Melodrama – not real life – was the only description for the rarefied, theatrical atmosphere in the 2024 Newmarket Tattersalls Sales ring. The audience gasped, caught their breath and gasped again as bidding for yearlings, foals and mares went stratospheric. For the principal actors who splashed out fortunes, they’ll have the winter months to muse over whether they’d bought ‘Black Friday’ bargains or not. Black Friday is when marketeers go all out to sell stock, slashing prices. In racing the market seems to operate in the opposite direction - the only way is up. A word of warning: Black Friday was coined to mark the start of the Great Depression in America.

Robert Sangster was born to be a big spender. His fortune initially came via his father Vernon - Vernons Football Pools. With the Lottery looming Sangster saw the light and sold his heritage to Ladbrokes for £90m. Vernons was subsequently valued at £1 when the Lottery - sales pitch “It could be you” wiped out the Pools concept.

Sangster’s hedonism in horseflesh had the firewall of expertise money can’t buy. The union of Irish horse genius John Magnier and the former Pools magnate wasn’t made in heaven but at Haydock Park racecourse, in 1972, the day Green God (Magnier’s but not in his colours) won the Vernons Sprint Cup, Magnier and Sangster shook hands and proceeded to shake the racing world. Sangster’s biographer said, somewhat tendentiously, “In terms of horses John was about one hundred and forty-eight years older” – though Sangster who died prematurely in 2004, aged 67, was actually the elder of the two. Magnier continues to conduct the world’s outstanding horse empire, Coolmore in Ireland.

In 1972 Magnier brought in Vincent O’Brien, through their Cork, southern Ireland, family connections to manage Coolmore at Ballydoyle stables. After unparalleled success with the master trainer, he found a successor to Vincent, Aidan O’Brien (no relation) appointed in 1996. And then came ‘the lads’, the squad of big hitters that accompanies the trainer to the world’s winner’s enclosures and Sales rings. American humourist Damon Runyan’s rune, “Always try to rub up against money, for if you rub up against money long enough, some of it may rub off on you” was pertinent. ‘Big hitters’, some of whom you would not want to rub up the wrong way, came flocking.

When Magnier met Sangster the latter was already operating Swettenham Park Stud in Cheshire. Between 1977-84 Sangster was almost always leading owner, winning the Derby with The Minstrel and then Golden Fleece and three Arc de Triomphe’s with Alleged and Detroit. He brought more than money to the table but not a title which, while the Jockey Club still ruled, was a credential money couldn’t buy: it opened doors and attracted clients. Advised to get a ‘gong’ Sangster was fast-tracked to Jockey Club membership, bringing fresh blood to a sclerotic body.

Others stand on the shoulders of genius; Magnier and the O’Briens stood, and still stand, shoulder to shoulder - a hegemony which has lasted over half a century. A quarter of a century after Vincent last achieved the feat in 1977, Aidan became the only other Irish trainer to win the British Championship. He’s won it five times since. The time scale has not been that long in historical terms; lifetimes in the case of Northern Dancer, Sadler’s Wells and Galileo the stallions by whose legacies Coolmore is defined. Before them, in that first Haydock encounter, Robert Sangster appreciated the inescapable logic in his new associate’s plan to stand stallions who would, throughout their productive lives repay many times over their initial purchase price.

“Jesus, Robert,” said Magnier. “Nijinsky was sold to an American syndicate for $5.5m which is only about 2.2m Irish punts. With 40 shareholders, that’s only £55,000 a share. That seems like a lot of money, but it’s not. I’m laying you dollars to doughnuts right now that Nijinsky’s first sale yearlings will fetch $100,000 each. I would not be surprised if they fetched $200,000 each. How the devil can £55,000 be expensive when your first yearling will – at least in my view – damned nearly get you out of your investment? After that you can breed to him every year for the rest of his life. For free.”

Compelling words, set in tablets of stone. The greatest maths masterminds, Isaac Newton, Archimedes, Srinivasa Ramanujan could juggle figures miraculously but nobody matched Magnier when it came to measuring a stallion’s worth. Sangster’s virtue was in appreciating Magnier’s calculations. And those figures were based on forty mare coverings! Soon, treble or quadruple that figure was expected of stallions in their prime.



