The Thursday Take is our weekly column: one racing talking point, put to the test against the Proform database — every British and Irish runner, every result. This week's question was put to us in almost exactly these words, and it is the one that ends every fixture-list argument.
The short version
- Irish-based yards supply under 2% of British runners. In 2025 they had 1,508 of the 86,255 runs on British courses — 1.75%. Remove every one of them and the average British field falls from 8.52 to 8.38: a seventh of a horse. 143 races would drop below eight runners and lose an each-way place; 97 would go below five.
- They are not leaving. They are arriving in greater numbers. Irish runners in Britain rose from 1,351 in 2018 to 1,508 in 2025 while the British runner pool fell 7%. The traffic that collapsed runs the other way: British yards were 0.9% of Irish runners in 2018, 0.24% in 2020–21, and only 0.67% last year.
- Where the fear is true is the top of jump racing. One in four runners in a Class 1 jumps race — the Graded and Listed races — is Irish-trained, and they won 51 of the 191 run in 2025. Without them the average Class 1 jumps field drops from 9.5 to 7.1, and 30 of the 191 would go to post with fewer than five runners.
- Cheltenham without the Irish is a seven-runner meeting. Irish yards were 54.9% of the 2025 Festival field and won 20 of its 28 races. The average Festival field of 16.1 becomes 7.3.
- That happened in one step. The Irish share of the Festival sat at 32–40% from 2018 to 2021, jumped to 55% in 2022, and has stayed at 52–56% every year since. Outside the Festival their share of Class 1 jumps races has gone from 3.4% in 2020 to 17.3% in 2025.
- Follow the money and the framing inverts. Irish-based yards took £19.3m of the top-four place money paid on British races in 2025 — 10.4% of it, 36% of the Class 1 jumps pool — up from £12.9m and 8.4% in 2018, a rise of 15% even after inflation. British prize money is propping up Irish yards, not the other way round.
- And "the Irish" is really four stables. Four yards took 73% of that money in 2025 and are taking 80% of it in 2026. Aidan O'Brien alone has won £7.5m in Britain this year from 111 runs — 45% of everything Irish yards have won here. The number of Irish yards sending a runner has not grown since 2018; the runs per yard have.
- Build it: System Builder — the new Trainer Nation rule on the Connections tab (Ireland, Great Britain or Overseas raider), then put Course Nation against Trainer Nation in the Grid for the whole raiders table in one click.
This week's talking point: who is propping up whom
Last week's column measured what the fixture list has done to British field sizes: 1,548 races added since 2004, the runs to fill them down 7%, two races in five now paying fewer than three each-way places. The 2027 fixture list landed the same day. Since then the argument has moved from fixtures to money — betting-shop closures, the levy, what happens to the prize-money pot if the funding goes — and it keeps arriving at the same anxious question, which a reader put to us almost word for word:
Before we answer it, one thing about the premise, because the money question has two halves. In cash the published fund across British races has grown: £168.5m in 2018 and £194.8m in 2025, up 16%, with the average fund per race going from £16,200 to £19,300 — £20,900 so far this year, and 2026 running 3% ahead of 2025 like for like. But UK consumer prices rose 30.7% across the same eight years (ONS annual average CPI, 105.9 in 2018 against 138.4 in 2025). Put 2018's fund in today's money and it is worth £220.2m against the £194.8m actually on offer — a real-terms fall of 11.5%, a hole of £25.4m. Per race that is a fall of about 9%, and even this year's better £20,900 sits around 4% below where 2018 stood.
So the pot has grown in pounds and shrunk in what those pounds buy, which is a question about where the money comes from next. It is not the question we were asked. Field sizes and Festival shares count horses rather than money, so the one we were asked stands on its own terms: what if the Irish stopped coming?
It is a good question because everyone assumes the answer. The Irish are said to be propping up British racing, and the fixture list is said to be leaning on them. We have the database, so we measured it: every British run in 2025, and every year back to 2018, with each runner's yard classified as Irish-based, British-based or an overseas raider.
First, who counts as Irish
We classify a yard by what it does, not by its postcode: where its runners actually race. A yard is Irish-based in a given year if at least half of its runs that year were on Irish courses — the whole island, Northern Ireland included, because Irish racing is one jurisdiction. Yards that visit Britain from further afield — the French and American raiders at Royal Ascot, for instance — are kept separate as overseas raiders; everything else is British.
The split is not close. In 2025 the top of the Irish-based list reads Willie Mullins (221 British runs), Gordon Elliott (171), Aidan O'Brien (136), John McConnell (88), Joseph O'Brien (76), Gavin Cromwell (71), Henry de Bromhead (68). The rule is applied year by year, so a yard that moves flips at the turn of the year, and the same rule is now a filter in the System Builder — every number below can be reproduced there.
