Denise Coates, the quiet queen of online betting from Stoke

Not long after Denise Coates convinced her family to bet big on internet gambling, the first dotcom bubble burst. Bet365, which she launched from a portable cabin in a car park in Stoke-on-Trent in the English Midlands in 2000, nearly went bust. That was the making of the company and its young co-founder.

By mortgaging their betting shops and selling other assets, Ms Coates and her family avoided having to answer to outside investors. The 51-year-old entrepreneur can run her brainchild in peace, shunning personal publicity, and distributing Bet365’s profits more or less as she wishes: to staff, to Stoke City, the football club the group owns, and to local good causes via a foundation.

But also to herself. This week, Bet365 revealed it had dispensed £220m — a third of its 2017 operating profit — to an unnamed director, undoubtedly Ms Coates. The billionaire chief executive with a head for numbers, who once worked as a cashier in the betting shops, earns more than twice the payroll of the entire Stoke City squad. Her salary outstrips even that of US chief executives such as Tesla’s Elon Musk.

For the gaming industry’s critics, Ms Coates’s fortune is built on the back of a dubious and addictive pastime. Her fans believe she deserves to harvest the fruits of her extraordinary entrepreneurial flair. She has helped pull in 35m customers and turn the start-up into the world’s largest online gambling company with an estimated 8 per cent share of a $43.1bn market.

Her recent nine-figure payout was dubbed ‘obscene’ by campaigners and some politicians

The ubiquity of Bet365’s brand from Europe to Latin America — on stadium billboards and in persistent television commercials during sporting events — is in direct contrast to the elusiveness of Ms Coates. She is a slight, smiling, wordless figure in videos for projects that her foundation funds, including a children’s hospice and a campaign to improve maths teaching in Stoke. The public faces of the company are her father Peter, who chairs the football club, and her younger brother John, the group’s joint chief executive. Both are also Bet365 shareholders, but Ms Coates owns a controlling stake.

In the few emailed statements she allows to trickle out, she insists she is entirely devoted to work and family (she has five children) and emphasises her fierce desire to succeed.

“I was always motivated at being the best at whatever it was I was doing — school, exams, sport,” she wrote in an email to the Financial Times in 2016.

Her early drive and maths skills won her a first-class degree in econometrics at Sheffield university and fuelled her determination to move the family-owned betting business online. That allowed Bet365 to exploit a growing international market and outflank traditional bookmakers. Ms Coates also pushed the group to develop its own betting software and focus on “in-play” betting. Most of Bet365’s revenue now comes from bets taken during events. Ms Coates continues to take an active interest in its software development.

Whether or not she has become used to the annual burst of limelight for her pay, Ms Coates must realise she risks becoming a lightning rod for criticism of the industry that made her fortune.

Public concern about problem gambling recently prompted the broadcaster Sky to launch plans to limit adverts for betting companies to one per commercial break, which would affect one element of Bet365’s UK strategy. The same day as Bet365 published its annual report, the UK gambling regulator warned about the spread of problem gambling among young people.

“Across our sector and across the wider industry, everybody accepts that we’re at a low ebb and we have to get on top of a lot of these issues,” says Clive Hawkswood, chief executive of the Remote Gambling Association, which lobbies for online operators and is chaired by John Coates.

As well as pursuing global expansion, Ms Coates says, in the latest company report, that the group is drawing on behavioural science and artificial intelligence to promote safer gambling.

In Stoke, one of the most deprived areas of the UK, the Coates family’s dedication to their home town makes their reputation almost impregnable. The headline on the latest article about Bet365 in Sentinel, the local daily, focuses on profits and new jobs, not Ms Coates’s salary.

David Frost, chairman of the Stoke-on-Trent & Staffordshire Local Enterprise Partnership, says there is no sense locally that Ms Coates is getting too big for her boots. “The really good thing is that here we have a locally owned company with its roots very firmly in Stoke-on-Trent, employing 3,500 people and pointing in a new direction,” he says, referring to the growth of a cluster of information technology companies spawned in the area by former Bet365 staff. There is “enormous pride in the Coates family, because they’re not in Guernsey or Nevada, they’re in North Staffordshire”, adds Tristram Hunt, former MP for Stoke.

Elsewhere, though, Ms Coates’s nine-figure payout, which broke her own record for best-paid UK director, was dubbed “obscene” and “irresponsible” by campaigners and some politicians.

As the regulatory clouds gather, Bet365’s publicity-shy founder may need to take a more public stance.

“You can survive a long time with your head down and at some point there might be an argument for being more open,” says the chief executive of a rival betting operator. On the evidence, though, that is an argument that Ms Coates will be one of the last to accept.

The writer is the FT’s management editor