Jockey Club staff cull leaves Derby feeling flat with Ascot and Goodwood riding high

The King George card at Ascot on Saturday was an day that showcased Flat racing at its best, and the sense of optimism at the end of the afternoon was only enhanced by the imminent prospect of five days at Glorious Goodwood this week.

Scandinavia and Trawlerman will reprise their Ascot Gold Cup rivalry in Tuesday’s Goodwood Cup. The “big three” of Bow Echo, Gstaad and Opera Ballo have all been declared for Wednesday’s £1.5m Sussex Stakes. Diamond Necklace, the French Oaks winner, is lined up for the Nassau Stakes on Thursday while on the final day, the fierce punting challenge of the Stewards’ Cup, one of the biggest betting races of the summer, lurks on the Saturday card.

Racing rarely proceeds seamlessly from one highlight to another, however, and news emerged last week that Jockey Club Racecourses, the biggest commercial operator in British racing, is to shed up to 30 staff following a “restructuring” overseen by Jim Mullen, the former boss of Reach plc, who joined the Jockey Club as chief executive in June 2025.

For the moment at least, the redundancy process remains voluntary, but 30 jobs is nearly 5% of a 650-strong workforce, not all of whom are being offered the chance to leave, so some compulsory redundancies may yet be required.

The most surprising departure so far is Jim Allen, the general manager at Epsom since October 2024, who is both an originator and the public face of the track’s five-year plan to revive the status and popularity of the Derby.

Allen, who has opted for voluntary redundancy in preference to applying for a newly created role overseeing a “London Hub” of tracks including Epsom, told the Racing Post on Sunday that he is “sure [the five-year plan] will stay”, though “obviously it will be tweaked and improved as there’s still a way to go and it was never going to happen in one year.”

For Allen, the Derby project was not just a professional commitment. He had a deep personal investment in the scheme too, having grown up near the course and started his career in racing as a work-rider on the downs.

His rich and varied path through the sport has included senior roles in racecourse management and a spell as a trainer in the United States, and he may now return to a more hands-on role as either a trainer or syndicate manager. “It’s all very amicable,” he told the Post, “and I’m hoping I’ll be back at next year’s Derby festival with some sort of runner.”

Amicable though it may be, Allen’s drive, enthusiasm and focus will be a big loss to the Derby project, which has the ultimate aim of returning to a 100k attendance across the two days of Epsom’s Classic meeting.

But it is not a loss that can be easily quantified on a balance sheet, and Mullen – who oversaw a 25% cut in headcount during his six-year tenure at Reach plc – has targeted cost savings to arrest a decline in JCR’s profitability.

Mullen signed an exclusive £100m, 20-year deal in March with the hospitality company Levy with the aim of improving the raceday experience for fans, but JCR’s recently filed accounts for 2025 reflect the extent to which the business’s costs – including the wage bill and increased National Insurance obligations – have been rising faster than revenue.

“With that in mind,” a Jockey Club spokesperson said on Monday, “we have been working over the past six months on a plan to ensure we have an organisation able to maximise the potential of investing the £100m … realised earlier this year.

“Our aim is to give our racecourse teams more autonomy when it comes to commercial decision-making and ownership of the customer experience at their venues. It is also about us creating a more successful and sustainable business that can play a larger role in supporting, investing in and growing the sport while promoting racing and the thoroughbred.”

JCR remains the biggest commercial entity in the sport and is unlikely to surrender that status any time soon. A round of job cuts, though, is a sharp contrast to the mood at tracks like Ascot, Goodwood and York, where the Ebor meeting will take centre stage next month.

What is also unclear – because the accounts do not single out individuals tracks’ profit-and-loss figures – is the extent to which JCR’s profits depend on the major National Hunt festivals at Cheltenham and Aintree in March. The fact that only Cheltenham has been left as a stand-alone entity in the restructuring, however, probably tells its own story.

It is an odd turn of racing history that has seen the Jockey Club, which is so firmly rooted in Newmarket and Flat racing, become increasingly reliant on the runaway success of Cheltenham and its festival meeting over the last two or three decades.

The five-year scheme to revive the Derby was, and remains, a way to bring Flat racing – which, unlike jumping, has a global audience – at least a little more back into the JCR mix.

There are still plenty of very capable people at the operation’s HQ, but losing Jim Allen’s passion for the project still feels like a setback that it could well do without.