Arc and ITV drop the Racing League

It's a shame because the Racing League gave us great racing. The trick was to ignore the league element.

You sure?

14 runner handicaps on the aw. No thanks, although at least they were all trying

Agree ramruma

bookies think it was great.  4 or 5/1 the field handicaps.

boycotted the racing league on basis it was a stupid idea (fairly typical of nonsense in the past 20 years or so - premier racing, diversity, blah blah) and have zero interest in Friday Night Live, mind I'm more than double target audience so they won't miss me!! at least it's all weather during all weather season...was at Durham National day when Invades had loads in, certainly increased the atmosphere if you could turn a deaf ear to the shrieks as they passed post with 2 circuits to go!! Musselburgh handles Invades pretty well, gives them their own area/bar - would be interested to find out in 10 years time, how many of them are now regular racegoers (not just the social event ones)...

I was unwittingly at Nottingham a couple of times when Invades was present; not my cup of tea although my idea of a good day at the races is like last Friday at Southwell!

However, I do applaud intiatives to get more younger racegoers attending. Obviously they won't all become regular visitors but then clearly many of those who started going 40 years ago haven't kept going otherwise crowds would be at the same levels.

there must be very few £50 /£100 backers going racing these days.  Expense of travel / admission / time wasted that could be studying / more meetings &  races ( with pictures ) staying  at home.... and exchanges.

cant be bothered with the roads howard also bar a few exceptions most tracks don't want you there for a lot of their fixtures

as for the RL good riddance imo

Should never have been allowed start. A pathetic idea. Handicaps galore. A bookies benefit. Only for addicted mugs.

Nobody was ever forced to bet on them ,do people prefer these many very small field races ?

Nov 17, 2025 -- 1:32PM, jimnast wrote:

Nobody was ever forced to bet on them ,do people prefer these many very small field races ?

how about have the same races w/o the team bs

What's the new idea for Fridays?

Good idea to get the younger cohort included in racing at whatever level, it is similar to what is happening at some French tracks during the summer evening meetings maybe it would be better to do it in the summer time over here.

early new year is best time for students - it's definitely a money spinner for Invades

"Nobody was ever forced to bet on them ,do people prefer these many very small field races ?"    Obviously better than 2 or 3 runners  but I prefer 6 to 10/11 runners with a short price fav which you can back or take on.  You are clearly an enthusiast more than anything else if you are happy with bookie races jimnast.

Welcome news.

Hope they do the same for the Shergar Cup.

Yes Howard just an enthusiast happy to do my money every year ,the racing league was 6 meetings a year well attended with decent fields ,

well attended because they gave out an enormous number of free tickets

Good competetive racing.

Racecourses need people through the gates and if some free tickets are given out that’s good,shergar cup no free tickets north of 20,000 turn up .

shergar cup not for me either but its done in 1 afternoon this RL bs is rammed down your throat for weeks

Racing can’t be run for all those geniuses on betfair who get fortunes out of of the game ,let those who enjoy the sport have a few days enjoyment at the end of the day there the ones who pay for your lifestyle.

Love the Shergar Cup! Made a nice bit of £££££ betting on the ladies over the years. There are plenty of worse Saturdays.

let those who enjoy the sport have a few days enjoyment at the end of the day

who the fck are these people?

Me

certainly haven't been attending the RL

people is plural

you enjoy(ed) it and are in tiny minority

My wife also attends so there’s 2

super

Not 230 yet and we have had hurdles omitted,fences omitted,jockeys wrongly pulling up and a farce at Leicester,don’t get that in the racing league

Even Carlisle fc get good gates ( 10,800 ) when it's a tenner    ( ycfc fan here ! )

Nov 17, 2025 -- 2:29PM, jimnast wrote:

Not 230 yet and we have had hurdles omitted,fences omitted,jockeys wrongly pulling up and a farce at Leicester,don’t get that in the racing league

woke a few up on here tho

Uncompetitive novice chases in recent weeks due to the ground now thankfully the rain has come so no problems in that department,oops just seen Wednesdays Hexham 5 runners Warwick 3 runners .but at least we can all pick the colours out easily.

Wonderful news it's been binned. It was never a goer as it would never attract new racegoers given the quality of the races and horses.

Fewer races (not more) to arrest the present spiral decline of horseracing in the UK.

Just when I think you have reached the bottom of your stupidity you defy me Impossible.lol

Wen do new racegoers know quality horses and races....

My experience was through friends when introduced to horse and greyhound racing. My friends would not "waste" time on non-consequential races.

Sad day! The RL offered some of the best betting opportunities you could ever find in Horse Racing. This years meeting at Chepstow was a thing of beauty. And it went on to produce the Ces winner and the game as they come Crowd Quake. It was very strange to me to hear punters were so down on it.

This summer's six Racing League cards were seen by a combined total of just 15,016 racegoers, while the latest accounts of parent company Championship Racing showed debts totalling more than £5 million.

It was an utterly ridculous concept for horse racing.

