Unofficial Partner Podcast

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 big new event coming up at the end of August. The Collins Cup has a $1.5million prize purse and is a reformatting of the sport along the lines of golf’s Ryder Cup. If you’d like to find out more, then click here.  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 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.

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 leading UK firm Ernst & Young in 1991 to assist in planning the new Premier League. Appointed Chief Executive in February 1992, the competition was officially ratified just seven days later by The Football Association, allowing Parry to proceed with negotiations for a television deal which was eventually awarded to BSkyB and the BBC for a then record bid of £304 million over five years.The context of the conversation is the recent review of English football carried out by Tracey Crouch MP, the former sports minister and a previous guest on Unofficial Partner. Her review was set up following the failure of The Super League, which features six of the Premier League’s leading teams. UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden announced he had “no choice” but to move quickly and launch the Government’s manifesto commitment of a fan-led review.The review he said will be wide-ranging in nature and will examine the potential for changes to ownership models, governance, how finance flows through the game and how to give supporters a greater say in the running of the game.The launch of the fan-led review comes following a number of high profile collapses in recent years including Bury Football Club that went into administration last year after being expelled from the Football League in 2019.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 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 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 Valley of sport’s role in showcasing brand and other types of messages. 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 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.

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 whether we’re talking about Twenty20 cricket and the rise of the IPL or the current questions around the ECB’s new brainchild, The Hundred; the Premier League play-offs; The Super League; or FIBA’s 3x3 basketball format and Rugby Sevens, both of which feature at the Olympics. Could a better format have saved The Super League? How can big tournaments be made more fun to watch but avoid contrived gimmicks? How can competitive balance be achieved without punishing excellence? And what does the data say about how women’s football, cricket and rugby could benefit by balancing components such as jeopardy, quality and connection with fans?  Our guests are Omar Chauduri and Ben Marlow, from Twenty First Group, who have thought about this question a great deal, and created a model that approaches the format question through a data led decision making framework. I find the results of their work fascinating, for what it says about sport and the questions it poses for everyone, from fans, teams and event rights holders through to television and media owners and financial investors. So wherever you are in the sports biz jungle, this is a topic that talks directly to your day job.   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. Subscribe via unofficialpartner.com or via Substack 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.

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 beginning to look like just another sports broadcaster. There’s fun to be had over-interpreting the basket case that is the French sports rights market. Amazon price structure for Ligue 1 suggests the end of cross-subsidization, which could be good news for rights owners; increases potential for future rights acquisitions. The Bundle price inflation: ESPN just announced their second rise in 2021. Does ESPN have an international vision, or it just an American thing? I live in the UK and never think of subscribing and I wonder if that’s significant. Does corporate memory shape strategy? ESPN got burnt from their experience with Premier League a decade or more ago, picking up scraps from Setanta and then losing them to BT Sport four years later. Does that experience still shape the company’s strategy, even though the people at the top are different?The reason Big Tech and football don’t fit seems too obvious: Football is a market by market thing whereas tech platforms are about breaking down that structure, like music, films and shopping. Note, Netflix is going after gaming not sport.Amazon’s NFL deal is an enormously expensive anomaly. DAZN x YouTube x Women’s Football: Globalization driving increased sponsorship opportunity; Limited downside, unlimited upside; UEFA’s recent deal for the Women’s Champions League could be the most significant of the year.When does a rights holder become a betting company? DraftKings new MLB deal includes live games alongside odds. The US discovers betting (streaming) rights, already a constant (and significant sourUnofficial 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.

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 around a new event schedule starting with The Collins Cup, a Ryder Cup-type international team format that pits the best in the world together on 28th  August. This is a way in to questions facing every sports rights holder as they seek to navigate a global marketplace of fans with fast changing expectations of how they want to consume elite 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 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.

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 other inventory via digital channels. To help us understand what a post-cookie internet might look like, we asked two experts in digital marketing to join us. Dr Augustine Fou is a world renowned leader in the topic of digital marketing and ad fraud who has held Group Chief Digital Officer roles for major advertising networks and is a former McKinsey consultant. https://www.linkedin.com/in/augustinefou/Joining Augustine is Phil Stephan, director at the sports data consultancy, Two Circles who has just published a white paper looking at this subject. https://twocircles.com/gb-en/articles/sport-third-party-cookie-crumbles/If you’re a sports data nerd, hold the purse strings of a brand marketing budget or just someone who wants to know more about how digital marketing really works, I promise this is a conversation you’ll want to hear.  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 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.

Re:Thinking Sport - The Players and P/EThis 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 private equity a good fit for sport?Our guests are Jonas Baer Hoffman, general secretary of FIFPro, the global representative of professional footballers which acts to support players interests across 64 national member associations. Joining Jonas is Peter Hawkings, part of the Portas leadership team with a focus on investment, who has served and advised CEOs of some of the largest federations in England and globally. 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 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.

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 Daniel Levy. He’s a board member of Ofcom and managing director of the America’s Cup sailing race. For everyone interested in sport’s value as a media product, this was a great opportunity to have a conversation about how we got here, and what that tells us about where we’re going. 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 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 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 favourites from the short list. It’s a conversation about creativity in a sports marketing context, and much more besides, from the role of agencies, whether sponsorship helps or hinders creativity and we look at the threads that are common to the very best work. 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 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.