“The race isn’t always to the swift or the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet” wrote Runyan. The Nijinsky yearling that the Coolmore team bought in 1985, Seattle Dancer, cost them $13.1m. Underbidder was America’s top trainer Wayne Lukas who surrendered the bidding duel, resignedly, with, “When it keeps snowing, after a while it doesn’t matter how deep it gets.” Lukas acknowledged the supremacy of bottomless pockets. Even bottomless pockets were not deep enough at Newmarket Sales this November and December: you needed a shovel to move the snow drifts of cash splashed out on thoroughbred stock.

The 1970s had been under pressure to follow the revolutionary Swinging Sixties. For racing the decade immediately showed promise: not one Triple Crown winner but two, either side of the Atlantic. Secretariat, ninth of thirteen crowned in America: Nijinsky fifteenth and last, in the UK. Coinciding with the arrival of the Arabs, together they kicked off the gold rush. Half a century later Frankel, even without that Triple Crown medal, signalled another. This year’s Tattersalls Book One upheaval had Frankel at its heart – his offspring the best ‘money can buy’.

Those heady 70s had hits and misses. And it was in the 1980s when Sheikh Mohammed broke the $10m ceiling for a yearling – the abortive Snaafi Dancer - and not until 2006 that even more abject The Green Monkey (named after ‘the lads’ Barbadian golf course) cost $16m. And yet a Gulf Arab sheikh, descending on Kentucky courtesy of his own airline, allegedly remarked that he was “puzzled when Mr Sangster was described as a very rich man.”

How would the sheikh have described the advent of Amo Racing and Wathnan Racing? They are the ones to have shaken the money tree at the 2024 Sales; tree? orchard more like. This year’s Group 1 juvenile’s championship race, the Dewhurst, featured another round of Coolmore versus Godolphins: only a make weight filled a field of five. Will Amo and Wathnan break into this closet, Amo the brain/love child of supreme footballer’s agent Kia Joorabchian; Wathnan the Emir of Qatar’s enterprise? At Newmarket they made those old Keeneland days look like a car boot sale. Turnover for the three days at Newmarket Book One was 127,823,000gns of which ‘only’ 23mgns was the Amo Racing total. It was a million (give or take a few thousand) more than Godolphin. Coolmore bought just one, six-figure offering, a Frankel filly. Wathnan weighed in with more millions.

The Sale median was 250,000gns. Clearance rate nearly 90 per cent. The catalogue had been reduced by sixteen per cent to 449 lots. Of the top eight – those at 2m gns and above - four went to Godolphin, four to Amo whose blow out included a 4.4m gns Frankel filly and another Frankel at 2.5m plus a 4.3m Wootton Bassett colt. A couple of the records that were trashed saw Amo in partnership with the Qatari Al Shaqab. In 2013 Al Shaqab bought Al Naamah for a record 5million gns. Not quite a failure, she still finished way behind the same owner’s Treve (no bid at Arqana Sales) in the 2015 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. The dam of the aforementioned Wootton Bassett colt is full-sister to Al Naamah.

The last great football-racing confrontation, Coolmore v Manchester United’s legendary manager Sir Alex Ferguson didn’t exactly go the ‘soccer side’s’ way. Own goal? Coolmore won that ‘match’ - disagreement over stud ownership of 2002 horse of the year Rock of Gibraltar. Joorabchian has given the market a good kicking. The 2025 season will decide whether he is leading scorer – or, like Ferguson, shown the ‘red card’.

“It’s great for racing and I hope we’ve managed to trigger something where people go ‘oh wow, we can do that too’,” said the mercurial Joorabchian. You need no formal qualifications to be either a bloodstock or football agent and despite those enormous headline figures for bloodstock the most expensive yearling wouldn’t buy you a one-footed full back from the UK’s lower soccer divisions. Top player’s contracts, negotiated by such as Joorabchian, still get paid, injured or out of form: try selling a racehorse that wouldn’t pass the vet; or the winning post.

