Unofficial Partner Podcast
Unofficial Partner
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Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. Our guests are a who's who of the international sports industry talking about the big issues.
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3 days ago
UP317 What's The Tottenham Stadium Worth?
In April, 2019 Tottenham Hotspur football club opened a new £1 billion state-of-the-art stadium, built on top of the old White Hart Lane ground in North London. One of the sports business stories since then has been the club's aspiration to deliver a naming rights sponsorship deal that surpasses those traditionally seen in Europe.
Reports in media outlets claim the club is looking to strike a deal in the region of £25 million a year.
Since then the club is augmented the stadium's content offering by securing long-term partnerships with the NFL and Formula One, aswell as music and boxing promoters. In doing so the club has created a venue that offers premium year round content.
Four years on though, the club has not secured a naming rights partner. But they remain resolute in securing a deal that's aligned to their original target.
So what is the Tottenham stadium worth?
What do you buy when you buy a naming rights deal and how does it differ from other forms of sponsorship?
Helping us fund an answer to these questions is Dan Gaunt, General Manager of
Turnstile, the global market leader in the provision of fair market price sponsorship valuations.
With Dan is Adam Mitchell, Chief Executive of the sponsorship decision-making organisation Sponsor Pulse
This podcast coincides with the launch of a new report into stadium naming rights from Turnstile that's available via turnstilegroup.com.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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May 23, 2023
UP316 The Product
Why do we care about some events and not others? Why do some tournaments capture our imagination and interest, while others seem contrived?
Will an expanded 48 team FIFA World Cup work in 2026, or will it lead to a boring tournament?
Where do you stand on closed leagues?
Does the 'Super League' idea of Best v Best work in the real world?
Why do we cheer for underdogs, but only in the early rounds?
In the tennis Grand Slams, what are the commercial implications of three sets for women and five sets for men?
Why does Twenty20 cricket work but Rugby Sevens doesn't?
What do the various constituencies around sport - fans, teams, rights holders, media, investors - want from the sporting product?
How can data analytics add relevance, jeopardy or commercial value to a league or competition?
These just some of the questions we asked in this first episode of The Product, a new series launched in collaboration with Twenty First Group the tech-led sports intelligence company which works across multiple sports, using data to help organisations drive sporting success and unlock commercial value.
In the last week, TFG has launched the TFG World Sports Rankings, a first of it's kind collection of multi-sport rankings which rank sports products - athletes, teams, competitions, leagues and tournaments - by the three core drivers of long-term value in sport: Quality, Jeopardy and Connection.
You can interrogate the data by going to TFG's website here.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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May 19, 2023
UP315 Joanna Coates
Joanna Coates started her career as a fashion buyer at 16 and became CEO of two of UK sport's major governing bodies.
From 2015 to 2019, Joanna Coates was EnglandNetball's CEO and worked with the governing body for almost ten years. She was part of the team during her time in charge which led the Vitality Roses to victory at the 2018 Commonwealth Games where they won their historic gold medal. The sport was also experiencing record growth during her tenure.
Coates took on the CEO job of UK Athletics in February, 2020 a period dominated by COVID, financial and safeguarding challenges.
In this revealing conversation Jo Coates reveals much about how sport works, the challenges faced by the National Governing Body model, her admiration for Sharron Davies and the issue of transgender athletes.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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May 16, 2023
UP314 The Buy Side - Accor
The Buy Side is our regular series in which we talk to brand marketers about sport and sponsorship.
This week's guest is Stuart Wareman, SVP of Sponsorship, Events and Experiences for Accor, the French multinational hotel group that owns, manages and franchises hotels in over 5300 locations in 110 countries and is the biggest hospitality company in Europe, the sixth biggest in the world.
Its booking platform brand Accor Live Limitless (ALL) has become a familiar presence in sport. The brand's sport sponsorship portfolio includes the shirt of PSG and official partnerships with Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, The 2023 Rugby World Cup and many other major national relationships.
Today’s episode is sponsored by our friends at Turnstile.
Do you know what your sponsorship is really worth, or are you guessing? Turnstile uses real market rates to quantify the value every single sponsorship right within a deal, looking beyond the traditional media metrics to calculate the value of the Exposure, Intellectual Property and Direct Benefits.
This enables Turnstile to deliver a recommended transaction price that’s comprehensive, accurate and defensible. So don’t pay too much. Don’t leave money on the table. Know the fair market price, and buy and sell with confidence. If you value your sponsorships, value them properly. Get in touch with Turnstile at turnstilegroup.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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May 12, 2023
UP313 The Big Idea - Burger King's Stevenage Challenge
The Big Idea is our series on creativity in sports marketing with regular sidekick Simon Moore, the award-winning consulting creative director.
Today we focus on one of the most awarded campaigns in recent years: Burger King's Stevenage Challenge.
If a brand wants to sponsor the best football players, they have to pay millions. But Burger King found a way to endorse them without paying them a single penny. It sponsored a team at the bottom of English football’s 4th division: Stevenage. BK knew that if its logo was on their shirt, it was going to appear in FIFA 20. The brand then launched the #StevenageChallenge, inviting gamers to play with Stevenage and sharing UGC of the likes of Messi and Neymar wearing the BK logo, for BK rewards in return. It turned a small team in real life into the biggest team online.
Main Awards
- Direct Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions 2021
CREDITS
Brand: Burger King.
Advertising agencies: DAVID Madrid and DAVID Miami.
Global Chief Creative Officer: Pancho Cassis.
Chief Operating Officer: Sylvia Panico.
Executive Creative Director: Saulo Rocha, Andre Toledo.
Group Creative Director: Fernando Pellizzaro, Jean Zamprogno.
Creative Director: Fred Bosch.
Copywriter: Luis Giraldo, Alex Allen, Jared Schermer.
Art Director: Felipe Antonioli, Andy Tamayo.
Head of Social: Alex Sanchez.
Director of Strategy: Jon Carlaw.
Planner: Stephanie Salvador.
Junior Planner: Vanessa Amaral.
Group Account Director: Stefane Rosa.
Management Supervisor: Jenny Gobel.
Head of Global Production: Veronica Beach.
Producer: Marina Rodrigues.
Senior Business Affairs Manager: Barbara Karalis.
Production Company: Landia.
Music & Sound Company: Twenty Below Music, Jamute.
Audio Mixing: Heard City.
PR: ABMC.
Media Placement: Horizon Media & Scout.
Social Media: MullenLowe.
Digital Studio: Unicorns & Unicorns.
Animation: Mr. Klauss.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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May 9, 2023
UP312 Ed Warner on the future of UK Athletics
What's going on at UK Athletics?
The last few weeks have seen a series of stories about the financial plight of the governing body.
In the accounts released in December, UKA returned a £1.8million deficit for 2021-22 with reserves falling from £2.2m to £430,000 in the space of a year.
Subsequent stories have referenced job losses and most recently the decision to close its Alexandra Park head office in Birmingham.
Today's guest is Ed Warner, who was chair of UK Athletics for ten years between 2007 and 2017.
Warner recently wrote a blistering critique of the current state of UK Athletics, in his own newsletter, Sport Inc.
This was in part a response to a piece by Matt Lawton in The Times, which we reference in the first part of our conversation.
That article is here (paywall) Drive To Survive: UK Athletics offering Netflix-style documentary in bid to avoid going bust.
Ed Warner's current roles reflect his previous careers in sport and financial services. He's chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and Crystal Palace's Palace for Life Foundation and holds similar roles at HarbourVest Global Private Equity among others.
We talked to Ed at The Kia Oval cricket ground in London during the recent SportsPro Live event, so thanks to Nick Meacham and his team at SportsPro for letting us do that.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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May 2, 2023
UP311 Sports Podge
Sports Podge is a British sports industry institution. The invite-only networking lunch began life 18 years ago in the upstairs room at the famous Langan's Brasserie in Park Lane, London.
Ahead of this week's event at the Kia Oval, we took Podge creator Phil Jones, his daughter and business partner, Clare Jones, along with Sports Podge co-founder Jimmy Worrall back to Langan's to discover the secret ingredients that encourage the sports industry's biggest names to come back year after year.
And to help jog memories of Podge's past we invited some of their friends:
Emma Atkins (CEO of Groundwork and sports consultant),
Alexandra Willis (Director of Digital Media and Audience Development at the Premier League),
Matthew Wotton (Executive Director - Sports, Media and Entertainment, Coutts)
Kit Taylor (Managing Director, PSD Group).
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Apr 24, 2023
UP310 The Buy Side - Crypto.com
Crypto.com has been one of the biggest spenders in the sports sponsorship market over the last three years, putting its brand to properties including FIFA World Cup, F1 and the Aston Martin team, UFC, Australia Football League and the naming rights to the Staples Centre in Los Angeles among many others.
Every major sports property in the world rushed to do deals in a category of companies seeking to pay high fees in return for global brand awareness and brand trust.
Then came the FTX scandal which rocked not just the crypto and web3 sectors but also the sports world, which sought reassurance as to whether they were going to get paid.
It's this rollercoaster we explore in this podcast, with Crypto.com's head of sponsorship Alex Shapiro, whose cv also features Visa and ESPN, along with Buy Side co-hosts Sally Hancock and Shaun Whatling.
Today’s episode is sponsored by our friends at Turnstile, who are asking a good question: do you know what your sponsorship is really worth, or are you guessing?Turnstile uses real market rates to quantify the value every single sponsorship right within a deal, looking beyond the traditional media metrics to calculate the value of the Exposure, Intellectual Property and Direct Benefits. This enables Turnstile to deliver a recommended transaction price that’s comprehensive, accurate and defensible. So don’t pay too much. Don’t leave money on the table. Know the fair market price, and buy and sell with confidence. If you value your sponsorships, value them properly. Get in touch with Turnstile at turnstilegroup.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Apr 21, 2023
UP309 The World According to Nielsen Sports
What's the difference between the US and European sports marketplace?
Few people are better positioned to answer this question than Jon Stainer, the US based Englishman who is Global General Manager of Nielsen Sports, the leading source of sports measurement and analytics around the world.
Stainer has led multiyear relationships with the NFL, NBA and Premier League during his time at Nielsen, bringing a truly international perspective on the sports industry, working on three Olympic Games and two FIFA World Cups.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Apr 18, 2023
UP308 How To Get Ahead In The Sports Business
What's your next job? Where will it come from? What are the factors that make you more or less likely to get it?
What's your office culture like? Can you maintain culture when most people are working from home? Do you trust colleagues to work hard from home?
What about networking, is it the secret to career success, or just a euphemism for drinking?
Is the sports business a booze culture? What does sport look like to people who don't drink?
How old is too old to work in sport?
Is 45 the new 60?
All these questions and many more are put to our guests, Ishveen Jolly and Mark Thompson.
Ishveen is Founder and CEO of OpenSponsorship, an Inc magazine Top 100 Female Founder and a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumni.
Mark is Chief Operating Officer of newly promoted Burnley Football Club, and formerly a strategic consultant for Two Circles. The recording took place at the new London offices of Spectacle Partners and we thank them for their support.
Interested in How To Get On In The Sports Business, here are some other UP podcasts you might want to listen to:
UP163 Paul Nolan's Careers Advice
UP269 Sports Business networks and how to build them
UP245 What it means to be Unsigned
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Apr 14, 2023
UP307 If Tesco Ran Sport
The big retailers are years ahead of sport when it comes to understanding their own customers.
So we asked today's guests what can sport learn from Sainsbury's, Tesco, Target and Amazon.
We're joined by Finn Bradshaw and Claire Kelly.
Finn is head of digital at the International Cricket Council, the game's global governing body.
Claire is General Manager of Gemba Europe.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Apr 11, 2023
UP306 Kumar Sangakkara
Kumar Sangakkara is one of the most important and influential voices in international cricket today and in an ideal position to offer insight in to many of the current sports business themes. The IPL has changed cricket forever, and is challenging the status quo of the traditional game, run by the national governing bodies and the ICC.
As a player, he's regarded as the greatest wicket keeper batsmen of any era, he scored 28,016 runs in International cricket, the second highest total of all time. In 2019 he became President of the MCC, the first non-British person to be appointed to the position since the club was founded in 1787. His MCC Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture was a powerful and brave criticism of corruption and incompetence in Sri Lanka cricket, and a rallying call for change in the way the sport is governed. He is currently director of cricket for the Rajasthan Royals IPL franchise, and he talked to us from the road between matches.
The other guest is Rowena Samarasinhe, a…
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Apr 4, 2023
UP305 DAZN WTF?
DAZN continues to be one of the most talked about companies in the sports media world since its launch in 2016. But the story is shifting from its initial ambition to be 'The Netflix of Sport'. The last set of accounts showed DAZN's operating losses of $1.3billion, taking the total Group loss to $5billion in five years.
Yet the company remains a significant bidder for sports rights. According to the sae accounts, DAZN has a committed rights spend of $3.2bn through to the end of 2028, and this month announced a ten year deal to stream NFL Game Pass International from the 2023 season, enabling fans outside the US to watch every NFL regular and postseason game, including the Super Bowl.
Meanwhile, its attempts to build a foothold in the UK domestic football market continue, including a proposal to stream all 1,656 matches of the EFL, challenging the 3pm blackout and a likely bid for domestic Premier League rights in the next cycle.
We talk to Veronica Diquattro, DAZN's CEO of Global Marke…
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Mar 31, 2023
UP304 ReThinking Sport: Inside Women's Tennis
Marina Erakovic's family fled war torn former Yugoslavia when she was a small child, and she grew up in New Zealand where her precocious tennis talent was nurtured. After winning nine titles in a thirteen year career on the WTA Tour, she is now a business consultant working for PwC in Auckland.
She takes us inside the reality of the professional tennis circuit, comparing her experience with that seen on Break Point, the current Netflix series.
We talk about the future of tennis as an entertainment and commercial product, the rise of paddle and pickle ball, Naomi Osaka's role in elevating the conversation around mental health of elite athletes, the post-Serena Williams era, and we question the existing structures of tennis federations against a backdrop of changes in viewing habits and participation rates around the world.
This is an episode of Re: Thinking Sport, our series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.…
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Mar 28, 2023
UP303 Moya Dodd, Football Pioneer
Moya Dodd has been one of the most influential women in international football for the past two decades. In 2013 she was one of the first women in 108 years to be appointed to the FIFA executive committee, the governing body's key decision making group.
The former international player and lawyer led reform for gender equality including greater inclusion in the decision-making process and for there to be a larger investment in the women's game. FIFA passed her proposal and added a requirement that every continent must have a board seat filled by a woman. But after four years of rigorous campaigning, Dodd controversially lost her place on the FIFA Council to another candidate, who couldn't answer basic questions on the women's game.
So what did the experience teach her about the cultural fit between FIFA and women's football and what are the options available to take full advantage of the growing popularity of domestic leagues? But we start by talking about FIFA's relationship with Saudi…
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Mar 24, 2023
UP302 The Bundle 22
The Bundle is our regular series on the sports media and streaming market, with guests Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke.
Three main stories and a quick fire round.
ESPN Takes a shot at creating a sports streaming hub; Apple's MLS opt-out and what would happen if that became the model for the relationship between rights holders and media; and the danger of misreading the bankruptcy of Bally Sports and the state of the Regional Sports Network model in the US.
Then there's a bit on the story of Serie A buying Sky Italia, which is not going to happen but interesting anyway; Sky and Amazon retaining Champions League in Italy and Paramount+ launching soccer-specific FAST channel with CBS Sports Golazo Network.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr**…
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Mar 21, 2023
UP301 The Buy Side - Coke and the Olympics
Coca Cola and the Olympics is sport's most enduring commercial relationship. But how does it work on the inside? How relevant is the Games to today's Coke drinker? Is the Olympic TOP programme still fit for purpose? And how can the IOC balance its promises around sustainability with the reality of hosting massive, multi-sport events, and sponsored by companies such as Coca Cola, which is one of the biggest producers of plastic in the world?
As VP of Olympic Assets and Marketing, James Williams was Coca Cola's man on the ground at three Summer Games, starting in London 2012, through Rio 2016 and onto the Covid delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
What he's got to say talks to many of the big themes that dominate the sports business today and in to the future.
Helping me ask the questions are my regular Buy Side co-hosts, Sally Hancock and Shaun Whatling.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who…
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Mar 14, 2023
UP300 The Big Idea - Nike x Corteiz
This is episode 2 of our series on creativity in sports marketing, with regular co-host Simon Moore, award winning Creative Director.
We pick apart the latest Nike Rules The World ad, featuring the brand's recent collaboration with London based streetwear imprint Corteiz, and directed by Walid Labri for Division.
Spoiler: We quite liked it but not enough to put it in to the Unofficial Partner Big Idea Hall Of Fame (UPBIHOF). More details of how to nominate work for this in the UP Newsletter.
Topics covered:
The culture of product drops.
Controlling scarcity.
The signal of Phil Foden.
The perils and challenges of a product ad.
The provenance of ideas.
The history of advertising challenges, from Michael Jordan to Ronaldinho.
The punk red flag.
Sport in ads v sport in films.
Never ask a footballer to act, unless it's Paul Pogba or Eric Cantona.
Links to other work that's mentioned in the podcast:
*This Is Not Another Inspiration Video - 2023
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr6r9jpKG…
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Mar 7, 2023
UP299 The Buy Side
In the week of the European Sponsorship Awards, we resurrect The Buy Side, our series where we talk with brand marketers about sport sponsorship.
Previous conversations have included guests from Visa, TSB, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Sipsmith and Vitality. These can be found in the Unofficial Partner archive on our website.
To relaunch the series, we've recruited the help of two highly regarded sponsorship experts, Sally Hancock and Shaun Whatling.
Sally was Director of Olympic and Paralympic Marketing at Lloyds Banking Group, during the company's sponsorship of the London 2012 Games. She is now managing director of High Tide Leap Consulting and a board member of the British Paralympic Association.
Shaun is chief executive of Redmandarin, the strategic sponsorship consultancy which has worked with over 42 of Europe's largest 100 businesses since its foundation.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations wit…
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Mar 3, 2023
UP298 Sir Martin Broughton
Sir Martin Broughton sold Liverpool and nearly bought Chelsea.
As chair of the former he was tasked with moving the club out of the hands of previous owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett and in to its current ownership group, Fenway Sports Group.
More recently, Broughton put together a consortium to bid for Chelsea, when the club came to market following the forced sale by Roman Abramovich.
So there are very few people who have a more informed view on the value of a Premier League football club than Sir Martin Broughton, and although he doesn't say this himself, he'd be a good pick as an independent regulator for football.
Sport features heavily in a corporate career that includes chairmanship of British Airways and British American Tobacco, putting Broughton a close up view of how London 2012 Olympics, Formula One, horse racing and plenty of other sports really work.
He's written a book - the link is here - and it's both a fascinating insight in to the sports business, and also a good…
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Feb 28, 2023
UP297 Sports documentary and the authenticity question
It's sometimes said that this is a golden era of sports documentary.
F1's Drive to Survive has changed the landscape.
Every sports rights holder wants its own version, to use as a tool to reach new audiences, whether that's the infamous Gen Z demographic or in different parts of the world, delivered by the global streamers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.
But what are trade offs required in this form of commercialised documentary.
Adam Darke is a veteran documentary maker, whose work includes Winning Ugly on rugby union; Forbidden Games, the life of Justin Fashanu, Keeping Up With The Brownlees and All Or Nothing Juventus.
Darke's latest series is Deadline Day: Football's Transfer Window, currently available on Sky and produced by Pitch International.
It goes behind the scenes of football's transfer marketplace, revealing the work of agents and clubs in sourcing and acquiring soccer talent at every price point.
This conversation is linked to another recent podcast we recorded with Sa…
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Feb 21, 2023
UP296 The Big Idea
This is a new series on creativity in sports marketing.
With award winning Creative Director Simon Moore as our regular sidekick, we go in search of brilliance.
Each episode dissects campaigns we love and campaigns we hate.
Some rules:
* Does the idea deserve to be celebrated in the *UP Big Idea Hall of Fame?* Does the campaign come with a level of craft and sophistication that merits an award, does it challenge the conventions of the what’s normally done in its category?
* *Can only sport deliver this idea?* Creativity in the sport category is an oddity because it's not a specific medium - PR, ad creative, media, outdoor etc - sport itself is the medium for the storytelling. It has to be not just the canvas for the idea, but the paint as well.
* *Does it add value to the fans experience of sport?* And does the brand play a relevant role? Fans are not just customers, they are different, how does the work reflect this fact?
* Does the insight behind the creative show a *nuanc…
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Feb 17, 2023
UP295 Solving for Piracy
Piracy and illegal streaming is a $28.3 billion a year global business, impacting sports rights holders and broadcasters across the world.
Pirate streams of sporting events are not difficult to find on the internet and shutting these down has proved to be a difficult task for sports leagues. While legal action has been successfully brought against several illegal streamers, many are still fully operational. When one stream gets taken down, more pop up in its place.
But there are signs of hope.
In just one season, LaLiga Tech removed more than 1,065,000 videos on YouTube, more than 368,000 videos on social networks and more than 820 mobile applications.
How did they do this, and what does it mean for the ongoing battle against piracy?
Our guests are Lorin Parys and Guillermo Rodriguez.
Lorin Parys is CEO of Belgium football's Juliper Pro League and a former political leader in the Belgian parliament.
Guillermo Rodríguez is Chief Operating Officer at LaLiga Content Protection, the…
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Feb 14, 2023
UP294 Warren Gatland
Warren Gatland is one of the most successful coaches of the professional rugby era. His career has spanned the club and international game, with stints in charge of Ireland, Wales and three times the head coach of the British and Irish Lions touring teams to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
In December 2022, Gatland returned to Wales ahead of the current Guinness Six Nations Championship, a contract that sees him in charge through to the 2023 Rugby World Cup in France, with potential to extend another four years, to the 2027 tournament.
This is a very timely conversation on the topic of leadership in sport: the stories we tell about coaches and managers and how those correlate with the reality of the job. We ask whether teams have a discernible DNA, what type of players have benefited from rugby's Moneyball era and whether team spirit is something viewed through the rear view mirror.
It's full of Gatland's trademark honesty and insight at a time when he's in the full glare of t…
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Feb 7, 2023
UP293 ReThinking Sport: Martin Glenn
Martin Glenn was CEO of The FA for four years until 2018, following a career as a senior executive at United Biscuits and PepsiCo, where he famously made Gary Lineker the face of Walkers Crisps.
Glenn was offered The FA job by then chairman, and former UP guest, Greg Dyke and his tenure is regarded favourably across football and the journalists who cover it. Revenue increased 40% and the organisation became noticeably more diverse. England teams began performing better; he sacked Sam Allardyce as England manager and replaced him with Gareth Southgate; nearly sold Wembley Stadium to Shahid Khan and was a big supporter of the women's game at all levels.
Today Glenn is chair of The Football Foundation, the charity that distributes money from the Premier League, The FA and the UK Government to help fund grassroots football facilities.
ReThinking Sport is our series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity. Every episode…
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Feb 3, 2023
UP292 Table Tennis England and the NGB Question
How many people play Table Tennis in England? Who are they and why do they play? Is that number growing or contracting? How easy is it to watch the sport in today's omnichannel media environment and how is it going to evolve?
And, is the National Governing Body model, the basis of the economy for sport in the UK, still fit for purpose?
These are questions we put to today's guests, Adrian Christy and Mike Emery.
Adrian Christy became Chief Executive of Table Tennis England in March 2022.
