Unofficial Partner Podcast

This is the third in our Tomorrowland series about the sports tech and innovation, and we’re delighted to welcome two guests from two major sports governing bodies: Helen Rowbotham from British Rowing and Chris Pollard of the LTA.Helen moved to rowing in 2016 from CSM, where she was director of consulting. She has nearly 20 years experience in the sports and events industry, delivering projects both in the UK and internationally for local, city and national government organisations; event bidding and organising committees; Olympic Committees; event rights holders and many others. Her experience includes comprehensive strategic reviews of the Commonwealth Games Federation and Paralympic Games, the development of a High Performance Strategy for Saudi Arabia, multiple event feasibility and bidding projects (including the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games) and working on a wide range of facility development projects, including the 2012 Olympic Stadium and Singapore Sports Hub. Chris Pollard is another CSM alumni and was prevoiusly head of information and knowledge management for London 2012. Chris oversees the relationship between The LTA and Deloitte which aims to put digital transformation at the heart of the governing body’s work to grow tennis in Great Britain, devise new digital initiatives to support the LTA’s vision of ‘Tennis Opened Up’, encouraging anyone of any age, background or level of fitness to pick-up a racket, with the ultimate aim of growing participation and attracting a new generation of tennis fans.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 week’s guest is Jeremy Dale, one of the original co-founders of the OTRO the football media platform, who has had a marketing career working for some of the world’s most famous companies. He was former VP of Worldwide retail for Microsoft, won a BAFTA for the launch of Pokemon and led Motorola’s Product (RED) Campaign in collaboration with Oprah and Bono, the latter of whom he claims gave him the inspiration for his new book, The Punk Rock of Business. Jeremy was listed in Total Films 100 Most Influential People in the Movies (between Tom Cruise and Matt Damon), not bad for someone who started as an accountant for Tarmac.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 5 of The Bundle, our fortnightly show that goes deep in to the murky world of sports media, with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke.This week we unpick DAZN’s negotiations in Japan to move their long term J-League rights deal in to a profit share agreement and wonder if this is how things are going to be in the post Covid era.Like DAZN, Amazon is never far from The Bundle conversation and this week is no different, with a look at the noises its making around live rights acquisition, and the launch of a new sports category on Twitch, and of course that new Spurs doc and accompanying storefront deal. Then it’s on to the future value of highlights, Mediapro’s Telefoot mobile subscription play, Spotify’s League of Legend sponsorship deal and the prospect of single leg UEFA Champions League matches. So much to fit in, hope you enjoy it. If you’ve got a topic you think we should discuss on The Bundle, get in touch via the website and sign up to our newsletter. 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.

Greg Dyke’s hugely successful career is defined by leading some of the UK’s biggest and most influential organisations, from the BBC, ITV, London Weekend Television, The FA and Brentford, the west London club he’s supported since childhood. Sport has been a theme throughout his professional and personal life. When he was managing director of LWT in the early 1990s, Dyke arranged to meet representatives of five major English clubs to discuss a deal to award them a greater slice of media rights fees. This meeting is often cited as a catalyst for creation of the Premier League. Famously, Dyke’s ITV was outbid by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky, and years later, when Dyke was a board director of Manchester United, his was the only vote against Murdoch’s proposed takeover of the club. He became Director General of the BBC in 2000, with a reform agenda, famously describing the organisation as ‘hideously white’. In 2013, Dyke replaced David Bernstein as chairman of The FA, leaving in 2016, choosing not to seek re-election. We’re grateful to Nic Coward for putting us in touch. If you’re a latecomer to Unofficial Partner, you can go back and listen to our entire back catalogue, for free, via the website or Apple Podcasts. and if you’ve been with us since episode one, we’re really grateful for your support and interest, and rest assured we’re just getting going.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.

