Predicting the future is a useful skill for a bookie. Back in the 1990s, Denise Coates was running her family’s modest chain of Midlands betting shops when she realised that the internet would make it possible for her to create a global gambling giant. In 2000, amid the financial turmoil of the dotcom crash, Coates and her brother John started Bet365 from a portable building in a car park in Stoke-on-Trent. Relentlessly investing in their own technology has been critical to the Coates’s success. Bet365 could adapt its website more quickly than its rivals and pioneered “in-play” or “live” betting, where punters could wager on a game once it had begun. Betting soon became possible on the number of free kicks, the half-time score and countless other aspects of football and an ever-growing roster of sports around the world.