The aggregate answer: a seventh of a horse
Here is British racing with and without its Irish-based runners. "Without" simply removes them from each race and recounts the field; it assumes nobody else would have taken the slot, which is true at Cheltenham and generous in a Tuesday Class 5, so read the right-hand columns as an upper bound.
| Year | British runs | From Irish yards | Share | Avg field | …without them | Races dropping below 8 | Below 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 93,001 | 1,351 | 1.45% | 8.94 | 8.81 | 135 | 55 |
| 2019 | 91,393 | 1,473 | 1.61% | 9.06 | 8.92 | 144 | 66 |
| 2022 | 86,395 | 1,183 | 1.37% | 8.46 | 8.34 | 109 | 99 |
| 2024 | 89,002 | 1,440 | 1.62% | 8.91 | 8.77 | 133 | 86 |
| 2025 | 86,255 | 1,508 | 1.75% | 8.52 | 8.38 | 143 | 97 |
| 2026 (to 7 Sep) | 58,169 | 1,055 | 1.81% | 8.41 | 8.26 | 89 | 63 |
Under two per cent. Take every Irish-trained horse out of British racing in 2025 and the average field loses 0.14 of a runner. It is a real number — 143 races would slip under eight runners and lose an each-way place, 97 would fall below five, and four would have been walkovers or void — but set against last week's finding that the fixture list itself has taken two and a half runners off every race since 2005, it is not the story. For ordinary British racing, the Irish are not a subsidy. They are a rounding error.
They are not leaving. If anything, we are.
The second half of the question — have they started to stop coming? — has a clean answer, and it is no. Irish runners in Britain went from 1,351 in 2018 to 1,508 in 2025, up 12%, over a period in which the British runner pool fell 7%. Their share has climbed from 1.07% in 2021 to 1.75% in 2025. Compared like for like — the first 250 days of each year, which is where 2026 currently stands — this year is running at 1.81%, a shade below 2025's 1.91% at the same point and well above the 1.4–1.7% of 2018 and 2019. Marginally off last year's peak, then; nowhere near a retreat.
The traffic that did collapse runs the other way. In 2018 British yards supplied 0.9% of the runners on Irish courses; by 2020 and 2021 that was 0.24% and 0.23%, and it has recovered only to 0.67%. Brexit paperwork and Covid roughly halved the British raid on Ireland and it has not come back. If one side of the Irish Sea stopped travelling, it was ours.
Where the fear is true: the top of jump racing
Now change the question. Not "British racing", but the races that people actually mean when they say the Irish are propping us up. Here is 2025 split by code and class. Class 1 is the top tier — in jumps racing the Graded and Listed races, on the Flat the Group and Listed races.
| 2025 | Races | Irish share of runners | Irish wins | Avg field | …without them | Races dropping below 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jumps — Class 1 | 191 | 24.9% | 51 of 191 | 9.47 | 7.10 | 30 |
| Jumps — Class 2 | 251 | 8.6% | 14 of 251 | 9.08 | 8.29 | 7 |
| Jumps — Classes 3–7 | 3,137 | 1.4% | 57 of 3,137 | 7.66 | 7.55 | 36 |
| Flat — Class 1 | 282 | 9.9% | 34 of 283 | 8.77 | 7.90 | 16 |
| Flat — Class 2 | 472 | 2.9% | 9 of 472 | 10.78 | 10.46 | 1 |
| Flat — Classes 3–7 | 5,785 | 0.3% | 20 of 5,801 | 8.75 | 8.72 | 7 |
One runner in four in a British Class 1 jumps race is Irish-trained, and they won 27% of them. Take them out and the average field in those races drops from 9.5 to 7.1; 30 of the 191 — one in six — would go to post with fewer than five runners, which is win-only betting; and in 26 of them at least half the field was Irish. Below Class 2 the Irish presence is almost nothing. On the Flat the effect is real at the top and invisible below it.
So the honest answer to the question has two halves. The Irish are not propping up British field sizes. They are propping up British Grade 1 jump racing — and that is a different thing, because it is the part of the sport that sells tickets, television and the story.
