Lifford Greyhound Stadium aims to reach certain standards for SIS inclusion

Lifford Greyhound Stadium said their inclusion in the Sports Information Services’ schedule of Irish greyhound racing is considered to be a critical path to expanding their off-course tote pool and to extend the reach of Lifford's racing to bookmakers in UK and Ireland.   

Essentially like a National Lottery, in tote betting the operator takes a percentage of the fund and the rest of the pool is shared out equally between those who placed the winning bet. The odds are determined by how many people have selected that horse and the payout is known as a dividend. Pool betting at the majority of racecourses is operated by the tote. 

In a meeting last Tuesday with the SIS and Greyhound Racing 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, but to do so, Lifford has to meet certain racing standards and metrics that SIS require.    

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.  

Lifford have stated that they will be working on these metrics to see what might be required from their 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.