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How to play Great Blue
Petra’s journey to the role started in a hotel management school where she learned the ropes of hospitality, followed by a job at Transavia Airlines, a subsidiary of renowned Dutch operator KLM. This led to 24 years in the aviation industry, in a host of different roles: sales, marketing, operations – all aspects of the business that would later become useful in the casino industry.
By the time Covid came around in 2020, Petra felt she had done enough in aviation and went looking for her next role. As she told me, “Holland Casino popped up and I am somebody who by their nature looks at similarities instead of differences.
“What I saw is, Holland Casino is a company with 4,000 people working in hospitality, in a strongly regulated market where you have to balance between offering entertainment and a nice evening out with hospitality, and the risk attached to that – and there you see the similarities with the airline industry.
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That window Scheinthal had hoped for seems to be moving further away. Caesars’ proxy filing showed that even during negotiations in the spring, Fertitta refused to go above its $31-per-share offer “due to higher financing costs and increased macroeconomic risks”. From the end of 2025 to late April of this year, higher borrowing costs had resulted in “approximately $40 million per year in additional costs from when the process started”, the filing said.
Diller, for his part, lodged an all-cash, $48.30-per-share offer for MGM days after the Caesars deal broke. People Inc. finished Q2 with $1.1 billion in cash, but between the 74% of shares it would acquire, as well as MGM’s long-term debt of over $6 billion, some level of financing would be required. MGM appointed an independent committee to review the bid but has said nothing since.
Moving forward, history suggests that this month’s rate hike might not be the last. During hawkish periods, the FOMC has paused after an initial rate hike just once since the 1990s, per the Wall Street Journal. Over that period, the US Central Bank has typically lifted rates six to seven times throughout an upward cycle. Warsh has signalled optimism in the economy’s stability moving forward.
About Great Blue
But Entain warned the current timeline, which would enforce the ban by August 2027, was not timely enough, allowing unlicensed operators to sponsor Premier League clubs for another full season.
Premier League clubs are prohibited from any form of gambling front-of-shirt sponsor, after a voluntary ban came in from the start of the 2026-27 campaign.
But Entain found 11 of the current 20 Premier League clubs still hold sponsorship or advertising arrangements with operators that don’t hold a UK licence, up from the government’s estimate of eight.
