The research that forced racing to look in the mirror
Every two or three years, someone commissions research that is supposed to revolutionise racing’s marketing. Most of them produce a press release, a bar chart and an awkward silence. Project Beacon, the joint study delivered in late 2025, is different – not because its conclusions were unexpected, but because the numbers were too big to ignore and the audience implications too clear to duck.
The headline is this: Project Beacon identified a potential UK horse racing audience of 25 million people. Current participation in horse racing betting sits at 4% of the adult population, according to the Gambling Commission’s 2025 survey – roughly 1.8 million regular bettors. The gap between actual and potential is the question the sport has spent decades not answering, and Project Beacon has forced the answering conversation onto the agenda.
Who ran the study
Project Beacon was a collaboration between the British Horseracing Authority, Flutter Entertainment’s Alpha Hub, Racecourse Media Group (RMG) and York Racecourse. The combination of a sporting governing body, a major operator’s research arm, the industry’s broadcast and media group, and a leading racecourse operator gave the study unusual authority and access. The sample base was 7,500 UK respondents, stratified across age, gender, region and existing engagement with racing.
The methodology combined quantitative survey data with deeper qualitative interviews to build attitudinal segmentation rather than simple demographic reporting. The segmentation identifies groups by their current and potential engagement with racing, which is more useful for audience-development thinking than raw demographic splits.
The funding structure mattered. A BHA-led study would have produced one kind of output; a Flutter-led study another; an RMG-led study a third. Running all four together produced a shared evidence base that the industry can collectively act on rather than a fragmented set of commercial research that each stakeholder interprets differently.
The 25m headline unpacked
The 25 million figure represents the total number of UK adults who showed some level of potential affinity for horse racing across the study’s segmentation – a mix of current bettors, occasional viewers, event-only attendees and non-engaged potential fans with indicative positive sentiment. It is not a claim that 25 million will realistically become regular bettors; it is a measure of reachable audience under optimised conditions.
The current active base against which to measure this is small. Horse racing betting participation of 4% in the four weeks to October 2025 represents roughly 1.8 million people. The sport’s racecourse attendance figure of 5.031 million in 2025 – the first time above 5 million since 2019, up 4.8% year on year – represents attendance events rather than individuals, so the unique-attendee figure is substantially lower, probably in the 1.5 to 2 million range after deduplication.
Between the 1.5 to 1.8 million currently engaged and the 25 million potentially engaged, there is an audience of roughly 23 million UK adults who could in principle become more engaged with racing but currently are not. Project Beacon’s strategic argument is that the sport has been investing almost nothing in understanding, let alone converting, that gap.
Segments that refuse to engage
Within the 25 million potential audience, Project Beacon found 16.9 million who currently have little or no engagement with racing. That subset is the practical conversion target, because they have shown indicative positive sentiment but have not acted on it.
The study’s segmentation broke this group into several distinct types. Some were passively aware of racing as a major event in the national sporting calendar – they recognised Grand National and Royal Ascot as significant occasions – but had never bet, attended a race meeting or watched a race on television. Others had watched a single event, most often the Grand National, but had not followed up with any deeper engagement.
The conversion barriers identified differed by segment. For some, the perceived complexity of betting products was the blocker – form figures, handicap ratings and odds formats appearing intimidating to a first-time potential punter. For others, the cultural associations of the sport (traditional, male-dominated, high-society) produced a self-selection out of engagement. For a third group, the lack of a clear entry point – an obvious first event or product to start with – meant interest never translated into action.
Event-only viewers
About 25% of younger fans in the Project Beacon study said they agreed that “only the big events are worth watching.” That statistic is more instructive than it first appears. Younger potential fans are not rejecting the sport; they are framing their engagement in compressed, event-focused terms – the Grand National, the Gold Cup, the Derby, Royal Ascot. Anything between those events is outside their interest window.
The implication for operators and media companies is that the traditional weekly-racing-fan model may not be the only template for audience growth. An event-focused engagement model, in which fans follow only four or five major meetings a year but engage intensively during those windows, is a viable audience segment that the sport has historically underserved. Betting products optimised for occasional engagement – simplified entry, low-friction stake limits, strong responsible-gambling defaults – suit this segment better than the habitual-punter products that dominate current marketing.
Brant Dunshea, for the BHA, captured the finding for Betting Startups News: “Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that there is a vast, untapped market for the sport with significant potential for growth.” The framing is deliberately commercial. Project Beacon was commissioned partly to give the sport a response to the pressure from affordability checks, tax changes and the shrinking Levy yield pool. If the participation base can be expanded, the economic arguments about the Levy and betting duties change.
Implications for betting product
Project Beacon’s strategic conclusions matter for punters because they affect what the regulated betting market will look like over coming years. If operators invest in products designed for event-focused, occasional bettors – simplified odds displays, onboarding tools, in-app education – the habitual punter’s experience will also change. The historical betting slip and the detailed racecard interface may coexist with newer, lighter products aimed at the occasional user.
The commercial pressure to expand participation is mounting. The 2025 Autumn Budget’s Remote Gaming Duty increase to 40% from April 2026 and the General Betting Duty increase to 25% from April 2027 (with horse racing retaining 15%) will compress operator margins substantially. EY modelling for the Betting and Gaming Council suggested the RGD rise alone could cost around 15,000 high-tech jobs and shift £4+ billion of stakes into unlicensed channels; the sports-betting duty change risks an additional £2 billion offshore and 1,750 job losses. Against that cost structure, operators must either find new margin in existing customers or expand the customer base itself. Project Beacon’s audience findings point directly at the second option.
For the punter inside the existing regulated market, the consequences are mostly positive. A larger participation base produces more betting turnover, feeds a larger Levy pool, supports more generous prize money, attracts better horses and produces more competitive fields. Racing’s direct revenues at £1.47 billion and total UK economic contribution at £4.1 billion (per BHA submissions to parliamentary reviews) all benefit from an expanded audience. The sport’s 85,000 supported jobs, including 20,000-plus directly employed at BHA-licensed racecourses, depend on betting flows continuing to scale with the rest of the industry.
Whether the industry actually converts Project Beacon’s findings into action is the open question. The research exists; the commercial incentive to act exists. The historical pattern is that audience-development initiatives in British racing are announced confidently and delivered haphazardly. The pillar on betting at horse racing covers the regulated-market context within which any audience expansion will play out.
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Published by the bettingathorseracing.com team.