Yeah I lost 10k on the fav but was over the moon about it because Yorkshire won the race 

You surprise me impossible way you talk down regarding moderate racing as when enable won on the aw at Newcastle on her racecourse debut you must have been watching as you backed her right away to win the breeders cup.

Nov 17, 2025 -- 2:04PM, barstool wrote:

Welcome news.Hope they do the same for the Shergar Cup.

Abso fookin lutely. And the all-weather $hite at Newcastle, and numerous other places.

Nov 17, 2025 -- 2:25PM, Coneygree1971 wrote:

Love the Shergar Cup! Made a nice bit of £££££ betting on the ladies over the years. There are plenty of worse Saturdays.

Only Newcastle, and the Northumberland Plate. Get the GRASS back, and the Pitmen's Derby.

Never understood how people get themselves into a proper frenzy over the shergar cup it’s 6 races in a season .

Regarding the racing league whilst I thought the racing was pretty good it was probably getting to good as it started to effect other handicaps particularly in the north,races like the great st Wilfred.

agree Jimnast I liked the Racing League and personally don't mind the Shergar Cup
usually a bit of value here and there in both formats - we cant just have the same offering
52 weeks a year and expect things to change and to attract new racegoers, the concerts after racing work though
definitely not my thing as usually groups, artists I don't particularly care for but obviously others do
the student days seem popular too - these initiatives have to be given a chance or racing will continue to decline
in popularity

Good evening north east

Couldn’t disagree with any of your post music nights certainly not for me that said I went to one of the first ones possibly the very first one Gerry and the pacemakers at the July course,I wouldn’t go to the shergar cup but have absolutely no problem with it,I did go to plenty of the racing league fixtures ,the student days are not as bad as many of us elder ones think even though plenty have had a few drinks there remarkably polite throughout the day.

Who cared what region won, or were in the lead? It ruined the commentary as the commentator was obliged to keep mentioning the various regions the horses were running for. Decent prize money thrown at a flawed concept.

"Never understood how people get themselves into a proper frenzy over the shergar cup it’s 6 races in a season"

Not sure I'd call it a proper frenzy, but those brought up on horse racing as a cultural cornerstone of British life in the 20th century, and who have a genuine connection to the turf, choose to voice opposition because it is anathema to that connected understanding. Racing is not, and never will be, a team sport. But even then it might pass unnoticed and ignored if it weren't for those who talk and act like it occupies a vacant space in a desperate and misguided ploy to capture a fickle and disengaged audience.
As I've said many times on here before, horseracing exists in the conscience of the committed, as a result of exposure at a vulnerable and impressionable age to a world of edgy risk, laced with an air of intrigue and the whiff of disrespectability. It was a heady cocktail, and I got drunk on the fumes in the 1970s, both in the betting ring and downbeat betting shops. In 2025 those influences are long gone, and are unlikely to be replaced by the sanitised vaccuum of family friendly gimmicks and team racing.

Paul Fisher, chief executive of the Jockey Club - which owns racecourses including Aintree, Cheltenham, Newmarket and Kempton Park - believes the concept of City Racing could help bring racing to "a younger, urban audience".

"I'm a keen cricket fan and this could be racing's Twenty20. It could take it to a whole new audience around the world," said Fisher.

   

If the shergar cup is going to survive then it needs to attract a better class of jockey than the muppets that were riding this year.

A very fair point cropstick but with Newmarket,haydock and the curragh on it won’t happen.

Howard. 17.00. 

steerforth I agree that those in charge of racing seem to think that change is vital but few of their ideas seem as good as what they replace. I have never known a life without racing. I was (or so I was told) taken to a PTP before I could walk and certainly remember going every Saturday from March to June from the age of 4. First time at Prestbury Park in 1955 (and a member there for 35 years). 70 years later I still watch most races every day on TV. What I miss most is the diversity of trainers and riders as the sport gets into fewer and fewer hands just like every other part of the economy. Back in the 1960s I could recognise the names of 90% of owners, trainers and riders and the horses were household names but now too many of them are in French or Arabic and I forget them in a month.

Amen to all that Sageform. My mind is working exactly the same way as yours. I struggle to reacall or differentiate between so many good horses whose mames mean nothing and merge into an incoherent vat of hotch potch jibberish. And what exactly is a berlais, or a d'Oudaries. I made this point elsewhere and was accused of xenophobia (and worse). Pointing out that confusion is not irrational fear did me no good.
And when 9 of 11 Group One entries at Doncaster last month were trained by the same team, and that that in itself, was not necessarily unusual, and certainly not mentioned in mainstream media as being particularly worrisome, well, we lose a little of our heritage.
To quote someone whose name I don't recall (although he was American, not Arabic), "Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."

I dont think that a few minutes of entertainment every 30 minutes is high on the agenda of the 18-25 generation . Like most on here the love of racing originated from our famiy upbringings . Even in the 1960s I remember thinking then that a lot of time was wasted , I soon grew out of that notion  .

