Advertisement

How William Hill is hoping to score in US sports betting market

Think of William Hill and you probably think of the bookmaker's traditional high street betting shops or, perhaps, the Sports Book of the Year award it set up 30 years ago and has sponsored ever since.

If Philip Bowcock gets his way, though, you might soon start to think of a UK gaming company that has expanded very successfully in the United States.

The William Hill chief executive wants the US to become an increasingly important part of the business following a decision by the US Supreme Court, in May last year, to finally overturn a federal ban on sports betting.

Under a previous law, passed in 1992, the state of Nevada was the only place in which a punter could legally place a bet on the outcome of a particular sporting fixture.

Now, if states see fit to permit sports betting, they can legislate in order to do so.

William Hill already had a presence in the US, having bought a business in Nevada in 2012, but, since the ban was lifted, other states have started to open up.

Apart from Nevada, the company now has sports betting operations in New Jersey, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Rhode Island and Delaware.

Mr Bowcock told Sky News: "The US sports betting market is really opening up.

"We're in Nevada, we've been there for over six years and we're doing very well there, it's very profitable, but we're now in six further states and we now do approximately a third of the sports betting in the US at the moment.

"We're encouraged by what we've seen so far - the American population is five times the size of the British one, they love their sports and their sports are really made for sports betting."

On that basis, given the size of the potential US market, it is conceivable that it will become more important to William Hill quite quickly.

But Mr Bowcock is reluctant to make any predictions: "We have six states at the moment [apart from Nevada] and 29 states have got pending legislation, so I think it is going to take three to four years, at least, but I think it will come."

According to Mr Bowcock, Americans are currently betting slightly larger sums of money on sports fixtures than British punters, but he expects in time that betting habits in the two countries will come into line.

He said American football, followed by basketball, were the two most popular sports on which to bet.

The opening of the US market represents a significant opportunity for William Hill after a wretched few years.

The company's online service was widely derided in the UK betting industry as being inferior to its rivals and not growing as rapidly as hoped - underperformance that cost Mr Bowcock's successor, James Henderson, his job in 2015.

The company also appeared to be sidelined during a period of consolidation in the industry that saw Paddy Power merger with Betfair while Coral merged with Ladbrokes - the enlarged Ladbrokes Coral has since been acquired by online specialist GVC Holdings - while an attempt to merge with the Canadian owner of the Pokerstars website came to nothing.

Mr Bowcock was also forced, early in his job, to spend time defending the company against an unwanted joint takeover bid from 888 Holdings, the online betting firm and Rank Group, the owner of Grosvenor casinos and Mecca bingo.

Other headaches included having to sell William Hill's business in betting-mad Australia in March last year after a government ban on extending credit to customers and ahead of an expected tax increase.

If all that were not enough, Monday brought the introduction of stake limits on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs), the gaming machines on which all the traditional bookies have become increasingly reliant for their profits during recent years and which ensured that many otherwise unprofitable high street betting stores remained viable.

With punters previously able to stake £100 per spin, the arrangement attracted huge criticism from charities dealing with gambling addiction, despite evidence that the biggest cause of problem gambling is actually the National Lottery's scratchcards.

Nonetheless, the maximum stake per spin fell this week to £2, a reduction that William Hill warned, at its business alone, could force it to close 900 of its 2,300 stores with the loss of 4,000 jobs.

Mr Bowcock insisted it was still too early to say what the final number of stores closing will be - with much depending on whether punters stake the money they may no longer put in FOBTs on other forms of betting.

He added: "It's very early days - we changed on Monday.

"We've not seen anything surprising that we had not expected to see so far and there will certainly be shop closures and they will come in due time.

"There could be up to 900 shops that have to close. We'll see the customer reaction and then we'll take it from there - because we really don't know how the customers will react."

It seems almost inevitable that, as betting moves inexorably online from the physical environment, some betting shops will close in any case.

Over time, though, that ought - all things being equal - to come to the aid of the bookies.

And, in the meantime, the opening up of the US sports betting market offers an opportunity that the established players have not seen for years.