Sir Philip Davies, the former Conservative MP and one-time joint chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Betting and Gaming, has joined the board of the British Horseracing Authority (BHA), racing’s governing and regulatory body. The BHA confirmed the appointment in a statement on 12 October.

Davies joins as the Racecourse Association’s (RCA) Member Nominated Director on an interim basis. He replaces Wilf Walsh, who had held one of the RCA’s two nominated seats on the BHA board since October 2021. The BHA did not give an end date for the interim arrangement.

Under the BHA’s Articles of Association, the racecourse member appoints two directors with practical experience of the horseracing industry. Davies joined the RCA board earlier this year.

A familiar voice for racing and betting

Davies was MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire from 2005 until 2024. Alongside his APPG for Betting and Gaming role, he was vice chair of the APPG for Racing and Bloodstock.

Since leaving the Commons he has built a portfolio of roles across racing and greyhounds. He is chairman of the Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB), a post he took up in September 2025, and chairman of the National Horseracing College in Doncaster. He is also a former board member of the Racehorse Owners Association.

BHA chair Simon Cox said Davies had been a strong advocate for racing and betting throughout his parliamentary career. “Throughout his time in Parliament he was a strong advocate for racing and betting, helping to ensure the interests of our sport were understood by his fellow politicians,” Cox said in the BHA’s announcement. Cox also thanked Walsh for his contribution over the past five years.

Davies said he was delighted to be joining the board “to represent the interests of racecourses”, adding that he looked forward to working with stakeholders across the sport to support its long-term success.

The appointment was not without friction. The Racing Post reported that the RCA had originally put forward Arena Racing Company chief executive Martin Cruddace and York racecourse chair Bridget Guerin for its two board places, and that Cox pushed back on both over potential conflicts of interest arising from their racecourse roles. Neither the BHA nor the RCA addressed that account in the official announcement. Cox, a former Molson Coors executive, took over as BHA chair this month and, according to the Racing Post, was due to chair his first board meeting this week.

Tax and affordability checks at the top of the agenda

Davies arrives as racing grapples with the fallout from a turbulent period of fiscal and regulatory change. In the November 2025 Budget, the government abandoned plans for a single harmonised tax on remote betting and gaming. Instead, according to HM Revenue and Customs guidance, Remote Gaming Duty rose from 21% to 40% from 1 April 2026, and a new 25% rate for remote general betting will apply from 1 April 2027.

Remote bets on UK horseracing were excluded from that increase and remain at 15%. The government justified the carve-out on the basis that bookmakers already pay 10% of their racing profits into the Horserace Betting Levy, giving racing bets an effective 25% rate. The exemption followed the BHA’s “Axe the Racing Tax” campaign, which included an unprecedented sport-wide strike on 10 September 2025. Official figures put the overall gambling duty package at more than £1bn a year in additional revenue by the end of the decade.

Racing’s other major battle has been over financial risk checks. On 7 July 2026, the Gambling Commission confirmed it would introduce Financial Risk Assessments in stages. The first phase will apply to the largest operators when a customer reaches £5,000 in net deposits within 24 hours. Once fully in place, checks would trigger at £1,000 in 24 hours or £3,000 over 90 days for customers aged 25 and over, with lower limits for under-25s. No date has been set for full implementation.

BHA chief executive Brant Dunshea said at the time that the authority was “hugely disappointed” by the decision and warned of severe financial consequences for the sport, arguing the checks would push punters towards the illegal market.

The BHA has said it will work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Gambling Commission and the betting industry to limit the impact of the checks as they are rolled out. With the tax settlement for racing secured for now but affordability checks still to be phased in, Davies’s parliamentary experience on both betting and racing gives the racecourse side of the sport a seasoned political voice on the BHA board at a sensitive moment.

France’s online sports betting market took €11.5bn in stakes in 2025, up 12.0% year on year, according to a new note from the Autorité nationale des jeux (ANJ), which also found that obscure football leagues and in-play period markets are dominated by players its systems flag as excessive gamblers.

The regulator’s 18-page study, published on 12 October, puts exact stakes at €11,517m and gross gaming revenue (GGR) at €1,766m, up 10.4%. The growth came in a year with no major international tournament, after 2024 had benefited from football’s European Championship.

The segment counted 5.27 million active player accounts, up 7.9%, belonging to 3.65 million unique players, up 8.6%. Because stakes grew faster than the player base, average annual spend per bettor reached €3,159, compared with €2,512 in 2020, a 25% rise the ANJ said “may reflect an intensification of practices”. Operators paid out €180m in bonuses, equal to 1.6% of stakes, with 80% going on retention rather than acquisition.

Football and tennis drive growth

Football accounted for €6,320m of stakes, or 54.9% of the market, up 10.2%, and generated €1,052m of GGR. The ANJ said the headline figure understates underlying demand: stripping out the €438m wagered on Euro 2024, football growth would reach at most 19%. The new FIFA Club World Cup filled part of the gap, drawing €248m across 63 matches.

The expanded UEFA Champions League became football’s biggest betting competition at €829m, up 48.6%, ahead of Ligue 1 (€603m), LaLiga (€453m) and the Premier League (€428m). The calendar-year match count rose from 137 to 189, and the regulator attributed three quarters of the stake growth to the extra fixtures, suggesting that “more abundant supply generates additional demand”. The year’s most-bet match was the Champions League final between PSG and Inter Milan, at €38.2m.

Tennis took €2,652m (23.0% of stakes), up 16.0%, with women’s events making up around 40% of tennis wagers. Basketball reached €1,018m, of which the NBA held 54%. Among smaller sports, table tennis stakes rose 47% to €152m, which the ANJ flagged given heightened international integrity concerns around the discipline, while operators lost €9m on MMA, largely around UFC Paris.

