-licensed operator, Bally’s, have moved that partnership to the sleeve rather than lose it entirely.
Brentford and Hollywoodbets converted seven years of front-of-shirt sponsorship into a five-year deal as the club’s official betting partner instead.
West Ham are the exception: relegated to the Championship, where the ban does not apply, BOYLE Sports simply continue as their front-of-shirt sponsor as though nothing had changed.
The next threat is already forming, and racing is exposed again
Racing’s status as the exempt sport is looking shakier by the week. Reports emerged this month that chancellor John Healey is considering a rise in Machine Games Duty, the tax on the fixed-odds betting terminals and gaming machines found in betting shops, ahead of next month’s Budget.
Treasury officials are said to be examining how much extra revenue the move could raise, with one government source telling the Times that “increases in gambling taxes are definitely on the table again.” Former prime minister Gordon Brown has separately called for the rate to be doubled outright, and a Social Market Foundation report published this summer argued that doubling Machine Games Duty to 40% for the machines found in betting shops, arcades and bingo halls could raise an extra £275 million to £458 million a year.
Racing has no exemption from this one. Industry modelling on the same proposal estimates that doubling the duty would push almost 3,000 betting shops to close, cutting the sport’s income from levy and media rights by a further £70 million. Coming on top of Betfred, Paddy Power and Evoke’s closures, and with new prime minister Andy Burnham having already lumped betting shops in with “rogue” high street operators, the pressure on the shop-based side of this industry is building from more than one direction at once, months before the headline sports betting duty rise has even landed.
Two very different bets on the same tax
Put these next to each other and the split is stark.
Betfred, Coral and bet365, three of the most recognisable names in British betting, are pulling back from sports, in Betfred’s case from the high street itself.
BetMGM, Betway and BOYLE Sports are doing the opposite, picking up what has been vacated and adding their own ambitious projects on top, from a rebuilt racecourse to a stadium takeover in Dublin.
Nobody yet knows what happens to any of this once the sports betting duty actually rises to 25% next April, let alone with a Machine Games Duty rise now reportedly under consideration for next month’s Budget too.
But the retreat and the expansion are both already priced in, months before the tax that supposedly caused all of it has even taken effect.
Whatever Healey decides, some operators have already decided sport isn’t where they want to be spending, and others have already decided this is exactly the moment to take their place.
