***IMPORTANT UPDATE***

26th June 2024
Update following Lifford Stadium’s meetings with Greyhound Racing Ireland (GRI) and Sports Information Services (SIS) 25th June 2024.

Lifford is grateful for the positive interactions with GRI and SIS and look forward to progressing discussions in the short term.

Inclusion of Lifford in SIS’s schedule of Irish greyhound racing is considered by Lifford to be a critical path to expanding the off-course tote pool volumes of our unique low-retention tote model – to build on the success of the on-course pool volumes – and to extending the reach of Lifford’s racing to fixed odds bookmakers in UK and Ireland.

GRI confirmed that they are broadly in support of Lifford being proposed to SIS for inclusion in SIS’s schedule of Irish greyhound racing under existing commercial agreements between SIS and GRI, subject to Lifford meeting necessary racing standards and metrics that SIS require for it to be part of their content. While SIS is open to having Lifford as part of its schedule, it does not enter agreements with individual stadia.

SIS confirmed that it has a high level of satisfaction and confidence in the current GRI-SIS racing product and will defer to GRI for their decision on whether Lifford should be proposed.

Inclusion in the schedule will be subject to SIS being satisfied that the ‘racing product’ from Lifford meets certain established metrics, considered important to SIS for their online racing content offering under their current agreements. Within the next few days GRI has undertaken to provide these metrics to Lifford for review, along with where GRI assesses Lifford’s performance to be at currently. We will be working on these metrics to see what might be required from our side to give confidence to GRI and to SIS that racing from Lifford will meet stakeholders’ expectations.

In addition, inclusion will be subject to achieving certain technical, racing management and data-upload performance to support smooth onward distribution by SIS. We are confident that these requirements can be met. These aspects will be considered once GRI and SIS have the required confidence in Lifford’s ability to meet the required metrics.

We expect that there will be focus on alignment of Lifford’s racing with the performance of racing at other Irish tracks that are part of the SIS schedule. We hope to be able to confirm these details shortly.

In any Lifford racing distributed by SIS, it is expected that there will be a significant reduction in the number of sprint races; tighter grading; a reduction in the percentage of vacant traps. These will be supported by a credible undertaking to increase the greyhound pool to a level that safely supports 10- or, preferably, 12-race programmes to be distributed by SIS.

A further update will be given as soon as possible.