Sports

The Mob Used To Run Sports Betting. Now DraftKings and FanDuel Do.

How sports betting moved online and started a debate about its benefits and negatives.

David Bockino | 6.29.2026 11:30 AM

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In May 1995, a supporters group associated with the English football club Stoke City FC launched a campaign demanding wholesale changes to their beloved team. At the time, Stoke City played in Division One, the competition just below the top tier, three-year-old English Premier League (EPL). At the conclusion of every season the best clubs in the First Division get bumped up to the EPL to compete against heavyweights like Manchester United and Liverpool. But Stoke City was languishing, and hope that it would get promoted any time soon was fading. In an advertisement published in a local newspaper, the group asked, "Does the club's present level of investment in players provide for a real promotion challenge in the future?" Much of the ire was directed toward Stoke City chairman and majority shareholder Peter Coates. Owner of a catering business and a collection of betting shops, Coates had been in charge of Stoke for close to a decade. "Whenever a club is seen not to be doing well there always has to be someone to blame," he said a few days after the group's ad. The problem, Coates explained, was a lack of resources. The money being poured into clubs like Blackburn, winners of the English Premier League title, is "the exception to the rule. Generally this does not happen and we would love such a sugar daddy at Stoke. But I don't think we are going to get one." He was right. No man was going to save Stoke City. But a woman would.

On January 10, 1998, Stoke City suffered its worst home defeat in history, a 7–0 drubbing by Birmingham City. No longer content with strongly worded missives, angry supporters stormed the field: "They came through the door like a herd of buffaloes," a former Stoke City player told a reporter. A few days later, Coates resigned as chairman. A few months later, Stoke City was relegated to the Second Division. Almost two years later, Stoke City was sold to a consortium of investors from Iceland.

No longer in charge of a football club, Peter Coates returned to the corporate world to find that his daughter had big plans for the family business. Denise, an econometrics graduate from the University of Sheffield, had doubled the number of betting shops and grown revenue. But her real ambition was to shed the brick-and-mortar model to focus on the internet. Cognizant of the startup costs needed to compete with the offshore operators, Denise mortgaged the buildings and took out a loan. She purchased the domain name bet365.com for $25,000 and in March 2001 launched the company's website. Four years later, all the shops had been sold and resources were being poured into the online business.

Her bet on the future of the internet paid off (maybe as well as any bet has ever paid off). With Coates' focus on technology, customer service, and marketing, bet365 became one of the most popular online gambling websites in the world, generating far more revenue than the retail shops ever had. Suddenly the Coates family was flush with cash. In 2006, they bought Stoke City FC back from the Iceland group and Peter Coates resumed his role as chairman. With its newfound wealth, the family could now provide the resources needed to elevate the club's fortunes. Two years later, much to the delight of its rabid fans, Stoke City finished in second place and was promoted to the English Premier League. Just a decade after her father's acrimonious exit, Denise Coates had used gambling money to give her community what they had always wanted: a world-class football club.

Meanwhile, bet365 continued to grow. With gambling companies now allowed to advertise on television, it became nearly impossible to watch a British sporting event without seeing a bet365 commercial. The marketing tsunami, combined with the emergence of the smartphone and the company's first-mover advantage, proved to be a potent combination. Add to the mix some exposure in the world's most popular sports league—in 2012, bet365 became Stoke City's primary jersey sponsor—and the result was the biggest gambling website on the planet. By 2014, the company was taking in $25 billion worth of bets from 7 million customers across 200 countries. Three years later, Denise Coates took home a compensation package worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 million. According to The Guardian, her pay was "more than 1,300 times that of the prime minister" and more than double the collective salaries of the entire Stoke City roster.

While Denise Coates became one of the wealthiest women in the world, her company became an influential part of the Stoke community and British society. Much of this influence was positive. As reported by The Guardian's Rob Davies, bet365 became the largest employer in Stoke and provided jobs to over 10,000 people worldwide. The company also became one of the country's biggest taxpayers with annual bills in the hundreds of millions. Denise Coates herself became a dedicated philanthropist, pouring over $1 billion into causes such as medical research, disaster relief, and college scholarships.

And yet there was negative influence as well. For example, bet365 was often cited as one of the reasons for the increase in British "problem gamblers." The site's innovative "in-play" betting, where users could bet on dozens of outcomes while watching an actual event, was seen by some as a gateway to addiction. So were marketing tactics that involved handing out bonuses to bettors who had recently suffered big losses. One member of Parliament put it this way: "bet365 appear to be deliberately preying on vulnerable people and encouraging customers to rack up huge losses to boost their own profits."

The moral duality of the company wasn't lost on at least one employee, who in an anonymous letter to The Guardian asked, "The success [of bet365] presents an ethical quandary: do the taxes, the charity, the healthy salaries, and employee benefits balance out the massive harm that gambling causes, nationally and specifically in deprived areas such as Stoke-on-Trent?" In other words, do the positives of legalized gambling—which in the case of bet365 included not only thousands of jobs and a billion dollars to charity but also the salvation of the community's favorite football club—outweigh the negatives?

States Decide Between Uncle Mick and Sports Betting Legalization

This quandary can be extrapolated outward, past Stoke City and far beyond the United Kingdom. After the fall of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), for instance, each American state faced this very dilemma. But because........

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