Prior to that, he had been Chief Executive of Badminton England, a role he held from 2006 until stepping down in September 2021. He is also a consultant to the Board of Pentathlon GB and a Non Executive Director of the Sport and Recreation Alliance.
Mike Emery is the CEO of Joymo, the Norway based company that provides sports rights holders with an innovative and affordable video streaming solutions, enabling partners to create their own monetisable IP by broadcasting their valuable content direct-to-…
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Jan 31, 2023
UP291 Mo Salah's Agent on the Meaning of Transfer Deadline Day
Mo Salah was a teenager playing for Cairo-based club Arab Contractors in the Egyptian Premier League, when he was spotted by Sascha Empacher, the founder of the SPOCS football agency.
Today, Salah is one of the world's greatest players, after a series of transfers took from Basel, Chelsea, Roma and to his current home, Liverpool.
Empacher's business has also grown considerably, making him ideally placed to star in the recent documentary, called Deadline Day: Football’s Transfer Window, produced by Pitch International and available to watch on Sky Documentaries and NOW.
This is a conversation about the role of football agents, the myths and the reality of what they do, set against a backdrop of proposed legislation of the agency market by FIFA.
We discuss the impact of American ownership in the Premier League and compare that to the relatively sluggish financial performance of Bundesliga clubs and how that impacts on their ability to develop talent; what professionalisation of the age…
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Jan 24, 2023
UP290 AI, Google and the World Cup clip economy
How did you watch Qatar 2022? Did you sit in front of a big TV showing live games in real time? Or did you consume thousands of clips across social media and via AI curated digital platforms such as Google OneBox, which saw the biggest ever surge in search queries for football related content during the tournament.
The FIFA World Cup was made up of 30,000 highlights clips. That epic final between Argentina and France generated 800 of those, with Messi the king of the clip economy, with 1800 individual moments shared tens of millions of times.
This is a conversation about how it all works.
Who are the commercial players in the supply chain between rights holder and fan? How should sports bodies tackle the big questions of discoverability and personalisation of their content? What are the implications for the media and commercial rights markets of sport, and how will AI alter what watching sport means for millions of people around the world?
Our guests for this episode are at the centre…
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Jan 20, 2023
UP289 Sport's Napster moment and the lessons of Spotify
Will Page was Chief Economist of Spotify and PRS for Music and is the author of the critically acclaimed book Tarzan Economics.
Some Will Page references to read alongside the pod.
* This chart from The Economist on the age of festival headliners
* New Year New Ideas, key chart showing the growth of stadiums and festivals below - think Big Eventer)
* Billboard: Examining Covid's Impact on UK's live and recorded industries
* Music Business Worldwide: Live Music Goes From Suffering to Recovering
* IQ Magazine: Economist Will Page on Live Music's Resurgence
* Financial Times: Roar of the live music crowd drowns out stadium income from sport
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jan 16, 2023
UP288 Esport Economics - The in-game ad market
The market for in-game advertising and sponsorship is valued at around $8billion, and is predicted to more than double by the end of the decade. The audience is young, affluent and increasingly diverse, so it's unsurprising that big brand names are seeking ways in to this world, via the publishers of mobile and big box console game titles such as League of Legends, Call of Duty or FIFA.
Great for brands, but what do gamers think of commercial messages gatecrashing their party?
We asked today's guests, Ryan Snyder and David Wynn.
David is Head of Solutions Consulting at Google Cloud for Games and Ryan is Head of Esports and Games at Nielsen Sports.
To help frame the conversation, we asked Ryan to commission a special Unofficial Partner research panel, using Nielsen's Video Game Tracking survey, the premiere source for measuring consumer sentiment towards video game software on PC and console.
The top line results are as follows:
Gamers think Advertisements will disrupt gameplay (74%)…
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Jan 13, 2023
UP287 The Bundle 2023 Preview
What's going to happen to the sports media and streaming market in 2023?
We asked Bundle regulars Yannick Ramcke and Murray Barnett for their hopes, fears and predictions for the year ahead.
Price hikes, subscription wars, economic woes and OTT white elephants; it's all here.
Plus what the year holds for Disney, Sky, DAZN, the FAANGs and the a host of Drive to Survive wannabes.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jan 10, 2023
UP286 The Athlete Investor trend
Why are so many leading athletes putting their money in to early stage sports tech ventures? What are the pros and cons of having Serena Williams, LeBron James, Naomi Osaka, Tiger Woods or Lewis Hamilton on the cap table of investors?
What is being traded for equity in the business, is it cash or fame, or access to the opportunity?
And below the 1% of superstar athletes, how is this trend impacting the athlete endorsement market, where the nature of sport sponsorship is changing rapidly.
To help us answer these and other questions are Ishveen Jolly and Andrew Petcash.
Ishveen Jolly is CEO and Founder of OpenSponsorship, a global marketplace platform for sports sponsorship, matching brands to professional athletes, creators and influencers.
Andrew Petcash is a former elite college basketball player turned sports entrepreneur, investor and author of the Profluence Sports newsletter and podcast that breaks down the business issues surrounding the emergence of the NIL market that allows co…
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Dec 29, 2022
UP285 Kat Craig
Kat Craig is an award winning human rights lawyer who has represented victims of some of sport’s most traumatising sexual abuse cases and played a central role in the remarkable story of the evacuation of women footballers from Afghanistan following the American withdrawal from the country and the subsequent Taliban-led regime in Kabul.
In 2016, Craig co-founded Athlead sport and social-impact consultancy with her husband, Nick Wigmore to create the UK’s first not-for-profit consultancy specialising in athlete-led charity and social change.
Athlead’s clients include UN agencies, national governments, major sport-for-development funders, and former Premier League footballers and Premiership rugby players. Kat and her team have developed and managed projects relating to gender equality, systemic racial injustice, refugee rights and social inclusion, mental health and childhood trauma.
We talk about the potential and limits of sport's ability to affect social change, what's neede…
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Dec 20, 2022
UP284 The Unofficial Review of 2022
How was it for you? That's the question we're asking in this final episode of 2022, in our review of the year in the sports business.
Our guests are Sanjay Bhandari, who you just heard, Preeti Shetty, Joel Seymour Hyde and Matt Cutler.
Sanjay is a lawyer, investor and Chair of Kick It Out, the football anti racism charity.
Preeti is non executive board member of Brentford Football Club and founder of tech firm Upshot System.
Joel Seymour Hyde is UK Managing Director of the sports marketing agency Octagon.
And former SportBusiness editor Matt Cutler was until this week, the head of comms at Two Circles from where he's branching out in to new things in 2023.
The recording took place at Two Circles offices in London.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @Unffcl…
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Dec 13, 2022
UP283 ReThinking Sport: Birmingham 2022
This year's Commonwealth Games in Birmingham was the biggest and costliest sports event held in the UK since the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Birmingham 2022 was the largest Commonwealth Games ever held, with 72 participating nations and over 1.3 million tickets sold. It was also the first to have more events for women than men and the first integrated event, with the para competition held at the same time. Alongside the Games, a cultural festival ran across the West Midlands, as well as a number of trade events and a Games specific esports event. It marked the last time that the Games were held under Queen Elizabeth II prior to her death on 8 September this year, which was exactly one month after the conclusion of the Games.
According to UK government figures, the cost of the 11 day event was £778 million, split between the central and local government in the form of Birmingham City Council, with the former paying three quarters (UK£594 million) of the total funding.
So…
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Dec 6, 2022
UP282 The Bundle 21
The Bundle is our regular series on the sports media and streaming market with co-hosts Yannick Ramcke and Murray Barnett, both fresh from appearing at SportsPro's OTT Summit in Madrid.
Yannick is head of OTT at One Football and Murray is director of the DTC Consultancy, founder of 28West Sport and formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN.
Today, we talk about the return of Bob Iger to Disney, what that might mean for ESPN and why they've just bought the remaining bit of BAMTech they don't yet own.
Then it's onto what 2023 holds for Warner Brothers Discovery, what that brand means, why FuboTV is getting out of betting, Amazon are getting into NFL talk shows and what the price of Apple's first MLS Season Ticket might mean for the market for sport.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and…
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Nov 28, 2022
UP281 Martin O'Neill
*Martin O'Neill*, OBE won two European Cups as a player for Nottingham Forest under the legendary management duo of Brian Clough and Peter Taylor and earning 64 international caps for Northern Ireland including captaining the side at the 1982 World Cup.
As a manager O'Neill became one of the most in-demand leaders of his generation, building a reputation as a deep thinker on the game from his start at Wycombe Wanderers, moving through stints in charge at Norwich City, Leicester City, Celtic, Aston Villa and Sunderland. In 2013, O'Neill was appointed Republic of Ireland manager, with Roy Keane as his assistant, and led them to qualification for the 2016 UEFA European Championship, for only the third time in the nation's history, beating the reigning world champions, Germany in the process.
O'Neill remains one of the most interesting and erudite people in football, so it's fitting he's written a book detailing the story of his life and career.
On Days Like These is published by Pan Macmi…
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Nov 22, 2022
UP280 The Race to Convergence
There's a race on to define the next era of the sports business. The winners will reap enormous financial returns. The losers will likely disappear from view.
Sports media and gambling have always been bedfellows.
But what comes next is a complete convergence of the two, a seamless offer that puts betting at the very centre of the business model.
The appeal is obvious: Gambling companies gain access to valuable new customers; sports teams and leagues gain new licensing opportunities and fan engagement channels; and media companies retain and increase viewer interest, driving increased advertising revenue.
But there are barriers too: cost of technology, the threat of legislation and the basic marketing problem of differentiation between the mass of platforms now available to fans.
We discuss each of these with today's guest Sam Sadi, CEO of gaming and media business, LiveScore Group, one of the runners in the convergence race which delivers real-time sports scores and free-to-air live s…
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Nov 16, 2022
UP279 How to ambush the World Cup
Everything you need to know about ambush marketing, the dark art of associating with a major event without paying to be an official sponsor.
We've gathered a posse of the smartest experts in fields such as brand marketing, sponsorship, sports law, creative and sales promotions agencies.
Together we pick apart the idea of official partnership, that underpins the commercial model of FIFA and other sports governing bodies. Official partners buy category exclusivity and have contracted rights to the imagery and marques, protecting their investment from rival brands trying to leverage the massive global interest in the World Cup.
But...does it work? Is category exclusivity a promise that can be delivered? Do fans and customers know or care about the official - unofficial divide? Are ambushers seen as exciting mavericks or boring chancers, and can the sports economy evolve beyond the official partner concept to a model that better suits today's marketing environment?
*Unofficial Partner is…
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Nov 14, 2022
UP278 The FTX Ripple
FTX, the second biggest cryptocurrency exchange filed for bankruptcy in the US, and the company's founder Sam Bankman-Fried, previously referred to as the King of Crypto, stepped down as chief executive.
In the filing, FTX estimated that it had between $10bn and $50bn in assets and liabilities and more than 100,000 creditors, including some of the biggest names in sport, from the Miami Heat to Tom Brady, Mercedes Formula One team and the MLB.
The FTX brand has become a familiar presence over the past two years, signing a series of high value sport sponsorships.
So what happens now? Both to the money promised and not yet delivered but also to the sports economy more widely, as its relationship with crypto and associated categories comes under intense scrutiny.
What are the conversations taking place today throughout the commercial offices of Premier League football clubs, Formula One teams and other major sports rights holders.
To pick this apart we have three people with extensive e…
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Nov 8, 2022
UP277 Mo Bobat and the Business of High Performance
Today’s guests are Mo Bobat, Performance Director of the England and Wales Cricket Board, and Omar Chauduri, Chief Intelligence Officer of Twenty First Group.
The topic is high performance and its fundamental link to the commercial success of sport.
Mo and Omar’s teams worked extensively together on the ECB’s new High Performance Review, chaired by former England captain Sir Andrew Strauss.
This aims to improve the quality of both the domestic structure and the men's national side, aided by an advisory board including Sir Dave Brailsford and Dan Ashworth, former FA Performance Director.
The review made 17 proposals, each seeking to focus attention on the difficult question of What It Takes To Win (WITTW). You can read the review HERE.
But the performance conversation is often put into a silo, and treated separately from the commercial side of sport. As we’ll hear in this episode, that’s a mistake.
This conversation, more than anything, is about the product of sport, wha…
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Nov 1, 2022
UP276 Re:Thinking Sport - Maheta Molango's PFA
When they retire, some professional footballers train to become coaches, and a few rise to become the team manager or director of football.
But very, very few players do what Maheta Molango has done, and cross the divide between the playing side and the C-suite, to become the CEO of a top club.
It’s a massive Church and State divide, a journey that reveals much about the person who is now in charge of the PFA, The Professional Footballers' Association, the union for all current and former footballers in the Premier League, the FA Women’s Super League and the English Football Leagues.
Molango passed his law degree during a playing career in Spanish and English football, going on to specialise in employment and sports law. In 2015 he was seconded to Atlético Madrid where he served as legal counsel, focused on contract and transfer negotiations and the following year was appointed the Chief Executive of RCD Mallorca after the takeover by former NBA star Steve Nash and Phoenix Suns…
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Oct 25, 2022
UP275 The Bundle #20
The Bundle is our regular series looking deep in to the sports broadcast, streaming and media rights market in the company of Yannick Ramcke, Murray Barnett and Charlie Boss.
Today's headline topics are: DAZN acquires Eleven Sport; NBA's latest D2C play; World Rugby acquires Rugby Pass; Potential Saudi (PIF) investment into BeIN sport.
For previous episodes of the series, search 'The Bundle' on Unofficial Partner/podcast
To get the best analysis of the sports business in your inbox every week, sign up to the Unofficial Partner Newsletter, via substack.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Oct 18, 2022
UP274 FWIW: Private Equity in Australian Soccer
This is episode 3 of For What It's Worth our regular series in collaboration with Turnstile, the sponsorship valuation service.
Today's special guest is Danny Townsend, the CEO of The Australian Professional Leagues, aka the A-Leagues, home of professional soccer, comprising men's, women's, youth and esports competitions.
Townsend formerly held global leadership roles at Repucom and Nielsen Sport before becoming chief executive of Sydney FC, and then moving to head up the league.
In December 2021, the APL announced that Silver Lake, the private equity firm, had made a significant minority investment in the organisation, which it said would 'drive technology enhancements and innovation aimed at improving the fan experience and driving further development of the game in Australia'.
The transaction values APL at approximately USD$300m / AUD $425M.
So, what's it like when private equity comes on board? What is the basis of their investment outlook, and how do they put a value on their inve…
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Oct 10, 2022
UP273 The Web3 Brainstorm Live at Emirates Stadium
This podcast is a recording of the Unofficial Partner Web3 brainstorm which took place at Emirates Stadium in London, the home of Arsenal Football Club, who were our collaborators on the project.
The subject matter covered NFTs, blockchain, crypto and DAOs.
To make things interesting, we gave a group of experts a problem to solve over the course of the evening.
The conceit of the brainstorm was this: UP FC is a middling Premier League club with ambitions to ‘enhance fan engagement via web3, NFTs and blockchain’.
What are the opportunities and problems we'll face? What are the mistakes that are common to sports clubs, leagues and federations when entering this exciting and confusing space?
The first person you'll hear is Juliet Slot, Arsenal's Chief Commercial Officer. Juliet's objective is to help facilitate the industry conversation around football's relationship with web3, and we're grateful for her support and the hard work of her team at Arsenal for helping to get the event o…
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Oct 4, 2022
UP272 Ed Smith Live at Leaders
Ed Smith is one of the most innovative thinkers in sport. The former test cricketer turned author and broadcaster co-created the Institute of Sports Humanities, and in 2018 was made chief selector for England men's cricket.
His new book is called Making Decisions: Putting the Human Back in the Machine, in which he asks some very important questions facing sport and business today, offering a framework for identifying and maximising talent, spotting team weaknesses and communicating ideas that lead to stronger leadership, clear judgments and ultimately, improved performances.
The conversation took place on stage at the Leaders conference at Twickenham Stadium.
Unofficial Partner podcasts has a global audience of people from across the professional sports industry: to join the dots on the various conversations and to keep up with key trends and analysis from across the business, subscribe to the Unofficial Partner newsletter, published every Thursday.
*Unofficial Partner is the leadin…
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Sep 27, 2022
UP271 Kara Nortman
Kara Nortman is one of the three founders of Angel City Football Club, along with Julie Uhrman and the actor Natalie Portman, and it’s the first women’s professional soccer team in Los Angeles for over ten years.
But the story has been about far more than football.
A host of famous people have come on board, Serena Williams, Alexis Ohanian, Mia Hamm, Eva Longoria and Jessica Chastain to name just a few of the club’s investors, who are buying in to one of the sports business’s most intriguing case studies.
Nortman brings financial expertise from her role as managing partner of Upfront Ventures, so we talk about how US investors view women’s and men’s football, the opportunities and pitfalls ahead for women’s pro leagues, the questions associated with private equity and the benefit of an outside perspective in growing the women’s game.
To keep up to date with all our podcasts, you should sign up to the Unofficial Partner newsletter. It goes to thousands of people acro…
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Sep 23, 2022
UP270 The Figo Affair
Our guests today are Ben Nicholas and David Tryhorn, the creators behind a new Netflix documentary, The Figo Affair: The Transfer That Changed Football.
The film chronicles a three week period in 2000 when the superstar Portuguese player Luis Figo left Barcelona for arch rivals Real Madrid. The result was a political storm, the legacy of which remains in place today. The deal heralded the beginning of Real Madrid’s galáctico era and with it a shift in how football transfer market works, all told by a cast including some very familiar faces, such as Pep Guardiola and Real Madrid president Florent Perez.
We talk about how Netflix works, the problem of sourcing archive footage and the motives of famous sports stars when it comes to making high profile documentaries.
This podcast is sponsored by Leaders Week London, which kicks off on Monday 26th September and culminates in the two day Leaders Summit at Twickenham Stadium in west London on the 28th and 29th. See the full Leaders Wee…
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Sep 16, 2022
UP269 Sports business networks and how to build them
September always has a back to school vibe and with it comes the start of conference season, an opportunity for all us to get away from our computer screens and meet people out there in the real world.
This brings with it the subject of networking, the skill of building valuable relationships with people who may or may not be of use to your personal professional development.
To talk about the best and worst ways to do this are Laura McQueen, Managing Director of Leaders in Sport, who's in charge of Leaders Week London, taking place from Monday 26th September, and Sean Singleton, the co-founder of Unofficial Partner, who has blagged his way through more conference free lunches than anyone in Western Europe.
We talk about how to plan to get the best results, the worst food to eat while standing up and how to avoid getting stuck with boring people who are of no commercial use to you.
If you want to extend your own sports business network, join us for Wise UP, the Unofficial Partner Web3…
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Sep 13, 2022
UP268 IMG WTF?
Adam Kelly has been at IMG for over twenty years and is now the president of IMG Media, overseeing the four core units of rights sales, production, betting and digital media, the latter part via the recently acquired Seven League.
In May this year IMG announced a twelve year strategic partnership with The Rugby Football League (RFL) and Super League Europe, with the headline objective to ‘reimagine Rugby League and its competitions in the UK’. The agreement follows the recent decision for the RFL and Super League to realign and form a new joint venture company.
So what does IMG see in the sport of Rugby League and what does re-imagining mean in 2022? This is a way in to a conversation about how the storied agency views the sports landscape today, the pitfalls that await nascent sports, and the challenge of communisation in the sports marketing agency sector.
This podcast is sponsored by Leaders Week London which returns this at the slightly earlier than usual date of 26th to 29t…
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Sep 5, 2022
UP267 Stop saying OTT
The acronym OTT has become ubiquitous in recent years, but what does it really mean, and what are the implications of the decisions being made today by sports organisations big and small.
OTT stands for “Over The Top” and refers to the way a streaming service delivers content over the internet. The service is delivered “over the top” of another platform. The term has become ubiquitous across the sports business in recent years, talking to the options now available to fans, beyond the traditional cable TV subscription. OTT comes with a set of questions, about the ability of individual sports federations, governing bodies, leagues and teams to go direct to their customer, mirroring services such as Netflix, Spotify or Disney+.
It’s an appealing idea, enabling sports bodies to capture first party customer data, build competitive tension in the rights market and ultimately, hopefully, make more money.
But, as we hear from our guests Mike Emery and Murray Barnett, there’s no…
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Aug 30, 2022
UP266 Web3 WTF - Sillytuna x Sporting Crypto
Today we're going deep in to football's relationship with NFTs, crypto, blockchain and all things web3, as preparation for our inaugural Unofficial Partner event: Wise UP - the Live Web3 Brainstorm which his being held on the evening of Wednesday 21st September at The Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal Football Club in London.
Tickets are £50 each and are available to buy here.
Our guests today are two of several experts who will be joining me on stage on the night.
Alex Amsel (@Sillytuna) is an award winning game developer, investor, and blockchain expert. After 15+ years running a game studio he moved into the blockchain field in 2012, selling NFT startup Ownage in 2018 before most even knew the term, and made the 3rd highest NFT sale of 2021 via Sotheby's. He's currently co-founder of Soulcast, a customisable NFT platform, and key backer of Clodhoppers, a stop-motion animated multiplayer brawler.
Alex is an early stage investor and advisor in numerous NFT, DAO, DEFI and infrastru…
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Aug 23, 2022
UP265 The Bundle 19
The Bundle is our regular deep dive in to the sports broadcast and streaming market with regular guests Yannick Ramcke, head of OTT for OneFootball, and Murray Barnett, Director of D2C Sport, specialists in direct to consumer media, and Founder of 26West Sport, a sports commercial advisory consultancy.
This conversation was recorded just after the deadline for broadcaster submissions for UEFA's Champions League rights tender in North America and so much of the podcast focuses on the US sports market, with reference to ESPN's recent price rises, and its potential as an acquisition target for Apple. For the first time, ESPN+ is more expensive in the US than its cable subscription. The streaming service has 22.5million subscribers, which is still dwarfed by the cable bundle that boasts 75.7million paying customers.
And Premflix, the oft mentioned Premier League direct to consumer play, is given another airing, in the light of recent comments by new Chelsea owner Todd Boehler.
Leaders We…
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Aug 19, 2022
UP264 Anatomy of a Saint
Who, or what, is a Southampton (Saints) fan? It's a trickier question than it first appears, because when the sports business conversation moves to describing fans, it often refers to them as a homogenous blob of cliches and replica shirt wearing stereotypes.
In reality, obviously, they are a collection of individual people, with different reasons for supporting a club. This makes pleasing them difficult.
And this is the job of today's guest Sarah Batters, Director of Marketing and Partnerships of Premier League club Southampton.
Do the normal marketing tropes of funnels and customer acquisition strategies apply to the tribal nature of sports fandom? And is a Saints fan also a Saints Women's team fan?
With Sarah is Asa Sherrill, Senior Vice President of Product and Design at InfrontX, the digital media consultancy whose clients include PGA TOUR, Verizon, NASCAR, FOX, Chelsea FC, AS Roma, the International Ski Federation among many others.
This is a build on a previous episode, Element…
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Aug 16, 2022
UP263 Eng-ger-land: Football, race and identity politics
Actor and playwright Hannah Kumari has been performing her own one woman play 'Eng-ger-land' at football clubs around Britain.
The play was written in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and is inspired by Hannah’s own experiences of going to football matches as a mixed-race teenager in the 90s.
ENG-ER-LAND blends 90s nostalgia with themes of racism, identity politics, lad culture and the idea of Englishness; what does it mean to be English and who gets to define that?
Her story gives a view rarely heard within the sports business conversation and gives much needed context to debates about fandom, athlete activism and the relationship between women and football.
