Inside the Betfred Story How Fred and Peter Done Built One of Britain’s Largest Independent Bookmakers
Most of Britain’s big betting names changed hands somewhere along the way. Betfred didn’t. Almost sixty years after two brothers opened a single shop in Salford, the business is still controlled by the same family that started it. That alone makes it an outlier.
How the Betfred Founders Started in 1967
The story begins with a bet. Fred and Peter Done backed England to win the 1966 World Cup, and the proceeds funded their very first betting shop in Salford a year later, in 1967. Fred was 24 at the time. There was no outside money, no chain to plug into, no safety net beyond what they made themselves. The shop traded under the name Done Bookmakers, and that name stuck for the better part of four decades.
What the brothers brought instead of capital was instinct. Their father had run an illegal bookmaking operation, and both had grown up close to the trade. They understood punters. They understood the odds. And they understood that a friendly shop with sharp pricing could pull custom away from bigger, colder competitors.
Done Bookmakers and Decades of Independent Growth
Expansion came steadily rather than all at once. A second shop opened in 1969. The hundredth followed in 1997. By the time the business hit its 450th premises in 2004, it had become a genuine national presence built largely on the high street.
Fred earned a reputation as an industry showman along the way. He invented the Lucky 15 bet, which became one of the most popular wager types in the country. He was the first bookmaker to pay out early on a result, settling bets on Manchester United to win the league in 1998, only for Arsenal to pip them. The payout cost money. The publicity was priceless.
The Betfred Rebrand and the Move Online
In 2004, Done Bookmakers became Betfred and launched Betfred.com. The timing mattered. Online betting was about to reshape the entire industry, and Betfred moved into it while keeping its retail estate intact rather than abandoning one for the other. That same year, a customer named Ken landed over £1.1 million on a single bet in a Salford shop, becoming the first betting shop millionaire and handing the new brand a story that wrote itself.
Acquisitions followed. Betfred bought the Tote in 2011, and after the Ladbrokes and Coral merger in 2016 it picked up 322 shops, pushing its high street count past 1,650. Growth here was deliberate, financed from the business itself, not from selling control to investors.
Betfred’s Global Expansion Into the US and South Africa
The Done brothers have since pushed well beyond Britain. Betfred holds sports betting licences across 10 US states, including Pennsylvania, Colorado and Ohio, through a Las Vegas based subsidiary built specifically for the American market. In South Africa, the company now runs more than 50 betting halls and has taken a majority shareholding in LottoStar, one of the country’s largest online betting operators.
For anyone running a betting business today, the operational lesson is worth sitting with. Betfred reached new markets without surrendering ownership, which is rare in an industry where international scale usually arrives via private equity or a public listing.
Future Outlook What Comes Next for Betfred
The clearest signal of intent is in technology. Betfred completed a £100 million migration of its online customers onto its own proprietary platform, a move that hands the company full control over its digital product rather than renting it from a third party supplier. That is a long game decision, and it tells you where the focus sits for the next stage.
Expect the US and South African operations to carry more of the growth from here, with retail still treated as core rather than legacy. The bigger question for the wider market is whether a family controlled, independent model can keep pace with consolidated rivals across multiple regulated territories at once. Betfred is betting that it can. On the evidence of the last fifty-eight years, doubting the Done brothers has rarely paid off.
Source: Betfred Company Information
