Unofficial Partner Podcast

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.comUnofficial 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 and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

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.comEvery 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 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 and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

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 listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

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 opportunity to delve in to the lives and the minds of some of the best and highest paid esports gamers working today.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.comEvery 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 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 and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

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.comUnofficial 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 and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

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 represented Great Britain.A qualified lawyer, Aluko built a career as a TV pundit immediately combined with representing players and advising on contracts. All of this makes her supremely well placed for a very wide ranging conversation about many aspects of football, from the boardroom to the playing field, the pressures and challenges of fame, the role of agents and the future of both Angel City and women’s football, in the UK, Europe and the US.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.comEvery 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 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 and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

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 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.comUnofficial 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 and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

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.comUnofficial 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 and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

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 is the Co-Chairman of the Phoenix Rising Football Club, a professional soccer team, based in Phoenix, Arizona and which plays in the USL, the league below the MLS in the States. More recently, Johnson bought the rights to a new USL Championship franchise in Pawtucket, Rhode Island which is set to begin in 2022 at a new stadium. And earlier this year, Johnson was a member of the consortium that bought Ipswich Town Football Club, one of the founder members of the Premier League team but who currently reside in League One, the third tier of English football.My other guest is Fabrice Bocquet, who is a Partner at Portas Consulting.   Fabrice leads the Global Football Practice and was formerly Managing Director of French club FC Lorient, having begun his tenure at the Ligue 1 team as Chief Financial Officer in 2011. Every episode of ReThinking Sport can be found by searching Unofficial Partner via the big podcast providers, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via your favourite podcast app. Alternatively, you can go direct to unofficialpartner.com and search ‘Portas’ and you’ll find series one and two in their entirety. 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.comUnofficial 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 and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

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 and Vicks Cotton, two of the most accomplished and experienced sports television producers working today. Vicks is Executive Producer of Live Streaming at BBC Sport, covering major events including women’s football, netball and The Hundred. Jo is an Executive Producer at Sky Sports, covering a range of programming including Netball Superleague, The Hundred and the Women’s Super League. 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 unofficialpartner.comUnofficial 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 and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.