Joorabchian has already had a carousel of trainers and jockeys. He was born in Tehran in 1971 – yes, the year before the Magnier-Sangster accord – and is alert to the possibilities. “We are competing against people that have been established for many years,” he said (never plaintively). “A lot of the horses we bought were foal shares (owner of stallion and mare sharing costs of production) where people who we were bidding against were bidding fifty cents to the dollar.”

The calculations of John Magnier on the advance of stallion fees all those years ago have been realised in spades. Frankel’s is private but £500,000 might be an understatement; Dubawi, £350,000. During his reign at Coolmore as champion sire from 2008 to 2020 Galileo’s fee was undisclosed: the old saw ‘if you have to ask you can’t afford it’ comes to mind; rumours were it went north of 400,000; another stab was that he earned 40 million annually.

Figures in racing are as verifiable as sales of pop records but those advertised for Coolmore’s current market leaders include Wootton Bassett up 100,000gns to 300,000gns. No Nay Never is actually down but you still have to part with 125,000gns for his services. Coolmore’s headline first season stallions, successive Derby winners Auguste Rodin and City of Troy, both humbled on their final outings, stand respectively at 75,000 euros and 35,000 euros; Camelot sire of this year’s ‘star player’ Blue Stocking is also 75,000 euros. Justify, 13th Triple Crown winner and the only one unbeaten, bought by Coolmore according to the New York Times for $60m, is the sire City of Troy. His advertised price at Ashmore, Coolmore’s American branch, in Kentucky is 250,000 dollars. He traces to Nijinsky. Coolmore have just paid a record 5m euros for the Prix Diane, Group 1 winning filly Sparkling Plenty who may visit Justify.

Then came the foals wedged, in early December, between the yearlings and the potential broodmares. Joorabchian once again trumped anybody who took him on. He bought the Irish Oaks winner You Got To Me (like Juddmonte’s Blue Stocking trained by Ralph Beckett) for 4.6m gns; Coolmore responded with 3m gns for the many times Group One sprint placed bridesmaid Believing. As ever the auctioneer repeated in his non-stop repertoire “thank you for your help”, as the bids piled in. Help! All this gambling (and it is mere speculation) on the future appeared ignorant of revelation that gambling on horseracing in Britain is plummeting. There’s a £3 billion ‘black hole’ in racing’s finances.

As is the case every year, Group 1 winners came from the bargain basement. As yearlings Sun Chariot (Group 1) heroine Tamfana cost €20,000, while Nunthorpe (Group 1) winner Bradsell fetched just 12,000gns. Nobody can ‘legislate’ for them but Joorabchian is mindful of the future. Aware that no outfit can survive unless it breeds its own champions he paid 2.5m gns for Guineas winner Chaldean’s foal sister. One day she may be worth a place in his projected blue-blooded broodmare band. Of the thirty-six Group 1’s in Britain this year, just eight went to horses that were bought at the Sales, none to horses bought for £1million or more. Ballydoyle won eleven Group 1’s, all but one gained by their homebreds. Godolphin won five Group 1s in Britain, all of them homebreds.

Extraordinary (outlandish?), even among this cornucopia of dealing, is the reputed Joorabchian £2.5m offer for Freemason Lodge Stables, Newmarket. Can it be true that this historic yard which has produced successive champion racehorses under the tutelage of the recently retired ten-time champion trainer Sir Michael Stoute could be had for half the cost of a yearling with everything to prove? Nobody will top – gazump - Joorabian who is reportedly looking to “concentrate his string” – of horses if not his footballers.

Racing in Britain began in the 1700s – the Jockey Club putatively established in 1750 when the sport largely consisted of aristocrat owner-breeders taking one another on. In the nineteenth century Confederacies, groups of gamblers with their own stables, muscled in, applying ‘professionalism’ to make betting fortunes. In the twentieth century, as the aristocracy retreated in face of waves of oil-rich Arab potentates, the Irish-led coterie matched strides. Now ‘new money’ has cascaded into a game increasingly vulnerable to economic waves. Nothing lasts forever: the sub title of that Sangster biography was “The rise and fall of the Sport of Kings”.