We have got to talk about…Britain’s richest woman

There’s a good chance most people have never heard of Denise Coates, but the co-founder and CEO of bet365 is one of the highest paid executives in the world and she’s also Britain’s biggest tax payer. How did she get so rich?

Prologue

One of my most recent articles here on Medium was an essay entitled ‘Nadir: How the cost of living crisis has taken so many in broken Britain to the depths of despair.’ It was all about the struggles more and more Britons are experiencing just to put food on the table and how the retail landscape has suffered as people have less money to spend and increasingly turn to the internet rather than the high street.

To follow that up I was looking for something else to explore, another subject worthy of a deep dive. After some time thinking about what that could be, I landed on it when considering the phenomena that is online betting. At a time when millions are struggling to make ends meet, perhaps it’s no wonder so many are turning to gambling. Whilst some still buy lottery cards or scratch cards, or visit the bookies, most gamblers prefer to use their phones and place their bets online. And these days, you can bet on almost anything, indeed you can even place a bet that you have personally created.

And while the world of online betting has no doubt created a few very rich individuals, like all forms of gambling, it’s the house that inevitably comes out on top. If you want to make the really big bucks, the odds are way more in favour of those that take the bets, than those who place them. Indeed, if you want to become super rich, one of the best ways to do so is by having your own betting business. It’s why there are so many of them around and it’s why offshore locations like Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus have reinvented themselves to be tax efficient havens to so many of these companies.

These days, online betting companies are omnipresent. Everywhere you look, there seems to be yet another gambling company advertising itself online and appearing on football team jerseys and on billboards around their stadia.

In the 2023–24 season, over one third of all Premier League teams have front-of-shirt sponsorships with online betting companies in deals estimated to bring in almost $72 million. They are AFC Bournemouth (Dafabet), Aston Villa (BK8), Brentford (Hollywoodbets), Burnley (W88), Everton (Stake.com), Fulham (Sbotop), and West Ham United (Betway)

The Premier League is the only top-five European league to have this many sponsorships with online betting companies while Spain’s LaLiga banned such deals ahead of the 2020–21 season, the Premier League will do the same for the 2026–27 season.

When I watched a recent soccer game, by far the most advertising was for online gambling companies. During just that one match I spotted no less than six of them (Astropay, bet365, BetMGM, Betway, 6686Bet and Unibet) on the electric billboards, and one of the teams had an online gambling firm’s logo on their shirts.

Almost without exception, every professional sports team has an official online betting sponsor, many of whom are little known in this country. In terms of profile, I’d say the most prominent names are BetFred, PaddyPower, Betway and Astropay. But one company appears to be bigger than them all and that’s bet365.

Bet365 was founded 23 years ago by Denise Coates in Stoke-on-Trent, once famous the world over for being the centre of Britain’s pottery industry. She also happens to be the country’s youngest billionaire as well as someone for whom having just the one helicopter is simply not enough.

Being that Denise Coates is also the highest paid woman in Britain, it’s not surprising that there’s lots of articles about her and her family. But when you read them you begin to realise much of the information is the exactly the same. The same facts are rehashed and the same few photos keep popping up. In fact, the deeper you dig, the less you find out about her.

So how did it all begin?

The company that is now bet365 began life operating from a Stoke-on-Trent car park.

Miner’s son Peter Coates — the youngest of 14 children and whose mother died when he was two — was a keen footballer, but hung up his boots at the age of 23. He then concentrated his efforts on Stadia Catering, which provided food and drink at football clubs and grew the company to the point where most football grounds were supplied by his business — later renamed Lindley Catering Investments.

In 1974, he launched bookmaker Provincial Racing with three shops. It was here that his daughter Denise learned her trade, working first as a cashier before studying econometrics at the University of Sheffield where she graduated with a first-class degree. Econometrics, if you were wondering, is the application of statistical methods to economic data.

In 2000 she convinced her father that the future of betting was online. The family gambled everything on Denise’s hunch and took out a £15m loan from RBS, turning Provincial Racing into bet365. This was secured against what Denise has called “a small chain of pretty rubbish betting shops”. Bet 365 began operating in 2001 from a portacabin in a Stoke-on-Trent car park.

Famously shunning publicity, Denise paid £2,000 for the bet365 domain name on eBay, and over the last two decades she has grown the business into a multi-billion pound enterprise. The new venture was so successful that by 2005 the high street shops were sold to Coral for a reported £40m and bet365 went completely online.

While competitor websites typically only offered the major sports, bet365 grew to include betting on every imaginable sport. Customers could visit the website and place a bet on their favourite team or athlete in everything from snooker to American sports. That may not sound that original today, but like so many things, bet365 was the first to do so.

The company grew fast, offering innovative ways of in-game betting, market-leading competitive odds and aggressive advertising fronted by actor Ray Winstone, to keep the punters coming back. It is difficult to know for certain, but it could well be that bet365 is now the world’s biggest bookmaker.

