3. GVC Holdings (2017)

If there’s any executive in the industry who could give Breon Corcoran a run for his money on reputation, it might be Kenny Alexander, who seems to elicit breathless quotes wherever he goes. “He knows bookmaking, he knows the numbers, and he’s got the balls,” said one peer in an Evening Standard piece. “If Kenny played chess, he’d be four moves in front of you,” former Hills CEO Ralph Topping told the Financial Times.

The man himself tends to shy away from such personal praise, and attributes much of GVC’s success in recent years to the people he has hired. And despite the absence of any big deals so far in 2017, organic growth has been the order of the day.

H1 NGR climbed 12% in constant currency to €486.2m, with sports brands up 13% to €355.1m and gaming brands up 10% to €112.4m. Growth even accelerated into Q3, with underlying daily NGR up 23% as the firm continues to reap the benefits and synergies of its bwin.party merger completion.

And the good times look set to continue, with the Sportingbet business the final piece of the integration puzzle, set to be moved onto the bwin platform in December. The firm’s CTO Sandeep Tiku praised the speed and flexibility of that platform, adding: “We control our own destiny. We stand ahead of every other company in terms of what we can do.”

Analysts of course raised concern about the level of grey market revenues, with some suggesting GVC needed M&A to mitigate the potential loss of revenues from places like Turkey. But Alexander dismissed those concerns in a recent conversation with EGR, hailing the organic growth of his firm.

“We don’t really need to do any M&A quite frankly,” he said. “The rate at which we are growing with our scalable cost base – I think we will double our EBITDA in four years. There is no doubt about that in my mind.”

It’s a credible argument, but it would take a brave man to bet against GVC playing at least some part in further industry consolidation.