Unofficial Partner Podcast

Today we’re talking about Pele, the greatest footballer ever, discuss. And specifically the new documentary film of his life, released on Netflix this week.The film chronicles Pele’s life on and off the field from his first World Cup appearance in 1958 through to the great final of 1970, a period in which Brazil moved from democracy to dictatorship, and Pele himself from an unknown teenager to the most famous sportsman in the world.Our guests are the film’s directors Ben Nicholas and David Tryhorn, and we discuss the storytelling challenge inherent in long form sports documentaries, the issue of editorial integrity and the expectations we project on to the athletes when it comes to social and political activism. If you like the Unofficial Partner podcasts, you’ll really like our weekly newsletter, which is read by thousands of people across the global sports business, and is where we talk about the topics and themes that arise from our podcast conversations. We can send it direct to your inbox every Thursday, all you have to do is sign up via unofficialpartner.com, where you’ll also find our back catalogue of podcasts.The newsletter that accompanies this podcast is available here: 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’s conversation is about the role of agencies in helping clients be culturally relevant in fans lives across sport, music and esports. And we ask why some brands seem able to build a bridge across those cultural divides, and some don’t.Our guests are Richard Adelsberg and Owen Laverty from the independent creative agency Ear to the Ground, where something seems to be going right.Despite the pandemic and the widespread cancellation of sport, Ear to the Ground has had a stellar year, tripling net profits and broadening its client portfolio that includes New Balance, Sony PS5, STATSports and Therabody, the performance tech brand.If you like the Unofficial Partner podcasts, you’ll really like our weekly newsletter, which is read by thousands of people across the global sports business, and is where we talk about the topics and themes that arise from our podcast conversations.We can send it direct to your inbox every Thursday, all you have to do is sign up via unofficialpartner.com, where you’ll also find our back catalogue of podcasts.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.

Ralf Reichert is one of the true pioneers of esports.He co-founded ESL in 2000 and has seen it grow in to one of the biggest and most influential event rights holders in the world.As will become clear, I come to this conversation with all the misconceptions of someone who never got in to gaming.But by the end, I’m a bit of a convert.I still don’t know much, but an hour with Ralf Reichert has put me straight on some of the redundant cliches people like me carry around with them.This is a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a long time, but as you’ll hear in the first bit of this interview, it’s not always easy to set these thing up.If you like the Unofficial Partner podcasts, you’ll really like our weekly newsletter, which is read by thousands of people across the global sports business, and is where we talk about the topics and themes that arise from our podcast conversations.We can send it direct to your inbox every Thursday, all you have to do is sign up via unofficialpartner.com, where you’ll also find our back catalogue of over 140 podcasts.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.

We’re talking about where audio fits in to digital strategy, with guests Sophie Hind of Voiceworks.ai and Charlie Beall of Seven League.We start on FIFA Sound, the governing body’s new collaboration with Universal Music, fronted by Liam Payne of One Direction, and move quickly through Alexa Skills, voice commerce, official club podcasts and of course, Clubhouse.To go deeper in to this topic and themes that run through the podcasts, you should sign up to Unofficial Partner’s weekly newsletter, which can delivered directly to your inbox every Thursday afternoon. Head to unofficialpartner.com to sign up.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.

Mark Williams has spent his career studying expertise and is one of the world’s leading authorities on skill acquisition in sport.His book, co-written with journalist Tim Wigmore, is called The Best, How Elite Athletes Are Made and includes stories and interviews with many leading sports stars including Marcus Rashford, Steph Curry, Helen Glover and many more.So what can we learn from these people about how to be better at what we do in other spheres? How do some of the book’s themes apply beyond sport and are there patterns to the ‘best’ organisations?What are the limits of the sports metaphor in training business people? How much of success is about culture? Do businesses ever grow beyond the culture of their founders?What are the traps of using data as the basis of decision making and how valid is the idea that technology spend is the key competitive advantage in sport/business in the future?To go deeper in to this topic and themes that run through the podcasts, you should sign up to Unofficial Partner’s weekly newsletter, which can delivered directly to your inbox every Thursday afternoon. Head to unofficialpartner.com to sign up.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 six of Money Talks, our regular series that looks at sport through the eyes of the finance and private equity sectors.Our guests today are Rob Tilliss and Michael Broughton, and the conversation is about how to value a professional sports team or franchise.Rob Tilliss is CEO of Inner Circle Sports and the former MD of JP Morgan’s sport advisory group. Inner Circle is a global investment bank focused the sports, media and entertainment industry.Michael Broughton is partner at Acceleration Capital, formerly director of business technology, innovation and investment strategy at FIFA.We talk about the various methods used to value an NBA franchise, what the new limited partnership rules mean for investors and owners, and how this compares to buying teams in the Premier League, with a look at the recent Burnley acquisition by ALK Partners.There’s more of this type of thing on the Unofficial Partner weekly newsletter, that’s delivered to your inbox every Thursday afternoon. If you don’t get it, 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.

