Welcome to The Bundle, our regular series on the sports media and streaming marketplace with co-hosts Yannick Ramcke, General Manager of OTT at the streaming service OneFootball and Murray Barnett, founder of 26West Consulting and formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN International. This week’s podcast is sponsored by We Are Sweet - helping you tell compelling stories in-the-moment, as they happen, from the heart of the action. We Are Sweet captures live biometric data from athletes to uncover st...
Oct 29, 2024•58 min
The Big Idea is our regular series on creativity, with co-host award winning consulting Creative Director Simon Moore . We ask a guest to bring three of their favourite sports related creative campaigns. This week it's Gundeep Anand in the hot seat. Gundeep founded The Last Stand and is a docu-style Director & Photographer whose work is influenced by his background as an ex-youth worker, coaching in communities, council estates and schools. Gundeep choices are: And 1 Mixtapes CRTZ x Nike Jog...
Oct 22, 2024•45 min
Fresh from an excellent Leaders Summit at Twickenham, or should we say Allianz Stadium, is a conversation with Gareth Balch, founder and CEO of Two Circles agency about the agreement to buy KORE Software, a deal announced this week. Two Circles is buying the company from Serent Capital, the private equity firm that bought Kore in 2018. Earlier this year, Two Circles themselves sold a majority stake in their business to private equity firm Charterhouse Capital Partners, a transaction which valued...
Oct 18, 2024•42 min
Other People's Money is our regular series on sports investment, with co-host Matt Rogan, co-founder of Two Circles. Today we get in to the minutiae of deal making, with Steve Hacking, managing partner at Latitude Partners , who has worked on more than 200 company acquisitions for clients across both buy and sell side of investment deals in sectors ranging from technology and telecoms to media, healthcare, retail and sport, including working on behalf of Sky Sports and British Cycling in the cre...
Oct 15, 2024•52 min
The 3 is a failed experiment in podcast format innovation. The 3 is a creative collaboration between Unofficial Partner and Leaders in Sport. The 3 picks three stories from the sports business week and dissects them on a Friday morning. The 3 may return, and it might not. This week Richard Gillis, David Cushnan and James Emmett pick these three stories: Will the cool kids be wearing FIFA 1904? Wither the Wimbledon line judge. What is Brand Saudi now? Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for...
Oct 11, 2024•48 min
This is a follow up to our popular series of last year, The Squeezed Middle, which was a collaboration with PTI Digital, the independent strategy and technology consultancy. This episode looks in to a new report, The Sports Leadership Benchmark, based on a survey of sports CEOs, carried out by PTI. You can download the report, for free, at ptidigitalgroup.com Joining Richard are Ben Wells, CEO of PTI Digital and Aquatics GB CEO and former EFL Marketing Director, Drew Barrand. This podcast is spo...
Oct 08, 2024•44 min
The ECB is currently seeking investors for The Hundred franchises, the short form cricket competition and are selling a 49% stake that values them at up to £150m each. Today’s guest Lalit Modi disagrees. The founder of the Indian Premier League explains exclusively to Unofficial Partner why: “Based on the information memorandum a 100% stake in a team would be between £5m and £9m [for] outside London teams, and maximum, if one really wants a trophy asset, is London teams closer to £25m.” Earlier ...
Oct 06, 2024•39 min
Three stories, three opinions, ten minutes (50minutes) What's in a name? FIFA's Club World Cup stadia naming snafu What is streetwear? The deeper meaning of Arsenal's style collab How old is too old? Sportfive and Tendulkar launch International Masters League This podcast is sponsored by Leaders in Sport - Get 15% off Summit passes Leaders in Sport connects the most influential people and the most powerful ideas in global sport to catalyse discussion, and drive the industry forward. Through a se...
Oct 04, 2024•51 min
This is a live episode recorded at StreamAMG's excellent Direct-to-Fan Playbook event, held at Amazon's Liverpool Street headquarters in London. A big thank you goes to the team at StreamAMG for inviting us along, we learnt loads. Joining Richard on stage was Murray Barnett, one half of the regular Bundle presenting team, founder of West26 Consulting and formerly ESPN, F1 and World Rugby. We were joined by Andrew Ryan and David Dellea. Andrew is Managing Director of FIBA Media, the joint venture...