If you enjoy the podcasts, make sure you're signed up to the Unofficial Partner newsletter that goes out every Thursday where you'll also find details of our upcoming live event, in the evening of 21st September, in partnership with Arsenal Football Club, at the Emirates Stadium in London. You can buy tickets for that…
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Aug 5, 2022
UP262 Esport Economics: The Creator Marketplace
This is episode 4 of our series looking at the business of esports, in collaboration with Nielsen Sport, the world’s leading source of sports measurement and analytics.
Today’s conversation moves the focus to the subject of influencer marketing: what is it, who is being influenced, how much brand marketing money is being spent, what evidence is there of its impact and what is the effect on the sport sponsorship market more generally of the rise of esport creators?
Our guests are Seb Carmichael Brown and Salvatore De Angelis.
Seb co-founded Hashtag Utd with his brother, the Youtube personality Spencer FC, and is a content creator in his own right; his ‘Seb on Golf’ YouTube channel has over 130,000 subscribers.
Salvatore is Head of Digital, International at Nielsen Sports & Entertainment, based in Milan.
To keep in touch with the rest of the series, make sure you subscribe to Unofficial Partner via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podcast app.
If…
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Aug 5, 2022
UP261 ReThinking Sport: Dawn Airey
This is an episode of ReThinking Sport, our series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
Our guests are Dawn Airey, who chairs the Barclays FA Women's Super League and Championship board and Elise Kossaifi, head of the women and sport practice at Portas.
The conversation was recorded a few days after England's Lionesses beat Germany at Wembley to win the UEFA Women's Euros. So the topic is, what now? How can the WSL capitalise on this moment? What's The FA's commercial plan for the league, where is the money going to come from and what are the opportunities and threats that lie ahead?
Dawn Airey has had one of the most high profile careers in British and European media, running or holding very senior positions at some of the biggest broadcasters including Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV, Sky, Yahoo and Getty Images.
This episode refers to others in the Portas series in which we've talked to the biggest decision maker…
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Aug 2, 2022
UP260 The L Word
What's the point of major sports events?
Ten years on from London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, we talk about legacy, promises, over claims and returns on investment.
As the UEFA Women's Euros ends and the Commonwealth Games continuing in Birmingham, it's a subject that's ever more relevant to the business of sport, which makes ever more ambitious claims as to the short and long term returns of big events including economic benefit, participation booms and other categories of societal impact.
We talk to Tim Hollingsworth and Alex Balfour.
Tim is chief executive of Sport England, who held the same role at the British Paralympic Association at London 2012. Alex was the London Organising Committee's head of new media, a role he's carrying out currently on secondment in Birmingham. He co-founded cricket website Cricinfo, now part of ESPN, and runs the Generate Digital consultancy.
One thing to mention before we start the conversation is the inaugural Unofficial Partner Live event tak…
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Jul 29, 2022
UP259 Inside Soccer's Billion Dollar Game Market
The market for soccer simulation games is dominated by EA Sports' FIFA franchise, a licensing agreement that is in its 23rd and final year. It's a very lucrative market. Last year EA made around $1.6billion in net revenues, with 150million players. FIFA makes around $150million from the license. So what happens now? How will EA and FIFA move forward in this new era and is EA's market dominance vulnerable to new entrants, in a world where millions of young people have grown up playing free to play mobile games rather than on expensive consoles.
These are some of the questions tackled in this conversation with Eugene Nashilov, CEO and Founder of Strikerz Inc, creator of the UFL soccer simulation game, due to launch this year. This is a deep dive in to how the gaming market works, the reality of the player and team license agreements that underpin the games and how the rise of games like Fortnite and League of Legends has shaped the behaviour of the elusive and much sought after Generatio…
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Jul 26, 2022
UP258 The Ticket Problem
Match tickets are the point at which the promise of new technology meets real life. And the results are mixed.
Some of the biggest football matches in recent times have been blighted by claims and counter claims of ticket fraud and technology failures, most notably at the 2022 UEFA Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool in Paris, the start of which was delayed amid frightening and chaotic scenes outside the Stade de France as thousands of ticket holding Liverpool fans were stuck outside where police deployed pepper spray and tear gas on supporters holding legitimate tickets. The French government's initial response was to deflect failures in policing by putting the blame on what it called "industrial-scale" ticket fraud, pointing at similar scenes at UEFA's other showcase event, the Euro 2020 final at Wembley last year between England and Italy.
So what's gone wrong with the humble match ticket?
Has the shift to digital and mobile technology made it easier for the fra…
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Jul 19, 2022
UP257 ReThinking Sport: UEFA Women's Euros
This is an episode of ReThinking Sport, our series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
Today’s guest is Baroness Sue Campbell of Loughborough, the former chair of UK Sport who is now The FA’s Director of Women’s Football.
We talk about the UEFA Women’s Euros, currently taking place across England. We use this as a jumping off point to ask, what are The FA’s hopes and plans for the women’s game, how will the Women’s Super League evolve, why has The FA decided against developing a relationship with private equity and what are the implications of these decisions. Sue Campbell is as ever, a straight talker and the result is a fascinating insight in to the game’s present and future.
One of the big ambitions of this series has been to look at the football market through the eyes of the people who own and control the clubs and the people in charge of the leagues and the sports’ governing bodies. S…
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Jul 12, 2022
UP256 The Godfather of Sports Law
Michael Beloff QC is often described as ‘the godfather of sports law’ and the person who Chambers legal directory said ‘more or less invented sports law’ as a discipline. As a result Beloff is one of the most influential people in world sport over the past three decades.
He’s written a memoir about his life and career in and out of sport. It’s called MJBQC and we recommend it highly.
Beloff was called to the Bar in 1967 and became a Queen's Counsel in 1981. He’s been a Member of the Court of Arbitration for Sport ("CAS") from 1996 and in that capacity has been an arbitrator at the Olympic Games including Ethics Commissioner at London 2012. He has been on the CAS Panel for UEFA and the FIFA World Cup, chairman of the International Cricket Council’s Code of Conduct Commission and was elected as one of the judges of the FIA’s International Court of Appeal.
Every sport has been influenced by Beloff in some way, and so the topic of conversation is broad, ranging from co…
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Jul 5, 2022
UP255 OneFootball meets Web3
Today’s guest is Lucas Von Cranach, the founder and CEO of OneFootball, the global media platform based in Berlin with regional offices around the world.
The company recently announced it had raised a $300 million Series D funding round led by blockchain investor Liberty City Ventures, creating a web3 joint venture, One Football Labs, with blockchain games firm Animoca Brands and Dapper Labs known for its sports NFT deals with the NBA and NFL.
This follows last year’s acquisition by OneFootball of Dugout, which brought with it relationships with several leading soccer clubs as shareholders, including Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Olympique de Marseille.
So this is a conversation about football, digital platforms, web3 and money.
If these topics are of interest, you’ll want to join us in London in September for the first Unofficial Partner event.
You can register your interest for the eve…
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Jun 28, 2022
UP254 Fan tokens WTF?
We can file this podcast under the banner heading of Web3 WTF, an occasional series in which we talk to a wide range of people about sport’s relationship with the next iteration of the internet.
Future episodes will talk to people on every side of this subject, from new blockchain, web3 and metaverse startups to financiers, agencies, fans and sports rights holders.
Unofficial Partner’s position on this topic is that nobody knows everything. Each conversation is a partial view in to this fast evolving and exciting space, with opportunities for experimentation and mistakes.
Today’s guest is Joey D’Urso, the investigations writer of The Athletic. And the subject is fan engagement tokens, crypto currency and football clubs.
D’Urso has written a series of deep dives in to Socios, the most prominent and controversial of a new generation of self styled ‘fan engagement’ apps, which promise to tokenise the relationship between clubs and fans by creating digital assets that can…
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Jun 24, 2022
UP253 Re-Thinking Sport: Inside Wimbledon
This is an episode of ReThinking Sport, our series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
This week we went to Wimbledon to talk to Jamie Baker and Alex Willis.
Jamie was a professional tennis player, British number two and Davis Cup player who is now Tournament Director and Head of Professional Tennis at The All England Lawn Tennis Club.
Alex is Wimbledon’s Communications and Marketing Director, responsible for the brand vision for The Championships.
So we talked about the tennis product, the decision of the ATP and WTA Tours to remove world ranking points from this year’s event, what LIV Golf would look like in tennis, the challenges of domestic stars such as Emma Raducanu and Andy Murray and we talk about whether the grass court season, so important to the Wimbledon brand, is under threat.
Every episode of ReThinking Sport can be found by searching Unofficial Partner via the big podcast providers, incl…
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Jun 21, 2022
UP252 The Bundle 18
The Bundle is our regular deep dive in to the sports broadcast and streaming market with regular guests Yannick Ramcke, head of OTT for OneFootball, Charlie Boss, chief commercial officer at The Jockey Club and Murray Barnett, director of the D2C consultancy and formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN.
Today’s conversation covers MLS and Apple; IPL, Disney and Viacom18; Rugby League and IMG; why is innovation so hard in sport and why do people love the Netflix for Sport story.
Today’s episode is sponsored by our friends at Turnstile, who are asking a good question: do you know what your sponsorship is really worth, or are you guessing?
Turnstile uses real market rates to quantify the value every single sponsorship right within a deal, looking beyond the traditional media metrics to calculate the value of the Exposure, Intellectual Property and Direct Benefits.
This enables Turnstile to deliver a recommended transaction price that’s comprehensive, accurate and defensible.
So don…
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Jun 14, 2022
UP251 FWIW Anatomy of a Deal
This is the second of our For What It’s Worth series in collaboration with Turnstile and is an opportunity to pick apart the reality of the sponsorship sales process on both sides of the negotiation table.
To do this we’re pleased to welcome Celine Del Genes and Rob Grenville Jones.
Celine is Global General Manager of Specialist Sports at Adidas and Rob is Commercial Partnerships Director at the English Rugby Football Union (RFU).
Joining us is Dan Gaunt, General Manager at Turnstile.
This is a conversation about trust - how is this cultivated? How quickly can it be established? Ego, both personal and corporate. Intangibility - the role of gut feeling v rationality, head v heart; the role of emotion, and the under rated job of selling the deal to the board, and finally, how is a deal communicated to the general public via the media. How reliable are the prices quoted and what are the games that are played on both the buy and sell side of the equation.
The first episode in the…
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Jun 7, 2022
UP250 McCormack to the Metaverse
Welcome to the 250th Unofficial Partner sports business podcast.
To mark the occasion, we've been going back into the archive and re-listening to many of the conversations we've had over the last three or more years.
What we found were a mass of interconnecting threads, each telling a part of the bigger story that is the sports industry's past, present and future.
This episode pulls at some of these threads with the help of a host of guests including Claire Enders, Lesa Ukman, Barry Hearn, Patrick Nally, Matt Locke, Rory Sutherland and Paul Hawksbee.
Before we get going, we want to put a date in your diary. We're hosting a live Unofficial Partner podcast in London, in July.
More details when we have them, but if you're interested in the general idea, we'd be grateful if you were to register your interest via THIS LINK where you'll be looked after by our friends at Sponsorworks Event & Guest Management Software for Brands & Rights Holders.
Here's to the next 250 podcasts...
*Unof…
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May 31, 2022
UP249 A short business history of Tour de France
The Tour de France is one of the great sporting moments of the year, with a storied history and cultural heritage that is both international and uniquely French.
Journalist Alex Duff has written a book called Le Fric, which uncovers the business story of this great French institution and its ever changing relationship with money and power; the secretive family who own it and the multiple attempts to wrestle control by rival groups keen to make the Tour the centre of a world cycling league.
Today’s episode is sponsored by our friends at Turnstile, who are asking a good question: do you know what your sponsorship is really worth, or are you guessing?
Turnstile uses real market rates to quantify the value every single sponsorship right within a deal, looking beyond the traditional media metrics to calculate the value of the Exposure, Intellectual Property and Direct Benefits.
This enables Turnstile to deliver a recommended transaction price that’s comprehensive, accurate and defen…
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May 24, 2022
UP248 Golf's $10billion question
Today's guest is Andy Gardiner, the man behind the Premier Golf League, the self-styled Formula One for professional golf whose promising to generate $1.8billion of annual revenue and $10billon of equity value by 2031.
This comes a week after our podcast with Sean Bratches from the rival disruptor league, Saudi backed LIV Golf. Since we spoke, Bratches has resigned.
As you'll hear in our conversation, Gardiner is bullish on the PGL's chances of breaking the current stalemate with the PGA Tour, by offering a revenue share agreement to the players and demanding their representatives on the PGA Tour Policy Board publish an independent valuation on the PGL's projections .
The stakes are very high and the proposal would change professional golf forever, something Gardiner refers to as a 'multi generational opportunity' for the game.
The deadline for a decision is looming and the PGA Tour is countering with threats to the players livelihoods and attempts to undermine Gardiner's projected fig…
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May 20, 2022
UP247 The Bundle #17
Welcome to The Bundle, our regular series on the sports broadcast and streaming market with regular guests Yannick Ramcke of OneFootball and Murray Barnett, former ESPN, World Rugby and F1.
The conversation takes us from Formula One in Miami to soccer in Mexico via FIFA+, Disney+ and the questions facing Discovery’s direct to consumer future.
You’ll hear us reference various articles and stories, all of which are available to read in the Unofficial Partner newsletter, which goes out every Thursday. To subscribe, sign up at UnofficialPartner.com or follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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May 16, 2022
UP246 Why US cities (still) await FIFA's 2026 decision
There’s a lot riding on 2026 FIFA World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico.
It’s often sold as the moment America finally gets it: When the game catches fire as a professional entertainment product, justifying the investment money flowing in to the MLS and the accompanying franchise valuations, which don’t seem to make sense unless something transformative is about to happen.
So 2026 as catalyst: No pressure.
But as ever when it comes to FIFA, there are subplots…
We still don’t know where the games will take place and patience is wearing thin among the 17 US cities that have submitted bids to host matches in 2026.
Site visits have been completed, small print pored over. Expensive demands have been made, from the quality of turf to policing and security through to Human Rights promises.
And still they wait. It was going to be last year. Now a date in Q2 is the next deadline for announcements. Yes, COVID, but not only COVID.
When it comes to organising and running a World…
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May 10, 2022
UP245 What it means to be Unsigned
*Lorraine Ugen's story is a must listen for anyone interested in the personal and commercial reality of professional sport.
*Ugen is an Olympian who competes in her own brand; one she designed, manufactured and models, and who's building a community of fellow athletes who face the dilemma of competing at the highest level without personal sponsorship from the big sports apparel and equipment manufacturers.
Ugen competed in the long jump at the Rio 2016 Olympics and captained the Great Britain team at the inaugural Athletics World Cup in 2018, winning gold in the women's long jump. For England, she anchored the women's 4 x 100 metres relay team to gold at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. As a collegiate athlete in the United States, she won an NCAA indoor and outdoor long jump titles.
As Covid hit, Ugen found herself without a personal sponsor, the income from which is one of the bases of a professional athlete's income.
The plan is to allow athletes to wear the Unsigned brand and attrac…
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May 6, 2022
UP244 Brett Gosper at the NFL
We went to the NFL’s London office to talk with Brett Gosper, the former head of World Rugby who leads the sport’s push in to the UK and Europe.
We discuss the NFL brand, the German sports market, what he’s learnt about private equity’s role in sport, the conversation around the big tech platforms and why Mad Men was not far from the truth when it comes to the early days of the advertising world, which is where Gosper started his business career while in Paris, while playing rugby for the famous Racing Club.
Today’s episode is sponsored by our friends at Turnstile, who are asking a good question: do you know what your sponsorship is really worth, or are you guessing?
Turnstile uses real market rates to quantify the value every single sponsorship right within a deal, looking beyond the traditional media metrics to calculate the value of the Exposure, Intellectual Property and Direct Benefits.
This enables Turnstile to deliver a recommended transaction price that’s compre…
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May 2, 2022
UP243 Sean Bratches on the Golf Super League
Sean Bratches spent close to 30 years with ESPN, and then became Managing Director of Commercial Operations at Formula 1, following Liberty Media’s acquisition of the race series from CVC, the private equity group.
In November last year, Bratches announced he’d joined Greg Norman at LIV Golf, the organisation behind the Golf Super League, backed by funding from PIF, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
So this is a conversation about an attempted disruption to the status quo in a major global sport. We go in to the business plan behind the new venture, which regular listeners will detect, touches on several of the big themes impacting the sports business today.
If you like the podcast, you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter that goes to thousands of subscribers every Thursday, sign up via UnofficialPartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global indust…
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Apr 29, 2022
UP242 FIFA+ WTF?
Dave Roberts is one the primary architects of FIFA+, the football governing body’s newly launched global streaming service.
It’s an opportunity to peak below the surface, at what the initial plan was; how it works and how that’s evolved; who’ll watch it and what they’ll watch; how and when it will be commercially viable; and what it says about how sports governing bodies view themselves in 2022.
If you like the podcast, you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter that goes to thousands of subscribers every Thursday, sign up via UnofficialPartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Apr 26, 2022
UP241 ReThinking Sport: Baroness Sue Campbell
This is episode of ReThinking Sport, our ongoing series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
Today’s topic is girls participation in sport and our special guest is Baroness Sue Campbell of Loughborough, one of the most influential sports administrators of the last thirty years.
A former PE teacher, she was made chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust in 1995, having played a key role in setting it up. In 2003 Campbell was appointed as chair of UK Sport. She held this position for two terms until April 2013, presiding over Team GB and Paralympic GB's performance at the London 2012 games. Campbell was appointed Head of Women's Football at The FA in March 2016, and became Director of Women's Football in January 2018. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to sport.
Sue is joined by Elena Portas and Elise Kossaifi.
Elena leads Portas…
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Apr 22, 2022
UP240 For What It's Worth: Arsenal FC
This is the first of a series in collaboration with Turnstile, looking at alternative ways of valuing sports sponsorship and other commercial inventory.
The conversation took place at the Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal Football Club and our guests are Juliet Slot, Arsenal’s Chief Commercial Officer and Dan Gaunt, general manager of Turnstile.
We talk about what a football club is selling, the hidden value of Intellectual Property, the role of the No More Red anti knife crime campaign and the burgeoning sponsor interest in women’s football.
If you like the podcast, you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter that goes to thousands of subscribers every Thursday, sign up via UnofficialPartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr**…
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Apr 11, 2022
UP239 Jamie Peacock tackles the business of Rugby League
What is the state of Rugby League today? Who has the commercial and political power in the game and what impact will this year’s Rugby League World Cup have in the game’s major heartlands of the UK and Australia.
These are just a few of the questions I put to today’s guest, Jamie Peacock MBE, who brings a lifetime of insight and expertise to the conversation, courtesy of being the most successful Rugby League player in Super League history, winning nine championships and four Challenge Cup winners medals for Bradford Bulls and Leeds Rhinos, during a career that saw him captain both England and Great Britain national teams.
Since retiring from the game, Peacock has built a consultancy business focused on leadership mentoring and wellbeing, a subject very close to his heart, as Jamie will be running a 100 mile ultra marathon for Greenhouse Sports on Saturday 16th April. For more information please visit - https://www.justgiving.com/campaign/runfortheroof
Today’s episode is spo…
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Apr 5, 2022
UP238 Good Owner, Bad Owner
The subject today is club ownership in English football and the ongoing debate about the need for an independent regulator following the UK government review in to the governance of the game led by Tracey Crouch MP.
Our guests are Nick Harris, John Scales and Niall Couper.
Nick Harris is chief sports news correspondent for the Mail on Sunday newspaper and has recently published an extensive report asking fans what they thought of their club’s owners. The results are fascinating and are available to view on Nick’s Twitter page @sportingintel.
John Scales played in the Premier League for Wimbledon, Spurs and Liverpool in a career which included winning three caps for England. He is now an entrepreneur working across sport.
Niall Couper is head of media for Amnesty International UK and is chief executive of Fair Game, a pressure group consisting of English football clubs seeking to change the governance of the game.
There are close to 250 episodes of the podcast available by sear…
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Mar 31, 2022
UP237 Sport on Social League Table 2022
Today’s conversation is about Olympic sports federations and the challenge of building and sustaining audiences for their sports on social media platforms.
Our guests are Jonny Murch and Stéphane Schwander.
Jonny is Chief executive of Red Torch, the award-winning research, digital and social media agency.
Stéphane is head of digital at the FEI, the world governing body for equestrian sport and a member of the Olympic movement for over a century.
Since 2017, Red Torch has tracked the performance of every Olympic federation on social media and the latest edition of the #SportonSocial League Table was published this week, and you can download it for free, via the shownotes of this podcast or go direct to the Red Torch website.
There are close to 250 episodes of the podcast available by searching Unofficial Partner in your favourite podcast app or going via Apple or Spotify.
If you're interested in sports business analysis and comment, follow @UnffclPrtnr on Twitter or Linkedin a…
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Mar 29, 2022
UP236 The Bundle #16
Our deep dive in to the sports media market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke and guests Murray Barnett and Charlie Boss.
Murray is founder of 26West Sport and formerly had senior roles at World Rugby, F1 and ESPN.
Charlie is chief commercial director of The Jockey Club and was formerly at the Walt Disney Company.
We talk about Buzzer, IPL, Discovery and HBO, Genius Sports and Pixellot; CVC and Ligue 1; sporting monocultures; Barstool and betting; Amazon, Looper, Facebook and the IPL auction.
You can hear previous episodes of The Bundle series by searching Unofficial Partner in your favourite podcast app or going via Apple or Spotify.
If you're interested in sports business analysis and comment, follow @UnffclPrtnr on Twitter or Linkedin and sign up to the weekly newsletter that goes to thousands of people across sport every Thursday.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who…
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Mar 21, 2022
UP235 ReThinking Sport: 777 Partners
This is episode 12 of ReThinking Sport, our series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
Today we’re asking what does 777 Partners, a Miami based private investment firm, see in professional British basketball?
The company has recently bought 45% of the British Basketball League for $7million, having already bought up the London Lions franchise.
This is part of a bigger move in to sports investment. 777 recently paid US$137 million for a 70 per cent in Vasco da Gama, which values the Brazilian club at US$333m, following on from other investments in La Liga club Sevilla and Serie A side, Genoa.
So we talk the person Lenz Balan, who is Vice President at 777 and one of the people leading their move in to sport.
Joining Lenz is Peter Hawkings, who is sports investment lead at Portas Consulting.
You can hear the other episodes in the Portas series by searching Unofficial Partner in your favourite podcast app or…
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Mar 18, 2022
UP234 Spotify Barcelona WTF?
The most eye catching deal of this week was the announcement that Spotify, the music streaming company is buying almost the entire sponsorship inventory of FC Barcelona, including the shirt of the men’s and women’s teams, the training kit and a title partnership of the famous Camp Nou stadium.
To get to what’s really happening here, we’ve brought together Tom Gray, Joel Seymour Hyde and Matt Rogan.
Tom Gray is a founding member of Mercury Prize winning band Gomez and a board director of PRS For Music. Tom leads a social media-driven campaign, #BrokenRecord which calls for more of the streaming revenue ‘pie’ to make its way to artists and songwriters. His submission to the parliamentary select committee is referenced in the conversation and is available to read here.
Joel Seymour Hyde is Managing Director for Octagon UK, the sport and entertainment agency with offices in 22 countries around the world including FRUKT which has particular expertise across music, entertainme…
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Mar 15, 2022
UP 233 Sport and the price of media
The price of television advertising is spiking rapidly and has big implications for the value of sport and the market for sponsorship, whether you're buying or selling.