Today’s podcast is the first in a new series in which we talk to women about sport and the sports business more generally.Joining me on this trip is Laura Weston, the global communications consultant and board member of Women’s Sports Trust, as well as being a two time former guest on the show herself.Laura’s going to be my regular co-host in this series, helping us to ask better questions about women’s relationship with sport and the business that surrounds it.Our guest today is Maggie Murphy, CEO of Lewes FC, who is asking some really interesting questions herself about the task of building commercial value in women’s sport and specifically the evolution of professional football in Britain.Murphy doesn’t have the usual football boss CV and comes to the job from a career as a human rights and anti-corruption advocate, working for Transparency International, a global non profit seeking to end the abuse of power in its many forms.She has been playing adult competitive football since she was thirteen, and has set-up, coached or played for teams in Tanzania, Rwanda, Guadeloupe, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK.In 2019, Murphy became CEO of Lewes FC, a small town club in East Sussex playing alongside big names such as Liverpool and Leicester City in the FA Women’s Championship, the second tier of football in England.But the Lewes story has travelled far beyond the sports pages.In 2017, they became the first professional or semi-professional football club to pay its women’s team the same as the men’s team as part of their Equality FC initiative, which aims to raise awareness about gender inequality and encourage more support for women’s and girls’ football across the UK and around the world.We’ll be following up on the themes discussed in the podcast in later episodes and in this week’s Unofficial Partner newsletter, which you can subscribe to via the website if you don’t already.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.

There’s a very small group of people who have genuinely shaped what is today called the sports marketing industry. Patrick Nally is one of those, and is often bracketed together with Mark McCormack and Horst Dassler as the genuine architects of today’s sports business.It’s hard to think of a major event or sport  that doesn’t bear Nally’s handprints, from the Olympics and FIFA World Cup through to Commonwealth Games, snooker, rugby, golf, cricket and more latterly match poker.But that’s just a part of the story. This is a conversation that reveals the back room deals, the agency politics and sometimes vicious personal rivalries among people at the very top of sport over the last fifty years.If you’ve ever wondered how we got here, you’ll enjoy the next hour.As ever, if you enjoy our podcasts, you’d really like the Unofficial Partner weekly newsletter, which builds on the topics and themes we talk about in more depth. You can sign up to that via UnofficialPartner.com where you can also delve in to the back catalogue of conversations with people from every corner of 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 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 to Nick Bitel, one of the most influential people in British sport as chair of Sport England, board member of UK Sport and chief executive of the London Marathon.The timing of this podcast coincides with the launch of Sport England’s new ten year strategy, called Uniting The Movement.The conversation covers a bit of ground, from the image and reality of sports governing bodies, their relationship with innovation and change, and the lessons learnt from the Covid pandemic which has hit grassroots sport and activity so hard.So given all that, it’s appropriate that this podcast is sponsored by our mates at Joymo.Joymo is a livestreaming platform made for grassroots sports, allowing clubs to engage with fans from around the world and generate income with pay-per-view ticket sales. You can start livestreaming in an easy and cost effective way using the Joymo App. All the equipment your club needs is a smartphone or tablet and a tripod and you are ready to go. Sign up today by visiting Joymo.tv!As ever, if you like the podcasts, you’d really like the weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter, which covers the sports business themes we talk about in more depth. You can sign up to that via UnofficialPartner.com where you can also delve in to the back catalogue of conversations with people from every corner of 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 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.

Of the +125 pods we’ve done over the past 2 years or so, today’s conversation must rank as one of our all time favourites.It’s with Norway’s greatest export Jan Age Fjortoft, the former international, Bundesliga and Premier League footballer turned media star and strategic sports consultant.In 1992, Fjortoft was one of just 39 foreign players in the Premier League during a career that saw him score 249 goals in 548 professional games including 71 caps for Norway, for whom he played at the 1994 FIFA World Cup in America.This was before he embarked on a range of second careers working as a popular TV host, interviewer and analyst for German and Norwegian television, ESPN and SKY Germany. He has also managed the Norway national team, worked as an adviser to the Norwegian government and anti drug agency WADA and built his own strategic consultancy.So, we talk about loads of things, including the peculiar and often bizarre reality of playing in the Premier League, the Middlesborogh Galacticos, what it was like on the town with Fabrizio Ravanelli and we talk about the much derided genre of the post-match interview with players and managers.A big thank you to Adrian Bevington for putting us together. The pair have been mates since they met at Middlesbrough in the mid ‘90s.As ever, if you like the podcasts, you’d really like the weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter, which covers many other sports business themes in more depth. You can sign up to that via UnofficialPartner.com where you can also delve in to the back catalogue of conversations with people from every corner of 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 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.