Britain’s Power Players: Denise Coates and Stella David Are Running the Betting Industry

The betting and lottery industry has spent decades being written, run, and owned almost entirely by men. In the United Kingdom, that picture no longer holds. Two women currently sit atop two of the country’s biggest gambling companies: Denise Coates, the self-made billionaire who has run Bet365 since founding it in 2000, and Stella David, the seasoned executive who took the reins of Entain in 2025 after years steering some of the world’s best-known consumer brands. At Leiden & Leuven Magazine, we follow stories like theirs closely, because they prove that even the most stubbornly male-coded industries eventually answer to competence, not gender provided someone is determined enough to prove it.

Denise Coates: The Billionaire Who Never Left the Building

Denise Coates didn’t inherit Bet365, she built it from scratch, launching the site in 2001 from a portakabin above one of her family’s betting shops in Stoke-on-Trent, after graduating from the University of Sheffield with a first-class degree in econometrics. More than two decades later, Bet365 handles tens of billions of pounds in bets every year and remains one of the largest privately owned online gambling companies in the world. Coates still runs it day to day as joint CEO alongside her brother John, with their father Peter serving as chairman  a genuinely family-run operation at a scale most public companies never reach. She has consistently ranked as Britain’s highest-paid woman, taking home over £260 million in a single recent year, and was made a CBE for services to business and the community. What sets Coates apart isn’t just the size of her fortune  it’s that, unlike most founders who cash out once a company reaches this scale, she has stayed hands-on in the business for 25 years, still based in the same city where she started.

Stella David: Steering Entain Through Turbulence

Stella David’s path to the top of Entain, the company behind Ladbrokes, Coral, bwin, and half of the US platform BetMGM, looked nothing like Coates’s. David spent over 15 years in senior roles at Bacardi, later became CEO of William Grant & Sons, and built a long track record as a non-executive director at companies like Domino’s Pizza and Norwegian Cruise Line before joining Entain’s board in 2021. When the company needed steady leadership first after Jette Nygaard-Andersen’s departure in 2023, then again after a brief and turbulent successor left in 2025 David stepped in twice as interim CEO before finally being confirmed as permanent Chief Executive in April 2025. Her appointment was framed by the board as a deliberate choice for stability: someone who already understood Entain’s operations and had earned the trust of shareholders during two rounds of crisis management, rather than another unfamiliar outsider.

Two Companies, Billions in Wagers, Two Women in Charge

Between them, Coates and David now oversee two of the most recognizable names in global betting. Bet365 remains privately held and famously secretive about its numbers, but is estimated to process more than $65 billion in bets annually across sports, casino games, and lottery-style products in dozens of countries. Entain, meanwhile, is a publicly listed group spanning sportsbooks, online casinos, and lottery-adjacent games under brands like Ladbrokes and Coral, with operations stretching from the UK to Australia and the US. Having women running companies of this size and complexity isn’t a symbolic footnote anymore, it’s simply how two of the betting industry’s biggest players are being run right now.

At Leiden & Leuven Magazine, we keep telling stories like Denise Coates’s and Stella David’s because they widen what young women picture when they imagine themselves at the top of an industry. Neither woman got there by softening what the job required, Coates by staying obsessively hands-on for 25 years, David by proving herself twice under pressure before earning the permanent title. Their example is proof that in even the most male-dominated corners of business, there is always room at the very top for a woman determined enough to take it.