I'm with Steerforth (although a wee bit younger) in that my 45 years of passionately following racing (annual membership, hosting hospitality days, visiting all UK tracks and 7 remaining in Ireland, Breeders Cup, Dubai World Cup, Arcs, part ownership etc etc) due to a heady mix of horses, gambling, drinking and days off work (often midweek when some of the best racing was to be had)...personally the powers that be (in their various guises) sold the goose a long time ago - great races like the Tommy Whittle, Ebor, July Cup etc etc and of course the Derby have been devalued and no longer exist in the conscience of the casual racegoer-punter due to them being relegated to the paragraphy below Leyton Orient in the saturday sports pages (online and on paper)....

N East Correspondent - there was no need for initiatives in 70s through 90s, just great horses running (often!) against each other, a fairly large number of trainers winning big races, great jockeyship, on course bookies offering different(imagine that!) odds, and leaving the track win or lose not feeling that you'd been screwed over by the price of a pint or a steaming bowl of barrie cope seafood curry....it's not surprising when the people behind these recent initiatives don't care to even engage with the core racegoers as to what they might suggest that they are doomed to failure from the start..

as I said earlier, no problem with Invades particularly if bars/music in different area of track a la Musselburgh

as someone who follows the top end of greyhound racing I was thinking that the sport has at most 20 years left in UK, probably longer in Ireland and I can definitely see the day when NH racing is under pressure and there aren't enough concerned folks to fight that corner

20 years is optimistic. I will be in the ground by then and none of my family will notice when jump racing disappears.

Sageform whilst I agree that national hunt isn’t in a good way what do you think will happen to Cheltenham and Aintree ?

There’s still huge investment going into both.

Reports of the death of the Racing League are greatly exaggerated. That was the message sent out by founder Jeremy Wray, who is already working on ways to get the competition staged this year.

Wray had been talking to potential new partners even before the Racing Post broke the news on Monday that Arena Racing Company had dropped its support.

The Racing League has run on its tracks for the last five summers and been covered on ITV4, but the future of the team-based series looked to have been thrown into serious doubt after it was revealed Arc and ITV are now uniting to create a new 'Friday Night Live' programme of meetings from January to March next year.

However, Wray said: "We knew what was coming and what Arc were doing and now it's out there. But we want to continue with the Racing League.

Jeremy Wray:
Jeremy Wray: "We want to continue with the Racing League"
"We are pursuing other options as to where we can showcase it this year. I've been having those conversations since I was aware of this. I've been talking to other racecourses and other media groups."

Wray remains hopeful, although he admitted that it is a difficult time to secure financial commitments from racecourses or media organisations, for a series which again offered more than £2 million in prize-money last summer.

He said: "There's an element of 'wait and see' with the budget coming up next week as everyone's attitude to these things at the moment is that they want to see how they'll be affected by what happens with that.

"When I present some of the numbers that we achieve, there will be people out there pleasantly surprised at what the Racing League can bring – the betting turnover is a major factor to anyone involved commercially."

Trainer Jamie Osborne, who was a Racing League team manager, hopes the event can be resurrected.

Leading Jockey Saffie Osborne with her dad and team manager Jamie Osbourne at last year's Racing League
Jamie Osborne and jockey daughter Saffie with their 2022 Racing League trophies
Credit: John Grossick (racingpost.com/photos)
"It was a great prize-money boost for owners," he said. "Lots of people paid for their seasons through it so to lose that would be disappointing.

"I'd like to see it survive, for everybody's sake. It was something slightly different, without trying to reinvent the wheel, and there were some quite lowly-rated horses winning big chunks of money.

"To a degree, having a chance to do that with some horses would keep some people in the game. I just hope it can be resurrected so that opportunity is alive going forward.

Maybe the Jockey Club and independent Racecourses can pick this up. I would completely do away with the team aspect of it and make it more individual based leagues for Jockeys, Trainers & Horses who all score points for the finishing positions and an end of season final meeting with the top dozen or so horses at each distance Racing for boosted prize money races. I'd have more RL meetings but they would just be standard meetings with just the Handicaps being staged on the card qualifying as Racing League races (the maidens/novice wouldn't be RL races) and prize money would be boosted to encourage full, competitive fields but of course not to the levels the Racing League finals would be

I'm not really a fan of AW racing, but love the sport and all it entails, not only the betting aspect. Quite often i only have 1 or 2 bets, but watch most of the card; even better with a few mates and drinks etc

Much the same here.  Wish I had got more involved with horses when I was young.  Betting is now secondary to watching the racing and enjoying the special performances.

There was support for the racing league based on the money thrown at it. I don't think the format was a real factor. If you throw that sort of money at any format there will obviously be support for it. I would guess that over 80% had no interest in the team aspect.

I only watched it a couple of times.  It took a bit of grasping and the constant mid commentary reference to team names was, or became, a bit tedious.  Picking winners was a minefield too.  Wasn’t a hit with me but have no idea if it was liked by racecourses.