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 f...
Sep 14, 2021•1 hr 4 min
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 Foot...
Sep 10, 2021•52 min
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 Dan...
Sep 07, 2021•45 min
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 ...
Sep 03, 2021•52 min
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,...
Aug 28, 2021•46 min
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 M...
Aug 27, 2021•34 min
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 G...
Aug 24, 2021•37 min
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 techno...
Aug 13, 2021•52 min
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...
Aug 10, 2021•52 min
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 ...
Aug 06, 2021•1 hr 13 min
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 lead...
Aug 03, 2021•55 min
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 Va...
Jul 30, 2021•32 min
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 wh...
Jul 26, 2021•57 min
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 beginn...
Jul 23, 2021•1 hr
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 a...
Jul 20, 2021•52 min
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 ot...
Jul 12, 2021•57 min
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 p...
Jul 09, 2021•1 hr
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 ...
Jul 06, 2021•1 hr 5 min
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 favourit...
Jul 02, 2021•47 min
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 re...
Jun 29, 2021•31 min
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, ...
Jun 18, 2021•46 min
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 P...
Jun 15, 2021•1 hr 8 min
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 spo...
Jun 11, 2021•44 min
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’...
Jun 08, 2021•28 min
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 ci...
Jun 04, 2021•49 min
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 se...
Jun 01, 2021•42 min
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 thou...
May 28, 2021•48 min
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 abl...
May 25, 2021•49 min
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 ...
May 18, 2021•50 min
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...
May 14, 2021•47 min