More broadly, the events of the past two years have led to significant disruption to the advertising landscape.
People's media habits changed considerably as their physical location was altered and advertisers were driven to adopt new investment strategies as audiences changed and physical channels were limited.
Consumers sought more online distribution and product access through e-commerce and the overarching theme through this period has been acceleration: Netflix took five years to reach 10 million households and Disney+ will get there in three. E-commerce saw five years worth of organic growth in just 12 months.
To help us navigate through this complicated picture are today’s guests Alex Charkham and Bhavin Balvantrai.
Alex is Chief Strategy Officer at Fuse, Omnicom’s sport and entertainment agency.
Bhav is…
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Mar 8, 2022
UP232 Re-Thinking Sport: Club Rugby
This is an episode in our Re-Thinking Sport series in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity. Today, we're talking about the business of rugby union with our guest, Nick Garcia, the former City Football Group executive who is now CEO of Welsh club, Ospreys and Head of Team Sports at Y 11 sport and media, the Hong Kong based group that bought a 75.1% stake in the club in May, 2020.
The other voice you'll hear is that Nick Rawlinson, senior consultant at Portas.
If you're interested in sports business analysis and comment, follow @UnffclPrtnr on Twitter and join thousands of busy sports people who receive the Unofficial Partner newsletter every Thursday. Sign up via UnofficialPartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter…
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Mar 4, 2022
UP231 A Guide to Sportswashing
The obvious context to today’s conversation are the terrible events happening in Ukraine, which has brought in to sharp focus sport’s role in the political landscape that surround them, in particular the role of governing bodies and the supply chain of professional enablers that are part and parcel of sportswashing and the soft power strategies beloved by autocratic regimes.
My guests are two experts in the relationship between business and geopolitics.
Robert Barrington served as Executive Director of Transparency International UK and is now Professor of Anti-Corruption Practice at the University of Sussex.
Professor Dan Hough heads the department of politics at the same university and together they’ve written a book that couldn’t be more timely.
It’s called Understanding Corruption: how corruption works in practice
Unofficial Partner listeners can get a 30% discount by clicking the above linkand using the code EMAIL30
If you're interested in sports business analysis a…
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Feb 28, 2022
UP230 A Gambling Addict's View of the Sports Business
Former professional cricketer Patrick Foster has written a searingly honest memoir about how he became addicted to gambling while at university, developing a habit that cost him £4million and ruined his relationships and career.
So this is an opportunity to discuss sport’s commercial relationship with the betting industry, something that’s often couched in abstract terms, of new deals being struck by rights holder, team shirt sponsorship and Ray Winstone at half time.
We don’t tend to hear from the people who are being targeted by all that marketing activity and how the sports business looks from the perspective of a gambling addict.
Patrick Foster was a professional cricketer, who became a city trader.
We talk about what it feels like to lose everything to addiction, and how he views the marketing strategies of the betting industry, its use of sport as a sponsorship and advertising medium, the psychological triggers within brand communications and the gateway drugs of gamif…
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Feb 25, 2022
UP229 Cindy Parlow Cone
This week the US Soccer Federation (USSF) and the US Women’s National Team settled a six year fight over equal pay. The players will receive $24m. The USSF has promised to equalise pay between men’s and women’s national teams for all competitions, including the FIFA World Cup.
*Why is this happening now?*
Next week the USSF elects its next president, whose tenure will include the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico.
The two candidates are former president Carlos Cordeiro and today's guest, the acting president Cindy Parlow Cone, who took over two years ago, when Cordeiro was forced to resign after his legal team filed court documents that implied men are better than women, so should get more money.“…by ignoring the materially higher level of speed and strength required to perform the job of a Men's National Team (MNT) player. A reasonable juror could conclude that the job of MNT player requires materially different skill and more responsibility than plaintiffs…
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Feb 21, 2022
UP228 Guy Kinnings
One of the biggest sports business stories of the past year has been in golf where the two major tours - European and PGA Tour - are in what some have called an existential battle for control of the game at the highest level. A new rival, the Golf Premier League led by Greg Norman and backed by Saudi money, is attempting to disrupt the tours, by offering enormous sums to the very best players. That story is moving as we speak, as major stars such as Dustin Johnson and Bryson Dechambeau back away from their earlier enthusiasm for the project.
Whatever happens, our guest today is at the epicentre of the story.
Guy Kinnings, deputy chief executive of the European Tour and formerly head of golf at IMG. So, poacher turned gamekeeper, who in his previous role would have been advising players as to whether to take the cheque or stay within the tour structure, and get a slightly lower cheque.
Chubby Chandler, founder of rival ISM agency and a former guest of the podcast said of Kinnings:…
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Feb 18, 2022
UP227: Sponsorship strategy masterclass
Today’s conversation is a masterclass in sports sponsorship strategy prompted by recent changes to the way FIFA is packaging its commercial rights.
Our guests are two people whose views I go to first whenever a major deal is done, so I’m very pleased to be able to get them around the microphone at the same time.
For two decades, Ricardo Fort was in charge of the global sports programmes for Visa and Coca-Cola, overseeing relationships with FIFA and the IOC among many others. He now runs his own consultancy Sport by Fort.
Shaun Whatling is CEO of Redmandarin, the renowned sponsorship strategy consultancy which has advised many major global brands in and around the top table of sport, again including World Cups and Olympics.
So this is a deep dive in to the incentives, behaviour and psychology that sits just behind the decision making process at big corporate marketing departments, and the lens that is applied to sports rights and activation.
As usual, every episode of Unofficia…
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Feb 15, 2022
UP226 How to market test cricket
Today's episode was prompted by a question posed by author, journalist and regular listener Mike Jakeman: *How do you market test cricket successfully?*
"The national cricket boards have figured out that the big money comes from success in the shorter formats. And certainly in England, their focus has been on building success in one day in 2020. It's been very successful. England obviously won the 2019 ICC World Cup and they reached the final of the T20 World Cup late last year.
But test cricket, it's fun too. And it delivers slow burn, sporting excellence in ways that limited overs cricket just can't replicate. So how do we sell test cricket to broadcasters, sponsors and even the cricket boards themselves?"
To answer Mike's question we recruited Omar Chaudhuri and Tony Singh.
Tony Singh is the chief commercial officer of the England and Wales cricket board, leading the teams responsible for all ECB fan engagement and revenue generating activity across England cricket, The Hundred,…
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Feb 11, 2022
UP225 What Just Happened: Two Circles buys Livewire Sport
This week, sports agency Two Circles bought Livewire Sport, a content production company that works for clients including the Premier League, Wimbledon, World Rugby, ECB and the International Paralympic Committee. This follows on from last year’s buyout of TRM Partners, the commercial sales agency.
So Sean and I went to Two Circles headquarters in London to find out why and to ask what it says about the way the sports business is evolving.
Our guests are Two Circles founder Gareth Balch and Pranav Soneji, one of the founders of Livewire and the conversation was an opportunity to ask about the future direction of sports governing bodies, federations and tournament rights holders and about the battle lines of the next ten years, between two conflicting ideologies.
Every episode of Unofficial Partner can be found by using the big podcast providers, including Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podcast app.
We’d love it if you could take the time to rate us on App…
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Feb 8, 2022
UP224: ReThinking Sport 10: Professionalisation
This is episode 10 of ReThinking Sport, our series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
The focus today is on the idea of professional sport. What does it mean when a sport is professionalised. And what are the trade offs in terms of access to opportunity, competitive balance and for the well being of the athletes themselves. It’s a conversation that talks to the very nature and broader purpose of the sports business, where much of the attention is taken up by huge rights fees, sponsorship deals and the wealth of a few lucky superstars at the top of the pyramid.
Our guests are Baroness Tanni Grey Thompson, England rugby player turned media pundit Ugo Monye and Rowena Samarasinhe, expert partner at Portas Consulting.
Every episode of Unofficial Partner can be found by using the big podcast providers, including Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podcast app.
We’d love it if you could tak…
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Feb 4, 2022
UP223: Elements of Value
This is a deep dive in to the relationship between sports fans and teams, with Ben Phillips and Mike Brady from InfrontX.
And specifically, we break down the component parts of the value exchange that exists between a football club and a fan, particularly when the relationship is conducted almost entirely via digital channels.
I’ve written about this topic in this week’s UP Newsletter, so you can see the Elements of Value model that we reference in the podcast.
Every episode of Unofficial Partner can be found by using the big podcast providers, including Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podcast app.
We’d love it if you could take the time to rate us on Apple or Spotify, as it helps spread the word.
And if you’re interested in more sports business comment and analysis, you can follow me on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr
The weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter is read by thousands of people across the sports business every Thursday, to join them subscribe via un…
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Feb 1, 2022
UP222: PickGuru
Today we talk about the launch of PickGuru, a new social gaming disruptor app launched by Oli Slipper, the Stats Perform and DAZN Co-Founder, who recently completed a seed funding round, securing an enterprise investment of £2.6 million, which values the company at £6million.
Slipper leads PickGuru’s enterprise team formed by Paul Cobley the ex founder of Matulo Software as CTO and former Sportsquake and Stats Perform financial lead Paul Watkins as COO.
The press release for the launch says its ‘a concept built and refined by some of the most successful sports entrepreneurs in the UK, PickGuru will allow users to test their knowledge to win big cash pots for small stakes in nationwide leagues or compete with their friends in mini-leagues,”.
So we went to Putney in south west London to talk to Oli Slipper along with the company’s CEO Olly Roland Jones and Nick Compton, the former Middlesex and England cricketer and one of Pick Guru’s sporting experts on hand to help custo…
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Jan 28, 2022
UP221: Inside Beijing
Next week is the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, the first city to host both a Winter and Summer Games. Go back to 2008 and the story the IOC was telling was one of engagement and the power of the Olympics to open up China to the West. By contrast, the run up to this event has been dominated by human rights violations in Hong Kong, the appalling treatment of Uighur Muslims and the fate of tennis player Peng Shuai.
The intervening 14 years has seen many false narratives, as organisations from across the sports business seek to build sustainable and profitable businesses in China, with the promise of selling their sport to the 1.4billion people in the country.
Mark Dreyer moved to Beijing to cover the 2008 games and has stayed ever since, so he’s had an up close view of the many twists and turns in the relationship, through the boom and bust of President Xi’s football strategy to the NBA’s media blackout and the on-off story of China’s World Cup 2032 World C…
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Jan 25, 2022
UP220: The Bundle 15
This is number 15 of The Bundle our series on the broadcast, streaming and media rights market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke and special guests Murray Barnett and Charlie Boss.
Charlie is Chief Commercial Officer at The Jockey Club and has Disney ESPN, The FA and England Rugby on his cv.
Murray is another ESPN alumni, who was CCO at World Rugby and Head of Global Partnerships at F1. His 26West Sport consultancy specialises in TV rights, sponsorship and commercial development.
The conversation starts on Apple and moves quickly to the big deal of the last week, Microsoft’s proposed buyout of gaming giant Activision Blizzard for around $70billon. What are the implications for sport and for the media market generally, what does it say about the value of IP, and how are the broadcasters and streamers going to respond?
Every episode of Unofficial Partner can be found by using the big podcast providers, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podca…
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Jan 18, 2022
UP219: Web3 WTF?
Today we’re talking about web3, blockchain, NFTs, fan engagement tokens and the metaverse.
Our guests are sports investor and former advisor on tech and innovation to FIFA Michael Broughton and Carsten Thode, founder of Aphetor, the games for creators and influencers who was formerly strategy head for Synergy Sponsorship and Manchester United.
Every episode of Unofficial Partner can be found by using the big podcast providers, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podcast app.
The weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter is read by thousands of people across the sports business every Thursday, to join them subscribe via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jan 11, 2022
UP218: Steve Perryman MBE
Steve Perryman MBE is a legend of Tottenham Hotspur FC, whose 17 years at the club began as a teenager in the late 1960s before becoming one of the clubs longest serving and most decorated captains, winning The FA Cup twice in the early 80s.
But that’s just a part of this conversation, which takes us inside the business of football at the sharp end.
Perryman’s love affair with Spurs ended unhappily in 1994 when he was part of the management team of his friend and fellow Spurs star, the Argentina World Cup winner Ossie Ardiles, who were sacked by then owner Alan Sugar.
Perryman recalls his journey from player to management, for Watford, Brentford and to great success in Japan’s J-League, again with Ardiles.
For the last two decades, Perryman has been an unpaid director of football of Exeter City in the lower reaches of England’s professional league pyramid.
This gives him a perspective on the current debate about the fundamental importance of lower division football, both t…
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Dec 24, 2021
UP217: Esport Economics 3
This is episode three of our series on the business of esports, created in collaboration with Nielsen Sport, the world’s leading source of sports measurement and analytics.
Today’s conversation moves the focus to the market for mobile gaming in the Asia Pacific region and our guests are Ajay Jilka Director of Regional esports partnerships of Moonton Games, and Mike Wragg, Nielsen Sport’s Managing Director for Asia Pacific who is also the company’s International Head of Strategy Consulting and Research.
Moonton Games was established in 2014, based in Shanghai, China, and is best known as one of the pioneers of MOBA Gaming and in particular the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang World Championship. In March 2021 Moonton was acquired by ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, in a deal valued at around $4billion, marking the mobile social platform’s move in to the gaming business.
To keep in touch with the rest of the series, make sure you subscribe to Unofficial Partner via Apple Podcasts, S…
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Dec 17, 2021
UP216 Sport, the IOC and China
Today’s guests are Baroness Tanni Grey Thompson and Ben Rogers, co-founder of Hong Kong Watch, the lobbying group
The topic is sport’s relationship with China, the value of diplomatic and sporting boycotts, the role of sportswashing, the limits and opportunity of athlete activism, the IOC’s handling of the Peng Shuai situation and ultimately we ask, what is the purpose of the IOC and the Olympic Movement in 2022?
Every episode of Unofficial Partner can be found by using the big podcast providers, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podcast app.
And if you don’t already get the weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter, you can join thousands of busy sports biz execs who receive it direct to their inbox every Thursday, subscribe via the unofficialpartner substack.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our c…
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Dec 14, 2021
UP215: Pepsi, Barclays and Fuse
This was a bit of a moment for Richard and Sean as its the first in person recording we’ve done since the lockdown forced us online. Newer listeners won’t remember but the first fifty or so podcasts we did were face to face at various locations, and we’ll be looking to do more through 2022, virus permitting.
So, we met up at the London headquarters of Omnicom Media Group for the second in our series on sports marketing in partnership with Fuse, the sport, entertainment, cause and culture agency, who helped us pull together a stellar panel that includes Tom Corbett, Group Head of Sponsorships and Media at Barclays, Adam Warner, Senior Director of Global Sports Marketing at PepsiCo, along with Steven Hutchison, Managing Director of Fuse.
It’s a broad conversation about football sponsorship, the UEFA Champions League, The Premier League and the FA Women’s Super League, through the eyes of the people making the decisions on the brand side of two of sport’s biggest spending co…
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Dec 7, 2021
UP214: Tom Fox
Today’s guest is Tom Fox, the former chief executive of Premier League club Aston Villa during the ownership tenure of fellow American Randy Lerner. So this is a timely conversation about the economics of the Premier League, the power and limitations of the CEO’s job and the potential impact of government regulation following the Tracey Crouch review in to football governance.
Fox’s career has mixed high end football with brand marketing. Before Villa, Fox led Arsenal’s commercial team under CEO Ivan Gazidis following a marketing career at PepsiCo and Nike. Between 2017 and 2020 he was president of MLS franchise the San Jose Earthquakes and recently carried out a similar role at FaZe Clan, the esports franchise.
The weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter is read by thousands of people across the sports business every Thursday, to join them subscribe via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought…
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Dec 3, 2021
UP213: The NHL on social media
The National Hockey League is made up of 32 teams and 750 players, and the story of the league is increasingly told by the players themselves across their owned social media platforms.
Today’s conversation is about the implications of this shift for the league, the team owners, the fans and the players themselves.
Our guests are David Klatt, director of social media platforms for the NHL and Daniel Kirschner, founder of Greenfly, the software platform that helps organisations to collect, organise and distribute digital media.
If you don’t already get the weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter, you can join thousands of busy sports biz execs who receive it direct to their inbox every Thursday, subscribe via unofficialpartner.com
Every episode of Unofficial Partner can be found by using the big podcast providers, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podcast app.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of enter…
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Nov 30, 2021
UP212: Bhandari and Amaechi on racism
The subject of today’s conversation is racism and sport’s relationship to it. And our guests are Sanjay Bhandari and John Amaechi.
Sanjay is chair of Kick It Out, the charity campaigning to end racial and ethnic discrimination in English football.
John Amaechi OBE is a psychologist and founder of the APS Intelligence consultancy.
The context for the podcast is English cricket and specifically the accusations of institutional racism made against Yorkshire Cricket Club by Azeem Rafiq, the former player, who detailed his experiences at a highly charged and very emotional meeting of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee on November 16th.
The conversation took place before the publication yesterday of the ECB’s action plan to tackle the issues raised by the controversy.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of li…
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Nov 23, 2021
UP211: The esport psychologist
Mia Stellberg is an esport psychologist. She’s employed by some of the world’s most successful teams to help them win and keep the best gamers in the world happy and focused on being the best they can be.
Stellberg wrote recently that “Esport is chess at warp speed. It’s strategic, you need to be really clever, several steps ahead of your opponent, you need to have good strategy, you need to practice all the time, to the point – and even beyond – of obsession.”
So, what does she do to make good players better? What’s the tension between the needs of the individual player and the team owners? What are the areas of competitive advantage that determine the difference between winning and losing?
But beyond that, we talk about the life of a pro gamer, the pressures and the incentives. And we ask how the usual tropes of sports psychology apply to the gaming world, things like team culture, 10,000 hours and marginal gains.
Welcome to a world I hardly knew existed, and an o…
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Nov 19, 2021
UP210: Michel Masquelier
Michel Masquelier entered IMG as an intern and left as chairman. The intervening 30 years saw a transformation in the sports economy, led by the boom in media rights values, an area in which Masquelier became a world expert as head of IMG Media, first under Mark McCormack, then Ted Forstmann and finally Ari Emanuel’s Endeavour.
We talk about private equity, bundles and betting, and his new book, Life Is Not A Dress Rehearsal, which charts the ups and downs of a career in sport.
The Unofficial Partner newsletter goes to thousands of people across the sports business, to join them sign up via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Nov 16, 2021
UP209: Eni Aluko, Angel City and the business of football
This is another episode in our series Talking To Women About The Sports Business, with my regular co-host Laura Weston, the global PR consultant and trustee of the Women’s Sport Trust.
Earlier this year Eni Aluko was appointed sporting director of Angel City FC, the new expansion team in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) which begins playing in 2022. The Los Angeles based franchise has a majority female ownership group led by actor Natalie Portman, venture capitalist Kara Nortman and a host of other founder members including Serena Williams, Jennifer Garner and Mia Hamm.
Before moving in to management, Aluko played professional football for Chelsea and Juventus among others and made 102 appearances for the England national team from 2004–2016, competed at the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup in China, 2009 UEFA Women's Euro, 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup in Germany, 2013 UEFA Women's Euro, and 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup in Canada. At the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, she re…
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Nov 9, 2021
UP208: Simon Bazalgette
Richard first met Simon Bazalgette when he was chief executive of The Jockey Club, the organisation that owns some of the UK’s biggest racecourses including Aintree, Epsom and Cheltenham.
But this isn’t really a conversation about horse-racing, because Bazalgette was very early to some of the big themes that we talk about on this podcast. things like media streaming services, data, betting, financial models and digital publishing. His career really took off in the music business, when he was one of the founders of Music Choice Europe, an early digital music platform and was one of the darlings of the first dotcom boom when it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2000, boasting 14million subscribers and was a forerunner of today’s music streaming and digital radio industry.
Simon is a non-executive director of the EFL was a senior independent director of the World Athletics Championships in London in 2017 and is a member of the Sports Board of the NSPCC.
And if you don’t a…
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Nov 5, 2021
UP207: The Bundle 14
This is another episode of The Bundle, our regular look at the sports media and streaming market, with my co-host Yannick Ramcke. This week’s guests are Hannah Brown, the Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer at Formula E, who lists Sky, Relevent Sports, FuboTV and KPMG in her CV, and Murray Barnett, ex ESPN, World Rugby, F1 and now the D2C Sport consultancy.
We look in depth at the Premier League’s North American ambitions, UEFA’s agency RFP and ask, what do you get when you buy BT Sport, a question facing DAZN if recent media stories are right.
And if you don’t already get the weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter, you can join thousands of busy sports biz execs who receive it direct to their inbox every Thursday, subscribe via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to…
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Nov 2, 2021
UP206: ReThinking Sport: Multi-Club Ownership Pt2
This is episode 9 of ReThinking Sport, our series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
One of the big ambitions of this series has been to look at the football market through the eyes of the people who own and control the clubs and the people in charge of the leagues and the sports’ governing bodies.
So previous episodes have featured Ricky Parry, the chair of the EFL, Mark Bullingham, CEO of The FA and Kelly Simmons, head of the women’s professional game at The FA and the WSL.
On the club ownership side, we’ve had guests including Andy Holt, owner of Accrington Stanley, and Paul Conway, head of Pacific Media Group, one of the leading proponents of a multi-club ownership model, which is a feature of today’s conversation with our guests Brett Johnson and Fabrice Bocquet.
Brett Johnson is a founder and partner of property development company Fortuitous Partners which invests in professional sports and…
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Oct 29, 2021
UP205: Media coverage of women’s sport
This week the Women’s Sport Trust released some new research, commissioned by them and carried out by the Futures agency, who monitored UK media coverage of women’s sport over the course of the last year.
The data is available via the Trust’s website.
What are the key findings of this research, what works and what doesn’t when it comes to the job of attracting more people to watch and to stay watching beyond the big quadrennial events and individual star performances.
To answer these and several more questions, we invited Chris Hurst, Jo Osborne and Victoria Cotton to unpick the data and share their considerable experience on this topic.
Chris has been a Trustee of the Women’s Sport Trust since 2017, having previously worked for organisations including the Premier League, the ICC, BBC Sport and Nielsen, and is now a sports consultant. He is also a Non-Executive Director of the Rugby Football League.
The view from the media side of this discussion is brought by Jo Osborne…
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Oct 26, 2021
UP204: The UP Women’s Street Football Brainstorm
This week we’ve assembled another group of very expensive expert advisers to brainstorm a new sports property that will make billions for its creators (minus Unofficial Partner commission, cash only).
The idea comes from our friend and former podcast guest Gundeep Anand, who in 2016 created The Last Stand, a street football tournament aimed at uniting communities and breaking down social, cultural and religious barriers through sport.
Now Gundeep is launching a women’s street football version in the centre of Birmingham next month and we got a group together to see how we can help.
Joining Richard and Gundeep are Ricardo Fort and Michaela Gooden.
Ricardo was head of Coca Cola and Visa global sport sponsorship programmes and now runs his own consultancy, Sport by Fort, advising rights holders, brands and other investors in how to make sport work for them.
Michaela is a former professional footballer for Fulham who became an agent with Magna Sports Management, where she overse…
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Oct 22, 2021
UP203: John Amaechi OBE
Today’s guest is John Amaechi OBE, the former NBA basketball player who has built a global reputation as an organisational psychologist via his own APS Intelligence consultancy. His book The Promises of Giants was a New York Times bestseller, and is a manifesto for a new type of conversation about leadership.
