How John and Denise Coates predicted online explosion to revolutionise gambling and make them £9 billion

It is coming up to 30 years ago that John and Denise Coates started to talk about the potential of a gambling business based over the internet.

Their dad Peter, a miner’s son from Goldenhill, had set up the Provincial Racing chain of high street betting shops but that was only part of a wide range of business interests ranging from from stadia catering to launching Signal Radio.

The National Lottery was set up in 1994 against a backdrop of sweeping changes in a well-established but stigmatised industry. Analysts predicted it would prove the death of the betting shop but the Coateses predicted, in the Sentinel, that it would open the door to growth.

“Back in 1995 about eight per cent of the population was involved in gambling in betting shops, although 80 per cent had tried the National Lottery,” John Coates, now joint-chairman of Stoke City, said in a 2002 interview. “We recognised that gambling is for most people an extension of normal social behaviour.”

The exact scale of that growth might have surprised even them. This weekend the family will be listed in the Sunday Times Rich List with a combined wealth of £8.8 billion, putting them 16th in the charts for 2023.

The big change came in 2000 when the catering wing of the Sprintinca group was sold off and the betting arm was brought under the wing of a new company, bet365. It was led by a team of John, Denise, Peter and British Betting Office Association director Will Roseff – and they had to find millions of pounds to try to get to the front of the pack.

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“(They mortgaged the) physical shops, bought the bet365 name off eBay and launched her online start-up from a modular building pitched in a Stoke car park,” summed up the Times.

The first online bets started to be taken a year later and a year after that, they had customers in more than 120 countries.

John said at the time, as Provincial bet365 became just bet365: “Any business venture is a gamble and you have to weigh up whether the loss of your investment offsets the potential gain.

“My father brought the experience of having set up Signal Radio to the business model. He recognised that there would be a huge investment required to set up the infrastructure and technology. But once you have cleared that hurdle the business is very profitable.

“You have to have the aspiration to be more than you already are if you are going to succeed in business. We were already the leading bookmaker in the Midlands, and there was nothing wrong with that. But we believed we could be a strong niche player in a bigger market and that what we needed was ambition, hard work and drive.”

Back then, industry experts expected the global gambling market would be worth £125 billion by 2015. In real life, by last year it had become worth about £370 billion.

By 2005, the Coateses decided to dedicate their focus to online and sold its 49 shops to Coral in a deal believed to be worth about £40m.

The licensed booking shop company, which had been established by Peter in 1974, had generated pre-tax profits of £2.2m that year on the back of sales of £73m — up 14 per cent on the same period last year.

But its growth was dwarfed by its internet arm which pushed overall group sales up 35 per cent.

Denise explained: “The business has been successful but the cash betting industry is mature, while the internet and telephone side has grown so big so quickly that 99 per cent of our time had been spent trying to keep up with the pace of development. That side of the company has gone from nothing five years ago to a £650m turnover business and a leader in its field.

“We’ve got 50 betting shops, but the top two have 2,000 a piece which means we’re never going to be a leader, but we are a hugely cash generative and leading player on the internet.

“While the internet is rapidly growing at the moment, we believe there will be a lot of industry consolidation and we want to have a war chest when opportunities become available.”

A year later, the Coateses entered into the Sunday Times Rich List for the first time with a family fortune of £126m.

The rise of their bank account since then has been extraordinary. In the last few months they have launched operations in New Jersey and Colorado but the business headquarters remains firmly rooted in Stoke-on-Trent.

The Sunday Times reports: “Whereas many gambling firms have shifted jobs offshore, Coates has created thousands of roles in and around her hometown. bet365’s headcount is now more than 6,000, after hundreds of extra workers were taken on in 2021/22. Many of these positions are graduate roles, often in short supply in Midlands towns.”

They were also named second on the Sunday Times Tax List, with a liability of £460.2m.

They have also invested £330m into Stoke City over the years, having bought the club back from an Icelandic consortium in 2006. They would like to put in more but for EFL Financial Fair Play rules which guard against owners who cannot afford to pay bills.

John explained recently: “It’s worth clarifying that haven’t been any changes yet to the financial regulations. You will have read about the Government white paper, which is the first stage to new law and regulation so it’s an important step. If you look at that along with Tracey Crouch’s fan-led review, both are pretty scathing about Profit and Sustainability, they don’t see that as the right regulation going forward. Let’s see how that develops but it hasn’t changed yet.

“The other route to change of the financial regulation is the talks about redistribution (of Premier League broadcast revenue). Within those talks between the Premier League and EFL might come a change of financial regulation. There are two routes to change… but it hasn’t changed yet.

“Clearly we have already gone out a five-year plan, which we’re a year into about investment into the stadium and training ground. That was originally trailed as a £20m investment. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I was speaking to (vice-chairman) Richard Smith earlier this week and that’s become bigger somehow.

“It’s become bigger, it’s become more ambitious and it’s exciting. I’m not going to talk about it in this forum. I think the team and maybe even Richard will be talking about that at a later date but there is some really strong investment.

“In terms of investment in the team and everything else… all I can say is that over the last 15, 16 years we’ve invested £330m into the club and I can only tell you that our passion for the club remains the same. We just want the club to be successful and that’s what we’ll be focused on.”

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