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 we...
Dec 13, 2022•53 min
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. ...
Dec 06, 2022•1 hr 4 min
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, Asto...
Nov 28, 2022•46 min
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 enga...
Nov 22, 2022•48 min
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...
Nov 16, 2022•1 hr
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...
Nov 14, 2022•48 min
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 a...
Nov 08, 2022•59 min
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 footba...
Nov 01, 2022•47 min
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, s...
Oct 25, 2022•41 min
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 202...
Oct 18, 2022•51 min
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...
Oct 10, 2022•1 hr 40 min
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 ...
Oct 04, 2022•1 hr 1 min
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 cas...
Sep 27, 2022•56 min
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 tol...
Sep 23, 2022•41 min
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...
Sep 16, 2022•51 min
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 RF...
Sep 13, 2022•55 min
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...
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr
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 ...
Aug 30, 2022•1 hr 1 min
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 ma...
Aug 23, 2022•43 min
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 ...
Aug 19, 2022•53 min
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 ...
Aug 16, 2022•32 min
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 B...
Aug 05, 2022•59 min
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 capita...
Aug 05, 2022•53 min
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 impac...
Aug 02, 2022•42 min
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 pla...
Jul 29, 2022•58 min
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 stuc...
Jul 26, 2022•54 min
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...
Jul 19, 2022•52 min
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 Arb...
Jul 12, 2022•1 hr 1 min
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 OneFootbal...
Jul 05, 2022•49 min
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 evo...
Jun 28, 2022•29 min