A Chartered Scientist, John was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health and a Research Fellow at the University of East London.
If you’ve ever heard John talk about sport and the business that surrounds it, you’ll know this is a topic about which he has very strong and persuasive views.
Every episode of Unofficial Partner can be found by using the big podcast providers, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podcast app.
And if you don’t already get the weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter, you can join thousands of busy sports biz execs who receive it direct to their inbox every Thursday, subscribe via unofficialpartne…
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Oct 19, 2021
UP202: Re-Thinking Sport #8
This is episode 8 of ReThinking Sport, our series made in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
Our guests today are Kieran Maguire and Nic Coward.
Kieran is a British academic, author and broadcaster best known for The Price of Football, the hugely popular podcast he hosts alongside comedian Kevin Day, which is based on Kieran’s book of the same name.
Nic Coward’s career has seen him working at the very top level of British sport, in roles including General Secretary of the Premier League, chief executive of the British Horseracing Authority, joint chief executive of The FA and the first chair of the global Sports Rights Owners Coalition. He is currently chair of UK Athletics and Golf England and is an expert partner at Portas.
The conversation takes several of the threads that emerged from previous episodes in this series, from conversations with Rick Parry, chair of the EFL, Mark Bullingham, CEO of The FA, Paul C…
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Oct 15, 2021
UP201: EA Sports, FIFA and women
For people under 30, FIFA is a computer game not a governing body. That’s become almost a cliche of sports marketing, and like all cliches, there might be some truth in it.
Which is why the noises recently coming from EA Sports, the company which makes the game, are so interesting.
There’s talk of a split between the governing body which licenses its name for around $150million a year and the company that is said to have turned that license in to $20billion over the past two decades.
Our guest today is David Jackson, the Everton supporting former Barclays marketer who is in charge of the FIFA brand for EA Sports.
We obviously talk about the current licensing story and much more besides, including the marketing potential of women players as cover stars of the FIFA game.
Listen to to the rest of the Unofficial Partner achieve by subscribing via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podcast app.
You’ll also need to get the weekly Unofficial Partner new…
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Oct 11, 2021
UP200: Esports Economics #2
This is the episode 2 of our series Esports Economics in collaboration with Nielsen Sport, the world’s leading source of sports measurement and analytics.
The conversation is focused on sponsorship and the key question of return on investment and builds on some of the threads we covered in episode 1.
Our guests are Carlos Alimurung and Nicholas Bruce.
Carlos is CEO of ONE Esports, the esports joint venture between ONE Championship and Dentsu.
Nick Bruce, Vice President of Consulting and Research for Asia at Nielsen, based in Tokyo.
So we challenge many of the preconceptions about esports among the brand marketing community, the arguments for sponsorship versus programmatic advertising and the big differences between rights packages developed in esports compared to those in traditional stick and ball sports marketing.
To keep in touch with the rest of the Esport Economics series, make sure you subscribe to Unofficial Partner via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via yo…
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Oct 8, 2021
UP199: Leaders Live: The UP Billion Dollar Brainstorm
We were at Leaders London this week and did a live session in front of a carefully selected audience of sports biz execs. The premise was simple enough, how can two amoral chancers like me and Sean build a new billion dollar sports property by cobbling together all the best bits from elsewhere and selling it to private equity, venture capital, media, sponsors or anyone else with deep pockets and a ‘Passion for Sport’?
To make it work we sought advice from no fewer than 11 very expensive experts from the Unofficial Partner WhatsApp Group, who came along to Twickenham with us. So you’ll hear the following people over the course of the next hour: Matt Rogan, Richard Ayers, Michael Broughton, Sophie Hind, Jane Purdon, Nic Coward, Patrick Massey, Gary Linke, Giles Morgan, Murray Barnett and Alex Inglot.
If you want to see how the Billion Dollar Brainstorm came about, you’ll need to catch up with the Unofficial Partner newsletter, which comes out every Thursday, subscribe via unoff…
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Oct 5, 2021
UP198: Inside The Hundred
The Hundred was one of the sports business stories of the summer in the UK. A new short form cricket event concept that was created and owned by the ECB, the governing body for the game in England and Wales.
Our guests today were central to the planning and execution of the tournament. Beth Barrett Wild is Head of The Hundred Women's Competition & Female Engagement for the ECB and Rob Calder is Commercial Director of The Hundred, having formally carried out that role for the ECB as a whole.
We talk about what went right and what they’ll change, the expectations around the pay, the marketing of the women’s game, building team brands and the commercial arguments for new formats.
If you like the podcast, you’ll really like the Unofficial Partner newsletter, which comes out every Thursday, subscribe via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the globa…
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Oct 1, 2021
UP197: Geoff Shackelford
Today’s guest is American golf blogger, journalist, podcaster and broadcaster Geoff Shackelford, who’s just back from Whistling Straits after covering the Ryder Cup.
Geoff’s one of the best and most astute observers of the game, his website and newsletter are essential reading not just for the golf industry but for the wider sports business too.
We talk about golf’s perennial pursuit of youthful audiences, the implications of the betting era and the threat of disruption to the tours from the Premier Golf League and other iterations, backed by private equity and Saudi money.
If you like the podcast, you’ll really like the Unofficial Partner newsletter, which comes out every Thursday, subscribe via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us o…
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Sep 24, 2021
UP196: Grant Wahl
Today’s guest is American soccer journalist, podcaster and broadcaster Grant Wahl, who’s first book The Beckham Experiment was a bestselling insight in to sport, celebrity and the market for the game in America. He followed that up with an attempt to get elected as FIFA President against Sepp Blatter. This failed, but in very entertaining and revealing ways. We talk MLS valuations, Ted Lasso and whether there’s a difference between Sepp Blatter and Gianni Infantino.
*This podcast is sponsored by Leaders Week London, which is back in real life at Twickenham Stadium between the 5th to the 7th of October. **To get 15% off, use the code UnofficialPartner15 via the Leaders website.*
The full agenda is now live on the site with details of speakers and sessions, including the Unofficial Partner Billion Dollar Business Brainstorm on the Podcast Stage at 12 noon on the first day. There’s a limit of fifty people allowed in the room, so you’ll need to get there early.
There are more…
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Sep 21, 2021
UP195: Andy Holt
Andy Holt is the hugely successful entrepreneur who in 2015 stepped into save his local football club Accrington Stanley FC from financial ruin. The club was one of the English Football League’s original founding members in 1888 and remains one of its smallest. But the club has been transformed under Holt’s ownership, winning promotion to EFL League One in 2018.
“Let's be clear," he said when he bought the Accrington Stanley. "Whatever individual, company or other entity owns the club is largely irrelevant, because this isn't a business venture. Has anyone ever made a profit out of Accrington Stanley? In 50 years I will be dust blowing in the wind - hopefully our input will mean the club is not!”
That’s a sentence that’s sure to resonate with any fans of Derby County, Bury or Macclesfield Town, EFL clubs which have recently gone bankrupt and which are sure to be joined by others as they struggle against an array of problems, from bad owners, the Covid shutdown and the ec…
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Sep 17, 2021
E194: Meg MacLaren
Today is part of our Talking To Women About The Sports Business series, with my regular co-host Laura Weston. Our guest is the English golfer Meghan MacLaren.
MacLaren is one of the most interesting people in golf at the moment and as you’ll hear we’ve been wanting to get her on the pod for some time, but because she’s currently playing mainly in the US at the moment, her schedule is very full.
Beyond her ability as a player, MacLaren has built a reputation for being an insightful analyst of the game and the cultural and business that surrounds it. I really recommend her Twitter account and her personal blog that we reference in the conversation, which took place the evening before the Sport Industry Awards, which explains some of the chat at the start.
This podcast is sponsored by Leaders in Sport, which is back in real life at Twickenham Stadium between the 5th to the 7th of October. There’s always a lot going on at Leaders, but I’ve got my eye on a peer to peer session…
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Sep 14, 2021
E193: Re:Thinking Sport - Multi Club Ownership
This is episode 7 of our series Re Thinking Sport in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
The subject is multi club ownership in European football, and our guest is Paul Conway, head of Pacific Media Group, one of the pioneers of the genre. Pacific Media recently completed the takeover of Dutch club FC Den Bosch, which becomes the seventh club in the group, which also includes English club Barnsley, AS Nancy in France, KV Oostende from Belgium, Denmarks’s Esbjerg.
So we ask, how does it work in practice, what’s the strategic advantage to each club and what’s the impact of on areas such as player transfers, performance data and the role of managers.
Paul Conway gives us an hour of his time for what feels like a genuine inside look at how professional football works today, if you work in sport, it’s one you need to hear. The other voice you’ll hear is that of my co-host in this episode, Patrick Massey, partner a…
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Sep 10, 2021
E192: The Bundle #13
This is another episode in our regular series on the sports media, broadcast and streaming market. My regular co-host Yannick Ramcke are joined by Charlie Boss, Chief Commercial Officer at The Jockey Club and former Disney ESPN executive.
This podcast is sponsored by Leaders in Sport, which is back live at Twickenham Stadium between the 5th to the 7th of October. The guest list is looking good, a lot of big name sports organisations are there *adidas, Bayern Munich, NBA, Chevrolet, NFL, City Football Group, Spotify, UEFA, WWE, loads more*.
*To get 15% off the full ticket price*, go via the Leaders Week London website and use the code *UnofficialPartner15*
We’re doing a live podcast, so make sure come and say hello when you get there.
As ever, if you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.
To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com
*Un…
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Sep 7, 2021
E191: Ronaldo, Messi and the business of big transfers
This summer football transfer window has been about massive names moving between so-called super clubs. Messi to PSG, Ronaldo to Man Utd. Mbappe apparently not moving to Real Madrid.
A theme of the business conversation is the commercial value of the individual player to the club. This complex issue is often dumbed down to a narrower conversation about shirt sales.
But, as you’ll hear over the next fifty minutes or so, its much more interesting than that.
To help us unpick the story, we have Daniel Kirschner, co-founder of Greenfly, the social media platform, Professor Simon Chadwick of Emylon Business School and Tim Crow, the sports sponsorship expert and former CEO of Synergy Sponsorship.
*This podcast is sponsored by **Leaders in Sport,** which is back live at Twickenham Stadium between the 5th to the 7th of October. There’s a long list of star speakers on the Leaders Week website including Sally Bolton CEO of Wimbledon and the All England Tennis Club, Kelly Simmons MBE, The…
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Sep 3, 2021
E190: Ed Warner
Today’s guest is Ed Warner OBE, who was Chair of UK Athletics from 2007 to 2017, and has been Chair of World Para Athletics for the International Paralympic Committee since 2011. He led the successful bid to stage the 2017 World Athletics Championships in London’s Olympic Stadium, and was subsequently Chair of the London 2017 organising committee.
And as you’ll hear he brings a view from what he calls his day job as a city financier and chair of a private equity group.
*This podcast is sponsored by **Leaders in Sport**, and we’ll be at Twickenham Stadium between the 5th to the 7th of October to do a live Unofficial Partner podcast. *
*Listeners can get a 15% discount by clicking** here** and quote the code UnofficialPartner15. *
*Come and say hello when you get there. *
As ever, if you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.
To join…
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Aug 28, 2021
E189: Esport Economics #1
This is the first in a new series looking at the business of esports, in collaboration with Nielsen Sports, the world’s leading source of sports measurement and analytics.
Today’s guests are Matthew Archambault, head of partnerships for North America at Riot Games, publishers of the phenomenally successful League of Legends franchise. Matt manages strategic partnerships, national sponsorships, media rights, and merchandising for the League Championship Series (LCS).
Joining Matthew is Matt Boyd, Vice President of Nielsen Esports and Games. Based in North America, Matt leads client relationships with teams, publishers/leagues, and brands, providing the data analysis to help them maximize the value of commercial partnerships.
So this is a conversation unpicking how the business of esports works through the lens of the industry's multiple stakeholders, from the game publishers to the media platforms and commercial partners through to the teams, leagues, players and fans.
To keep i…
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Aug 27, 2021
E188: Mike Keegan
Today’s guest is Mike Keegan, sports news correspondent of the Daily Mail, who inherited that paper’s Sports Agenda column from the legendary Charlie Sale, a two time guest on the podcast.
So we talk about some of the regular themes that crop up as part of the sports news agenda, what he describes as the ‘cult-like’ obsession with youth audiences at BBC Sport, what it was like attending the Euro 2020 final and then we talk about Mike’s new book, called This Is How It Feels: An English Football Miracle, which celebrates the glory days of Oldham Athletic in the early 1990s.
*This podcast is sponsored by our friends at the Professional Triathlete Organisation, who have a big new event coming up at the end of August. The Collins Cup has a $1.5million prize purse and is a reformatting of the sport along the lines of golf’s Ryder Cup. **If you’d like to find out more, **link here.*
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Aug 24, 2021
E187: Re:Thinking Sport - Mark Bullingham
This is a special episode of Re:Thinking Sport, our collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
Our guest is Mark Bullingham, who is the Chief Executive of The FA, the governing body for football in England, one of the biggest jobs in sport.
His remit covers the entire game, from England teams to grassroots, the Women’s Super League to Wembley Stadium.
Bullingham was promoted to the top job in March 2019 following the departure of Martin Glenn, the man who recruited him to The FA as the commercial director. Before that he ran Fuse, Omnicom’s sport and entertainment agency and was marketing director of the America’s Cup sailing race.
It’s a conversation that covers a lot of ground, including The FA’s relationship with the commercial sector and innovation, the future funding model for the Women’s Super League, what he thought of The Hundred and what he’s learning about politics and politicians from Euro 2020 and T…
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Aug 13, 2021
E186: Betting technology
It’s become fashionable to use the term Gold Rush to describe the North American betting market. In 2018 the US Supreme Court overturned a federal bill banning gambling, which effectively signalled a shift that turned sports betting from an unregulated market to a regulated one.
Estimates as to the size of the sports betting marketplace vary wildly. But all agree that it’s growing quickly, and that media technology is going to play a major role.
Today’s podcast looks at the role broadcast technology is playing to make betting easier and more accessible to sports fans.
Our guests are Miheer Walavalkar, Co-founder and CEO of broadcast technology company LiveLike and Brian Josephs, Vice President of Digital Sport at Sportradar US, a leading global provider of sports data, betting and entertainment products.
Together, LiveLike and Sportradar have launched emBET, that integrates live betting content and data into sports broadcast OTT streams in real time.
We talk about what this…
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Aug 10, 2021
E185: 20 Years of the Sport Industry Awards
On Wednesday 8th September, more than a thousand lucky invitees will make their way to Battersea in south London for the 20th edition of the Sports Industry Awards, which has grown from the inaugural event back in 2001 to a staple of the UK industry calendar, boasting a cast of world famous faces from sport, politics, showbiz and the media.
So, enjoy the next fifty minutes or so in the company of the event’s founder Nick Keller and a group of people we asked to recall their memories of the event, including Baroness Tanni Grey Thompson, Steve Martin of M&C Saatchi Sport and Entertainment, Alex Willis head of marketing at Wimbledon and the All England Club and Alex Coulson, Sport Industry Group managing director.
*This week’s podcast is sponsored by our friends at the Professional Triathlete Organisation, who have a big new event coming up at the end of August. The Collins Cup has a $1.5million prize purse and is a reformatting of the sport along the lines of golf’s Ryder Cup. If…
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Aug 6, 2021
E184: Sue Anstiss MBE
This is another episode in our series Talking To Women About The Sports Business with my regular co-host Laura Weston.
Our guest today is Sue Anstiss MBE, who has written a good book called Game On: The Unstoppable Rise of Women’s Sport, featuring many of the guests from Sue’s own successful podcast series The Gamechangers, where she interviews trailblazing women from across sport and beyond.
*This week’s podcast is sponsored by our friends at the Professional Triathlete Organisation, who have a big new event coming up at the end of August. The Collins Cup has a $1.5million prize purse and is a reformatting of the sport along the lines of golf’s Ryder Cup. If you’d like to find out more, then **click here**. *
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.
To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the le…
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Aug 3, 2021
E183: Re:Thinking Sport - Rick Parry
This is episode five of our series of Re-Thinking Sport, with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.
Today we’re talking about government regulation of football with our guests *Rick Parry*, the chairman of the EFL, and Adam Paker from Portas.
Rick Parry is the former chief executive of Liverpool, the original CEO of the Premier League and a board member at New York Cosmos.
He was recruited from his position as a senior management consultant with leading UK firm Ernst & Young in 1991 to assist in planning the new Premier League. Appointed Chief Executive in February 1992, the competition was officially ratified just seven days later by The Football Association, allowing Parry to proceed with negotiations for a television deal which was eventually awarded to BSkyB and the BBC for a then record bid of £304 million over five years.
The context of the conversation is the recent review of English football carried out by Tracey Crouch MP, the…
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Jul 30, 2021
E182: The Buy Side: Microsoft
The Buy Side is our series with brand marketers about sport and sponsorship.
Today we’re talking about how Microsoft views sport, with Monica Robbins, the tech giant’s global Director of Sports Partnerships who oversees relationships with among others the NFL, the NBA and more recently, the ECB, the governing body of cricket in the UK among several others.
So this is a conversation about tech, the cloud, purpose based marketing, how devices drive consumption patterns and the view from Silicon Valley of sport’s role in showcasing brand and other types of messages.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.
To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our c…
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Jul 26, 2021
E181: The business of jeopardy
Today we’re talking about one of the most fundamental parts of the sports business: the product. And specifically the process of creating and adapting competition formats to increase jeopardy, fan connection and commercial value.
This is a conversation about the way in which leagues, tournaments and competitions are structured, and its relationship to the commercial value of sport, both as a way of driving demand but also on the supply side, creating opportunities for investment.
This is true whether we’re talking about Twenty20 cricket and the rise of the IPL or the current questions around the ECB’s new brainchild, The Hundred; the Premier League play-offs; The Super League; or FIBA’s 3x3 basketball format and Rugby Sevens, both of which feature at the Olympics.
Could a better format have saved The Super League? How can big tournaments be made more fun to watch but avoid contrived gimmicks? How can competitive balance be achieved without punishing excellence? And what does…
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Jul 23, 2021
E180: The Bundle #12
This is episode 12 of The Bundle, our regular deep dive in to the media rights market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke and our guest is Murray Barnett, ex ESPN, World Rugby, F1 and current founder of D2C Sport.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.
To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com
Here’s ten things we talked about:
* Amazon is beginning to look like just another sports broadcaster.
* There’s fun to be had over-interpreting the basket case that is the French sports rights market. Amazon price structure for Ligue 1 suggests the end of cross-subsidization, which could be good news for rights owners; increases potential for future rights acquisitions.
* *The Bundle price inflation:* ESPN just announced their second rise in 2021.
* *Does ESPN have an international vision*, or it just an American thing? I live…
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Jul 20, 2021
E179: The Professional Triathlon market
What would you do if you had a blank sheet of paper and wanted to create a new type of sports rights holder.
That’s the question posed in this conversation with Sam Renouf, Chief Executive of the Professional Triathlete Organisation, a body part owned by the best athletes in the world and backed by Sir Michael Moritz, one of the most successful tech investors of the last twenty years, via his company Sequoia Capital.
What is the opportunity for the PTO to build a media and commercial programme around a new event schedule starting with The Collins Cup, a Ryder Cup-type international team format that pits the best in the world together on 28th August.
This is a way in to questions facing every sports rights holder as they seek to navigate a global marketplace of fans with fast changing expectations of how they want to consume elite sport.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across…
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Jul 12, 2021
E178: SPORT AND THE POST-COOKIE INTERNET
This is a podcast about cookies, the tiny strands of data that follow us around the internet, allowing advertisers and websites to remember us, the pages we visit, our passwords and the contents of our shopping carts.
So, we ask what they are, who’s using them, why Google and Apple are trying to remove them and what the specific implications of this will be for sports marketing, from the perspective of sponsor brands and for rights holders seeking to commercialise their teams, tournaments and other inventory via digital channels.
To help us understand what a post-cookie internet might look like, we asked two experts in digital marketing to join us.
Dr Augustine Fou is a world renowned leader in the topic of digital marketing and ad fraud who has held Group Chief Digital Officer roles for major advertising networks and is a former McKinsey consultant. https://www.linkedin.com/in/augustinefou/
Joining Augustine is Phil Stephan, director at the sports data consultancy, Two Circles w…
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Jul 9, 2021
E177: Re:Thinking Sport - The Players and P/E
Re:Thinking Sport - The Players and P/E
This is the fourth episode in our series ReThinking Sport, organised in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultant dedicated to sport and physical activity.
Today’s topic looks at the role of private equity in football through the lens of the players. This alters the perspective on the conversation and I think, like me, you’ll find it opens up some very interesting routes in to what is one of the biggest questions in professional sport: Is private equity a good fit for sport?
Our guests are Jonas Baer Hoffman, general secretary of FIFPro, the global representative of professional footballers which acts to support players interests across 64 national member associations. Joining Jonas is Peter Hawkings, part of the Portas leadership team with a focus on investment, who has served and advised CEOs of some of the largest federations in England and globally.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newslett…
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Jul 6, 2021
E176: Stephen Nuttall
Steve Nuttall is one of the true pioneers of sport media and technology, working within some of the biggest companies in the world including notably, leading YouTube’s sport and UK business and managing the Google owned business’s relationships with major rights holders such as the IOC, FIFA and UEFA.
Nuttall has also held leadership positions within Sky Sports, Telepiu (now Sky Italia), and Sportal, the early darlings of the first tech boom. Before that he was commercial director of ENIC under Daniel Levy. He’s a board member of Ofcom and managing director of the America’s Cup sailing race.
For everyone interested in sport’s value as a media product, this was a great opportunity to have a conversation about how we got here, and what that tells us about where we’re going.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.
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Jul 2, 2021
E175: How To Win A Cannes Lion
The Cannes Lions awards are synonymous with excellence in marketing creativity and in 2019 they launched a sports specific category. Because of Covid, the entries for 2020 and 2021 have been combined and a short list of the best creative work in sports marketing was produced. The head of the judging panel for the awards was Ben Hartmann, chief client officer for Octagon, and he’s our guest today.
We talk about the criteria the panel of ten judges used to judge the work and we choose our favourites from the short list.
It’s a conversation about creativity in a sports marketing context, and much more besides, from the role of agencies, whether sponsorship helps or hinders creativity and we look at the threads that are common to the very best work.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.
To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com…
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Jun 29, 2021
E174: Sipsmith goes to Wimbledon
Today is day two of the Wimbledon championships, a fortnight of tennis, polite queues and Pimms. And as of this year, Sipsmith gin following the brands five-year deal with the All England Club, the rights owner of the grand slam tournament. So we talked to Alex Willis, Head of Communications, Content and Digital, at the All England Club and Shelley MacIntyre, who's Senior Global Marketing Director of gin brands for beam Suntory, the corporate owner of Sipsmith.
If you like the podcast, you're really like the Unofficial Partner newsletter that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business. Every Thursday to join them sign up by Unofficial Partner dot com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jun 18, 2021
E173: Marketing’s Bigger Picture
Today’s podcast is the first of a series in which we look at sports market through the lens of one of the biggest media and marketing networks in the world, Omnicom.
This allows us to get beyond the bubble of the sport sponsorship industry and look at sport through a wider lens and allows us to ask some broader questions as to the value of sport to brand clients.
So this is a conversation about what CMOs want from their marketing spend, and whether sport is equipped to deliver on those demands, we note the gap between the level of digital inventory on offer within sponsor term sheets, compared to the demand for digital advertising generally, which leads to the question, is sport selling what brands want to buy?
