Horse racing is one of the world’s oldest sports and counts many people and organisations as stakeholders, spanning from race organisers, media outlets, bookmakers and technology firms, to the average racegoer and those watching at home.
It is unsurprising then that a plethora of people have an interest in the sport’s long-term sustainability. These people have been putting a lot of time, effort and resources into coming up with new ideas for the sport to address the challenges and changes of the modern world.
One of the most notable endeavours has been Racing1, an initiative involving betting operators, media rights holders and Arena Racing Company (ARC), the largest racetrack operator in the UK.
To gain some insights into Racing1’s plans and the conditions facing modern racing, Insider Sport spoke with Glen Swinney, Head of Commercial Partnerships at ARC and Racing1 spokesperson, at the ICE 2025 trade show late last month.
Insider Sport: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Glen. To start things off, could you please give us a breakdown of what the Racing1 initiative is trying to achieve?
Glen Swinney: Put simply, Racing1 combines rights from 1/ST (North America, South America and Turkey), ARC, RMG (UK) and Tabcorp (Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) to enable operators to enhance their existing horse and greyhound racing programmes, or to quickly and seamlessly add the best racing to their portfolios, wherever they might set their scene on the map.
Racing, as most people know, can be complicated. So, the Racing1 alliance was formed to align strategies around the delivery of products to ensure simpler consumption for both existing and potential racing clients in non-domestic markets. Racing1 benefits both consumers and operators – operators can offer a complete racing package via one contract while wagering customers can watch and bet on over 140,000 races. That equates to a race in every time zone, approximately every 10 minutes, 24/7, 364 days a year.
IS: Can racing regain its leadership spot as the leading betting sport (in the UK at least) and how can this be achieved?
GS: Speaking from a UK point of view, we don’t believe we should be looking at it as trying to become the top betting sport. Of course, racing has been ingrained in the UK market, from both an operator and customer perspective, for a long period of time. With competition increasing, it is critical that we, as the rightsholder, ensure horse racing stays relevant for the operator and the customer.
How do we achieve this? The operator is our ‘shopfront’ to the customer and the focus is on making sure the consumption of the product, the data and streaming is simple. This is achieved through constant dialogue with different operators and brands, always looking at what works in other sports and how any learnings can be transferred to racing.
From the customers’ point of view, it’s about the racing product itself. Starting at the top by creating competitive cards with healthy field sizes and, in turn, fashioning a strong betting product.
ARC has also been using AI to look at the reordering of racecards on the All-Weather and where certain races should be run in order to help drive turnover. This has already yielded positive results. By capitalising on similar initiatives and new ways of thinking, the racing product will stay relevant for both the bookmaker and the customer and that is always the goal.
The betting sector is of course a key component in horse racing’s lifeblood, alongside ticket sales and hospitality revenue, media rights deals and sponsorship. Having the right technology is critical to ensuring horse racing’s relationship with betting is maximised to its fullest extent.
Racing1 provided Insider Sport with an overview of its technological and B2B product efforts at ICE, including ‘Racing1 Markets’, its betting and content product suite recently rebranded from ‘ATR Markets’.
The firm was also looking to showcase its iFrame solution at ICE, which Swinney states was developed with ‘the objective of giving operators little to no barriers to adding racing to their portfolio’.
With horse racing having faced a challenging few years, particularly during the COVID lockdowns, the sport’s stakeholders are well aware of the need to maintain an ever lucrative relationship with betting operators….
IS: What would you say are the biggest challenges facing horse racing in 2025 and how to combat them?
GS: Over recent years, the UK bookmaking industry has been burdened with increased regulation and cumbersome affordability checks. As bookmakers continue to adhere to current regulations, an increasing number of customers are moving away to ‘off-grid’ options, which are targeting these customers.
Having departed, these players are effectively lost, leading to significant revenue loss for the sport through decreased media rights and levy payments. This is the main challenge facing our domestic market in 2025 and going forward and it is a difficult one to combat.
