Punter friendly sports results have been cited as one cause of a considerable downturn in Flutter Entertainment’s financial performance in Q4 of 2025.
The firm, who operate Paddy Power and Betfair amongst other brands, revealed that their revenue was down 9% in the UK and Ireland year on year.
And that overall position was largely due to a staggering 30% drop-off in revenue for their sports betting division from October to December 2025.
The reporting, published on Thursday evening UK time, saw Flutter’s New York Stock Exchange share price plummet 12%, with minimal recovery since.
No Quarter Given
The overall picture, when including their American operation, is not so challenging for Flutter.
Their total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025 was $4.7 billion (£3.5 billion), which was an increase of 25% on the same period a year prior. Their adjusted earnings were even more impressive, up 27% year on year.
However, that was an underperformance against expected earnings, with a forecast of $4.97 billion (£3.7 billion) – hence the pessimism on the part of stock market investors and traders.
In their annual results for 2025, Flutter outperformed 2024 levels by 17%, although total turnover of $16.4 billion (£12.2 billion) was lower that the predicted $16.7 billion.
Flutter’s flagship US brand, FanDuel, has stormed ahead to become the market leader for sports betting and online casino gaming, with growth of 35% in the fourth quarter.
But fears remain over the competition provided by prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, who have grown to become billion-dollar enterprises seemingly overnight.
The picture in the UK for Flutter, amidst tax hikes and Paddy Power shop closures, is also less rosy.
Part of the blame, insiders claim, can be attributed to an ‘adverse swing’ of customer-friendly sports results, as well as a lack of big-name teams and players in the latter stages of the NFL play-offs.
Their chief executive, Peter Jackson, was pleased enough with the results and hoped his firm could take advantage of a significant year ahead for sport, which includes the biggest edition of the football World Cup to date.
“Our geographic and product diversification and scale allows us to capitalise on opportunities while providing resilience, allowing us to grow consistently through market cycles,” Jackson said.
“With a pivotal calendar of global sporting and iGaming moments ahead, including the World Cup, we are focused on capturing the full breadth of these opportunities in 2026 and beyond.”
Horse Racing Betting Continues to Fall
It was a mixed bag of a year in 2025 for British horse racing, according to a new report.
The British Horseracing Authority (BHA) has released their annual look back at the year just gone, with both positives and negatives for the sport to take away.
The amount of betting turnover generated by horse racing fell 4.3% in 2025 year on year, which means that the sport is recording 10.3% less in bets taken than in 2023 – given that this is a key source of revenue, that has to be a major concern.
Although cautioning against pointing the finger of blame, the BHA director of racing Richard Wayman did suggest that the number of big stakes punters leaving the UK market – in the wake of enhanced affordability checks – had been a contributory factor.
Curiously, there is something of a split based on the meeting type. Those with the ‘Premier’ billing actually saw betting revenue rise by 1.1% on 2024, but the sport’s bread-and-butter meetings saw a considerable decline of 8.1%.
“Within these numbers, a very noticeable trend is that betting customers are increasingly focusing their attention towards the bigger race days,” Wayman commented.
“The field size trends at Premier fixtures have been more positive than elsewhere in the fixture list, there have been more races on ITV this year and the absence of a major men’s football tournament this summer [has helped].”
However, it isn’t all doom and gloom. Attendances at UK racing climbed to more than five million people for the first time since 2019, which is an increase of 4.8%. The average attendance on a fixture-by-fixture basis also rose by 3.6%.
Prize money in racing also rose to an all-time high of £194.7 million, although that alone hasn’t been enough to keep as many horses in training.
After field sizes rose, both on the Flat and in National hunt action, in 2024, they saw a marked drop-off last year, with the average field of 8.9 horses on the Flat – down from 9.14 – and 7.84 over obstacles, which is a decrease of 0.65 on average.
Once again, Premier race days fared well with field sizes actually increasing last year, which suggests that the core meetings are struggling – smaller, independent trainers are continuing to struggle amidst the rising costs of running a yard.