Maeve Halligan is a political commentator and spokesman for the Institute of Economic Affairs.
It has been two weeks since the now infamous advertisement featuring Sydney Sweeney first aired. To those of you who say you haven’t seen it, you are either lying to assert purity or living under a rock – I don’t know which is worse.
Regardless, I will provide a brief overview for those in the latter category. Sydney Sweeney is a 29-year-old actress who shot to fame in 2019 after starring in HBO’s Euphoria, a series following American high-schoolers known for laughably egregious costume choices and seemingly endless explicit scenes. Sweeney has since become something of a fixture of provocative advertising.
The minute-long video, released on 9 September, advertises the American sports prediction market and trading app Novig, and features the actress holding or wearing sports equipment in such a way that her otherwise unclad form is very much on show. Enough is left to the imagination to ensure the video could still be posted on YouTube and other platforms, where it has amassed millions of views.
Tasteful? Not the word I would use.
The campaign has drawn fury from female athletes, including four-time Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus. As a longstanding advocate for women’s rights, I understand why. I should also declare a lack of interest in the product itself: I don’t gamble and have little fondness for it.
But a free country is one in which adults may spend their own money on pastimes I would not choose myself. And putting aside debates on feminism and whether sex sells (it does), the more pressing question, for anyone who cares about British growth, is why an industry like this is booming in the US but has scarcely taken root here.
Novig’s website boasts 250,000 users across America and US$250 million paid out in winnings thus far. Unlike a traditional bookmaker, which sets the odds and builds its own margin into them, Novig is a peer-to-peer exchange: users trade with each other and prices move with supply and demand. The name itself refers to the “vig”, the bookie’s cut, which the platform promises to strip out.
This exchange model is British.
By industry accounts, Novig’s founding pitch drew heavily on Betfair, which pioneered the idea in London in 2000. Today’s prediction markets, now thriving in America, exemplify an all-too-familiar feature of the transatlantic special relationship, whereby the Yanks scale and cash in on a British invention. The growth has been startling, with Novig passing US$1.1 billion in trading volume in roughly six weeks since its nationwide launch. Combined monthly volumes at its larger rivals, Kalshi and Polymarket, rose from under US$5 billion last September to around US$24 billion by April. Polymarket alone is now valued at US$21 billion.
Britain, meanwhile, has barely a slice of the action.
The Gambling Commission made clear in February that prediction markets count as “betting intermediaries” needing a British gambling licence, and the big American platforms are closed to British users. The Financial Conduct Authority, for its part, still applies its 2019 ban on retail binary options to many financial contracts, though it is reportedly now reconsidering. A handful of British firms are trying to build within the rules, which shows that the appetite is there. But the capital, the jobs and the tax base are piling up across the pond, while Britain settles for the consolation of having had the idea.
This ought to worry a country in dire need of economic growth. Britain has world-class strengths in financial services, fintech and betting technology. Here is an industry sitting at the junction of all three, and our contribution has been to regulate it out of the country and tax whatever remains.
Taxing away the opportunity for growth
Indeed, part of the reason Britain is missing out is that the Government treats online betting and gaming as a cash cow to be milked rather than an industry to be nurtured.
In last year’s Budget, the Chancellor nearly doubled Remote Gaming Duty, from 21 to 40 per cent, from April 2026. Duty on online sports betting will rise from 15 to 25 per cent in April 2027. The Treasury expects the changes to raise £810 million in their first year, rising to £1.16 billion by 2030/31. Yet the Government’s own forecaster was sceptical. The OBR estimated that punters betting less, or betting elsewhere, would cut the expected revenue by around a third, with operators passing most of the cost on to customers through worse odds.
What’s more, the OBR’s estimate explicitly allows for punters switching to the illicit market. According to industry figures, stakes with unlicensed operators have more than tripled since 2019, reaching £16.6 billion last year, and are forecast to hit £33 billion by 2028. The licensed share of the market has fallen from 97 to 92 per cent. Offshore sites, meanwhile, offer no protections and no recourse when things go wrong, and they pay no tax at all. A policy meant to reduce harm and raise revenue is in danger of doing neither, and the appeal of the black market, with its better odds and absence of intrusive checks, is all too obvious for those in search of a flutter.
In America, by contrast, prediction markets operate as federally regulated exchanges, and the result is fierce competition between firms, all fighting for customers with better prices, new products and, as we have seen, attention-grabbing advertising. Granted, it has brought legal battles with state gambling regulators, and it is not a model to copy wholesale. But it has undeniably built a flourishing industry. That success stings all the more given that Britain, of all places, has chosen higher taxes and tighter checks, along with a licensing regime that deters innovators.
Making it dearer and harder to bet legally does not magically eliminate demand. It simply redirects it to the black market and across the Atlantic.
Novig’s advert showed just how much can be – ahem – stripped away while leaving the essentials in place. Policymakers should apply the same principle to Britain’s betting rules, and strip back the taxes and red tape whilst keeping the protections that matter. Let an industry that we invented come home again.