However, there is certainly an education piece addressing how, by using operators who are pirating the data, those customers are affecting the money going back into the sport. By coming together as Racing1, we can now speak with a coherent global voice and a united front, policing these operators and also explaining to them how through one contract and integration we can deliver a much better quality racing product in one solution.
IS: Why is Racing1 placing such a heavy emphasis on international cooperation in its strategy for the future of racing?
GS: While we’ve just assessed how the UK domestic market is facing challenges, it is important to note that the respective domestic market for each Racing1 partner will continue to be integral to the success of horse and greyhound racing and, in turn, one of our main revenue drivers.
More broadly, the opportunity to work together to push racing further and farther across the globe through the backbone of Racing1’s international cooperation will ultimately see financial benefits to racing generally.
There are so many territories out there that do not consume racing, and we want that to change by uniting and simplifying the solution for operators. With continuous new regulation across LATAM and other significant global regions, there’s a wide range of opportunities for us to grow eyeballs on racing and by doing so provide new revenue opportunities which will secure better investment in the sport.
IS: Can you walk our readers through the efforts racing stakeholders have taken to increase the sport’s visibility?
GS: Reach and visibility are key to expanding racing’s shop window. Look at each member of Racing1, and they all have different ways of distributing their content. Just take Tabcorp as an example in its domestic territory, where it has its Sky Racing channels. Furthermore, all Racing1 partners would have either linear channels or clean feeds that they distribute to partners.
The purpose of Racing1 is to find synergies and ways to deliver a vision to new customers either in one linear channel or via clean feeds. Again, it’s all about simplifying the way in which we deliver to these new partners. This effort isn’t just across vision but also data. As Racing1, we are looking at certain territories in which we do not currently have a presence, where we can now deliver a bespoke localised product across data and vision for that territory, thereby expanding racing’s footprint.
IS: As we’ve seen previously reported by Insider Sport, Racing1 has a subsidiary product Racing1 Markets, whose new deals include operators like Duelbits and Betmaster – tell us more about Racing1 Markets?
GS: Racing1 Markets is racing’s premier one-stop-shop solution. Notably, it’s the only solution available that combines media rights, data, streaming, pricing and risk into a single suite of services, making it possible for every operator, no matter the size, to profitably offer racing to their customers.
High frequency, high margin, high returns. Working with Pythia Sports as our exclusive MTS provider, we know that the service comes with the most predictive betting lines in the industry, maximising our partners’ profitability and ensuring a seamless delivery of service.
We are now in a position to offer operators two delivery methods – the existing API integration route which offers great control for an operator from a front end and betslip perspective, and now also the aforementioned iFrame route, which provides a full racing product via just one integration and contract – ‘Racing1’, hence the name!
This serves our goal to offer a racing product with little to no barriers. Effectively, from a fixed odds perspective, Racing1 Markets is now viewed as a significant commercial driver for the Racing1 alliance, bringing a seamlessly integrated Tier-one solution to the market.
The key stakeholders in Racing1 are confident that the initiative will play an instrumental role in ensuring horse racing comes off victorious against the challenges of the modern era – challenges that the sport is not alone in facing as many other sectors adjust to changing times.
Racing1’s partnership with Pythia Sports, with whom ARC and others have been working with for around five years, forms a key part of this, Swinney explains. The company’s suite of solutions has proved popular with major betting firms like Wiliam Hill, Ladbrokes and Coral, and Swinney says that Racing1 will continue to work with Pythia on ‘many exciting projects to further enhance the Racing1 Markets product offering’.
Horse racing remains one of the biggest sports in the world, and the global growth of the betting industry – with which it has always enjoyed an intrinsic relationship – offers an ever-present source of revenue and a means of engagement.
Ensuring this relationship can be applied to the modern digital era and meets the diverse consumption habits of today’s audiences is a task all horse racing stakeholders will need to address – and luckily for the sport they are doing so….