The Coates family also own Stoke City, which was also covered within the bet365 accounts. In 2023, the Championship football club recorded a turnover of £21.4m for the year and posted a £12.4m loss. As a result, the whole group fell to a £72.6m loss, dropping from £49.8m profit a year earlier.

In 2023, despite facilitating more than $65 billion in bets per year, bet365 reported a £72.6m loss. Even so, Denise Coates, who owns more than 50 per cent of the company, was paid around £221m. That was £7m higher than the previous year and she also received at least £50m worth of dividends.

To put that into perspective, Denise Coates, who is regularly recorded as the UK’s best paid boss, earns about £1 million every day before tax. In fact, she received more than a quarter of the company’s wage and benefit costs for staff, which came to about £785m for the year to 26 March 2023!

In that year, at the age of 56, she became the UK’s youngest billionaire with an estimated £6.2 billion fortune.

As of 2023; there were 756 billionaires living in the United States. With 186 billionaires, California leads the country with the most ultra-wealthy residents. These billionaires mainly come from the technology and entertainment industries. As an example, California’s wealthiest resident is 50-year-old Larry Page whose estimated net worth in March 2024 was a staggering $125 billion! But then again he co-founded Google.

Surprisingly, Britain has almost the same number of billionaires. According to The Sunday Times Rich List there were 171 on the 2023 list. That’s six down from 2022, the first fall recorded since the 2007–08 financial crisis. For the second year in a row, the Hinduja family topped the Rich List with a £35 billion fortune, £6 billion up on 2022. 36 of the UK’s billionaires live in London.

Over the past four years, Denise Coates’ total remuneration surpassed £1 billion, making her one of the world’s highest paid executives and one of the UK’s wealthiest businesspeople.

The High Pay Centre think tank argued that her bumper pay package was neither fair or appropriate. But I doubt that too many of those billionaires pay so much into the country’s coffers.

Being one of the biggest payers of personal tax in the UK also has a political advantage for bet365. Betting is a heavily scrutinised industry and, unlike most of her competitors who operate offshore, she most certainly will have a voice when discussing the regulatory landscape.

Denise still handles day-to-day operations, product development and technology at the business, while her younger brother John Coates, 53 — who just happens to be the UK’s eighth youngest billionaire with an estimated fortune of £2.84 billion — is joint chief executive and oversees its legal and financial affairs.

Coates also has two sisters — Moira and Siobhan — who according to documents filed with Companies House, each own 5 per cent of the business, which is still based in Stoke-on-Trent. With around 7,000 workers, it’s no surprise that bet365 is the city’s largest private employer. As far as I can work out, it employs 5,100 at its headquarters with the remainder working overseas, most of them out of Gibraltar.

Why is online betting so lucrative?

There’s no doubt that gambling continues to be an extremely lucrative industry. As an example of quite how lucrative, data from a Statista survey in 2019 revealed that the worldwide revenue for the entire gambling industry was $45.7 billion and one year later, in 2020 it had escalated to $55.1 billion.

Over the past four years however, the industry has experienced an average annual growth rate of 20%, culminating in a $95 billion revenue in 2023.

Looking ahead, Statista forecasts that the market will maintain its double-digit growth trajectory, projecting a market value of $117.6 billion by 2025.

One of the biggest contributors to this is the continued growth of mobile gambling. Its global reach means that players across the world can now enjoy their favourite games at any time, from any location with gambling quite literally being in the palm of one’s hand.

In the past four years alone, more than 80 million people have started gambling online, allowing the online gambling industry to more than double its user base, reaching an astounding 176 million users.

Online sports betting is the largest revenue stream in the market, expected to bring in $43.5 billion in 2023.

The United States and the UK still remain the juggernauts of the online gambling world, contributing over one-third of the total revenue of the industry. This is largely because both markets have mature regulatory frameworks and a high level of consumer trust.

The UK’s online gambling market was forecast to hit $12.8 billion in revenue in 2023, a 62% increase from four years ago!

Stoke City

Tracing its origins to 1863, Stoke City claims to be the world’s second oldest professional Football League club.

Opened in 1997, their all-seater stadium cost nearly £15 million to build and brought the club up to standards set out in the Taylor Report following 119 years at the Victoria Ground.

Originally it was known as the Britannia Stadium thanks to a £1m, 10-year sponsorship deal with the Britannia Building Society which was instrumental in funding the project.

In 2016, an initial six-year stadium naming rights agreement was entered into with club owners bet365, with the name ‘bet365 Stadium’ taking effect from June 2016.

Currently, the team are languishing in the bottom half of the Championship facing a relegation fight to avoid dropping down to League One. Home games on average attract around 20,000 fans in a stadium that has a capacity for 30,000.

Unlike some owners, the Coates family are not backing the club which wears the bet365 logo on their shirts with big name signings. That being said, the EFL limits how much money owners can pour into transfer kitties and wage pots at clubs in the Championship.

