Does Denise Coates Get Paid Too Much?
Denise Coates will be known to most as the woman behind bet365, one of the most popular betting sites in the United Kingdom. Born in 1967, she is the eldest daughter of Peter Coates, the one-time Chairman of Stoke City Football Club.
Each year, it is announced in the news that Coates has paid herself hundreds of millions of pounds for her work for the betting company over the previous 12 months. The money is usually an obscene amount to most people, being more than they will earn in a lifetime, which obviously begs the question about whether she is paid too much.
One the one hand, it is difficult to argue against that fact. Being paid, say, £400 million for a year’s work is more than anyone every actually needs. When you consider that Coates is already a billionaire, probably many times over, it makes it even more difficult to justify being paid such a huge sum. Add into that the fact that the money is earned by people significantly poorer than her placing bets through her gambling business and it becomes even harder to stomach. Yet unlike many of her colleagues, who will be paid similar amounts from abroad, at least she pays tax on it!
Who Is Denise Coates?
First things first, who is Denise Coates? Born in the 26th of September 1967, Coates went to the University of Sheffield and earned a first class degree in econometrics. She had already gained some experience of the world of betting, having worked as a cashier at Provincial Racing, a bookmaking firm that her family owned. When she left uni, she returned to Provincial Racing and worked as an accountant. In 1995, Coates was made the Managing Director of the small chain of shops, deciding to take out a loan from Barclays in order to buy a neighbouring chain of shops.
In 2000, Coates decided to purchase the domain name ‘bet365.com’. Setting up shop in some portakabins, she borrowed £15 million against the family’s betting shops, using the money to get the online betting business up and running. That the shops themselves were sold to Coral for £40 million in 2005 proved what a good move it was, with Bet365 launching at exactly the moment that online betting was taking off, growing year-on-year to the point that by 2016 it was one of the largest betting companies in the world, facilitating bets worth £40 billion-plus a year.
As for Coates, she owns half of the company and her personal fortune was estimated to be around £7 billion in April of 2023. A ‘bossy workaholic’, she worked night and day to get the company off the ground in the first place and would doubtless feel that she now merely reaps the rewards the she sowed during those early years. Her brilliance was in decided to combine the age-old thing of gambling alongside the use of cutting-edge gambling, coming up with new gimmicks on a regular basis in order to being in punters and then, crucially, keep them there.
What She Gets Paid
| Year | Salary | Dividends | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | £213M | ~£37M | ~£260M |
| 2021 | £250M | ~97.5M | ~£347.5M |
| 2020 | £421M | ~£48M | ~£469M |
| 2019 | £210M | ~£113M | ~£323M |
| 2018 | £265M | ~£45M | ~£310M |
| 2017 | £220M | ~£20M | ~£240M |
| 2016 | £200M | ~£18M | ~£218M |
| 2015 | £54M | ~£63.5M | ~£117.5 |
In order to assess whether or not we think Denise Coates gets paid too much, we first need to have a look at what she actually gets paid. It isn’t necessarily easy to find out what she was paid during the early years of Bet365, but we can have a look at a few different years to get a sense of the sort of money that she has been paid to become a billionaire.
Here is a look at her earnings across the years we’ve been able to find:
2015
In 2015 Denise Coates was named ‘Britain’s highest paid businesswoman’ after she took home £117.5 million. That was made up of £54 million in wages and £63.5 million in dividends, making her ‘basic pay’ second only to Martin Sorrell from the media giant WPP. Even the bosses of the likes of Shell and BP weren’t paid as much as her, whose net worth at the time was considered to be about £2.8 billion.
Those people employed by Bet365 include her husband Richard, meaning that the money taken home by the family will have been even higher than that £117.5 million figure for 2015.
2016
If you want to get a sense of how much Denise Coates is paid, it is worth bearing in mind that in 2016 she took home more than 40 times the average salary of Chief Executives at FTSE 100 companies.
She was paid £199,305,000, with £18 million added to that in the form of dividends for total pay of more than £217 million. With customers wagering more than £47 billion in 2016, it meant that the revenue jumped 39% on the previous year. This was used as justification for the pay increase that Coates received.