Our guests are three business leaders from across the Omnicom media network.
Louise Johnson is CEO of Fuse, Omnicom’s sport and entertainment agency, with clients including PepsiCo, Barclays, FedEx, Nissan, Vodafone, Royal London, EasyJet and Klarna. Louise is joined by…
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Jun 15, 2021
E172: Roger Mitchell
Today’s guest is Roger Mitchell, who you may know from another sports business podcast, Are You Not Entertained, where he uses his background in sport, finance and the music industry to great effect in questioning what’s happening in sport. Roger is great to talk to on a range of subjects, so that’s what we do, from podcasts and private equity to Spurs, Celtic, The Verve, machine learning and Tiger Woods. It’s a broad church and a good laugh.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.
To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jun 11, 2021
E171: Talking to Women About the Sports Business #4
This is another in our series where Richard and co-host Laura Weston look at the sports business through the lens of women from within and outside the industry.
Our guest today is Jennifer McClearen, author of a fascinating new book, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC
The book raises issues about the role of women in sports marketing, the difference between their visibility and the value they receive in return, we talk about some of the popular tropes of women’s sport and at the reality of life within the UFC’s business model.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.
To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community o…
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Jun 8, 2021
E170: Charlie Sale’s new book
Charlie Sale is a legend of sports journalism, often credited with creating the sports news genre, most famously as the feared and fearless writer of the daily Sports Agenda column in the Daily Mail and before that in the Express.
Charlie was one of our early guests on the podcast, following his premature retirement due to ill health in 2018, so it’s great to have him back on to talk about his new book, which in true Charlie Sale style, is already ruffling feathers in the corridors of sport. It’s called The Covers Are Off: Civil War at Lord’s and is about the two decades old dispute over the future development of the Home of Cricket, between the MCC and Charles Rifkind, the property developer who acquired the rights to develop the defunct railway tunnels that lie beneath the ground’s Nursery End. It’s about cricket, and sports business, but also about class, politics and the often painful balance between preserving the traditions of the past in a fast changing modern world.…
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Jun 4, 2021
E169: The Patrick Nally Diaries pt3 - Athletics
This is the third in our series looking at the formative years of the sports business with industry legend Patrick Nally. The first two episodes are on Fifa and the Olympics respectively, and in this episode we branch out in to athletics, starting in the late 1970s and early 80s, a period of called the golden era of track and field but which saw as much competition behind the scenes as on the track, as the athletes demanded an end to shamateurism, there were plans for a breakaway professional circuit, the inaugural London Marathon and the launch of the first ever World Athletics Championship in 1983. The deals that were done still resonate today, and help explain why professional athletics looks and behaves as it does. It’s a story of brown envelopes, car park bust ups, Bernie Ecclestone, Seb Coe, Horst Dassler and a whole new cast of characters.
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Jun 1, 2021
E168: Data is not the new oil
Our guest is Matt Locke, whose previous Unofficial Partner appearance remains one of our most popular ever episodes. Matt is the co-founder of Storythings, a consultancy specialising in the understanding of audiences and the entertainment formats that attract them *across a variety of spheres from entertainment to cause marketing and the public sector. Clients include the B*BC, PBS and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Before founding Storythings in 2011 Matt worked for over a decade in senior digital roles at Channel 4 and the BBC, including as Head of Innovation at BBC and Head of Multiplatform at Channel 4. He also started the *Public Media Stack* project, and is writing a *book about the history of attention metrics*, part of which is the focus of today’s conversation.
Matt thinks we need a different way of thinking about personal data, starting with the metaphors we use to describe it.
As ever with Matt, that’s just a way in to a rabbit hole of a conversation that questio…
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May 28, 2021
E167: The Bundle 11
This is episode 11 of The Bundle, our series on the media and streaming rights market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke.
Topics include the AT&T decision to merge WarnerMedia and Discovery, the state of the international football rights market, the Premier League renewals and we hear the buzz around Buzzer, the new short form mobile streamer which has just done a deal with the NBA.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.
To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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May 25, 2021
E166: Tim Hollingsworth OBE
Today we’re talking to Tim Hollingsworth OBE the Sport England chief executive and former chief executive of the British Paralympic Association (BPA).
Tim leads Sport England’s mission to get us all moving, by investing government money in sport and physical activity. This gives him a perspective in to some really important questions, such as what’s the role of government in sport, what does it want sport to do, does the system of national governing bodies work as well as it should, are they able to respond to a fast changing culture in which it’s easier to order a pizza than book a tennis court.
I ask him what Park Run has taught Sport England, whether Olympic gold medals are worth the cost and what the success of the Paralympic sport says about us as a country.
To find out more about Sport England’s work, I’d point you to their recently published 10-year strategy document called Uniting the Movement, which we reference during out conversation.
If you like the podcasts…
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May 18, 2021
E165: Re:Thinking Sport - Media Strategy
This is episode 3 of our regular collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity. This week’s topic is media strategy with special guests Glen Killane, Executive Director of Eurovision Sport, Andrew Ryan, Managing Director of FIBA Media and Wissam Khalaf, Partner at Portas.The media rights market is central to the sports economy, but we often talk about it in narrow price terms, focusing on how much money has been extracted by the major rights holders and ignoring the nuance and complexity in each particular marketplace.So in this episode we look at the regional variations in strategic approach to sports media, and ask dissect the role of OTT streaming and the impact of the Olympic Channel on the sports rights market.To go further in to the topics discussed you should subscribe to the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes directly to the inbox of thousands of senior sports professionals every Thursday. Sign up via unofficial part…
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May 14, 2021
E164: Andrew Craig
Andrew Craig is today’s guest, someone whose career in the sports business dates back to the mid-1980s, when he was one of the first recruits to ISL, the hugely influential sports marketing agency that played a central role in the commercial programmes around both FIFA and the IOC. Andrew was in charge during the formative years of the Olympic TOP programme before leaving to run CART, the American single seater motor racing series, taking it public in 1998. Since then, Craig has operated as much sought after consultant to Olympic bids and global motorsport properties.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday.To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our commu…
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May 11, 2021
E163: Paul Nolan’s career advice
Paul Nolan was headhunted to The FA by then CEO Adam Crozier, a decision that kick started Nolan’s career as one of the most influential people in the field of sports recruitment, leading to the creation of Nolan and Partners, one of the first specialist sports industry recruitment consultancies.So, this is a conversation about jobs, how to get them, how to keep them and how much you should be paid for them. Nolan and his team have placed many of the people who occupy sport’s boardrooms around the world and he has spent two decades at the sharp end of several regular themes of this podcast, such as digital transformation, diversity and inclusion, performance incentives and the sports industry’s relationship with change.If you ever wonder what it takes to reach the C-Suite and stay there, this is well worth your time.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports b…
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May 7, 2021
E162: Patrick Nally’s Olympic diaries
This is the second instalment in a series of podcasts looking at how the sports business has evolved over the past half century in the company of Patrick Nally, one of a small handful of people who can lay a genuine claim to have created the industry as we know it today.This episode is devoted entirely to the business story of the Olympic Games, starting in the crisis torn era of the 1970s, a period in which the IOC faced an almost existential crisis, moving from the tragedy of Munich in ’72 through to the boycotts and global political battles of Montreal, Moscow and LA.Patrick takes us behind the scenes, in to the conversations with the real powerbrokers of that time, such as Horst Dassler and Juan Antonio Samaranch, and we track the beginnings of the TOP programme, sports most valuable marketing idea, that has helped transform the Olympics from bankruptcy to the financial monster it is today.If you like the podcasts you’ll love the accompanying newsletter, that goes direct to the…
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May 4, 2021
E161: Tom Harrison
Tom Harrison is a former professional cricketer who now runs the game in the UK. As CEO of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), Harrison overseas every element, from the amateur club game, through to the first class county system and on to the England men’s and women’s teams across test, one day and Twenty20 formats.Harrison’s sport business career started with the launch of PlayCricket.com and continued at IMG, where he managed the agency’s media business in India and where he was responsible for global media rights sales for many international cricket boards and the Indian Premier League. He spent five years living in Asia, working for ESPN Star Sports. He moved over to the ECB’S top job in 2015.It’s been quite a journey and we talk about what he’s learnt along the way and how that frames his view of the job he’s held since January 2015.Expect an honest and thoughtful response to questions on a wide range of topics including: The Hundred, the future of women’s…
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Apr 30, 2021
E160: The Last Stand with Gundeep Anand
Today we talk to Gundeep Anand, who is the force of nature behind The Last Stand, the UK street football tournament created to unite communities and break down cultural and religious barriers through sport.It’s a great story and Gundeep’s a brilliant communicator, offering a perspective on sport, politics and media you very rarely hear in the sports business conversation. I really recommend listening in and then watching Gundeep’s film on The Last Stand on BBC Sport’s website.If you like the podcasts you’ll love the accompanying newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr…
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Apr 27, 2021
E159: Re-Thinking Sport Ep2
This is the second episode in our series created with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.The conversation today focuses on the specific opportunities and challenges faced by sport rights holders in women’s football and motorsport.Our guests are two of the most influential leaders in women’s sport.Kelly Simmons MBE is The FA’s Director of the women’s professional game, a brief that includes oversight of the Women’s Super League.And Catherine Bond Muir, the CEO of the W-Series, the world’s first all-female single-seater motor racing championshipJoining Kelly and Catherine is Patrick Massey, a partner at Portas Consulting and an advisor to leading major national and international sports organisations, leading the company’s work in football and sport investment in Europe and at a global level in horseracing.Episode 1 of Re-Thinking Sport can be found here.
If you like the podcasts you’ll love the accompanying newsletter, that…
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Apr 23, 2021
E158: The Super League WTF
There’s never been a week like it in the football business. So we’re talking about the launch, the short life and the excruciating collapse of The Super League with guests Sujit Jasani, managing director of Vero Communications and sponsorship expert Tim Crow, adviser to a growing roster of very unhappy football club sponsors.If you like the podcasts, you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, which goes to the inbox of thousands of people across the global sports business every Thursday. Sign up via unofficial partner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Apr 20, 2021
E157: Closing the Visibility Gap
Today sees the launch of ‘Closing the Visibilty Gap’ an important piece of new research in to the commercial future of women’s sport in the UK.It’s been carried out by the Women’s Sport Trust in partnership with the Two Circles agency which suggests that revenue generated by women's sport in the UK is set to grow from £350m in 2020 to £1bn by 2030 and makes the point that this growth is predicated on the growing visibilty of female athletes and teams.Joining us on the podcast to discuss these findings are Tammy Parlour, Chief Executive and Co-Founder of the Women’s Sport Trust and fellow trust board members Zarah Al Kudzy, head of commercial partnership development at Formula One and my regular series co-host and sports PR expert Laura Weston.Together we ask, what has to go right for the billion pound target to be met.The full study can be found on the Women’s Sport Trust website and includes bespoke toolkits for all major stakeholders in sport – rights-owners, athlet…
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Apr 16, 2021
E156: Euro 2021 on social media
The conversation today uses the upcoming UEFA Euro 2021 soccer tournament as the way into a debate about the value and best use of social media content. Our guests are Daniel Kirschner, co-founder of Greenfly, the content collaboration and distribution platform, Manu Leroy, director of marketing and communications for the Royal Belgian Football Association and JB Alliot, startup mentor and advisor to the UEFA Innovation Hub.If you liked the podcast, you'll really like the weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter. Sign up at UnofficialPartner.com.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Apr 13, 2021
E155: Ebru Koksal
This is the next in our series where we talk to women about the sports business, with regular co-host Laura Weston, the global pr consultant who’s a Trustee & PR lead Women’s Sport Trust and Trustee of the Liverpool FC Foundation.Our guest today is Ebru Koksal, the former investment banker who has been chief executive of leading Turkish football club Galatasaray for more than 15 years.Ebru became the first woman to be elected to the Executive Board of the European Club Association (ECA) in 2010 and the first and only female General Secretary of the Turkish Football Federation.In addition to her day job, Ebru Koksal is chair of Women in Football, where she is passionate about creating opportunities for women to step up to leadership positions in football.She is a graduate of Brown University, with a dual degree in Economics and International Relations, a graduate of Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program and a Chartered Financial Analyst.So, this is a conversation that…
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Apr 9, 2021
E154: Football as a platform
This is a conversation about how the digital economy is changing how football clubs define themselves, either as digital platforms or ecommerce vehicles. And we look at how the financial markets encourage this trend, and whether or not its feasible or desirable for big clubs like Manchester United, with huge global followings, to seek to be seen in the same company as the stars of Silicon Valley such as Pinterest or TikTok.Our guest is Lucas von Cranach is well placed to help us answer these questions. He founded OneFootball, the digital platform which boasts 85 million active users across the world, many of whom are under 30. The company is a veteran of digital, having begun life in 2008 and was among the first 1,000 apps in the Apple App Store.Recently, OneFootball acquired Dugout, the digital football network co-owned by ten of the biggest clubs in world football, including Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Chelsea and Milan. This places OneFootball and Lucas von Cranach at the centre of…
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Apr 6, 2021
E153: How sports PR changed
Today we’re talking about job of public relations and communications in sport, how it works and when it doesn’t, how it’s evolved and where its going, as sport increasingly becomes a digital content product, what do agencies and in house comms departments do.To answer these questions, we have Alun James whose career has taken him from Alan Pascoe Associates in the early nineties, through the International Tennis Federation, Hill and Knowlton and then at Four Communications. So this a conversation about everything, from indie shops to networks, inhouse and agency, bidding cities and the Olympic Games.Alun James has done it all, and he’s hear to tell us all about it.If you enjoy the podcasts, you’ll really like our weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter. Sign up today and get it direct to your inbox every Thursday.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industr…
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Mar 30, 2021
E152: Re-Thinking Sport: What’s important now
This is the first episode in a new series in collaboration with Portas, the leading global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.Portas has surveyed more than a hundred chief executives and leaders working across the sports sector to take the temperature of the industry in this extraordinary year.This episode sets the scene by talking to two people facing very different challenges. Chris Brindley MBE is chair of the 2021 Rugby League World Cup, which takes place across England later this year. And then we speak to Robert Sullivan, chief executive of The Football Foundation, whose remit is very different acting as the link between football's grassroots and the Premier League, The FA and the British government, with a brief to help communities improve their local football facilities through charitable grants.To frame the conversations, I first spoke to the person who ran the research program for Portas Consulting, Charlie Cowen, and asked why they did it and what…
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Mar 23, 2021
E151: The Man Utd shirt
This is an episode of What Just Happened? our regular news review series, where we take apart a recent story from in or around the sports business.This week, it’s the announcement of Manchester United’s new shirt deal with TeamViewer, the German based remote desktop software company which is reportedly worth in the region of £47million a year to the Premier League club.We invited Tim Crow, the sports marketing and sponsorship expert to explain what Man Utd are selling and what TeamViewer has just bought.If you like the Unofficial Partner podcasts, you’ll really like our weekly newsletter, which is read by thousands of people across the global sports business, and is where we talk about the topics and themes that arise from our podcast conversations. We can send it direct to your inbox every Thursday, all you have to do is sign up via unofficialpartner.com, where you’ll also find our back catalogue of podcasts.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of spo…
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Mar 19, 2021
E150: The Bundle #10
This is episode 10 of The Bundle, our regular deep dive in to the media rights markets around the world with co-host Yannick Ramcke.The current conversation is dominated by the huge new NFL domestic rights deals, which were announced formally a few hours after we recorded this episode.We ask the pros and cons of longer rights contracts and the difficulty facing many OTT streamers in getting stuck in the middle, between going direct to consumer and or doing deals with big media carriers.We deconstruct Facebook’s approach, comparing it to Amazon. The former wasn’t in the bidding for the NFL, whereas Amazon will be home for Thursday Night Football on Prime in the US.There’s a bit on F1’s flirting with the idea of a dedicated Amazon channel, ESPN’s National Hockey League multi platform deal for $400million a year and we ask how much of the value of the sports rights market is leaked by pirates.If you enjoy the podcasts, you’ll really like our weekly Unofficial Partner newslette…
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Mar 16, 2021
E149: Ricardo Fort
Until last month, Ricardo Fort had the job of deciding where Coca Cola’s vast sports marketing budget was spent. This is one of the most powerful roles in sport, because the soft drinks giant is omnipresent across major events, tournaments, leagues and athlete endorsements, from Olympics, FIFA World Cup, Euros, Premier League and McLaren F1 through national leagues and teams, personal endorsement of athletes and gamers and through to grass roots programmes around the world.So what did Ricardo Fort learn and what’s he doing next?If you like the Unofficial Partner podcasts, you’ll really like our weekly newsletter, which is read by thousands of people across the global sports business, and is where we talk about the topics and themes that arise from our podcast conversations. We can send it direct to your inbox every Thursday, all you have to do is sign up via unofficialpartner.com, where you’ll also find our back catalogue of podcasts.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast…
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Mar 12, 2021
E148: Did Facebook just change direction?
What is Facebook’s plan for sport? The social media giant chose not to bid for live NFL rights in the US and recently announced they were backing away from their existing UEFA Champions League and La Liga agreements in Latin America and India, respectively.A recent statement, via Sportico, has made waves: “the reality is that traditional media rights deals like these aren’t compatible with our current video business model. We also don’t think they’ll create the most sustainable value for the industry moving forward.”So what does this phrase mean for sports rights holders? Does it mark a new strategic direction in Facebook’s relationship with sport?We talk to Peter Hutton, Facebook’s global sport partnerships director about what rights holder can expect from Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and Facebook in the coming months and years.The conversation that strays in to other areas too, and we talk about private equity’s role in media rights negotiations, whether VR is ever g…
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Mar 9, 2021
E147: Inside the Wrexham takeover
Perhaps the biggest, most interesting, surprising sports business story of the last year has been the takeover of Wrexham football club by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.Like you, I saw the announcement and the social media campaign and wondered, why? What’s their plan, are they serious about investing in the third oldest professional football club which now resides in the lower reaches of the English Football pyramid, or is just about making a behind the scenes documentary, a content play or a way of promoting gin?So, to answer these questions we’ve got hold of the two people entrusted to carry out the plan on behalf of the two superstar owners.Humphrey Ker is a friend and colleague of Rob McElhenney, and a writer on the Apple TV show Mythic Quest. He’s the one who put the idea in McElhenney’s head in the first place and is now the club’s Executive Director.With him is Shaun Harvey, who many of you know will know as the former CEO of the EFL and before tha…
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Mar 5, 2021
E146: Ken Goldin and the future of sporting memorabilia
The market for sports memorabilia and collectibles has grown rapidly during the pandemic, and is currently a $10billion industry and our guest today is at the centre of it.Ken Goldin is founder of Goldin Auctions which was recently the subject of $40million dollar investment from The Chernin Group and a number of celebrities from across sports and entertainment. Peter Chernin, an investor in Barstool Sports and the Action Network, led the round, accompanied by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, NBA stars Kevin Durant and Dwyane Wade, NFL star Deshaun Watson, internet celebrity Logan Paul and media star Bill Simmons.Founded in 2012, Goldin Auctions has become one of the largest auction houses for sports collectibles, trading cards and memorabilia. The company grossed $800,000 in its first year, and more than $100 million in 2020. To date, it has overseen more than $300 million in sales.We talk about the market for nostalgia, and the future of the industry, and specifically the rise of c…
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Mar 2, 2021
E145: Channel 4 cricket
This winter, Channel 4 has been broadcasting the test series between India and England live in the UK. It’s the first time test cricket has been live on UK television since the 2005 Ashes, one of the most celebrated moments in the game’s recent history.It also marked the end of the Channel 4’s award winning cricket coverage, as the ECB, England cricket’s governing body controversially sold all rights to Sky Sports, which meant test cricket disappeared from free to air television for a generation.This decision remains one of the most hotly debated topics in sports media circles, and is used to frame the debate about sport’s relationship with pay television, and the critical balance between generating money at the expense of exposure and audience reach.To tell the story of what happened back then, we’ve recruited two people who played central roles in the drama.David Brook was head of strategy for Channel 4, the architect of the broadcaster’s fresh new approach to the game…
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Feb 26, 2021
E144: The Making of Pele
Today we’re talking about Pele, the greatest footballer ever, discuss. And specifically the new documentary film of his life, released on Netflix this week.
The film chronicles Pele’s life on and off the field from his first World Cup appearance in 1958 through to the great final of 1970, a period in which Brazil moved from democracy to dictatorship, and Pele himself from an unknown teenager to the most famous sportsman in the world.
Our guests are the film’s directors Ben Nicholas and David Tryhorn, and we discuss the storytelling challenge inherent in long form sports documentaries, the issue of editorial integrity and the expectations we project on to the athletes when it comes to social and political activism. If you like the Unofficial Partner podcasts, you’ll really like our weekly newsletter, which is read by thousands of people across the global sports business, and is where we talk about the topics and themes that arise from our podcast conversations. We can send it…
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Feb 23, 2021
E143: Sport, brands and cultural relevance
Today’s conversation is about the role of agencies in helping clients be culturally relevant in fans lives across sport, music and esports. And we ask why some brands seem able to build a bridge across those cultural divides, and some don’t.Our guests are Richard Adelsberg and Owen Laverty from the independent creative agency Ear to the Ground, where something seems to be going right.Despite the pandemic and the widespread cancellation of sport, Ear to the Ground has had a stellar year, tripling net profits and broadening its client portfolio that includes New Balance, Sony PS5, STATSports and Therabody, the performance tech brand.If you like the Unofficial Partner podcasts, you’ll really like our weekly newsletter, which is read by thousands of people across the global sports business, and is where we talk about the topics and themes that arise from our podcast conversations.We can send it direct to your inbox every Thursday, all you have to do is sign up via unofficialpartner.c…
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Feb 16, 2021
E142: Ralf Reichert
Ralf Reichert is one of the true pioneers of esports.He co-founded ESL in 2000 and has seen it grow in to one of the biggest and most influential event rights holders in the world.As will become clear, I come to this conversation with all the misconceptions of someone who never got in to gaming.But by the end, I’m a bit of a convert.I still don’t know much, but an hour with Ralf Reichert has put me straight on some of the redundant cliches people like me carry around with them.This is a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a long time, but as you’ll hear in the first bit of this interview, it’s not always easy to set these thing up.If you like the Unofficial Partner podcasts, you’ll really like our weekly newsletter, which is read by thousands of people across the global sports business, and is where we talk about the topics and themes that arise from our podcast conversations.We can send it direct to your inbox every Thursday, all you have to do is sign up via unoffi…
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Feb 12, 2021
E141: Audio, from FIFA Sound to Clubhouse
We’re talking about where audio fits in to digital strategy, with guests Sophie Hind of Voiceworks.ai and Charlie Beall of Seven League.We start on FIFA Sound, the governing body’s new collaboration with Universal Music, fronted by Liam Payne of One Direction, and move quickly through Alexa Skills, voice commerce, official club podcasts and of course, Clubhouse.To go deeper in to this topic and themes that run through the podcasts, you should sign up to Unofficial Partner’s weekly newsletter, which can delivered directly to your inbox every Thursday afternoon. Head to unofficialpartner.com to sign up.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Feb 9, 2021
E140: How to be the best
Mark Williams has spent his career studying expertise and is one of the world’s leading authorities on skill acquisition in sport.His book, co-written with journalist Tim Wigmore, is called The Best, How Elite Athletes Are Made and includes stories and interviews with many leading sports stars including Marcus Rashford, Steph Curry, Helen Glover and many more.So what can we learn from these people about how to be better at what we do in other spheres? How do some of the book’s themes apply beyond sport and are there patterns to the ‘best’ organisations?What are the limits of the sports metaphor in training business people? How much of success is about culture? Do businesses ever grow beyond the culture of their founders?What are the traps of using data as the basis of decision making and how valid is the idea that technology spend is the key competitive advantage in sport/business in the future?To go deeper in to this topic and themes that run through the podcasts, you should s…
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Feb 5, 2021
E139: Money Talks #6 How to value an NBA team
This is episode six of Money Talks, our regular series that looks at sport through the eyes of the finance and private equity sectors.Our guests today are Rob Tilliss and Michael Broughton, and the conversation is about how to value a professional sports team or franchise.Rob Tilliss is CEO of Inner Circle Sports and the former MD of JP Morgan’s sport advisory group. Inner Circle is a global investment bank focused the sports, media and entertainment industry.Michael Broughton is partner at Acceleration Capital, formerly director of business technology, innovation and investment strategy at FIFA.We talk about the various methods used to value an NBA franchise, what the new limited partnership rules mean for investors and owners, and how this compares to buying teams in the Premier League, with a look at the recent Burnley acquisition by ALK Partners.There’s more of this type of thing on the Unofficial Partner weekly newsletter, that’s delivered to your inbox every Thursday aftern…
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Feb 2, 2021
E138: Maggie Murphy
Today’s podcast is the first in a new series in which we talk to women about sport and the sports business more generally.Joining me on this trip is Laura Weston, the global communications consultant and board member of Women’s Sports Trust, as well as being a two time former guest on the show herself.Laura’s going to be my regular co-host in this series, helping us to ask better questions about women’s relationship with sport and the business that surrounds it.Our guest today is Maggie Murphy, CEO of Lewes FC, who is asking some really interesting questions herself about the task of building commercial value in women’s sport and specifically the evolution of professional football in Britain.Murphy doesn’t have the usual football boss CV and comes to the job from a career as a human rights and anti-corruption advocate, working for Transparency International, a global non profit seeking to end the abuse of power in its many forms.She has been playing adult competitive footba…
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Jan 29, 2021
E137: Patrick Nally's Fifa Diaries
There’s a very small group of people who have genuinely shaped what is today called the sports marketing industry. Patrick Nally is one of those, and is often bracketed together with Mark McCormack and Horst Dassler as the genuine architects of today’s sports business.
