FOBTs and crowd violence reveal the racing emperor is wearing no clothes
On Thursday morning senior racing industry figures woke to the news they had been expecting with a mixture of dread and resignation for several weeks: the maximum FOBT stake will be cut to £2, leaving thousands of betting shops financially untenable and a huge chunk of racing's funding at risk.
Many racing fans and betting shop customers, by contrast, greeted the news with approval. High-stakes machine gambling is often blamed for turning betting shops into mini-casinos that no longer appeal to many racing punters, while FOBTs' links to gambling addiction have caused them to be widely viewed as a societal ill.
This abhorrence of FOBTs has made it difficult to talk frankly about what their muzzling would mean for racing, since focus on the damage that will befall the sport was often mistaken for a defence of machine gambling by those who conflate analysis with campaigning. Now the muzzle is on, however, the sport can talk frankly about the sorry situation it finds itself in.
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