Oct 01, 2024•57 min
Today, we're launching a brand new show called Expected Goals, hosted by Matt Cutler and Maggie Murphy. Together Matt and Maggie will explore the business of women's football. Matt Cutler is the former editor of SportBusiness and was Director of Communications at Two Circles. As the head of Unofficial Partner Productions, Matt led on our hit series, The Pirates Versus The Premier League and the more recent Last Orders, on football's relationship with the pub. So he's the perfect person to be run...
Sep 27, 2024•52 min
Wedge Issues is Unofficial Partner's business of golf series, where we take some of the big trends from across sport and apply them to golf. This is a special live episode recorded in the boardroom of the DP World Tour's headquarters at The Wentworth Club on the Friday morning of the BMW PGA Championship, the Tour's flagship event. Around the table were people representing many of the golf industry's key stakeholders from across various parts of the game, including sponsors, media, agencies and ...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 7 min
The 3 stories are: 1. The race for the IOC big job - aka Bach’s overtures (this doesn’t make any sense but makes me sound like I know about classical music, which I don’t, apart from that theme from the Hovis ad). Six months ago the word on the street was that Seb Coe wasn’t running, and now he is. So, was the word wrong, or did he change his mind? Probably the former. Also, is the Samaranch name an asset or liability in the crusty world of IOC voting membership, the age profile of which makes t...
Sep 23, 2024•28 min
Earlier this year, The Football Association has became the first national governing body to mandate training on female health, with Women’s Super League and Championship clubs benefitting from a new league-wide support plan covering pregnancy, the menstrual cycle and pelvic health. The FA is working in partnership with The Well , specialists in delivering female health strategies across sport and co-founded by our guest today Baz Moffat. The Well is built on cutting-edge science, expertise and e...
Sep 17, 2024•45 min
The journey to creating a ten minute podcast is not a linear one. That's fancy talk for saying that rather than cut last week's half hour episode, this one went one for 45 minutes. Three stories: James Emmett reports from IMG's breathing and finance retreat. Richard Gillis on the big agency bun fight over UEFA rights. David Cushnan on the launch of Juventus Creator Lab. An Unofficial Partner x Leaders in Sport Collaboration. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A ...
Sep 13, 2024•44 min
Madeleine Orr is a leading sport ecologist and professor at the University of Toronto. A Forbes 30 under 30 inductee, she is the founder and co-director of The Sport Ecology Group, who consult on international climate issues for sports organizations such as the Commonwealth Secretariat, the UNEP, World Athletics, Adidas, F1 teams, and the NCAA. Madeleine has worked closely with the BBC and ESPN to further public understanding of climate issues in sport. Her book Warming Up: How Climate Change Is...
Sep 10, 2024•44 min
We tried to make a short form ten minute podcast and failed. It's supposed to be three stories in ten minutes. Think of this as a work-in-progress. UP's Richard Gillis is joined by James Emmett and David Cushnan from Leaders 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 ...
Sep 06, 2024•33 min
For millions of people, Rick Shiels' YouTube channel is how we watch golf in 2024. Shiels is our very special guest today. He started by uploading golf tips to YouTube 12 years ago to attract people to the Trafford Golf Centre in Manchester. Now there are 900 golf channels on the platform, but only one Rick Shiels, with more than 3 million combined subscribers whose videos have attracted more than three quarters of a billion video views. So this is a conversation about how we watch and consume s...
Sep 03, 2024•57 min
Other People's Money is our regular series on sports investment, with regular co-host Matt Rogan, co-founder of Two Circles. Our guests today are Jonathan Lenson and Sam Johnson, CEO and head of sport respectively at Milltown Partners, the communications and public policy consultancy co-founded by Paddy Harverson, the former PR to Manchester United and King Charles, among others. The conversation is prompted by some focus group work carried out by Milltown in to the reputational challenges that ...
Aug 27, 2024•1 hr 4 min
NBA v TNT – Exclusive Negotiating Periods and Last Matching Rights are central to the big row over NBA rights. But how they work and why does everyone hate them? Click here to r ead The Bundle Bulletin for the homework notes from this episode, compiled by regular co-hosts Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke. 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...
Aug 23, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Ben Sharpe, one of the most influential people in the golf business, as Managing Director & President of Callaway Golf across Europe, Middle East and Asia. Callaway is the largest manufacturer of golf equipment in the world and as such is a bellwether for any conversation about the commercial health of the game. Its tentacles run from the very top of the professional tours down to the participation at grass roots and in to retail and golf entertainment, via its TopGolf and Toptracer subsidia...