However the restrictions don’t cover infrastructure and Stoke are in the second year of a five-year plan of major improvements at the bet365 Stadium and the club’s Clayton Wood training ground. To that end, in February 2024, Chairman John Coates said the family were planning a further £25m investment in the club’s infrastructure next season which will include a new 1,500 capacity fan zone.

John Coates also said:

“We’ve always been fully committed to the club. We acknowledge that the last four or five years on the football pitch haven’t been as successful as we’d like, however no one said that owning a football club was ever going to be easy.”

He added:

“What we can do is try to set the club up for future success, we’re very conscious of the club’s place in the local community and we want to try to ensure it is financially sustainable.”

Philanthrophy

In August 2012, Denise Coates started the bet365 Foundation, a registered charity which was renamed the Denise Coates Foundation in February 2016.

Bet365 donated £105m to the Denise Coates Foundation.

In 2021, the Foundation committed 17 grants totalling £6,200,000 to 12 institutions in support of local, national and international charitable causes.

Following a £3.6m donation from the Denise Coates Foundation, Royal Stoke Hospital’s Cancer Centre is being revamped to includes a new entrance, pharmacy, multipurpose group room, two private rooms, an information centre, refreshment area and new waiting area for patients. Work is expected to be completed by December 2024.

While the Foundation states that it “proactively identifies the causes it supports”, it would appear it has not contributed to any institution which aims to help with gambling addiction.

The dangers of online gambling

It’s well known that any form of gambling can be dangerously addictive, but the impact of technology has changed the way we gamble and revolutionised the gambling industry.

Most important is its convenience: online gambling makes gambling easily accessible — and available 24/7 — to anyone with an internet connection and a bank account.

In addition, online gambling has expanded the reach of the industry, attracting new and younger players no matter where they are located. Furthermore, online gambling platforms offer a wide range of payment methods, including credit cards and digital wallets. However, the ease of accessibility also comes with its risks. The constant availability of online gambling increases the likelihood of impulsive gambling and making impulsive financial decisions.

If not managed responsibly, online gambling can lead to substantial financial losses. Its fast-paced nature can contribute to impulsive and uninhibited betting, potentially exacerbating the risk of losing money. Moreover, the absence of physical cash makes it easier for individuals to lose track of their spending, increasing the likelihood of significant financial losses.

And of course, as with all gambling, even if players win money in the short-term, continued play will inevitably result in losses because the odds will always be in favour of the house. There is no way to beat the house. The house always wins.

Private life

Denise Coates was born on 26 September 1967. Now 56, to say she maintains a low-key private life is an understatement. There’s very few photos of her, she rarely attends any event in an official capacity and it’s reported she only conducts interviews via email.

She and her husband, Richard, who runs the property side of the business and is vice-chairman of Stoke City, have five children, including four girls adopted from the same family.

In January 2012, she was honoured with the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The CBE was in recognition for her efforts as a businesswoman and community leader. Also in 2012 she received an honorary doctorate from Staffordshire University.

She lives in a huge home in Bechton near Sandbach, Cheshire. The £90 million space-age mansion was designed by world-renowned architecture firm Foster and Partners — the architects behind the Gherkin, Reichstag and Wembley Stadium — after she snapped up 12 separate plots of her neighbours’ land costing £5.5 million and five years .

Locals living near the say the Bet365 tycoon moved into the brilliant-white house with her husband and five children last year after five years was spent on renovation.

The 52-acre estate has an Olympic-sized swimming pool, an artificial lake, sunken tennis courts, as well as stables, ornamental gardens, workers’ cottages and a boathouse.

She drives an Aston Martin DB9 and commutes to work in one of her two helicopters.

About the author

Based in Sussex-by-the-Sea, on England’s south coast, Gary is a creative writer and image-maker. He specialises in creating out of the ordinary portraits of musicians and people with interesting faces, as well as photographing some of the world’s finest flowers and gardens, not forgetting an array of automotive exotica.

On the writing side, he has used his research skills to author deep dives into some noteworthy songs beginning with Bryan Ferry’s ‘These Foolish Things’ ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials, ‘Real Wild Child’ by Ivan and ‘All The Young Dudes’ by Mott the Hoople.

He has also written a biography of Robert Palmer and the stories behind Whitesnake’s blatant Led Zep rip-off, ‘Still Of The Night’, Harry Styles’ anthem to positivity, ‘Treat People With Kindness’ and the little known Queen track ‘Cool Cat.’

Most recently, Gary has penned the fascinating story behind George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ as well as ‘Believe It Or Not’ a look into the rise of fake news and his latest essay ‘Nadir: How the cost of living crisis has brought so many in broken Britain to the depths of despair.’

All these can be found here on Medium, along with his reviews of gigs and events and chats with musicians including the likes of Royal Blood, Joe Satriani and Wolf Alice.