{"id":9175,"date":"2024-03-25T17:34:53","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T17:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/?page_id=9175"},"modified":"2024-03-25T17:34:53","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T17:34:53","slug":"how-many-horse-races-take-place-each-year-in-the-uk","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/articles\/horse-racing\/how-many-horse-races-take-place-each-year-in-the-uk\/","title":{"rendered":"How Many Horse Races Take Place Each Year in the UK?"},"content":{"rendered":"
It is estimated that around 6 million people a year visit the racecourses to enjoy the spectacle of a day at the races.<\/p>\n
Cheltenham Festival alone is responsible for around 250,000 of them, but even so, that\u2019s a lot of people wanting to enjoy the racing.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, that doesn\u2019t account for the people who bet on and watch the sport online, on their bookies\u2019 websites, so the number of people who have an interest in horse racing is going to be much higher than that 6 million figure (around 13 million people bet on the Grand National each year, for instance).<\/p>\n
So there is demand for horse racing and no mistake \u2013 but how much demand? Are the number of people who are interested in horse racing enough to make sense of how many horse races take place each year in the UK?<\/p>\n
There is something further to be explored here, but first, let\u2019s look at the data and see the lay of the land.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You will find meetings held at racecourses up and down the country more or less every day of the week in the UK.<\/p>\n
With 365 days in a year, a handful of meetings each day, and between 6-9 races per meeting, the number of individual races run annually soon add up.<\/p>\n
The British Horse Racing Authority have been keeping accurate records on this since 2019 and have made that information available to the public<\/a>, and while this isn\u2019t exactly a large data set given it only covers races since 2019, it\u2019s enough to spot changes.<\/p>\n
Year<\/th>\n | Total Races<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | ||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2023<\/td>\n | 9998<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | ||||||||||||||||||
2022<\/td>\n | 10216<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | ||||||||||||||||||
2021<\/td>\n | 10353<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | ||||||||||||||||||
2020<\/td>\n | 7882<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | ||||||||||||||||||
2019<\/td>\n | 10086<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n Here we have the total number of races run in the UK every year, both in flat and jumps racing.<\/p>\n Bear in mind that 2020 was when COVID hit, so this warps the already small data set which is about as helpful as most customer service agents, but even so, you can see the total number of races starting to fall away.<\/p>\n The number of races has declined two years in a row from 2021 onwards, and as we will investigate later, this is no accident.<\/p>\n How Many Flat vs Jumps Races?<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n This is where things get interesting (assuming you enjoy looking at statistical data as much as the next bloke), because while flat racing has remained almost perfectly consistent apart from the impacts of COVID, jumps racing has not:<\/p>\n
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