Just over 100,000 people went to the races in Britain last Saturday. The attendance at York was better than the biggest crowd at Goodison Park during the Premier League season, while Chester’s crowd of 36,500 was narrowly ahead of the best gate at Spurs. And on Monday morning, once the money had been banked, came the recriminations.

Chester is annoyed that Newmarket has shifted its entire July Festival meeting back by a day, to run from Thursday to Saturday, with a knock-on effect that the Roodee’s City Wall Stakes moved to York to ensure coverage by Channel 4 racing. Richard Thomas, the Chester chief executive, pointed out that barely 10,000 racegoers made their way to Newmarket, and questions whether Saturday’s fixture congestion is really a price worth paying.

Newmarket, though, counters that its attendance was up by 8% over the three-day meeting, and that Saturday is the ideal position for a Group One event like the July Cup, particularly with a view to growing overseas audiences – and betting turnover – in years to come.

In a sense, they are both right, since the executives at both courses are arguing, understandably, from their own point of view. But if a bumper weekend of attendances at four of the sport’s most important venues can lead to bickering, it also suggests that before it can stride boldly into a commercial future, racing will first need to decide what, exactly, “racing” is.

Chester and Newmarket are both in the business of staging athletic contests between horses for the benefit of a paying public, but their actual markets are so different that “racing” effectively means something different depending on whether you are in Cheshire or Suffolk.

One point that Thomas was possibly too polite to make is that Chester’s attendance on Saturday outstripped not just the total for the card at Newmarket the same afternoon, but the gate for the entire three-day July meeting. And if the best races from the Thursday and Friday at Headquarters had been squeezed on to a single Saturday afternoon, the attendance would not have been appreciably higher. Its catchment area is sparsely populated, and its crowd is rarely rises past 20,000 even for its Classics.

Newmarket’s appeal is that it has the very best horses on show for those who are willing to take the trouble to get there. Chester’s overall programme falls far behind Newmarket’s in terms of quality, but thanks to outstanding management and marketing, it packs in the punters from its densely-populated surrounding area, to watch competitive cards with only a sprinkling of Listed or Pattern-class events. Last year, their numbers were up by 22%, and on some of its summer Sundays, cars are queuing almost from dawn to get a good pitch on the infield.

In terms of the needs of off-course punters, there was something for everyone at both Chester and Newmarket on Saturday, with the Bunbury Cup at the Suffolk track probably second only to the John Smith’s Cup at York as the biggest betting event of the day. But if Britain is to export its racing product to potentially valuable markets overseas, then a Group One event like the July Cup is going to be vitally important, particularly if, as part of a series, it can attract runners from markets like Singapore and Japan too.

The important point in terms of the future is that British racing is not a single product. Races make money from several different markets and the range will widen if foreign punters can be persuaded to bet on it too. The relative importance of those markets varies from one track to the next and even from meeting to meeting at an individual course.

As a result, the conflict between the courses that staged racing on Saturday is less significant than it seems. They are doing what they do best, and that must be good for the sport and the industry.