Education, education, education

I'm delighted that we've signed a deal with the Professional Players' Federation, for a number of reasons.

First of all, it was fantastic that we were able to form a coalition with other members of the betting industry very quickly. They turned around the request to join us in very short order, which says a lot for intra-industry relationships, and for their commitment to working with sport. Hats off to Clive Hawkswood at the RGA, Mike O'Kane at Ladbrokes and John Coates at bet365.

Second, I'm looking forward to working with the PPF. Over the years, I've had a number of meetings with Simon Taylor and Brendon Batson in the hope that one day we'd get something done between us, and now that we have, I've got high expectations of what relationships we might forge with the CEOs of the other sports players' bodies. We already have a good working relationship with Kevin Darley at the Professional Jockeys' Association, whose doctor we fund in conjunction with the Injured Jockeys' Fund.

And third, I think that this deal will be the major driver towards fulfilling what, for me, was the major recommendation to come out of the Parry report which was published at the beginning of last week, and which I have been told off for not having yet commented on!

I'm surprised there has been as little reaction to that report as there has. I think it's fair to say that the meetings of the panel were more fractious than Rick Parry himself would have expected when he accepted the job of chairing it at the request of Sports Minister Gerry Sutcliffe.

But, despite there being moments when I think we probably all felt we would never achieve consensus, we ended up with what in my view was a good report. Certainly, I think it is one which the betting industry will do all it can to make a success. And for me, the single most important recommendation that came from it was the need for education of players. As Brendon Batson says in the PPF's press release, "would-be corrupters...can only access sport if they can find away to get to participants". So today's announcement, of a deal which has been worked on for a little while and which was signed just before the report's publication, is, I think, an extremely positive step.

Conferences....

It's been an interesting week for conferences, not to say something of a conference fest. There have been four or five running concurrently in London, and a Thoroughbred Breeders' Conference in Ireland. I was called at the start of the week by a conference organiser who wanted to know what the industry needed in terms of conferences. "Fewer of them" was probably not the answer she wanted.


Still, there were some interesting comments made, as well as some fairly shocking ones. Hearing that the RGA was described by a racing Chief Executive as as ‘shabby’, ‘discredited’, ‘myopic’ and ‘old-school’ certainly fell into the latter category, but there were some more progressive and somewhat less personal views aired as well.


One gentleman who approached me after I had spoken to the European Casino operators said to me that he agreed with my argument about the need for quicker regulation to be enacted if Europe is to retain control of its destiny, from a macro-economic perspective. But his concern, he said, was that the market couldn't sustain more than a handful of operators. It was not sensible, in his view, just to set the regulatory standard and to license anyone who passed it, because it would be impossible to control the thousands of companies who would operate in your country.


Surely, if the UK market proves anything, it is that when markets are liberalised, they actually settle very quickly: although you need to make sure that you offer a complete range of products to cover all the variations of consumer demand, a handful of operators can actually fairly easily cover the bases that are needed. In other words, if consumers do, as I often suggest, find the product they want at the price they want it in an internet world, you don't need more than 20 or so operators to cover all tastes.


It's interesting, with that in mind, to ponder exactly why there are 5,000 gambling operators out there (by the estimates of the French government's Durieux report). I would argue that the reason is precisely because governments try to criminalise the activity of betting. I've worked in this industry for 10 years and I can't name more than about 30 operators internationally. How would an average consumer be able to do more? It's only multiple fragmentation - the direct result of prohibition - which creates so many options, which by definition (or perhaps design) are impossible to police.

Foley-Train report

The report by Jason Foley-Train, the DCMS official, in relation to sports betting (legal, commercial and integrity issues), written up in various places today, landed on my desk with a thud yesterday. It's a very detailed analysis, the conclusion of which appears to be that the argument that sports should be paid by betting just for putting on the show (in other words, the argument as advanced by SROC) is 'not robust'.

It also makes the very interesting point that while the betting industry is attacked for not paying any tax (or existing in tax havens), many sports governing bodies do much the same.

It will be very interesting to hear the response from SROC, or the individual sports; or any of those who have argued for a statutory levy (Lawrence Donegan of The Guardian, perhaps, since he regularly has a pop at me (such as here and here) for making the opposite case).

When we published a pamphlet last year making our case about why Betfair's levy payments are the right payments, we hoped for a response from the racing industry to the points that were made. Sadly, none were forthcoming. There was no rebuttal or even substantive response; just an accusation that the document was 'propaganda'.

I hope that the reaction of the sports is not the same to this document. If there's a good counter argument to Jason Foley-Train's analysis, let's hear it. I'm all for a good debate. It's when the response is 'we don't care what you say or how you support your argument, we think the opposite just because that's what we want to think' that I get frustrated.