General sport

As the Cheltenham Festival kicks off next week, gambling boss, Ralph Topping, explains that football is fun but racing remains tops at his firm

Evening Standard

Still at the races: Ralph Topping started working at betting shops when he was a 19-year-old law student in Edinburgh. Image courtesy of Evening Standard

Ralph Topping, chief executive of William Hill, is able to do what we would all love to do: dress up sporting jaunts as work. A visit to the Cheltenham Festival next week could be counted as work, as could a trip to the European football championships in Poland and Ukraine in the summer. But, says Topping, “I don’t like jaunts. Somebody at work said, ‘Ralph doesn’t work 24/7, he works 26/9.’ I turned down invitations to see two semi-finals at the World Cup in South Africa because it would have meant practically a week away from work. As a Presbyterian Scot, I get guilty if I’m not working.”

We have just sat down for lunch at the Ivy and the man who runs the country’s largest bookmakers with 2300 shops has encouraged me to order haggis.

I have already provoked him to defend his homeland by suggesting that Scotland is a backwater. “Everywhere’s a backwater if you’re sitting in London. There’s a lot going on at the moment.”

But then Topping, 60, is the son of a West Lothian policeman who, when I ask how he would vote on Scottish independence, says: “I come from a family which is very much independence-minded. Would I vote for it? Do I like Alex Salmond? Put it this way, I do think Salmond is the best politician in the UK at the moment, the cleverest.”

Topping does, however, have a shrewd assessment of the English products that work for his business. So, while William Hill sponsors the Scottish Cup — “a good product”, says Topping — it is the marketing deal he did with the Football Association in January that, he admits, has opened up the world for his business. “We’re a big company with a strong presence in England. We’ve got a big global footprint now, and there’s a hell of an amount of interest in the Premier League. Being associated with England is a good thing for our brand.”

Football did keep Topping awake on November 19 last year when all the favourites came in.

This — the football equivalent of Frankie Dettori winning all seven races at Ascot in 1996 — cost William Hill £6million and the industry £30 million. Football now has an increasing share of the business which, last year, saw William Hill’s income rise 6% to £1.1 billion. The online business contributed £321.3million, a 28% rise in net revenues.

Topping insists that there are no issues in the relationship with Playtech, its joint venture partner, despite a legal spat last year. As for walk-outs by employees in Tel Aviv and Bulgaria, he dismisses them as problems with “rogue employees”. However, William Hill, which has an option to buy out Playtech by next year, may now decide to exercise it.

For Topping, racing is “still the main sport for us” and the one that really concerns him.

“The racing industry hasn’t done enough to promote the sport, never been able to define what it actually needs. It should take a good look at itself. There is a lot it can do to put its own house in order. You can tell me the result of the football match last night. But 19 out of 20 people involved in racing will not be able to tell you the winner of the big feature race the previous weekend. Racing is a great spectacle but it does not last as long in the memory as other sports.”

Topping would get snooker supremo Barry Hearn to run racing. “He knows what the public are looking for. Take a walk down a high street in London, stop a punter and say, ‘How much is 1000 guineas worth?’ He wouldn’t be able to tell you what a guinea is worth. But we still have races called 1000 Guineas, 2000 Guineas. The races involving three-year-olds come incredibly early in the season.

“Does racing need the cost base it’s got at the moment? Should all those racecourses be sitting empty? Racing could probably sustain about 40 to 45 racecourses. It has over 50. That is a fair number of unprofitable businesses being propped up by a state subsidy called a levy.”

The levy paid by bookmakers, currently £65 million, is a perpetual battleground, with the sport feeling it never gets enough. “Well,” retorts Topping, “the industry is fairly Oliver Twist in its attitude. It always wants more. It’s never satisfied. We should never lose sight of the fact that it’s a betting product for people who go into a betting shop.” And for all the horses that Sheikh Maktoum and other rich men own, for Topping, “The working man keeps the show on the road.”

Topping has a very precise idea of what the working man does when he walks into a betting shop. “A working guy goes in a betting shop for about 18 minutes. During that time he’ll have four or five bets, with most of them around £3.”

Topping’s own experience of betting shops dates back to when, as a 19-year-old law student at Strathclyde University, he took a “Saturday boy” job with Mecca Bookmakers. His father had given him a car, but told him he must fund its running costs. “The betting shop had mainly women working in it, and if you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to go in the garage next door.”

