Eddie Jordan, the former racing driver and owner of a Formula One team, is part of a consortium that has made a bid to buy Playtech, an online gambling platform. At first, Aristocrat, an Australian company, was far ahead in the negotiations to purchase it, but a bid in the region of about three billion pounds from Jordan’s consortium, JKO Play, reversed the situation.
How the interest started
Motor racing tycoon, Eddie Jordan won the Irish Kart Championship in 1971 and spent the next decade in Formula One and Formula Two. After several accidents, he decided to create his own racing team and had considerable success with it before setting up a Formula One team. Michael Schumacher and Eddie Irvine are just some of the drivers who owed their break to Jordan. After selling his Formula One team, he moved on to becoming a TV pundit and entrepreneur.
Jordan started showing an interest in Playtech in 2021. London-listed Playtech was founded in 1999 and offers operational management, product design, and software for online gambling companies.
Playtech is one of the leading live dealer gaming providers in the US, and its customer portfolio includes casino operators such as Bet365 and Parx Interactive, which has just launched Play Gun Lake Casino in Michigan in partnership with the Gun Lake tribe.
More time to bid
JKO Play is headed by Eddie Jordan and Keith O’Loughlin and originally faced a deadline from the British takeover panel, by which time they had to declare their intentions. However, both Playtech and JKO asked the panel for more time.
Playtech decided to push back shareholder approval of the Aristocrat deal, which was due to be accepted at shareholder meetings in early January and JKO Play was granted the extra time to come up with a bid.
JKO Play’s bid
JKO Play’s bid will be examined by Playtech’s shareholders at a meeting in early February. It is not yet known whether Aristocrat, which started as a slot machine manufacturer and transformed into an online gambling platform, will counter the new bid. Jordan reportedly has financial backing from PartyGaming co-founder Vikrant Bhargava, one of the U.K.s wealthiest gambling tycoons.
The popularity of online gambling accelerates
The interest in Playtech and the value of the bids is an indication of the popularity of online gambling today. It will be interesting to see what happens when the shareholders of Playtech meet in February.
After New Jersey’s Supreme Court victory in 2018, many states can legalize sports betting in the U.S. With the pandemic preventing spectators from watching live sport, online sports wagering skyrocketed.
The pandemic accelerated all online activities, including all forms of online gaming. Even emerging artists today have to engage online if they hope to find an audience interested in investing in digital art.