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 Partne...
Feb 04, 2022•41 min
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 ...
Feb 01, 2022•41 min
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 or...
Jan 28, 2022•47 min
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 conversat...
Jan 25, 2022•51 min
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 favour...
Jan 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min
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...
Jan 11, 2022•50 min
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 Re...
Dec 24, 2021•50 min
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 provider...
Dec 17, 2021•27 min
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,...
Dec 14, 2021•1 hr 5 min
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...
Dec 07, 2021•49 min
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, organis...
Dec 03, 2021•42 min
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 ...
Nov 30, 2021•39 min
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 ...
Nov 23, 2021•42 min
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 Pa...
Nov 19, 2021•50 min
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 h...
Nov 16, 2021•59 min
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...
Nov 09, 2021•49 min
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 Sp...
Nov 05, 2021•55 min
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, hea...
Nov 02, 2021•48 min
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 severa...
Oct 29, 2021•51 min
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...
Oct 26, 2021•41 min
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 an...
Oct 22, 2021•41 min
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, i...
Oct 19, 2021•56 min
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 t...
Oct 15, 2021•46 min
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...
Oct 11, 2021•47 min
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 ...
Oct 08, 2021•1 hr 3 min
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. ...
Oct 05, 2021•53 min
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 Pre...
Oct 01, 2021•52 min
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 ...
Sep 24, 2021•46 min
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...
Sep 21, 2021•53 min
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...
Sep 17, 2021•40 min