It’s hard to think of a major event or sport that doesn’t bear Nally’s handprints, from the Olympics and FIFA World Cup through to Commonwealth Games, snooker, rugby, golf, cricket and more latterly match poker.
But that’s just a part of the story. This is a conversation that reveals the back room deals, the agency politics and sometimes vicious personal rivalries among people at the very top of sport over the last fifty years.
If you’ve ever wondered how we got here, you’ll enjoy the next hour.
As ever, if you enjoy our podcasts, you’d really like the Unofficial Partner weekly newsletter, which builds on the topics and themes we talk about in more depth. You can sign up to that via UnofficialPartne…
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Jan 26, 2021
E136: Nick Bitel
Today we’re talking to Nick Bitel, one of the most influential people in British sport as chair of Sport England, board member of UK Sport and chief executive of the London Marathon.The timing of this podcast coincides with the launch of Sport England’s new ten year strategy, called Uniting The Movement.The conversation covers a bit of ground, from the image and reality of sports governing bodies, their relationship with innovation and change, and the lessons learnt from the Covid pandemic which has hit grassroots sport and activity so hard.So given all that, it’s appropriate that this podcast is sponsored by our mates at Joymo.Joymo is a livestreaming platform made for grassroots sports, allowing clubs to engage with fans from around the world and generate income with pay-per-view ticket sales. You can start livestreaming in an easy and cost effective way using the Joymo App. All the equipment your club needs is a smartphone or tablet and a tripod and you are ready to go. Sign u…
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Jan 22, 2021
E135: Jan Age Fjortoft
Of the +125 pods we’ve done over the past 2 years or so, today’s conversation must rank as one of our all time favourites.It’s with Norway’s greatest export Jan Age Fjortoft, the former international, Bundesliga and Premier League footballer turned media star and strategic sports consultant.In 1992, Fjortoft was one of just 39 foreign players in the Premier League during a career that saw him score 249 goals in 548 professional games including 71 caps for Norway, for whom he played at the 1994 FIFA World Cup in America.This was before he embarked on a range of second careers working as a popular TV host, interviewer and analyst for German and Norwegian television, ESPN and SKY Germany. He has also managed the Norway national team, worked as an adviser to the Norwegian government and anti drug agency WADA and built his own strategic consultancy.So, we talk about loads of things, including the peculiar and often bizarre reality of playing in the Premier League, the Middlesborogh…
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Jan 19, 2021
E134: What Just Happened? The FA’s Strategic Plan
This is Unofficial Partner’s news analysis series, where we look in depth at one recent story impacting the sports business.Today we look at the role of The FA following the publication of its Strategic Plan covering the next four years to 2024.If you work in sport, it’s worth ten minutes of your time to read.The FA is the governing body for football in England, with a remit that goes from the England teams, World Cups and Euros, St George’s Park and Wembley Stadium to the grass roots, coaching, youth football and safeguarding.We invited two people to come on and dissect the strategy document. First of all, Alex Horne who held a number of leadership roles within The FA including CEO, COO and General Secretary. And then following Alex, we have Matt Rogan, one of the co-founders of Two Circles, the agency that works with many governing bodies both in the UK and around the world.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought…
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Jan 15, 2021
E133: Nic Coward
Nic Coward currently chairs UK Athletics and England Golf and several other organisations both in and beyond sport. He began his career working as a lawyer for The FA and has since held leadership roles at many of the UK’s biggest sports rights holders including the Premier League, British Horseracing Authority and he advises an array of international rights holders across motorsport, football and a host of others. So it’s fair to say he’s thought long and hard about how sport works and when it doesn’t. This is a conversation about many different things, including people’s relationship with change, the effectiveness of sports organisations and the day to day job of leadership.If you like the podcasts, you’d really like the weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter, which goes in to greater depth on the topics and themes raised in the podcasts. You can sign up to that via UnofficialPartner.com where you can also delve in to the back catalogue of around 130 previous podcast conver…
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Jan 12, 2021
E132: The Bundle #9
Today’s podcast is episode 9 of The Bundle, our regular series of conversations about sports media and the streaming market with co-host Yannick Ramcke.We start in France by picking apart the ongoing saga in the country’s top football league following Mediapro’s premature exit from its huge domestic rights agreement, which leaves a trail of uncertainty among clubs, players and fans, with Canal Plus seemingly the only entity ready to pick up the pieces and at a fraction of the price promised by Mediapro.Secondly, another regular appearance on The Bundle for DAZN, this time using them as the way in to a conversation about how the new generation of streaming sports sites are pricing their products and repackaging their OTT content for linear channels.Then we look at the metrics around Amazon’s recent streaming of NFL games in the US, BeIN’s recent rights acquisitions and look ahead to the upcoming Serie A rights auction.As ever, if you like the podcasts, you’d really like the…
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Jan 8, 2021
E131: What Just Happened - That Leeds tweet
Today we unpick the recent incident involving England footballer turned media pundit Karen Carney and Leeds United, the newly promoted Premier League club.The story starts out as just another Premier League matchday, with football pundits lined up to give their opinions ahead of the game between Leeds United and West Bromwich Albion which was being aired on Amazon Prime. One of those match analysts was Karen Carney, an England international with 144 caps to her name. She offered view the Leeds social media team didn’t like, so they clipped the video to the club’s official Twitter feed. Up in the director’s box, Leeds United’s owner Andrea Radrizzani saw this and retweeted the clip a couple of times, and which remain on his feed today.What happened next was depressingly obvious. Karen Carney’s Twitter account was trolled by hundreds of anonymous Leeds fans hurling some really vile misogynistic abuse, to the extent that Carney later deleted her Twitter account, cutting off her…
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Jan 5, 2021
E130: The Buy Side #4 - Vitality
Today’s podcast is episode 4 of The Buy Side, our regular series of conversations with brand marketers about sport and sponsorship.Our guest is Nick Read, Managing Director of the Vitality programme, the health and lifestyle insurance company which has become a very visible presence around sport, receiving plaudits for its approach to sponsorship of a variety of women’s sport properties, Parkrun and more latterly Premier League football clubs.We talk about the health insurance category and the challenge of commodification in a world where many of us choose our insurance via comparison websites, the role of incentives in tackling obesity, the decoupling of women’s sport sponsorship rights by federations and teams, the issue of category creep and then on to Vitality’s support for men and womens’ cricket, from the Vitality Blast to The Hundred, and I ask Nick what he thought of the ECB’s decision to align The Hundred so closely with KP, the crisp and snacks brand.If you enjoy…
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Dec 18, 2020
E129: How Adtech Ruined the Internet
Dr. Augustine Fou is a world renowned expert in digital advertising fraud who consults to major advertisers and publishing groups. He was formerly Group Chief Digital Officer of Omnicom’s Healthcare Consultancy Group, a $100 million group of 8 agencies serving pharma, medical device, and healthcare clients.So today’s conversation is about what has gone wrong with digital marketing and how the rise of adtech has undermined the potential of the internet as a marketing channel. This will change your view on topics including the Long Tail, behavioural and hyper targeting and the reality of programmatic media buying.A generation of marketers have been conned in to expecting massive audiences for their content, says Fou, but the reality is very different, bringing in to question the real returns sponsors get from branded content, mobile video and performance marketing.We reference some of Augustine’s published work on the topic, which I’ll include in the next Unofficial newsletter, w…
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Dec 15, 2020
E128: The FT and sport - Murad Ahmed
The Financial Times has always had an on-off relationship with the sport sector over the years, with some very good journalists covering the beat in a brief that also included other sectors such as Leisure, Hotels and Gambling.That’s changed and under the leadership of Murad Ahmed, the paper is treating sport as a standalone asset class, with a dedicated transatlantic team and a set of sport specific products from newsletters to events, in addition to greater coverage in the paper and online.So today’s conversation is about the relationship between sport and the finance sector, the impact of private equity’s interest in teams and leagues, and we ask, what defines a FT sport story?If you enjoy our podcasts, you’ll love the Unofficial newlsetter that’s delivered weekly to the inboxes of thousands of senior people from across the sport business sector. You can sign up free by heading to UnofficialPartner.com.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport.…
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Dec 11, 2020
E127: Money Talks #5 - Marcus John
This is episode 5 of Money Talks, our series on sport’s relationship with finance, venture capital and private equity. Our guest is Marcus John, CEO of Sports Capital Advisors based in Singapore, who was an early stage investor in Formula E and Extreme E and advises private equity funds and family offices on sports investment strategy and execution.Marcus was previously at IMG, during the Teddy Forstmann buyout in 2004 and so we talk about the impact of that moment both on IMG but on the sports industry as a whole. Then we talk about the market for sports investment advice as new money in Asia’s largest economies chases high value European and North American sports IP and we ask what the challenges and the implications of sport’s ever closer relationship with private finance.If you enjoy our podcasts, you’ll love the weekly Unofficial Newsletter that goes deeper in to the themes and topics we talk about in the pod. Head to UnofficialPartner.com and sign up.
*Unofficial Partner…
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Dec 1, 2020
E126: The Buy Side #3 - Visa
This is episode three of The Buy Side, our series of conversations with senior brand marketers about sport and sponsorship.
Today’s conversation is about life at the top end of the global sports market with Stephen Day, Vice President Sponsorship, Visa Europe. The Visa brand has become part and parcel of the big event experience for millions of people around the world. The company’s partnership strategy includes long term deals with the biggest events rights holders in the business, from the Olympics, Paralympics, FIFA World Cup and the NFL Super Bowl. Most recently, Visa became the first ever UEFA sponsor dedicated to women's football, following the unbundling by UEFA of sponsorship rights from the men's game.Stephen Day’s background in sports marketing includes stints in charge of sports sponsorship programmes at Guinness, RBS and NatWest, covering events such as the Rugby World Cup, The Six Nations and the England cricket team. So there’s a bit about Fred the Shred Goodwin,…
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Nov 27, 2020
E125: Manoj Badale on the lessons of the IPL
The IPL is one of only two professional sports leagues in the world where all of its franchise teams are profitable. Twelve years since launch, the IPL is valued at $6.3billion, accounts for over 30% of global cricket revenues and over 60% of India’s sport economy.These numbers are why every rights owner and governing body seeks to learn lessons from both Twenty20 cricket and the IPL.But what are those lessons?How much of it is about sporting format, or is it specific to India, its culture and media economy, and how much credit should we give the league’s creators and the group of entrepreneurs who put their money in to building the franchises.We talk to Manoj Badale OBE, the sport and tech entrepreneur who has been the lead owner of the Rajasthan Royals franchise since the birth of the tournament. Many of the regular themes of our podcasts are here: sport as entertainment, the role of private investment in sport and the implications of globalisation.During the conversation, we ref…
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Nov 24, 2020
E124: Luis Vicente
Luis Vicente began his sports career as a lawyer working for toy car company, where his job was to haggle over the price of IP with well known Formula One teams. Then he became a football agent, with a player roster that included Luis Figo, Ronaldo and Andriy Shevchenko.
Since the mid 2000s however, Vicente main role has been to foster a culture of innovation within some of the most famous sport’s organisations in the world, from Real Madrid and Manchester City to Fifa and now, as Group CEO of Eleven Sport, the broadcast platform which forms part of Aser Ventures, the investment vehicle of Andrea Radrizzani, the owner of Leeds United. With a CV like that, it’s perhaps inevitable that a conversation with Luis Vicente covers a great deal of ground, from the nature of innovation, the role of private equity and the business of model of football super agent Jorge Mendes. If you enjoy our podcasts, you should head over to UnofficialPartner.com and sign up for our weekly newsletter, wher…
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Nov 17, 2020
E123: Two Circles buys TRM
There’s been a major sports agency acquisition this week as Two Circles bought the rights sales house TRM Partners for what the Wall Street Journal estimate to be in the region of $45million, a number that is roughly equivalent to the price paid for Two Circles last year, by George Pyne’s sport and entertainment holding company Bruin Sports Capital.
So, this podcast is going to unpick what this means, with first Gareth Balch, founder of Two Circles and then with Leo Thompson and Harry Horsley, co-founders of TRM. To read more about this deal and what it says about the post-Covid economy of professional sport, head over to UnofficialPartner.com and sign up for our weekly newsletter, where we go deeper in to the issues and themes that arise from our podcast conversations.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign u…
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Nov 10, 2020
E122: The Bundle #8
This is Episode 8 of The Bundle with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke, where we go deep in to the world of sports media rights and distribution, asking the questions that everyone in the sports business wants answers to.This week we cover the following stories:* Overthinking Amazon’s Italy UCL play* F1’s YouTube experiment* Premier League PPV RIP* Money v Morals. Sport’s Saudi dilemma* Infront’s warning over private equity in Serie AIf you enjoy the podcast, make sure you sign up to the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes in to greater depth on the themes we’re covering each week. You can get that by signing up at Unofficialpartner.com where you can also access the first seven episodes of The Bundle and all the other 122 Unofficial Partner podcasts.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the week…
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Nov 6, 2020
E121: Marcus Luer
We’re talking about the various sports markets across Asia today with one of the region’s highest profile entrepreneurs, Marcus Luer, who founded Total Sports Asia as a 28 year old in 1997 based Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Since then the business has generated $500million in commercial revenue for its portfolio of clients including Premier League Football Clubs, Formula One teams, WWE, US Open Tennis and a host of Olympic Sports Federations. Beyond that however, it’s a story about the ups and downs in the life of a serial entrepreneur in a region that has seen financial crises and pandemics come and go over the course of the last three decades.If you enjoy our podcasts, make sure you sign up to the unofficial partner newsletter where we develop the threads of the conversations.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
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Nov 3, 2020
E120: Arsenal Fan TV
Robbie Lyle created Arsenal Fan TV (now AFTV) in 2012 as a platform for fans to have their say. And they did, in enormous numbers, making it one of the biggest fan networks in world football, and its mix of controversy and raw post-match reaction is much copied across both unofficial and official club channels.We talked about the reaction of mainstream media to this new upstart genre, the commercial future of fan based media channels and what the pandemic has revealed about the distance between the people in football boardrooms and the people who pay for tickets. Despite being an Arsenal fan, Robbie’s a nice bloke, and one of the smartest media operators out there.If you like our podcasts you should sign up to the Unofficial Partner newsletter which develops the threads of the conversations. You can do this via unofficialpartner.com where you can also explore the back catalogue of over 100 podcasts covering every area of the global sports business.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading…
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Oct 30, 2020
E119: PBSL Launch
Today we’re talking about leadership with the founding members of a new initiative, The Professional Body of Sports Leadership (PBSL) which has just launched as a network for current, and aspiring, senior executives, high performance specialists and non-executive directors in the sports industry. It aims to drive the development of a new standard in sports industry leadership and governance, safeguard mental health and wellbeing and actively promote inclusion and diversity in all its forms. Alongside this, it will harness the collective knowledge of the sports business, creating an industry dialogue and representative voice.To talk about this, we have three guests. Tom Sears, the founder of the PBSL who many listeners will know from his senior roles in sports bodies internationally and who in 2017 founded the sports executive search specialists Kinsey Sears based in London.Joining Tom are Chris Brindley, Chair of Rugby League World Cup 2021, and Zarah Al-Kudcy, Head of Commercial, Pa…
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Oct 27, 2020
E118: The business of European football with Phil Carling
Today we’re talking about the business of European football with one of the most experienced and respected people working in the industry today. Phil Carling started his career as Arsenal’s first ever head of marketing before moving to head up the commercial department of the FA. Since 2004, Carling has been head of football for the sports marketing agency Octagon, managing their clients relationship with clubs, leagues and governing bodies around Europe and beyond.
So Phil was my first call when the story broke revealing a plot among some of Europe’s big clubs to launch a European Premier League initially at least endorsed by Fifa and underwritten by $6billion of JPMorgan’s money. This is the latest of many threatened rebel competitions to have appeared over the course of the last three decades. I want to why the story has become such a regular feature of sports business conversation, why this one appeared now, what happened to the previous incarnations and where was Phil Car…
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Oct 23, 2020
E117: Project Big Picture
Today we pick over the remains of Project Big Picture, the controversial report in to the future of English professional football, that was instigated by the owners of two of the Premier League’s biggest clubs, Liverpool and Manchester United.
Our guests are Dan Johnson, former Director of Communications for the Premier League and Joel Seymour Hyde, the UK managing director of the sports marketing agency Octagon.
If you enjoy the Unofficial Partner podcasts, you should sign up for the weekly newsletter via the website, where we develop the threads of the conversation in more depth.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Oct 20, 2020
E116: NFL in the UK
Today we’re talking about the NFL and specifically its relationship to the international market.
To do this we have Neil Reynolds, who has created a niche as the face and voice of the NFL in the UK, fronting Sky Sports tv coverage and the Inside the Huddle podcast, all alongside his own show The Neil Reynolds Podcast. So we talk about that hardy perennial topic of the sports business, the long discussed London franchise, and the nature of fandom outside the core US market. If you enjoy Unofficial Partner, please rate and review us on Apple or via your favourite app, and sign up to the weekly newsletter via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Oct 16, 2020
E115: The Buy Side #2 - Peter Markey - TSB
This is the second in our series called The Buy Side, conversations about the reality of sport and sponsorship with CMOs and other senior brand side marketing decision makers. Today’s guest is Peter Markey, CMO of TSB Bank.Peter is responsible for all of TSB’s marketing and digital sales activity including brand, analytics, research, effectiveness, strategy, social media and marketing communications managing a team of over 100 across multiple sites.He was formally Marketing Director of Aviva, the insurance company and CMO of the Post Office, RSA and More Than.To find more conversations about every facet of the sports business, just search Unofficial Partner in your favourite podcast app, and sign up to our weekly newsletter via UnofficialPartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP New…
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Oct 13, 2020
E114: Money Talks #4 - WTF’s a SPAC?
Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs was a term I didn’t know a couple of months ago, and now I see them everywhere, particularly in relation to sport.So, this podcast goes in to what they are, why they’re very popular and what are the implications of this new investment vehicle for the sports business.To do this, I’ve asked Michael Broughton for help. Michael was co-founder of Sports Investment Partners, Europe’s first Investment Vehicle focused specifically on the sports industry. He has been a senior advisor to FIFA on business technology, innovation and investment strategy and is now an advisor to Acceleration Equity, focused on the acquisition of and investment into sports teams and franchises.Note this conversation took place just before the news broke of a possible IPO of the Fenway Sports Group via RedBall Acquisition Corps, the SPAC created by Gerry Cardinale and Billy Beane.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of ent…
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Oct 9, 2020
E113: Joymo
This week we’re looking in to the long tail of grassroots sport and ask if streaming technology has created a much needed commercial opportunity for teams, clubs and governing bodies who make up the vast majority of the sports participation pyramid.
To do this we’re talking to Michael Emery, CEO of Joymo, a streaming platform which allows parents, fans, players and coaches to film games and training sessions then store the content and sell access via a dedicated mobile app or through an unmanned camera.
Joining us in this conversation is Craig Edmondson, former head of marketing for the Premier League and MD of Zwift esports division, who is helping the international rollout of Joymo, which has its base in Norway.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @…
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Oct 6, 2020
E112: Timo Lumme
We’ve been wanting to talk to Timo Lumme for ages - but he’s been quite busy apparently.It’s sometimes said Lumme has had the perfect sports business career: IMG then Nike then Disney/ESPN then for the last decade and a half, the IOC’s big commercial job overseeing broadcast revenue and the TOP sponsorship programme, the largest of its type in sport.(And we haven’t mentioned a stint running Quokka, an early sports tech startup around the first Dotcom boom).So it’s fair to say that with that CV, not much surprises him. But then came Covid, and Tokyo 2020 became Tokyo 2021. So this was a great chance to spend an hour or so in Timo’s company and peer in to the business of the Olympics and the future of the greatest show on earth.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and f…
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Oct 2, 2020
E111: The Bundle 7
This is episode 7 of The Bundle, our fortnightly show about the sports media market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke.We revisit our controversial podcast with media analyst Claire Enders, look in depth at some of the stories coming out of the US market, and we ask what the big leagues can do to combat the enduring threat of piracy which is having real impacts on the value of rights in various parts of the world.
Hope you enjoy it, and if you do, sign up to the Unofficial Partner newsletter via the site.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Sep 29, 2020
E110: The Buy Side - Just Eat
This the first of a series of podcasts interviewing senior decision makers on the brand side of the sponsorship market across different business categories.Today’s guest is Ben Carter from the food delivery company Just Eat. Ben’s current role is Global Director of Restaurants and Strategic Partnerships, which sees him charged with commercial growth and partnership strategy to support the business 112,000 restaurant partner globally.Our conversation takes in how sport and sponsorship applies to what is a very dynamic market category for many sports rights holders.We start by asking Ben about how the company makes money, the preconceptions people bring to the Just Eat brand and then the role that sport and sponsorship plays in the company’s marketing strategy now and in to the future.Just Eat UK is owned by Takeaway.com, the new ‘Official Food Delivery Platform Partner’ for UEFA Euro 2020, a spot which replaced McDonald’s official restaurant designation. Just Eat has a histo…
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Sep 25, 2020
E109: Fifty-Three Six
This week we’re talking digital marketing with the founders of Fifty Three Six, Tom Fox and Marcus McDonnell. Often the digital conversation is about strategy and can be a bit abstract. This one isn’t like that. It’s an urgent conversation about how sports properties can use their digital assets to make money as we approach the race to the end of the year. Across the sports landscape, teams, leagues and events are facing a Covid driven existential crisis.