Cheltenham without the Irish is a seven-runner meeting
The meetings where the counterfactual bites, 2025:
| Meeting | Races | Irish share of runners | Irish wins | Avg field | …without them |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cheltenham Festival, March | 28 | 54.9% | 20 of 28 | 16.14 | 7.29 |
| Aintree Grand National meeting, April | 21 | 31.9% | 11 of 21 | 14.33 | 9.76 |
| Royal Ascot, June | 35 | 20.0% | 10 of 35 | 16.71 | 13.37 |
| Cheltenham, October | 14 | 27.1% | 2 of 14 | 12.14 | 8.86 |
| Cheltenham, November | 19 | 21.5% | 3 of 19 | 10.79 | 8.47 |
Two hundred and forty-eight of the 452 horses that ran at the 2025 Festival were trained in Ireland. They won 20 of the 28 races. Remove them and the average Festival field goes from 16 runners to seven. The Grand National meeting loses a third of its runners; Royal Ascot, one in five. No other British meeting comes close to these five.
A step change, not a drift
The interesting part is when this happened, because it did not creep up.
| Irish share of runners | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 so far |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cheltenham Festival | 32.2% | 38.0% | 38.0% | 40.1% | 55.1% | 52.9% | 55.6% | 54.9% | 51.6% |
| Class 1 jumps, outside the Festival | 4.9% | 6.2% | 3.4% | 6.7% | 10.2% | 13.2% | 15.1% | 17.3% | 14.2% |
| Class 1 Flat | 11.0% | 11.7% | 7.4% | 9.9% | 7.6% | 9.0% | 9.9% | 9.9% | 10.9% |
Three things stand out. The Festival went from 40% Irish to 55% Irish in a single year, 2021 to 2022, and has sat between 52% and 56% ever since — half the Festival is Irish now, structurally, not as a run of good luck. The less-noticed flow is the second row: in the Graded and Listed jumps races outside Cheltenham in March, the Irish share has gone from 3.4% in 2020 to 17.3% in 2025, five times over, and they took 35 of those 168 races last year. The Irish are no longer coming just for March. And the third row is flat: on the Flat, the Irish share of top-class races has sat between 7% and 12% for a decade with no trend at all. This is a jumps story.
One honest softening. At the 2026 Festival the Irish share held at 52% of the runners, but the wins fell to 15 of 28 from 20 the year before. That is one meeting and one year, and it moved the share of the field not at all — but it is the one place in this piece where the story gives ground, and it would be dishonest to leave it out.
Follow the money
Which brings us back to the reader's second worry: that if the money went, the Irish would go with it. Here is what Irish-based yards actually won on British courses — the prize money paid to the first four home, which is who won it rather than what was advertised.
| Year | Top-four place money paid, British races | Won by Irish yards | Share | Share of the jumps pool | Share of the Class 1 jumps pool |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | £154.0m | £12.9m | 8.4% | 8.7% | 21.4% |
| 2019 | £148.3m | £14.5m | 9.8% | 9.6% | 23.5% |
| 2022 | £171.6m | £11.3m | 6.6% | 11.4% | 30.3% |
| 2024 | £178.3m | £19.7m | 11.0% | 13.9% | 36.1% |
| 2025 | £184.9m | £19.3m | 10.4% | 14.2% | 36.4% |
| 2026 (to 7 Sep) | £136.6m | £16.7m | 12.2% | 14.4% | 35.6% |
Nineteen million pounds a year, and rising: Irish-based yards' share of British prize money has gone from 8.4% to 10.4% since 2018, their share of the jumps pool from 8.7% to 14.2%, and their share of the money paid in Class 1 jumps races from a fifth to more than a third. On the Flat they take about a fifth of the Class 1 money (20.8% in 2025) and have for years.
So the framing inverts. The Irish are not propping up British racing; British prize money is propping up Irish yards, to the tune of £19m a year, and the share is going up. Which also answers the worry the other way round. The British Grade 1 pot is what they come for, and while a race at Cheltenham or Aintree pays what it pays, they will keep coming. The Festival's 55% is the proof: it arrived in the years when British prize money was rising — the money paid to the first four home went from £154m to £185m over the period, and the published fund from £168m to £195m. If the funding argument ever does turn into a smaller pot, this is the table that says who would notice first.
