Denise Coates, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Bet365, took home at least £280m in pay and dividends in 2025, despite a sharp fall in the gambling group’s profits.
Accounts for the year to March 2025 show Bet365’s turnover rose to £4bn from £3.7bn, but pre-tax profits slumped to £349m, down from £627m the previous year. The decline followed a £325m rise in costs as the company reshaped its global footprint, expanding further into the US and South America while exiting China, where online betting is illegal.
Coates received £104m in salary during the year and, as majority shareholder, is entitled to at least half of a £353.6m dividend payout. This takes her total income from the group to a minimum of £280m, up from £150m last year but below her record £469m payout in 2021. Since founding Bet365 in Stoke-on-Trent, she has now extracted more than £2.5bn in pay and dividends.
While her remuneration has long attracted criticism for its scale, supporters note that Coates does not use aggressive tax structures and is one of the UK’s largest individual taxpayers. Bet365 also donated £130m to the Denise Coates Foundation during the year, although previous reporting has suggested tax relief linked to these donations may exceed the charity’s spending to date.
The company also waived loans to Stoke City football club, which was demerged from the group and is now controlled by Coates’s brother, John. The accounts made no reference to reported early-stage talks about a potential £9bn sale of Bet365.
Bet365 disclosed £59m of one-off restructuring costs linked to its exit from “certain markets”, understood to include China, although betting activity there did not cease until the end of March. The move is widely seen as necessary to avoid regulatory issues as the group accelerates its US expansion, where it entered five new states during the year and now operates in 16 following the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision to overturn the federal ban on sports betting.
