Increasing irrelevance of betting shops a growing problem for racing’s finances

Newspaper hacks know all about commercial superfluousness. An anxious whiff of redundancy lingers over lots of other businesses, too, and there’s no escaping a growing bang of irrelevance about betting shops. That’s bad news for those working in them and bad news for racing.

There were 684 betting shops in Ireland at the end of last year. There were close on 1,400 in 2008. In a betting world where every phone is a shop, cartoon representations of punters scrawling out betting slips with stubby pencils is a busted docket.