The ability to uncover new sustainable sources of revenue to replace gate receipts and match day revenue isn’t just a question, it's the only question. During the podcast we reference a piece of research work carried out by Fifty Three Six, called Five Actionable Facebook Campaign Insights To Win Q4. It’s available to download for free via the agency’s website.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global ind…
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Sep 22, 2020
E108: Kim Skildum Reid
Kim Skildum Reid founded Power Sponsorship in 1994 to provide advice to major corporate sponsors in the Asia-Pacific region for clients that include Target Stores, Unilever, Qantas, Dubai Government, SABMiller, ANZ Bank, QBE, Virgin Group, Singapore Government, Mazda, Estee Lauder, and many more.
So the topic of the conversation is obviously the sponsorship market, what’s the difference between good and bad strategy and how the Covid crisis is impacting how brands are viewing sport across the APAC region.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Sep 18, 2020
E107: Claire Enders
Today’s guest is Claire Enders, who has been the UK’s pre-eminent media and technology analyst, strategist and forecaster for over thirty years. After working across cable, satellite, and commercial Public Sector Broadcasting she set up Enders Analysis in 1997, to build comprehensive models for all parts of the UK media, telecoms and technology sectors and provides its research and expertise to over 140 organisations. During this time Claire Enders has built a reputation for outspoken and contrarian analysis of the prospects for technology, telecoms and media across Europe. She famously predicted first Dotcom crash, the advertising collapse of 2009 and has analysed every major sports rights deal of the last three decades. Someone once said of her that clients credit her with the ability to "see through the walls of boardrooms, and intuit the decisions they will make”. So, of course, we talked about the market for sports media rights generally, and the Premier League specifically,…
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Sep 15, 2020
E106: The Bundle #6
This is episode 6 of The Bundle, the fortnightly sports media conversation with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke. This week’s topics are the Premier League’s China problem and we ask whether it has implications for other rights holders selling in to that country. Then it’s Barney Francis’ views on the OTT streaming market, DAZN’s potential IPO or SPAC, and finally, we peer below Nielsen’s announcement that they have a new approach to measuring out of home viewing, which could have significant ramifications on the value of sports rights in the future.
Hope you enjoy it, get in touch via the website unofficialpartner.com and subscribe to the newsletter.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Sep 11, 2020
E105: Simon Hughes
This week we talk to Simon Hughes, the former professional cricketer, journalist, author and award winning broadcaster, which began as The Analyst on Channel 4’s ground breaking coverage of test cricket in the early noughties.Since then, Simon has been a regular presence on television and across social media, and has just co-written a book called A New Innings on the business of the IPL with Manoj Badale, the owner of the Rajasthan Royals. So this is a conversation about where cricket and business meet, and covers a lot of ground that regular listeners of Unofficial Partner will recognise, such as the role of private equity in sport, changes in audience behaviour and the role of innovation in sport.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Sep 8, 2020
E104: Tomorrowland #3
This is the third in our Tomorrowland series about the sports tech and innovation, and we’re delighted to welcome two guests from two major sports governing bodies: Helen Rowbotham from British Rowing and Chris Pollard of the LTA.
Helen moved to rowing in 2016 from CSM, where she was director of consulting. She has nearly 20 years experience in the sports and events industry, delivering projects both in the UK and internationally for local, city and national government organisations; event bidding and organising committees; Olympic Committees; event rights holders and many others. Her experience includes comprehensive strategic reviews of the Commonwealth Games Federation and Paralympic Games, the development of a High Performance Strategy for Saudi Arabia, multiple event feasibility and bidding projects (including the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games) and working on a wide range of facility development projects, including the 2012 Olympic Stadium and Singapore Sports Hub.
Chris Pol…
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Sep 4, 2020
E103: Jeremy Dale: From Oprah to Otro
This week’s guest is Jeremy Dale, one of the original co-founders of the OTRO the football media platform, who has had a marketing career working for some of the world’s most famous companies. He was former VP of Worldwide retail for Microsoft, won a BAFTA for the launch of Pokemon and led Motorola’s Product (RED) Campaign in collaboration with Oprah and Bono, the latter of whom he claims gave him the inspiration for his new book, The Punk Rock of Business. Jeremy was listed in Total Films 100 Most Influential People in the Movies (between Tom Cruise and Matt Damon), not bad for someone who started as an accountant for Tarmac.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Sep 1, 2020
E102: The Bundle #5
This is episode 5 of The Bundle, our fortnightly show that goes deep in to the murky world of sports media, with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke.
This week we unpick DAZN’s negotiations in Japan to move their long term J-League rights deal in to a profit share agreement and wonder if this is how things are going to be in the post Covid era.Like DAZN, Amazon is never far from The Bundle conversation and this week is no different, with a look at the noises its making around live rights acquisition, and the launch of a new sports category on Twitch, and of course that new Spurs doc and accompanying storefront deal. Then it’s on to the future value of highlights, Mediapro’s Telefoot mobile subscription play, Spotify’s League of Legend sponsorship deal and the prospect of single leg UEFA Champions League matches. So much to fit in, hope you enjoy it. If you’ve got a topic you think we should discuss on The Bundle, get in touch via the website and sign up to our newsletter.
*Unoff…
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Aug 28, 2020
E101: Greg Dyke
Greg Dyke’s hugely successful career is defined by leading some of the UK’s biggest and most influential organisations, from the BBC, ITV, London Weekend Television, The FA and Brentford, the west London club he’s supported since childhood.
Sport has been a theme throughout his professional and personal life. When he was managing director of LWT in the early 1990s, Dyke arranged to meet representatives of five major English clubs to discuss a deal to award them a greater slice of media rights fees. This meeting is often cited as a catalyst for creation of the Premier League.
Famously, Dyke’s ITV was outbid by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky, and years later, when Dyke was a board director of Manchester United, his was the only vote against Murdoch’s proposed takeover of the club.
He became Director General of the BBC in 2000, with a reform agenda, famously describing the organisation as ‘hideously white’. In 2013, Dyke replaced David Bernstein as chairman of The FA, leaving in…
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Aug 25, 2020
E100: Donald Dell
It goes without saying that we wanted to find a guest with a big enough reputation in the industry to withstand the enormous pressure of celebrating our 100th show. So, it’s a great pleasure to say hello to Donald Dell, one of the real legends of sports marketing folklore.He was the agent who signed the two most valuable and enduring shoe deals in sports history, Stan Smith and Adidas and Michael Jordan and Nike.Dell, now 83, is the Yale educated lawyer and former pro tennis player, who captained the US Davis Cup team in the 1960s containing Smith and Arthur Ashe, two megastars who became the founding clients of Proserv which Dell co founded in 1970. In an extraordinary career, Dell represented many of the giants of sport, from Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl, Stefan Edberg and Pete Sampras to Nancy Kerrigan, Patrick Ewing and for a while at least, Jordan. So this is an hour of conversation that moves around from star to star and decade to decade, taking us inside the room with some of the…
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Aug 21, 2020
E99: Snap's Sports Strategy
Today’s conversation takes us inside Snapchat as we talk about the platform’s relationship with sport, head of partnerships Anmol Malhotra. Snapchat burst on to the scene in 2011 as the anti facebook, a photo and messaging app aimed directly at a much younger target audience and with an entirely new visual grammar. It now claims to reach 90% of 13-24 year olds in America.This stat has led many teams, leagues and athletes to attempt to build an audience on the platform with mixed results. So we ask what works and what doesn’t, and delve in to what Snapchat knows about its audience when it comes to consuming sports related content, and how this is likely to evolve.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Aug 18, 2020
E98: Tomorrowland ep2 - What is UEFA’s Innovation Hub?
This is the second in our Tomorrowland series on sports technology and innovation.
Our guest is Jean Baptiste Alliot who’s in charge of UEFA’s Innovation Hub, which is described as ‘a vehicle for future proofing UEFA and ensuring UEFA stays one step ahead of the latest trends to shape the game’.
So, what does that mean, how does one of sport’s biggest and most commercially successful right owners view the future, what is its strategy on how we watch and play the game now and over the next decade. More specifically, I wanted to know how will they play nice with the giant tech platforms who, depending on your point of view, are either essential partners to reach football’s next audience or parasites seeking to use sport to collect and own ever greater reservoirs of first party data. So, as ever, we weren’t short of things to talk about.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a w…
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Aug 7, 2020
E97: The Bundle #4
This is episode 4 of The Bundle, our fortnightly series that goes deep in to the world of sports media with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke.Today’s we’re looking in detail at the value of tv rights beyond the domestic market, and ask what drives fan interest and therefore the price of international sports rights, is it the big clubs or the competitiveness of the league or tournament, and we look at the markedly different way that money is distributed by the Bundesliga and the Premier League.There’s also a new report out from Two Circles, which calls for rights owners to hedge their bets when it comes to media income streams by shifting towards a hybrid approach to distribution strategy.All of this questions the value of sports properties at a time when some areas are being circled by new private equity investment groups.As ever there’s plenty of news and analysis about the big questions facing the sports business.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of s…
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Aug 4, 2020
E96: David Wheldon
David Wheldon began his career as an ad exec at Saatchi and Saatchi in 1983 and retired as CMO of Royal Bank of Scotland earlier this year.In between these dates, Wheldon established himself as one of the most influential marketers of his generation, a career in which sport and sponsorship played a big role. His name is associated with several of the biggest spending sports sponsors of the last three decades, from Coca Cola to Vodafone, and more latterly across the big bank brands of Barclays, NatWest and RBS. So he brings an informed and experienced eye to bear on the biggest sports properties in the world, from the OIympics and Fifa World Cup to the Premier League, Formula One, Ferrari, McLaren, Manchester United, the England cricket team and the Six Nations rugby championship to name just a few.What has David Wheldon learnt about how sport works and when it doesn’t.This is a conversation that starts by going back to one of his earliest and most famous marketing campaigns.
*Unoffi…
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Jul 31, 2020
E95: The Lost Generation
There were already plenty of people worried about what was going to happen to their jobs and their careers in the sports business, as new technology and the data era made them question the relevance of their skills in today’s talent marketplace. Covid has amplified that fear at every level, from college leavers aspiring to break in to the industry, through first and second jobbers right up to the C-suite.All this at a time when the diversity of that talent pool looks so narrowly defined, by gender, ethnicity, age and mindset. So in today’s podcast I talk to Amanda Fone, founder and CEO of F1 recruitment, who brings 35 years of experience to these questions. In addition to running F1, Amanda is the co founder of the BAME2020 diversity programme, which launched in 2016 as a way of raising the issue of inclusion, diversity and social mobility within the sports sector. We talk about white fragility, office culture and the very potential that covid will create a lost generation of sport…
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Jul 28, 2020
E94: Mundial
Mundial started life in 2014 as the football hipster's magazine of choice, and built a publishing brand around the culture and obsessions of fans, from retro boots and exotic European kits to cheap continental travel and South American derbies. James Brown, the former loaded editor and previous guest of Unofficial Partner, described Mundial’s appeal as ‘the draw of the unfamiliar and the thrill of discovery’. So we today we talk about the past, present and future of Mundial with Owen Blackhurst the journalist and head of business about the company’s post-print strategy, digital transformation and the market for football content.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jul 24, 2020
E93: The Bundle #3
This is episode 3 of The Bundle, our regular look at what’s happening in the market for sports media rights with co-host Yannick Ramcke.If you enjoy our podcasts, you might like to follow Yannick on Twitter and read his blog posts that go deeper in the topics we cover on the pod.And if newsletters are your thing, subscribe to the unoffiicial partner weekly briefing, via unoffiicalpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jul 21, 2020
E92: Tomorrowland - Angela Ruggiero
This is a podcast about sports tech and innovation with our guest Angela Ruggiero.Angela is a four-time US Olympian and Gold Medalist in Ice Hockey and has been an IOC Executive Board Member for over a decade and served as the Chief Strategy Officer for the successful Los Angeles 2028 Olympic bid. This is mentioned here because we barely reference it in the podcast, because this is a conversation about the future and sport tech, it’s potential and its limitations. Angela is CEO & Co-Founder of The Sports Innovation Lab, a tech-powered market research firm and we start by talking about what that means, where she thinks the real excitement is when it comes to innovation in sport, both from an early adopter perspective but also to ask about what the challenges are when it comes to applying technology to the sports business.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global indus…
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Jul 16, 2020
E91: All Models Are Wrong #5 Elliot Richardson
In previous episodes of our digital series, All Models Are Wrong we’ve talked to people from across the industry about how digital transformation is impacting the sports business. Today we continue that conversation with Elliot Richardson, co-founder and chairman of Dugout, the football digital platform part owned by the biggest clubs in the world, including Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, Chelsea, Manchester City and Bayern Munich.Dugout is interesting because, as I say to Elliot during our conversation, it exists to solve a problem the football clubs have when it comes to digital, which is how maximise the return from their global popularity. So I ask him whether we’re at the end of the first social platform era, to sum up what the pros and cons have been of distributing football clips across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the rest and how will the next era of digital alter the value of football clubs as a sponsorship and commercial proposition. As ever, Elliot has plenty to say, back…
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Jul 14, 2020
E90: Simon Oliveira
Simon Oliveira is founder and Managing Director of KIN Partners, a sport and entertainment agency specialising in talent management & creative IP. Simon is well known as being a long time business adviser and ally of David Beckham so we talk about what he’s learnt from the experience about fame and celebrity and it’s relationship with the media and marketing world. KIN also has represented Owen Farrell, Ronnie O’Sullivan among others and Simon was also one of the Founders of OTRO, with Beckham, Neymar as well as Lionel Messi and Zinedine Zidane, which aspires to be a new global content and fan platform.Simon began his career at Lynne Franks PR before moving to Ketchum with Steve Martin and then to Simon Fuller’s company 19, the creator of Pop Idol and is the Svengali figure behind the Spice Girls and Brand Beckham. So it’s a chance to look at the rise of the superstar athlete as publisher and brand, and we talk about the obvious potential of that and also the limitations and…
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Jul 10, 2020
E89: Money Talks #3 Kyle Charters
This is number three in Money Talks, our series on sport and finance. The two previous guests were Jason Traub of 23Capital and George Pyne founder of Bruin Sports Capital. Today’s guest is Kyle Charters who leads Inner Circle Sports tech division. Inner Circle is a New York based boutique investment bank focused on the global sports business, which has been involved in multiple high profile mergers and acquisitions including US franchises and European soccer clubs.I start by asking Kyle what a boutique investment bank does all day and then we go on to talk about how they value sports teams, the differences between the US and European market and some detail on Fenway Sports acquisition and running of Liverpool FC, a deal which Inner Circle helped put together.If you’re enjoying our podcasts, you might also like our weekly newsletter that goes deeper in to the topics we cover. It’s free and available via unofficialpartner.com.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the bu…
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Jul 7, 2020
E88: Bundle/Unbundle # 2
This is the second episode of our series on the sports media market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke. Every couple of weeks we choose three stories from around the world and pick them apart to see if there’s anything we can learn that’s part of a broader trend in relation to sport tv, streaming or OTT market.
This week we talk about beIN Sport’s stand against piracy in Serie A and what the implications of that might be for other rights holders in the broadcaster’s considerable rights portfolio.
Secondly we look at the details of the recent Bundesliga domestic rights tender, what it means for DAZN among others, and thirdly we talk about Mediapro in France, where they decided that when it comes to the number of teams they want in Ligue1 and how many games they want to screen, it’s a case of less is more. Plenty in here for anyone with an interest in the value of sport as a media property, which I guess means everyone.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the bus…
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Jul 3, 2020
E87: Has Covid burst the women’s sport bubble?
Sally Hancock and Sally Horrox created the Y-Sport consultancy to offer clients commercial, media and sports expertise and have built a reputation for helping rights holders and brands to use sport to drive social change and to promote the commercial opportunities in professional women’s sport. We talk about the diversity question, Black Lives Matters and the impact of COVID19 on women’s sport.Unofficial Partner is listened to buy thousands of senior sports business professionals around the world every week. If you have a marketing challenge, our podcasts offer an innovative and cost effective solution. Get in touch with sean@unofficialpartner.co.uk.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jun 30, 2020
E86: #MoneyTalks 2 - George Pyne
Today we talk to George Pyne, the former Nascar and IMG CEO, who founded Bruin Sports Capital in 2015, which has emerged as one of the most interesting companies operating in the sports business today with nearly a billion dollars invested across the sector.Bruin was created with $250 million from Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP; Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Nassef Sawiris, executive chairman of Aston Villa among others. The fund was increased in size last November following a capital raise of $600million from CVC Capital Partners and the Jordan Group, which allows them to add to their portfolio of sports companies that includes Two Circles, Deltatre, Soulsight and Engine Shop.Before this, Pyne was CEO of IMG in Ted Forstmann era, part of the management team who sold the company to William Morris Endeavour in 2014. Before that was in charge of Nascar and The Portman Group. So a varied career that brought him in to day to day contact with some of the most influential…
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Jun 26, 2020
E85: Audio Strategy
A third of all Alexa requests are about sport. But who’s answering them?
Today’s podcast is about audio strategy for sports rights holders, we’re going to ask what does that mean, why has it become a thing and what are the creative and commercial opportunities and challenges that exist today and how those are quickly evolving, powered by advances in streaming technology and the move towards voice activated search led by among others Google and Amazon.
To do this we’ve sought the advice of three experts in this field. The first person we talk to is Sophie Hind, managing director of Voiceworks, a company that specialises in technology, search and content solutions for the rapidly-growing digital assistant marketplace. Next up is Jim Salveson who is head of Sport Social, an award winning radio presenter, writer and producer.
This part of the conversation is about content and creative: what are the production considerations for sports rights holders in the shift to audio engagem…
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Jun 23, 2020
E84: Who’s There? #2 - Lesa Ukman
If your job is to measure the impact of sponsorship, you owe a debt of gratitude to Lesa Ukman.She did the hard miles, doing more than anyone to pioneer and champion the role of sponsorship as a marketing form.So we get in to it all: the problem of trying to measure brand purpose, the rise of blackwashing, to add to sports washing, gaywashing and greenwashing; the ‘horrible’ experience of working for GroupM (Ukman created IEG in 1982 and sold to WPP’s GroupM in 2016), the sexism she encountered in London, the upside of which was getting to use the popular English term ‘wanker’ on a regular basis; the broken incentives of media agencies; the mafia-like politics of Chicago; tangibles v intangibles; what you buy when you buy an IOC TOP package; and loads, loads more.You won’t want to miss this one.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our…
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Jun 19, 2020
E83: The Bundle #1 - The sports media podcast with Yannick Ramcke
The Bundle is our new series of deep dives in to the sports media market where we’ll keep a watchful eye on the latest stories covering broadcast and digital platforms, this could be everything from changing fan habits, upcoming rights tenders, the D2C streaming trend and the decisions taken by the biggest broadcast and technology companies in the world.My copilot on this journey is Yannick Ramcke, one of the most insightful observers of broadcast and digital media out there.In each episode I ask Yannick to bring us the most interesting recent stories that we can pick apart to explore the broader trends.This week it’s the return of the Premier League, and the current rights tender being fought over for domestic rights to the Bundesliga.For future episodes we’d love to incorporate questions from listeners, which could be by email or if you want to send a WhatsApp message or something similar we can play that on the podcast. You can do this via the sign up page on unofficial partne…
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Jun 16, 2020
E82: Jane Purdon - Women in Football
We're talking to Jane Purdon CEO of Women in Football, the organisation that champions and supports women working across the professional game.Jane is a lawyer who has a track record at the highest level of football and sport, most recently as Head of Governance and Leadership at UK Sport and previously as Director of Governance with the Premier League and Club Secretary with Sunderland.This is the link to the Farrer report she talks about in the podcast.if you enjoy our podcasts, you can sign up for our weekly briefing via the website unofficialpartner.com.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jun 12, 2020
E81: Unofficial Partner meets John Wall St.
In today’s podcast, we’re going to review the last seven days in the American sports business market and we’re doing that in the company of Corey Leff, who is the man behind the John Wall St newsletter. We talk about Harris Blitzer's regional network ambitions, Endeavour IMG and the agency market, Nike’s approach to the Liverpool shirt and the legacy of the Chevy, Man Utd deal to name just a few.If you want to join the Unofficial Partner network, sign up to our weekly newsletter via unofficialpartner.com
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jun 9, 2020
E80: All Models Are Wrong #4 Aarti Dabas
This is another in our series All Models Are Wrong, which goes deep in to the subject of digital strategy in sport. Previous episodes have featured Mark Oliver, Alex Balfour and Daniel Kirschner, each of which is available via unofficialpartner.com or wherever you get your podcasts.This week we talk Aarti Dabas, who has just started a new role as head of media for Formula E having previously been head of media, broadcast and digital for the ICC,cricket’s global governing body.We spoke to Aarti a few weeks ago before she took up her new job and her views don’t represent those of her new or her former employer.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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Jun 5, 2020
E79: Decision making with Ed Smith
Today’s podcast is a conversation with Ed Smith, the chair of England cricket selectors on the subject of decision making, the first of an occasional series on various aspects of leadership.Ed was a professional cricketer for Kent, Middlesex and England whose career was curtailed by injury at the age of 31 when he started his second career as an author, journalist and commentator on the iconic Test Match Special before being made England cricket’s chief national cricket selector in 2018.Ed co-founded The Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH) which runs higher education programmes for professionals working in the sports industry. The MA Leadership in Sport is a 12-month non-residential course – designed so that students can stay in their jobs while studying – features evening seminars in London, online and with visits to other partner venues. You can contact them here.This podcast was recorded on the 8th of May.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of spor…
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Jun 2, 2020
E78: Who's There? #1 - Matt Locke
From sport and music, to films, radio or literature, every part of the culture industry is defined and shaped by the metrics we use to measure the audience for them.But who decides what metrics to use? This is a question posed by today’s guest Matt Locke, the co-founder of Storythings, and someone who I’ve been trying to get on the podcast since we started a year or so ago.Matt is one of the most interesting thinkers on our relationship with media, and he has written a series of essays called How To Measure Ghosts. Before starting Storythings in 2011, Matt worked in Digital Media for over two decades. He was Head of Innovation at BBC New Media from 2001, then moved to Channel 4 where he was Commissioning Editor, Education, and later Head of Multiplatform.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly…
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May 29, 2020
E77: What happens now
Today we ask what’s going to happen next? What should we all look out for as, when or if things return to whatever normal looks like post-covid. To help answer the question, we asked James Toller and Rob Pope of Mallory Group to give us some clues. Rob, James and Ross Collett of Roco Communications have pooled their knowledge working both in Europe, the USA and Asia and have written a white paper under the heading of There's a New Normal Coming for Sports Rights Holders - Are You Ready? which is available free via Mallory Group’s website. So we use this as a starting point for a conversation which is I think relevant to everyone who touches sport, from top to bottom.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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May 26, 2020
E76: Money Talks #1 - Jason Traub
Today’s podcast is the first in a series called Money Talks, conversations about sport’s relationship with private equity, venture capital and the financial markets. We’re asking a series of simple questions relating to money: Who needs it, how do they get it, who do they get it from, and what are the implications of that, how does the source of finance change the behaviour of the people in charge of sport at all levels. Our first guest is Jason Traub, co-founder of 23Capital.
*Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, **sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr** *
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May 22, 2020
E75: All models are wrong #3 Daniel Kirschner