2017
In 2017 Denise Coates was able to maintain her position as one of the world’s best-paid Chief Executives thanks to pay of £220 million. By that point, Forbes’ estimation of her personal fortune sat at $3.7 billion.
The pay didn’t include dividends, which were worth around £20 million. This is based on the fact that dividends of £80.1 million were paid to four directors, with the exact amount that Coates was paid of the dividends unknown. What we can say is that she earned more than James Dyson, who was paid about £200 million during the same period.
2018
When Denise Coates’ salary leapt to £265 million for 2018, the accusation made by many was that she was ‘living off the misery of others’. That was in no small part thanks to the news at the time that the amount of problem gamblers aged between 11 and 16 had quadrupled over the course of two years, coming in at 55,000.
Whilst Coates was obviously not to blame for that in and of itself, there is little doubt that companies like Bet365 will have profited from losses by bettors in order to make such a huge profit and allow for her to be paid that kind of amount.
2019
By 2018 the pay that Coates effectively gave herself went up by around £100 million. For 2018 she was paid £323 million, which was the highest amount of money an executive in the UK had been paid. The figure broke the previous record for an amount paid to someone in the United Kingdom, which had been set by Coates the year before.
The amount that she was paid was the equivalent of £1.3 million per working day of the year, which itself would be more than enough for the vast majority of people to live off, being 9,500 times more than the average salary in the country.
2020
The confirmation that Coates had been paid £421 million for 2020 meant that she had received more than £1 billion in pay across four years. It amounted to pay of £48,000 for every hour of every day across the 12-month period. The company declared that its pay was ‘appropriate and fair’, which isn’t all that surprising when you consider who decides the payout amounts.
Coates will also have received about £48 million when the dividends were paid out. It was, according to Luke Hildyard, ‘more than anyone can spend in multiple lifetimes.
2021
The year 2021 signalled the first time across the years that we’ve looked at that Coates actually ended up taking home less than the year before. Just in case you were tempted to get the violins out, though, it is worth bearing in mind that she was paid a salary of £250 million and added at least a 50% share of the £97.5 million in dividends to that.
It was one of the first occasions that Bet365’s growth appeared to have stalled, probably on account of the global health crisis that was occurring at the time and the reduction in live sporting events.
2022
When Bet365’s accounts for the tax year 2021-2022 were published, it was revealed that Coates was paid a salary of £213 million, which rose to about £260 million when the dividends were added on. It worked out as a little over £1 million for each working day of the year, but was 12% less than she had taken home the year before.
Not that many people will be shedding a tear for her in the wake of the news, of course. Speaking on the matter, Hildyard declares that it was ‘hopelessly inefficient for such a huge amount of income to accrue to one individual’.
Is It Too Much?
Unless you are Denise Coates herself, it is very difficult to argue that being paid hundreds of millions of pounds a year is anything other than ‘too much’. Whilst some might argue that her business, which she took a calculated gamble to set up, earned huge sums of money and therefore she deserves a piece of that, the reality is that gambling businesses will always make huge profits. They require people to lose their own money in order to be profitable, so the amount that Coates takes home is coming directly out of the pockets of people who often can’t afford to lose it.
Ultra capitalists would no doubt suggest that people shouldn’t be betting with money they can’t afford to lose, but that’s not the way gambling works. As Hildyard said, “A payment this size is obviously vastly more than necessary to encourage or reward success.”
The main thing that stands in Coates’ favour is that her earnings are declared publicly and paid through the British tax system. Whilst other betting companies will earn the same sort of figure, it is often paid via offshore accounts and not declared to the UK government, meaning little tax will be paid on it.
It should also be noted that bet365 have remained based in Stoke and it is the biggest employer in the city. The betting company also owns the Stoke City football team, of which Peter Coates was once chairman. If you ask people in the local area, and I have personally, the view of bet365 and Denise Coates is generally very positive as a result.
The fact bet365 has also remained private means they do not need to pander to individual shareholders. While this means Coates can take a massive salary at the same time it means that a lot of that money stays in the UK tax system, which wouldn’t necessarily be the case if it was a public company.
