Riley's Haymarket is built on scale, and Morten Andersen respects a venue that knows its own brief. This is the West End's largest dedicated sports bar, and it makes no apology for it.
The site occupies the former Sports Cafe on Haymarket, a Theatreland institution since the 1990s, five minutes from Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and Charing Cross. Riley's took the building's bones, dozens of screens and a hall big enough to get lost in, and ran with them.
The numbers tell the story. According to the venue's Time Out listing and current Yelp data, Riley's carries 43 screens showing more than 70 sports channels, with four English pool tables, three American pool tables and three ping pong tables across four bars, and room for close to 600 people. There is rarely a game on earth you cannot find here.
The point of a place like this is that it never shows you the wrong match. Football, NFL, rugby, boxing, darts and the racing all run at once on their own screens, so a table of friends can watch four different fixtures without an argument. A VIP bar and DJ nights push it past the whistle into a late-night room on Thursdays to Saturdays.
To drink and eat, it is pints, cocktail pitchers and a straightforward American-leaning menu of burgers, wings and sharing plates. This is volume catering done competently rather than a kitchen to seek out. Reckon on £6 to £7 a pint, with table and pool bookings worth making for the marquee fixtures.
Anyone wanting a quiet, characterful pint should look at our London bar guide instead, because Riley's is the opposite of intimate. For its actual peers, the big screens-and-pool barns, our roundup of the best sports bars in London is the right comparison, and on sheer capacity Riley's tops most of them.
What to order is mercifully straightforward for a hall this size. A pint runs about £6.50, a stack of wings for the table around £9, and a burger £14 or so from a menu that prizes speed over subtlety. Then put a fiver on a pool table before the football finishes, because the cues are claimed fast once full time arrives.
Who it is for is the group that wants options rather than a single screen. Mixed parties watching different fixtures at once, pool and ping pong players, and West End crowds spilling out of Theatreland all suit the scale of the place. Anyone after intimacy, a fireside half or a quiet word is in the wrong building entirely, and should be told so kindly.
The space spreads across multiple levels, with the screens banked so that no seat is stranded from a game. The four bars keep the queues survivable even at capacity, and the DJ nights stretch the room past the final whistle into the small hours. It is a machine for watching sport, and it has been refined over thirty years on this corner.
Best time to go is a packed Saturday of overlapping kickoffs, or a major boxing night when the late licence comes into its own. Avoid a quiet Sunday afternoon, when a hall this size feels cavernous. Book a pool table ahead if playing is the plan, because they go fast once the football finishes.
Riley's Haymarket will not win prizes for charm, and it is not trying to. It wins on the only metric a sports bar of this kind is judged by: it puts every game in front of you, gives you a cue and a pint, and stays open late. For West End sport at scale, it has no real rival.
Sources: Yelp (80 Haymarket, updated 2026); Time Out London; OpenTable (updated 2026).