"The Irish" is four stables
One more cut, and it changes the picture of who is doing this. The number of Irish yards sending at least one runner to Britain has not grown — 138 in 2018, 123 in 2025 — while the runs each of them sends have, from 9.8 a year to 12.3. The raid is deepening, not widening. And the money is concentrated to a degree that "the Irish" does not begin to describe:
| 2025, Irish-based yards in Britain | British runs | Wins | Top-four place money won |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aidan O'Brien | 136 | 31 | £7.89m |
| Willie Mullins | 221 | 40 | £4.13m |
| Henry de Bromhead | 68 | 8 | £1.06m |
| Gordon Elliott | 171 | 20 | £1.05m |
| Gavin Cromwell | 71 | 6 | £0.82m |
| Joseph O'Brien | 76 | 9 | £0.76m |
| All 123 Irish-based yards | 1,508 | 185 | £19.25m |
Four yards took 73% of the Irish money in 2025, and so far in 2026 four yards are taking 80% of it. Aidan O'Brien alone has won £7.54m in Britain this year from 111 runs and 22 wins — 45% of everything Irish-based yards have won here in 2026 — and that from a Flat yard, which is the twist inside the twist. The field-size story is a jumps story: Mullins, Elliott, de Bromhead and Cromwell filling the Graded races and the Festival. The money story is a Flat story: one yard at Ballydoyle taking the Group races at Royal Ascot, York and Newmarket. Both are true, and neither is "the Irish".
What it means for the fixture-list argument
Put the two halves together and the popular version of the fear is wrong in both directions. British racing's field-size problem is home-grown — last week's arithmetic of races added and runs lost — and the Irish neither cause it nor cure it; at under 2% of runners they could not. But the top of British jump racing is now a joint enterprise in which the visitors supply a quarter of the fields, a quarter of the winners and take a third of the money. If that ever changed, it would not be the Tuesday card that emptied. It would be the day everyone watches.
Build it yourself
Every table above is now one rule in the System Builder (Proform Premium), because this week we added it. Trainer Nation lives on the Connections tab and classifies every yard the way this article does — year by year, from where its runners race, with Northern Ireland counted as Irish and foreign raiders kept separate.
- The raiders: + Add Rule → Connections → Trainer Nation is any of Ireland (inc NI); then Course & Going → Course Nation is any of England, Scotland, Wales. Set the dates to 2025 and you will see the 1,508 runs and 185 wins in the first table.
- The top tier: add Race Conditions → Class = 1, and Race Type = Chase, Hurdle and NH Flat for the jumps half.
- The whole table in one click: open the Grid tab and put Course Nation down the side against Trainer Nation across the top — that is every row of this article, by class, by meeting, or by anything else you care to filter.
- The home team: a Cheltenham system that keeps only British-trained runners is Trainer Nation is none of Ireland — which, on the numbers above, is a system that has just thrown away 20 of the last 28 Festival winners. Back-test it before you trust it.
Trainer Nation works for today's qualifiers as well as back-tests, so a system built on it will list tomorrow's Irish raiders each morning.
Questions this raises
What share of British runners are trained in Ireland?
Under two per cent. In 2025, 1,508 of the 86,255 runs on British courses came from Irish-based yards, 1.75%, up from 1.07% in 2021. Removing them would cut the average British field from 8.52 to 8.38 runners.
What share of Cheltenham Festival runners are Irish-trained?
About 55%. Irish-based yards supplied 248 of the 452 runners at the 2025 Festival (54.9%) and won 20 of the 28 races. The share jumped from 40% in 2021 to 55% in 2022 and has stayed between 52% and 56% since.
Are Irish yards sending fewer horses to Britain?
No — more. Irish runners in Britain rose from 1,351 in 2018 to 1,508 in 2025 while British runs overall fell 7%. The flow that collapsed was British yards running in Ireland: 0.9% of Irish runners in 2018, 0.24% in 2020–21, 0.67% in 2025.
How much British prize money do Irish yards win?
About £19m a year. Irish-based yards won £19.3m of the top-four place money paid on British races in 2025 (10.4%), including 36% of the money paid in Class 1 jumps races and 21% of the money paid in Class 1 Flat races. Their share has risen from 8.4% in 2018. Four yards take about three-quarters of it; Aidan O'Brien's alone took £7.9m in 2025.
The Thursday Take runs every Thursday morning, with a special whenever the big meetings come around. All figures from the Proform database, read on 8 September 2026 through the same classification the System Builder's Trainer Nation filter uses, so every number here reproduces in the product. Scope: British races that were run and resulted, 2018 to 7 September 2026; every runner that started counts, including non-finishers. 2026 figures are January to 7 September only. "Irish-based" is judged year by year from where a yard's runners race — at least half its runs in a year on Irish courses — and "Ireland" means the whole island, Northern Ireland included, which races under one jurisdiction; a yard with fewer than ten runs in a year is judged on its record to date. "Without them" removes Irish-based runners from each race and recounts, assuming the place would have gone unfilled — an upper bound for ordinary races, an accurate one for the big meetings. Class 1 in the by-class table includes the Cheltenham Festival; the trend table shows the Festival on its own row and the other Class 1 jumps races without it. Prize money is the money paid to the first four home in each race — who won it — not the published race fund; it is the safest basis in the data and about 95% of the total paid.
