The name John Boyle might not mean all that much to you, especially if you’re not from Ireland. If we mentioned BoyleSports, however, then there is a decent chance that some of you might get a ring of recognition chiming away.
John Boyle bought his first shop in Armagh in 1982, moving his focus from Northern Ireland to south of the border fairly quickly. Over the following 37 years, he helped his company to become the largest independent bookmaker from the emerald isle, opening as many as 260 shops in Ireland and the United Kingdom to earn a place in the trade’s hall of fame.
Aiming to ensure that customer experience was one of the most important aspects of his business from the moment it launched, this approach allowed him to ensure that BoyleSports could thrive whilst competitors struggled.
He stepped down as the Chief Executive Officer of the company in 2017, but later returned in order to help the business find the right person to lead it into the future. He oversaw the company’s move into the UK when it bought a chain of shops in Birmingham, during which time Boyle himself was the Chairman of BoyleSports.
The Company’s Formative Years
John Boyle’s first foray into the world of betting came in 1982, which was when he began working at a bookmaker’s premises he’d bought in the Markethill are of County Armagh. His decision to become a bookie had been made years earlier, when he took a trip to London with his dad.
Boyle Senior was a greyhound trainer for a bookmaker, who they happened to meet on the trip to England’s capital. Boyle later recalled being told that he was a millionaire, heading home and announcing to his friends, “I’m going to be millionaire.”
He left school when he was just 15, working in numerous different jobs in order to make money. One of them was as a driver of a bread van, but when he was sacked from that role as a 25-year-old he knew it was time to think more seriously about his future.
That was when he got the job at the bookies in his local town, always aware that he would grasp any opportunity with both hands if one presented itself to him. He worked at the betting shop for the next seven years, always learning everything that he could about the business.
Not Always A Smooth Journey
By 1989, Boyle was able to open a second shop, having bought the other one with a loan of £6,000 that he took from his father. He later said, “As a kid going to the greyhounds, I’d love to do a bet. It was exciting and fun, you always thought you were going to win. That’s how I got into it.” He would go on to establish the headquarters of BoyleSports in Dundalk, County Louth, but it wasn’t as if the journey was entirely trouble free. Speaking about his concerns of Brexit and what it might do to Ireland in 2017, he told of how was his home was blown up during the Troubles.
The family lived in a small village in the south of Armagh, which was where the betting shop was located. In the early part of the 1970s, the house that the Boyle family lived in, which was above a pub, was blown up. Thankfully the family had been given notice to evacuate, meaning that there were no casualties, but the Republican group that carried out the bombing wreaked havoc nonetheless. A few years later, a Loyalist group returned and blew up the pub for a second time, though the Boyles had moved out by that point.
Sadly for Boyle, as with so many people that grew up in Northern Ireland at the time, bombings were just a fact of life. Even when he was delivering bread, he would be stopped by people looking to cause mayhem, with a petrol bomb once being thrown onto the front seat of the bread delivery van that he drove. It goes without saying that Boyle was against a border being put between Northern and Southern Ireland in the wake of Brexit, pointing out that the Emerald Isle voted overwhelmingly to remain in Europe so as to avoid any sense of division.
It wasn’t just the Troubles that stopped John Boyle’s life from being a smooth one. He lost the job as a ‘bread man’ because he over-indulged, drinking and not turning up for work. They were, he said, his ‘hard times’, being unemployed for a year before he made the move to open a bookmaker’s shop having been sober for a year. In addition to the £6,000 he’d borrowed from his father, he also got a loan of £12,000 from the bank. The trust from his father had been earned when he was younger, working Saturdays and Grand National days in the betting shop he owned in Camlough.
The Move South
The second shop that John Boyle opened was in Ireland and it was at that moment that he realised that there was a real chance for the chain to flourish. The attitude towards betting was much more relaxed south of the border, which was in start contrast to life in Northern Ireland.
In the north, anyone wanting to open up a betting shop had to go to court to prove that the area that you wanted to open up in had a need for a new bookmakers. In the south, the answer always seemed to be ‘yes’, which was why Boyle turned his attention to the Republic of Ireland.
One of the biggest booms for him came when the big horse racing events were on, such is the extent to which the Irish were ‘big into their horse racing’. When Glorious Goodwood or the Galway races were on, the betting shops would be busy, earning him enough money to continue to open shops around the south of Ireland.
This was in the days before you could have a television in the betting shops, so BoyleSports had to work even harder to win the trust and loyalty of its punters. He did so by putting customer services at the forefront of what he did.
The Creation Of An Empire
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John Boyle was sensible, opting for the slow and steady approach during the formative years of creating his bookmaking empire.
He opened five outlets in Drogheda in 1989, but progress was slow. In 2002, he opened up another 14 shops, slowly improving his standing in the country. By the August of 2004, there were 77 shops in Ireland and he opened his 100th store two years later. When Celtic Bookmakers were in financial trouble in 2011, BoyleSports stepped in to buy the chain and save 100 jobs, adding 17 more stores to the chain.
Later in the same year, BoyleSports once again stepped in to save jobs, making a strategic decision to buy 15 stores from William Hill. It was a slow and steady empire building, but a successful one; so much so that in 2017 John Boyle made the decision to step down as the company’s Chief Executive Officer and hand the role to Conor Gray, his son-in-law.
He didn’t leave the business entirely, however, taking up the role of Executive Chairman and guiding Gray as best he could in the continued expansion of the business.
It worked, with BoyleSports opening its 250th shop in Kilcullen, County Kildare in September of 2018. Not only that, but an announcement was made that the company planned to further expand its offering both online and in a retail sense.
Perhaps the biggest move came in June of 2019, which was when the company made its first moves into England, thanks to the purchase of the independent bookmaker Wilf Gilbert and the 13 shops that they ran in the West Midlands area, paying an undisclosed sum to purchase them.
The Modern Look Of BoyleSports
Despite the move into England, BoyleSports never forgot where it came from. So it was that in January of 2020, the company bought 33 shops in Northern Ireland from William Hill. It was a move that made it into the largest retail bookmaker on the island of Ireland, given that Paddy Power was mainly based online. In 2021, the company announced a re-structure that saw the UK Tote Group’s former Managing Director, Mark Kemp, brought in as the Chief Executive Officer, whilst Conor Gray was moved to become the Commercial Director.
Later that year, an acquisition of the independent bookmaker Tully saw BoyleSports grow even further. The deal saw them buy Tully’s telephone business as well as ten retail stores, taking the total of shops in Ireland to 268. January of 2022 brought with it a partnership between BoyleSports and platform solution organisation Aspire Global, which was designed to pave the way for the company to move into the betting market in the Netherlands. It was simply a matter of waiting for a licence to be granted before the move was made.
In March of 2022, Mark Kemp stepped down as the BoyleSports CEO. He did so in order to take charge of the sportsbook of streaming platform DAZN, meaning that someone needed to step into the role temporarily. Never wanting to let the company that he had formed down, John Boyle did exactly that, with the aim being to continue the expansion into the United Kingdom that had started in 2019 but been interrupted by the global health crisis that struck in the two years that followed. The company had a target of 100 retail shops in order to establish itself properly in the UK.
Boyle was never planning to remain in the role for long, but it was hoped that his experience and knowledge of the company would help in the recruitment of the right person for the job as Chief Executive Officer. There was also a need to find a new Online Managing Director, given Eddie Bennet had departed from the role earlier in the year.