UK Cities with Top Betting Activity Revealed and Ranked

Gambling has been a huge part of British culture for centuries. Whether it’s sports betting, horse racing, or casinos – people in the UK love a punt. 

And in the UK, gambling is a mature market. While in the US, gambling was outlawed throughout much of the 20th century, which unfortunately gave way to off-shore – and frankly unsafe – bookmakers, that’s never been the case in the UK. The addition of online bookmakers and casino sites since the millennium has put betting at our fingertips. 

So whether you’re a big spender, casual, or a once-in-a-blue-moon punter, there are plenty of options. But betting habits can be ingrained by our surroundings, and some areas of the UK have emerged as bigger bettors than others, our research has revealed. 

We took a look at some of the most populated cities in the UK to decipher which areas are the biggest bettors. We measured search volume metrics for keywords like ‘betting’ and ‘casinos’, as well as the number of bookmakers and casino destinations in each area, to come to some conclusions. Below are the results.

Who Are The UK’s Biggest Gamblers? 

According to the research, people in Liverpool are the biggest gamblers in the UK. Liverpudlians have 149 bookmakers and 12 casinos at their disposal, with 1,360 monthly total searches for betting related keywords per month. 

Around 1 in 1,910 people in Liverpool search for ‘betting’ at least once a month, with 1 in 1,040 people searching for ‘casino’ giving Liverpool an index score of 70 in total. 

Next in line we go north to Scotland, with Edinburgh featuring second with an index score of 66. 55 bookmakers and 7 casinos attribute to this, with 1 in 767 people in Edinburgh search for ‘casino’ a month on average, according to the search volume data. 

Bristol completes the top three with an index score of 641, with Leicester (48) and Leeds/Bradford (47) also featuring high up on the list. 

Unsurprisingly, London had the highest number of bookmakers (788), with also the highest amount of  casinos in London (54), as well as the highest combined search volume due to the size of the population. However, when taking that into account, their figures per capita had them just joint 5th on our index with a score of 47 putting them alongside Leeds/Bradford, Middlesbrough and Sheffield. 

More people search for ‘casino’ in London than anywhere else in England, with one in 798 people searching that term a month, or a total of 12,100 across the entire city. Only Edinburgh had more interest in casino searches at 1 in 767 people. 

On the other end of the spectrum, out of all cities measured, Manchester came in as the UK’s least interested in gambling city. Their index score of 13 was attributed to low search volumes in both ‘betting’ and ‘casino’, and also less casinos per capita than anywhere else on the list. 

Likewise, Brighton’s low search volumes combined with the lowest bookmakers per capita of one for every 34,582 people saw The Queen of Watering Places as the second least interested in gambling city in the entirety of the UK. 

Methodology: 

Our research and analytics teams measured the following factors for each city: 

• Population
• No. of bookmakers 
• No. of casinos
• Monthly search volume for ‘betting’
• Monthly search volume for ‘casino’

Figures for each metric above were then divided by the population in order to give a ‘per capita’ figure. Cities were then ranked and given a points total for each tally i.e. most bookmakers per capita was given 19 points (out of 19 cities) and least bookmakers per capita given 1 point. Points were added up to give a final index score. 

Sources: 

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