Last Thursday, John O’Reilly brought his tenure as Chief Executive of Rank Group Plc to a close, choosing to draw the curtain on a 33-year career that has unfolded alongside the competitive evolution of UK gambling.
Spanning three decades, O’Reilly can detail the shifting dynamics and consolidation of UK gambling’s biggest Plcs, viewed from the leadership ranks of Coral, Ladbrokes, William Hill and ending at Rank.
Yet, after witnessing 33 years of change, intertwined with endless challenges, can O’Reilly “simply check out of gambling?”
“If I’m honest, I never thought about stopping. I have always thought I have the best job in the world, in all the roles that I have taken on.”
Gambling has been a formative element in O’Reilly’s life: “I worked at a betting shop when I was a kid and as a student, but I joined its professional ranks in 1991.
“It was 5 November 1991, I joined Ladbrokes, I can remember the exact day as Robert Maxwell had gone missing from his yacht…you can’t forget it, the disappearance was all over the headlines.”
Ladbrokes offered the realisation of how UK gambling would be transformed by relentless M&A clashing with political interventions in which O’Reilly found his first mentor in Cyril Stein the deal maker of Ladbrokes acquisition of Hilton International (non-US) for £650m – a transformative deal for UK Plcs and changing the status of UK gambling.
“For whatever reason, I was mentored by Cyril Stein. He was the Group Chairman of Ladbrokes, which he transformed to the Hilton Group.”
O’Reilly reflected on Stein’s leadership of Ladbrokes as pioneering, elevating its business beyond betting shops – “He was effectively the founder of the business, he listed the company, brought Hilton, rebranded and moved into new ventures.”
“He taught me everything, barely a day went by that I did not get some wisdom from Mr Stein …On many occasions, he told me his most important lesson.
“In the world of betting and gaming, we fight for market share. If you grow it you are the hero; if you don’t you are a zero John… it’s the way it works”.
Though Mr Stein never hid from the cutthroat nature of the sector, in which investors demand market share, later developments would see O’Reilly believe “that the dial of gambling is fundamentally led by taxation and regulation.
That harsh realisation reshaped how he approached leadership at Rank Plc where commercial execution mattered, but political engagement would matter more.
“In this sector, you can do everything right operationally and still be undone by a single tax decision or regulatory shift,” he said.
“If you’re not in Westminster and Whitehall explaining your business, explaining your customers and explaining the consequences of policy, you’re leaving your future in someone else’s hands.”
In 2018, O’Reilly was hired to take leadership of an underperforming Rank Group, following the abrupt departure of Henry Birch. At the time, the appointment surprised certain board members who wanted a younger leader to initiate the transformation of the LSE gambling group.
“When I joined Rank in May 2018, at the time, the board said, How long will you stay with us, John, you’re not a spring chicken…I said, Look, I’ll definitely do three, and perhaps maybe four years”.
From the outset, O’Reilly faced pressure to follow “a copied PLC playbook” telling him to pivot Rank aggressively to online gambling to lessen or even abandon investment and resources in venues…That approach was rejected outright.
While investing to rebuild Rank’s digital capabilities, O’Reilly insisted the group’s competitive strength still lay in its physical venues in particular Grosvenor casinos and the Mecca Bingo brand both of which he believed had been starved of capital and strategic resources.
“I took a counter view,” he said. “The most important thing for the group was fixing and modernising the land-based business , reforms that had been promised for years but never delivered.”
That philosophy led to some of the toughest decisions of his tenure, most notably a significant reshaping of the Mecca estate, where too many venues were no longer commercially viable in a cost-sensitive market.
“It wasn’t easy, we had 85 Mecca Bingos… that were very loved, but we were operating just too many venues” O’Reilly admitted. “Bingo is all about liquidity and local strength. You have to right-size to compete.”
Yet just as Rank’s turnaround strategy began to take hold, Covid-19 delivered the single biggest shock of his career.
After early progress that briefly doubled the group’s share price, the business was forced into prolonged closures “burning through roughly £15m a month in cash.”
“We went into Covid with a strong balance sheet,” O’Reilly said. “And suddenly that cash had a purpose survival.”
“Sometimes fortunes don’t turn in your favour and Covid was the biggest example of that. Just as we were getting traction, the world closed down.”
Furthermore, post-pandemic consumer hesitancy to return to indoor venues, soaring energy costs and sharp wage inflation compounded the pressure on a business employing nearly 8,000 people.
Looking back, O’Reilly described the period as the most demanding of his career, a stretch defined by rebuilding a heritage business hostage touncontrolable elements, he knew his tenure would stretch beyond any previous intentions.
Though scarred by the pandemic, for O’Reilly the aftermath marked the point at which UK gambling entered a new phase of political sensitivity — one where the industry was no longer simply adapting to regulation, but being asked to actively rebuild public trust.
The dial was always going to move again. O’Reilly said. “The question was never whether there would be reform, it was where the Gambling Review would land.”
For Rank and its peers, the government’s post-pandemic scrutiny of gambling placed operators at the centre of a wider cultural and public-health debate, consuming consumer protection, affordability and social responsibility with long-standing fiscal pressures.
O’Reilly described the review process as one of the most politically engaged periods of his career, requiring near-constant dialogue with ministers, civil servants and regulators.
“It wasn’t just about compliance anymore,” he explained. “It was about explaining the role gambling plays as a leisure industry, the millions of customers who use it responsibly, and the consequences of getting the balance wrong.”
While welcoming reforms aimed at harm prevention, O’Reilly warned that policy shaped by ideology rather than evidence risked destabilising the legal market.
“The danger is always the same,” O’Reilly warned. “Society has a choice — you legalise, regulate, tax and protect consumers, or you push gambling underground. When taxation becomes punitive and regulation becomes ideological, you don’t reduce demand — you just lose control of it.”
In his view, the growing influence of public-health campaigning has increasingly blurred that balance, shifting political debate from harm reduction toward opposition to gambling itself.
“There’s a strand of thinking now that treats gambling per se as a social evil,” he said. “Not gambling harm — gambling itself. And that’s a very dangerous place for policy to go.”
O’Reilly leaves Rank stating that beyond hardships and profitability, that the biggest achievement is returning trust to Grosvenor and Mecca, that is visible to the “customer modernisation of venues and development of online platforms”
As he steps aside, O’Reilly expressed strong confidence in the group’s succession plans, backing Group CFO Richard Harris to lead Rank through its next chapter.
“I genuinely think it will be hard to find a better candidate than Richard,” he said. “He’s a CFO, but he’s far more than that — he’s commercial, he understands the game and he understands this business inside out.”
O’Reilly added that Rank’s wider executive bench is stronger than at any point in his tenure, shaped by a decade of crisis management, restructuring and regulatory upheaval.
“This leadership team has dealt with Covid, cost inflation, regulatory reform and major strategic change,” he noted. “They’re battle-hardened — and that gives me real confidence about where the business goes next.”
So can O’Reilly finally switch off from gambling? – “I’m 66 in May and I still feel like I’m in my twenties,” he reflected. “ I still work 70 hours a week, I have bundles of energy left, but I know now is the time to step away.”
