How to make horse racing a truly global sport

Horseracing operates on a global stage from Britain and Ireland to Australia, the US, Hong Kong, Japan, UAE and many more, and it delivers year-round action on a scale other sports envy and which is built on centuries-old foundations. Yet, despite this worldwide reach, racing is still working out how best to operate as a global sport in the way modern audiences recognise.

In reality, racing still operates as a collection of self-contained local markets, each with their own high-profile moments and largely consumed by local fanbases. Each jurisdiction has its own rules, rights, betting frameworks and cultural norms optimised for domestic economics. Consequently, while racing exists everywhere, it can feel like a localised sport and this brings challenges on how it can keep pace with other sports in building a truly global, modern fanbase.

New fans do not fall in love with a sport because they understand its every detail; they fall in love because they want to watch the best of the sport and absorb visible, meaningful and shared key stories around big occasions. Major events such as the FIFA World Cup or Olympic Games cut through because they command sustained attention over weeks and represent the pinnacle of their sports every four years.

However, many sports have had great success in growing global fanbases. Formula 1 grew, not by expecting fans to master aerodynamics but by leaning into storytelling and personality. The Hundred sold £1 billion in franchise stakes by creating a family-orientated audience model. PDC Darts turned personality into record-breaking viewership. Growth came from making fandom easy to access, more visible and more human.

Racing has the same ingredients to succeed: elite human and equine athletes, high-stakes competition and iconic venues. When racing is presented as a major global occasion rather than a localised betting product it attracts mass attention, but the challenge is how to create more of those cut-through moments.

One of the key problems is that racing asks new audiences to work hard. Discovery of the sport globally remains fragmented with no single source answering the basic question: what matters in global racing today? Unified storytelling is limited and even prestigious races take place with limited awareness beyond home markets. A compounding factor is that each market then layers on dense form guides, presenting information in their own way and unintentionally creating friction where other sports work to remove it.

Over the last six months we have been undertaking conversations with more than 60 senior figures across 40 of the sport’s most influential bodies to hear their views on the challenges for racing in growing its global fanbase. The same challenge has consistently surfaced: racing’s limiting factor is not quality, history, or volume of competition – it’s fragmentation.

This interesting summary was presented at the World Tote Association Forum in Berlin: racing is a global sport operating with a local mindset. Supporting this view, at the most recent IFHA conference it was more apparent than ever that racing now competes with every form of global entertainment as audiences expect every sport to be accessible, narrative-led, and culturally present across modern digital platforms.

However, racing is trying. There are signs of really positive momentum and formats like The Everest, the Global Jockeys’ League, and innovations such as JockeyCam show a willingness to test new presentations and invest in elevating the sport. Most importantly, World Pool provides proof that racing can collaborate globally when incentives align.

By co-mingling betting pools across borders, World Pool has addressed one of racing’s entrenched structural problems: fragmented liquidity. Since inception, World Pool races have grown from 30 to 329 in 2025, across 26 jurisdictions. Over that period, turnover reached HK$9.3 billion. In September 2025, The Everest became the largest race by turnover in World Pool history, generating HK$83 million. World Pool has successfully demonstrated alignment across borders.

It also exposes the next challenge: World Pool connects markets financially but does not yet connect them emotionally. It unifies liquidity, not wider racing fandom. It does not, on its own, create shared heroes or consistent global storytelling. If racing is to truly connect with new global audiences this is the next big step it faces.

So how does racing solve this problem? If racing is serious about being global, audiences should be counting down to major events and following storylines without barriers. It cannot be right that accessing major global races often requires a betting account or additional subscription, governed by local market commercial structures. Few other global sports would accept that as a growth model.

While core racing audiences are ageing – often averaging over 50 – younger, digital-native fans consume sport primarily through short-form video and social feeds. The sport needs to keep pace with these trends. The long-term answer is not to pump out larger volumes of meetings or increase the level of detail in the form; the answer is to elevate the sport through media and platforms that will enable scale.

Racing has a year-round calendar, international movement of athletes and iconic events that carry cultural weight. The coming decade will be an inflection point: racing is a compelling sport, but can it display enough foresight and unity on a global stage to bring storytelling, simplification of presentation and fan experience to life. Encouragingly, World Pool has already shown that global alignment is achievable.

At Spotlight Sports Group our thinking is shaped by these same questions – particularly how content can support a more intuitive racing experience delivered consistently around the world. Products like Smart View represent a new approach to racecard content. Our short-form video and social-feed presentation has changed dramatically and remains an investment focus. This is all to help potential fans find a way into the sport by making it easier to understand, building confidence over time and creating a more accessible, exciting experience.

Audiences should not have to work to understand racing; racing has to work harder to understand them. Bringing this concept to the global stage at the highest level is the challenge.

Sam Houlding is Managing Director of B2B at Spotlight Sports Group