BoyleSports chief executive Mark Kemp to leave after less than a year in the job

BoyleSports' chief executive Mark Kemp is leaving the bookmaker after less than a year at the helm, the operator said on Sunday.

Kemp, who formerly held senior positions at the UK Tote Group and Entain, is understood to be joining global sports streaming platform DAZN, which is headed by Shay Segev, the former Entain chief executive.

BoyleSports founder John Boyle is set to return to an executive role at the bookmaker alongside commercial director Conor Gray, who was Kemp's predecessor as chief executive and has been in charge of the company's plans for international expansion.

A statement said: "BoyleSports confirms that Mark Kemp will leave as CEO at the end of July 2022. In his short tenure, Mark has made a positive contribution to BoyleSports and we are sorry to see him go. We wish him success in his future career."

Kemp was announced as chief executive of Ireland's largest independent bookmaker, in April last year, officially starting in July. He had previously been managing director of the UK Tote Group and told the Racing Post in an interview last November that joining BoyleSports was an "incredible opportunity".

Kemp had joined the Tote in 2019 from Entain where he led the UK digital business for both the Ladbrokes and Coral brands and where his former boss Andy Hornby described him as "a simply outstanding businessman".

He started his career with Whitbread and also held various senior management roles in the UK and international hotel and travel sector before joining Coral in 2011, where he held a number of executive roles across both retail and digital divisions and was responsible for developing and launching the omnichannel product Connect.

BoyleSports, who were founded in 1989, now have more than 300 betting shops in Ireland and in the UK, where they established a presence in 2019 with an initial acquisition of 19 shops in the Midlands.

Kemp said last November that BoyleSports were looking to expand their UK betting shop portfolio to "a few hundred".

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