O'Brien urges racing to embrace social media and young fans

Aidan O’Brien argued that racing is leaving some of its strongest selling points on the table, from short-form video on X, Instagram and TikTok to the sport’s own natural drama. The Ballydoyle trainer’s message was blunt: racing needs to stop hiding its light and show younger fans why a day at the races, and a bet placed with discipline, can still feel like a clean escape.

His comments land at a time when the industry is trying to measure how much room it still has to grow. The British Horseracing Authority’s Project Beacon research, published on September 4, 2025, drew on more than 7,500 respondents across the UK and Ireland and found around 25 million adults open to racing, including about 17 million potential or casual fans. It also identified “open-minded rookies” and “social stakers” as priority growth groups, totaling an estimated 7.1 million people, while saying horse welfare remained the single biggest barrier to engagement.

That matters because the sport’s core business still shows strength even as audience habits shift. Horse Racing Ireland said on January 28, 2026, that 2025 racecourse attendance rose 6% to 1.316 million across 390 fixtures. Tote turnover climbed 7.2% to €81.3 million and commercial sponsorship rose 2.9% to €7.0 million, signs that racing still has commercial pull in Ireland even as it looks for younger, more digitally fluent fans.

Britain’s figures tell a similar but slightly flatter story. Official racecourse attendance in 2024 reached 4,799,730, down from 4,833,944 in 2023, though average attendance edged up to 3,404 as the number of fixtures fell. The challenge now is not simply filling seats; it is turning moments into content, and content into habit, for an audience that may discover sport first on a phone screen.

O’Brien’s betting remarks also sit against a live regulatory backdrop. The Gambling Regulation Bill passed the Oireachtas in October 2024 and includes daytime gambling-advertising restrictions, a change that helped raise uncertainty around Racing TV’s Irish coverage, with the broadcaster saying a separate ad-free Irish feed would not be economically viable. O’Brien has already made his view clear. In June 2025, he urged racing not to be negative but to tell people how good the sport is, and that remains the sport’s hardest and most urgent sell.