Within two years he was working for William Hill, and has never left. “The pay was absolutely fantastic compared with a teacher, which is probably what I would have ended up being. I’ve seen huge changes in the industry, all for the better.”

Failure by critics to appreciate that makes him really angry, be it Mary Portas calling betting shops a blight on the high street or MP Diane Abbott complaining about their proliferation in her Hackney constituency.

“Diane is a great one for the one-liner but, bless her, she isn’t a polymath. What she said was really stupid. We were able to show that the number of betting shops in Hackney had dropped in her time as an MP.”

What reassures him is that the critics are not in tune with society. “There’s an enormous amount of people who get pleasure out of betting. It has become really mainstream, just as drinking has become much more socially acceptable. When I was a boy, women could never go into the pub, they had to go to the snug bar to have a drink. People now don’t look down their nose if you have a bet.”

LIFE AND TIMES

CV MILESTONES

1973 William Hill trainee

2002 Retail operations director

2008 Chief executive

PERSONAL LIFE

Married with three children

BEST ADVICE I’VE RECEIVED

“This following piece of advice was given to me by Kevin — a director of William Hill who has now died. When I was a trainee manager at Ayr Racecourse, Kevin said to me: ‘It looks like you will go far in this organisation.

‘The higher up you go, do not forget where you came from.

‘You come in with an unblemished reputation, make sure you leave with one.’ I have never forgotten that advice.”

Evening Standard

Aiming high: Al Jazeera are ready to bid for Premier League games. Image courtesy of Evening Standard

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The current three-season TV deal which saw Sky and ESPN pay a total of £1.78billion to screen 138 top-flight live games per year ends in May 2013.

The fight for the next three-year ­contract is due to start in the spring and will be tougher than ever with the Qatar-owned TV channel said to be ­weighing up a move. Al Jazeera has already entered the French market. It screens Ligue 1 games and from next season it will also show the majority of Champions League matches on TV in France.

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Cafe Calcio – Season IV, Episode 1

Cafe Calcio is a football fanzine radio show broadcast out of London on Resonance 104.4 FM and resonancefm.com/listen every Thursday at 19:00, and repeated on Saturday at 11:00

We’re back, and we launched the new series with a guest, the caliber of which being equal to anyone we’ve had on before at the very least. On Thursday night, we welcomed the behemoth of sporting knowledge and all round thoroughly nice chap that is Mihir Bose to the Resonance studios to talk about football and sport in the wider context of his new book: ‘The Spirit Of The Game: How Sport Changed The Modern World‘. In the show we discussed the origins of fair play and its power as a civilising force, the cult of Horst Dassler and we also touched a little on the mess that is FIFA in current times. These things and much more are covered in the pages of his book, and I can genuinely recommend it to you all.

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The Observer

by David Goldblatt

A royal anniversary is, in any normal year, one of the biggest events in the British cultural calendar. But in 2012 it will face stiff competition. England are going to Poland and Ukraine for the European football championships – no doubt accompanied by the usual patriotic euphoria. But even this will look like small change once the Olympic machine begins to roll. The numbers are giddy: a real budget of more than £12bn (some 3bn over the official maximum); 302 gold medals; 10,000 athletes, and twice as many journalists; plus innumerable coaches and officials, sponsors and factotums. Almost every UK department of state, security agency and London local authority will be engaged for months with the process, and the power of the world’s hyperactive and hyperconnected media systems will be concentrated in the British capital.

“How did we get to this?” is the question posed by Mihir Bose in The Spirit of the Game. How did sport become such an ethically and symbolically charged dimension of our global culture? How and why did the forces of money and power come to take it so seriously? I’m not sure that it was his intention, or if he knew quite what he was letting himself in for, but Bose has ended up trying to answer these questions by writing a global history of modern sport….Read the full article

Click here to find out more information about The Spirit of the Game

Peter Oborne gets into the spirit of the Olympics, reviewing Mihir Bose’s The Spirit of the Game: How Sport Made the Modern World.

The Telegraph

By Peter Oborne, Chief Political Commentator

Almost exactly 125 years ago, a young Frenchman made a pilgrimage to Rugby School. Armed with a copy of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he headed across the quad and into the chapel, only stopping once he reached the altar beneath which Thomas Arnold, the school’s legendary headmaster, was buried.

There, as he was later to write, “in the twilight, alone in the great gothic chapel of Rugby, my eyes fixed on the funeral slab on which, without epitaph, the great name of Thomas Arnold was inscribed.

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Click here for more information about The Spirit of the Game