The regulator also noted that operators steer their payout rates close to France’s 85% annual cap. The market return-to-player rate hit 94.5% in September 2025 after favourable results for bettors, pushing the cumulative figure above the cap, before falling to 74.2% in November. The ANJ said this “seems to reflect an adjustment of odds at year-end” and that individual compliance is checked separately.

Niche leagues and in-play markets

The note’s sharpest finding concerns the long tail of the football offer. Some 93 secondary competitions, each worth under 2% of football stakes, together account for 37% of the total, or €2.3bn. They are played far more in-play (48%, against 26% for the Champions League), and South American, Asian and Oceanian leagues create a near-continuous 24-hour live offer worth about €900m a year outside European time slots.

Using its excessive-gambling detection algorithm, which sorts players into recreational, moderate-risk, excessive and manifestly excessive profiles, the ANJ analysed football stakes in the first half of 2026. Players classed as excessive or manifestly excessive generated more than 80% of stakes on the Brazilian, Saudi, Japanese and Australian leagues. By contrast, recreational players provided around 35% of World Cup 2026 stakes, rising to 50% including moderate-risk players.

A similar pattern appeared by market type in the second quarter of 2026. Outright bets such as a tournament winner drew the highest recreational share (33% in football, 36% in tennis), while bets on a period of play (half, quarter, set or game) took 80% to 89% of their stakes from excessive or manifestly excessive players, depending on the sport.

The ANJ cautioned that these competitions do not in themselves carry greater addictive potential, since they form a small part of those players’ overall activity and mainly reflect a lack of recreational interest. It nonetheless concluded that the finding “could argue for better integration of player protection” into the rules on authorised betting events, a list set by the ANJ’s board.

That points to a possible tightening of the French betting catalogue for licensees such as FDJ United, Betclic, Winamax and Unibet. Any move to remove obscure leagues or restrict period-of-play markets would fall to the ANJ college, which is now chaired by Pascal Chèvremont, and would weigh on the in-play volume that underpins much of the market’s recent growth.

BetMGM, the US online sports betting and iGaming joint venture of MGM Resorts International and Entain, grew net revenue by 7% to $710m in the third quarter of 2026 and more than doubled Adjusted EBITDA, according to a business update published on 13 October. The company reiterated its full-year guidance but again said it expects to finish towards the lower end of both ranges.

Adjusted EBITDA rose 112% to $86m, from $41m in the third quarter of 2025, while contribution increased 32% to $175m. The company described the period as a strong quarter in which disciplined execution continued to drive profitable growth.

iGaming carries the business

iGaming net revenue rose 6% year on year to $483m, roughly two thirds of the group total. Online sports net revenue grew 7% to $216m on handle of $3.24bn, up 3%, with the company citing a World Cup engagement boost and an upgraded sportsbook ahead of the NFL season. Retail and other revenue was flat at $11m.

Average monthly active players fell 3% to 878,000, from 902,000 a year earlier, meaning growth came from higher spend per player rather than a larger customer base. BetMGM put its share of gross gaming revenue across its active markets at around 14%, made up of about 20% in iGaming and 8% in online sports.

For the first nine months of 2026, net revenue rose 5% to $2.12bn and Adjusted EBITDA climbed 24% to $185m. iGaming revenue for the period was up 8% at $1.45bn, while online sports increased 4% to $647m.

The joint venture returned $68m in cash to its parents during the quarter, comprising $18m in parent fees and $50m in distributions to Entain and MGM Resorts. Capital expenditure was $4m in the quarter and $26m year to date.

Among operational highlights, BetMGM pointed to its multi-product launch in Alberta, where it said per-player metrics were trending above those it recorded at launch in Ontario. It also said new Game of Thrones titles, rolled out across the US, Ontario and Alberta, had been its most successful game franchise launch, and that a refresh of the Borgata brand had lifted average daily actives by 28%.

Guidance and prediction markets

BetMGM kept its 2026 guidance of $2.9bn to $3.1bn in net revenue and $300m to $350m in Adjusted EBITDA, and said it remained on track to land towards the lower end of both. The revenue range had already been cut from $3.1bn to $3.2bn when the company reported its first quarter in April. The company said it remains confident of reaching $500m in Adjusted EBITDA in the coming years.

The cautious outlook reflects pressure from federally regulated prediction markets, which have been spending heavily to acquire sports customers in the US. On the earnings call, chief executive Adam Greenblatt said the competitive environment remained intense and that BetMGM had narrowed its marketing to iGaming, multi-product states and higher-value players, pulling back acquisition spend in sportsbook-only markets. According to reports of the call, he said the company had meaningfully reduced direct online sportsbook acquisition spending over several quarters while holding its 8% share of sports GGR.

Greenblatt said he expects the competitive pressure to last until at least mid-2027, and that he hopes the US Supreme Court will settle whether states can regulate sports event contracts during its 2026-27 term. The court has not yet decided whether to hear the dispute, although the NFL and the American Gaming Association are among the parties urging it to do so. Greenblatt noted that most lower-court cases have gone in favour of states, attorneys general and tribes.

“I think the key test is whether this was the intent of Congress, and I think that that will be shown to not be the case,” Greenblatt told analysts.

He also played down a recent Commodity Futures Trading Commission proposal to exclude casino-style event contracts from the definition of a swap, arguing that the regulator could reverse the change as easily as it made it, and that the risk to BetMGM’s iGaming business had not gone away.

What comes next

The figures are unaudited and have not been reviewed by the company’s independent accountants. Entain is due to report its own third-quarter trading on 15 October, with MGM Resorts following on 28 October. With iGaming now generating most of its revenue and contribution, BetMGM’s results are increasingly tied to the small number of states that permit online casino, while its sports business waits on a Supreme Court decision that may not arrive before mid-2027.