Football wins force a profit warning from William Hill
Chelsea manager Antonio Conte and a host of winning football favourites gave William Hill a pasting over the Christmas break, as a £20 million windfall for punters forced the bookie into a profit warning.
The most painful result was Chelsea’s 3-0 win against Bournemouth on Boxing Day — costing it £2.5 million. In total, 18 of the 20 most-backed teams won in the worst day for bookmakers in living memory. One punter landed a £103,000 win for a £20 stake — a 5150/1 shot.
The results capped an awful December for bookies as Chelsea’s 13-match winning streak and an 18-match tear for Scottish champions Celtic bolstered accumulator wins, alongside good runs for Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool and Manchester City.
Racing also went against the bookies as favourites won both the King George VI Chase and the Welsh Grand National.
Hills was understood to have been trading at the top end of its guidance on profits — around £280 million — until the end of the year. But annual profits will now be a bottom-of-the-range £260 million.
Shares fell 10.2p, or 3%, to 287.5p. Other bookmakers also suffered, with Ladbrokes Coral off 2.6p to 119.5p.
The sporting reverses come at a tricky time for William Hill, which is still looking for a permanent chief executive after sacking its old boss last year in the wake of weak online trading. It faced an unwelcome takeover approach from Rank and 888 last summer, and a proposed merger with Canada’s online giant Amaya was shot down by Hill’s shareholders.
Nicholas Hyett, equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “We can forgive a run of poor sporting results. The bigger problem is that although performance in online is improving, it’s doing so at a snail’s pace.”
