William Hill’s Owner Sold for £243m. The Real Price Was £2.2bn

Shareholders in evoke, the London-listed owner of William Hill, 888 and Mr Green, voted on 17 August to sell the company to Bally’s Intralot. The all-share offer gives them 0.537 of a new Bally’s Intralot share for each evoke share. At signing that was worth about 52p a share, or £243.1m for the whole company. The enterprise value, which adds the debt the buyer takes on, is about £2.2bn.

That gap is the story. Roughly nine pounds in every ten of the deal’s value belongs to lenders, not owners. The deal is nowhere near the scale of Europe’s biggest takeovers this year, but measured by enterprise value it is a serious one. Measured by what shareholders actually receive, it barely registers.

Only a Gibraltar court sanction is left, expected in the fourth quarter of 2026 or the first quarter of 2027. After that evoke leaves the London market, adding another name to the queue of companies giving up on a London listing, a queue that already includes Flutter, the world’s largest betting group.

How a £2bn Purchase Became a £243m Sale

The debt dates from July 2022, when 888 bought William Hill’s non-US business from Caesars Entertainment for an enterprise value of about £2bn, paid for largely with borrowed money. Four years later the whole group, including 888 itself and its Italian, Danish and Spanish operations, carries roughly the same enterprise value as that single purchase.

Net leverage stood at 5.6 times earnings at the end of June, up from 5.2 times at the start of the year. The group lost £70.2m after tax in the first half, mostly through interest and the amortisation left over from the William Hill deal.

Then came the November 2025 Budget, which nearly doubled the tax on UK online gaming revenue from April 2026. By 9 December the shares were at 21.9p and the board had launched a strategic review. The offer is a 138% premium to that price, and as with Apollo’s offer for easyJet in July, a premium that size says more about how far the shares had fallen than about how generous the buyer was.

The Buyer Has Its Own Problems

Bally’s Intralot is listed in Athens and 57.9% owned by the US group Bally’s Corporation. In a quarterly filing on 14 August, three days before the evoke vote, Bally’s Corporation told US regulators there was substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern without new financing.

The evoke deal comes with its own money. A lender group including TPG Credit, Oaktree and OHA has committed about £889m to refinance evoke’s floating-rate notes and term loan, both due in 2028. Without the deal, evoke would have had to refinance that debt on its own, and its board said that would need a materially better level of profit and cash than the business was producing. Shareholders chose a shaky new parent over a refinancing wall, in a year when short sellers had already called the top of the betting boom in the US.

What Management Did While the Clock Ran

The operating numbers are better than the price suggests. According to the company’s half-year results, revenue held flat at £887.5m and rose 2% on a like-for-like basis, despite about 270 fewer betting shops than a year earlier. Around 200 of those closed in May alone.

Gaming duties rose by £46m year on year. Management says it offset more than half of that, and the biggest lever was marketing: spending fell from £142.1m to £115.8m, a cut of almost a fifth. UK and Ireland online revenue still grew 4%, with William Hill’s gaming business up 7%, and the division’s adjusted earnings rose 28% in a half when its tax rate went up.

Cutting a fifth of marketing without losing customers is only possible if rivals are not outbidding you for them, and since 19 December 2025 they largely cannot. The Gambling Commission now caps bonus play-through at ten times and bans offers that tie casino play to sports bets, so the 40x rollovers that once let operators advertise huge sign-up figures cheaply are gone. Competition has moved from the size of an offer to its terms. A ranking of UK casino welcome offers under the new wagering cap shows what that looks like in practice: the top pick is chosen on the terms of its offer rather than its size, 100 free spins for a £20 stake with the winnings paid as cash.

For evoke, that turned a cost it once had to match line by line into one it could cut. The phrase “improved promotional efficiency” in its results is doing a lot of work, and much of that work was done by the regulator. 888 shrank, deliberately, as the group stopped paying for customers who did not earn back what they cost.

The Bottom Line

Evoke was not sold because William Hill stopped working. It was sold because a 2022 purchase made with borrowed money met a 2025 tax rise, and the equity between them was squeezed to almost nothing. Bally’s Intralot gets a business whose UK online profits grew while its tax bill rose, plus £889m of new borrowing and a controlling shareholder that has warned about its own future. The Gibraltar court will decide whether the scheme is fair. Whether £2.2bn was a bargain will take longer to settle.