About BoyleSports
As we mentioned earlier, it was John Boyle who, in 1989, open the first Boylesports high street bookmaker. Since then the company has grown exponentially and now operate over 200 shops throughout Ireland along with telephone betting, online betting and mobile betting, not to mention their exploits into online casino, poker and bingo.
The company are still based out Ireland, near Dundalk and they employee a massive 1,700 throughout. In 2015 the company took on a huge decision to move their marketing operations to that of Gibraltar, but were still very keen to make sure that their Irish heritage remained in tact, leaving head offices in Ireland. As a result, they now hold licenses with both the UK Gambling Commission and the Gibraltar Gambling Commission, allowing them to practice safe gambling around the world.
High Street Betting Shops
Boyle Sports set out life in 1989 with just one shop to their name, opened in Northern Ireland by the then owner, John Boyle. The company then moved into expanding this sector of the business quite rapidly, going on to purchase another 76 stores by August 2004. From there they have still managed to maintain their growth steadily in the high street bookmaking sector and now boast 210 shops, all based in Ireland.
Boyle Sports have been very canny about how the company were going to expand and often picked up on ventures that were failing or no longer needed. This was highlighted in 2011 when Boyle Sports purchased 17 more stores from Celtic bookmaker and followed the same strategy over the next few years taking over 15 stores that were no longer needed from bookmaker William Hill.
The company are a fair size on the high street, but can’t compete realistically with some of the bigger players. They originally decided to solely concentrate their strategy on the streets of Ireland though, which limits them in terms of where and how many stores they can realistically push to.
Having said this, Boylesports are currently eyeing up the 360 UK betting shops currently owned by Ladbrokes and Coral that must be sold as part of their upcoming merger. They have some stiff competition for the stores, however, with Betfred also licking their lips at the prospect of expanding their high street presence.
Boylesports regard themselves as Irelands largest independent bookmaker. The company have been about since 1989, starting from a fairly modest background in highest street bookmaking, to now being a fully fledge online, mobile and telephone betting service.
This review will be looking at how the bookmaker fairs in one of the most competitive online gaming marketplaces, along with giving you an overview of the offers and promotions that are provided.
Odds & Markets
Boylesports have managed to carve out a nice little sector for themselves in the gambling industry and this is mainly to do with the competitive nature of the pricing structure. That odds we tested on a number of sports were consistently ranked in the top 20 and very rarely outside of a point or two behind the best price in the industry. The horse racing section was the standout for us when going through their odds with so many of the top races all being right up as one of the best in the business. Other sports perform well throughout the bookmaker, but it’s horse racing where we feel that Boylesports really excel.
Market coverage on the whole throughout Boylesports was more than acceptable. As we mentioned, horse racing and football are their go-to sports and it’s here where you are going to have the most joy. We will say that they don’t quite have the appeal of some of the larger brands in the industry, especially when betting on football, with a fraction of the number of markets to bet on compared with the industry leading bookmakers. All in all though, a more than solid effort from Boylesports and bookmaker that’s worth checking out.
Features
The first thing we wanted to highlight on Boylesports is the sheer size of the site in terms of markets and even sports on offer. Football and horse racing are the two biggest players, but we were super impressed with the depth markets on offer for slightly ‘lesser’ sports such as American Football, Cricket, Golf, Tennis and loads more to be honest.
The company have recently updated their website with an all new betting statistics page. This covers a lot of sports, but we agreed that it was football who were the main beneficiaries of the update. You are able to jump in search through loads of data from pretty much every match that Boylesports offer on site. You can easily see form, league position, head to head results, winning/losing margins and any trends from all this data to allow you to make much more informed betting decisions.
When you become a member of Boylesports you will also gain access to the sites in-depth betting blog. The blog includes articles from all sorts of sports and with this comes some really nice intuition from a mix of people who work for Boylesports and also ambassadors for the site as well. What we really liked is that it’s not just full of football and horse racing articles, but instead they mix it up and talk you through bets for sports that you might not necessarily have thought about betting on.
IN PLAY BETTING
You get an absolutely massive in play betting section at Boylesports, which you would expect from Ireland’s biggest independent bookmaker to be honest. Nonetheless, the site is very heavy around football betting, but outside of this the number of sports that are on offer is exemplary. Tennis is an option that will push football really hard and if you were looking for a good range of matches mixed with a good range of betting markets in tennis, then you will be hard pushed to find many better alternatives than Boylesports.
The only thing that we can really grumble about is that lack of any detailed match centre. You can click each game and see information such as the latest score then the markets linked with that game, but there is not live game overview for most sports, which does set it at a disadvantage to most bookies.
STATS
Boylesports are one of the only bookmakers to use Touch Line for their statistics section. What you are going to be getting is a really good range of stats to choose from, especially for football. We liked the fact that you could search through stats that would be relevant to a certain betting market, whilst also seeing the usual data such as head to head records, current form, league standings, player information and so on.