Aug 20, 2024•48 min
The Paris 2024 Olympic Games are over, the medals have been won and lost. And now the sports business conversation shifts to who won the other game, played between some of the biggest companies in the world, each seeking to stand out in the crowd of global and local brands sponsoring, or ambushing, the Olympics. What worked, what didn’t and how has the proliferation of digital channels changed how TOP partners and others approach the job of associating with the greatest show on earth. Our guests...
Aug 16, 2024•40 min
“As soon as the Southport murders happened, the way Muslims specifically were targeted has made you question again whether we do belong, whether deep down in the end, we're always having to justify our existence,” says Azeem Rafiq, the former professional cricketer on today’s podcast. “On an individual level. I’m not sleeping, I’m patrolling around the house, covering letterboxes up, that sort of thing is what all of us have been doing, getting in touch with each other, making sure if you do hav...
Aug 13, 2024•50 min
We go deep in to the North American market today with Daniel Kaplan, one of the very best reporters covering the US sports business beat. I’ve known Daniel for over twenty years, first when he covered tennis and the NFL for SportsBusiness Journal, and then more latterly at The Athletic, Front Office Sports and Awful Announcing, the sports media news site. We dissect three recent stories involving some of the biggest names in the US market: NFL, UFC, NBC and the Olympic Games. This week’s Unoffic...
Aug 09, 2024•45 min
We’re in the middle of the Olympic Games in Paris so it’s a good time to ask some bigger questions as to the future of the Olympics and mega sports events more generally, with regular contributor Ed Smith, founder of the Institute of Sports Humanities and fellow guest Dr Simon Rofe, a world leading expert in the field of sports diplomacy, and himself a visiting lecturer at ISH, which helps its students decode the signals derived from history and interrogate the impact of globalisation on sport. ...
Aug 06, 2024•50 min
A documentary special - UP Productions' Matt Cutler explores the changing relationship between two cultural institutions in the UK: football and the pub. The pub has an important place in both professional and grassroots football. As the place friends and family meet before the game, and dissect a win or loss afterwards. Where old school friends reserve a table under the big screen to catch-up on a weekend. And where Sunday League teams - many who operate thanks to patronage from their local pub...
Jul 30, 2024•1 hr 31 min
Why has the value of the NBA's media rights tripled, from $25billion to $75billion this week? "Purely because of gambling,' says Sam Sadi, CEO of LiveScore Group, the media and gambling platform, referencing the opening up of the US gambling marketplace. 'Nothing else that would drive that. Everything was trending downwards until five years ago, and nothing changed in the environment. It can be easily isolated and all of a sudden you see these increases that are much higher than what were projec...
Jul 26, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Leadership is one of the most important and yet misunderstood topics in sport. This summer, it has dominated the headlines. Performances of the England football team have mainly been analysed via the lens of its manager. So what is leadership and what are the mistakes we make when talking about it. Ed Smith is renowned thinker on sport, leadership and decision-making. The former professional cricketer with Kent, Middlesex and England, he was Chief Selector for England men’s cricket from 2018 to ...
Jul 23, 2024•47 min
The Buy Side is our regular series talking with brand side marketers about sport and sponsorship. This week’s guest is Mark Kirkham, the SVP & Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo, one of the biggest spenders in the sports industry, whose brands such as Aquafina, Pepsi, Gatorade and Lay’s are associated with a huge number of major events globally across a portfolio that includes official partnerships such as UEFA Champions League, the NFL, the Saudi Premier League, the LPGA, WNBA and EA FC or ...
Jul 16, 2024•47 min
Bryson Dechambeau heads to next week’s Open Championship at Troon as the reigning US Open champion, having beaten Rory McIlroy down the straight at Winged Foot in New York three weeks ago, confirming the American’s position as one of the very best players in the world today. But this is a conversation about what he’s done off the course over the last three years, that has changed his public image by becoming one of the most followed creators on social media. Brand Bryson is a masterclass in spor...
Jul 12, 2024•49 min
FIFA+ is the global football governing bodies own media platform, created in 2020 and launched two years later. It’s one of sports biggest and most ambitious and expensive direct-to-consumer projects, and so brings together many of the threads we talk about often on Unofficial Partner; a debate that runs across the sports industry, as governing bodies, leagues and teams spend billions creating owned and operated channels as a mitigation against volatility in the media rights marketplace and the ...
Jul 09, 2024•52 min