It goes without saying that we wanted to find a guest with a big enough reputation in the industry to withstand the enormous pressure of celebrating our 100th show. So, it’s a great pleasure to say hello to Donald Dell, one of the real legends of sports marketing folklore.He was the agent who signed the two most valuable and enduring shoe deals in sports history, Stan Smith and Adidas and Michael Jordan and Nike.Dell, now 83, is the Yale educated lawyer and former pro tennis player, who captained the US Davis Cup team in the 1960s containing Smith and Arthur Ashe, two megastars who became the founding clients of Proserv which Dell co founded in 1970.  In an extraordinary career, Dell represented many of the giants of sport, from Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl, Stefan Edberg and Pete Sampras to Nancy Kerrigan, Patrick Ewing and for a while at least, Jordan. So this is an hour of conversation that moves around from star to star and decade to decade, taking us inside the room with some of the great characters of the sports business, including Phil Knight, Horst Dassler and Mark McCormack to name just a few.If you’re a latecomer to Unofficial Partner, you can go back and listen to our entire back catalogue, for free, via the website or Apple Podcasts. and if you’ve been with us since episode one, we’re really grateful for your support and interest, and rest assured we’re just getting going. We spoke to Dell from his home in Maryland, Washington and we’re grateful to Steve Horowitz of Innercircle Sports for putting us in touch. 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 takes us inside Snapchat as we talk about the platform’s relationship with sport, head of partnerships Anmol Malhotra. Snapchat burst on to the scene in 2011 as the anti facebook, a photo and messaging app aimed directly at a much younger target audience and with an entirely new visual grammar. It now claims to reach 90% of 13-24 year olds in America.This stat has led many teams, leagues and athletes to attempt to build an audience on the platform with mixed results. So we ask what works and what doesn’t, and delve in to what Snapchat knows about its audience when it comes to consuming sports related content, and how this is likely to evolve. 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 the second in our Tomorrowland series on sports technology and innovation.Our guest is Jean Baptiste Alliot who’s in charge of UEFA’s Innovation Hub, which is described as ‘a vehicle for future proofing UEFA and ensuring UEFA stays one step ahead of the latest trends to shape the game’.So, what does that mean, how does one of sport’s biggest and most commercially successful right owners view the future, what is its strategy on how we watch and play the game now and over the next decade. More specifically, I wanted to know how will they play nice with the giant tech platforms who, depending on your point of view, are either essential partners to reach football’s next audience or parasites seeking to use sport to collect and own ever greater reservoirs of first party data. So, as ever, we weren’t short of things to talk about. 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 4 of The Bundle, our fortnightly series that goes deep in to the world of sports media with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke.Today’s we’re looking in detail at the value of tv rights beyond the domestic market, and ask what drives fan interest and therefore the price of international sports rights, is it the big clubs or the competitiveness of the league or tournament, and we look at the markedly different way that money is distributed by the Bundesliga and the Premier League.There’s also a new report out from Two Circles, which calls for rights owners to hedge their bets when it comes to media income streams by shifting towards a hybrid approach to distribution strategy.All of this questions the value of sports properties at a time when some areas are being circled by new private equity investment groups.As ever there’s plenty of news and analysis about the big questions facing the sports business.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.

David Wheldon began his career as an ad exec at Saatchi and Saatchi in 1983 and retired as CMO of Royal Bank of Scotland earlier this year.In between these dates, Wheldon established himself as one of the most influential marketers of his generation, a career in which sport and sponsorship played a big role. His name is associated with several of the biggest spending sports sponsors of the last three decades, from Coca Cola to Vodafone, and more latterly across the big bank brands of Barclays, NatWest and RBS. So he brings an informed and experienced eye to bear on the biggest sports properties in the world, from the OIympics and Fifa World Cup to the Premier League, Formula One, Ferrari, McLaren, Manchester United, the England cricket team and the Six Nations rugby championship to name just a few.What has David Wheldon learnt about how sport works and when it doesn’t.This is a conversation that starts by going back to one of his earliest and most famous marketing campaigns.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 were already plenty of people worried about what was going to happen to their jobs and their careers in the sports business, as new technology and the data era made them question the relevance of their skills in today’s talent marketplace. Covid has amplified that fear at every level, from college leavers aspiring to break in to the industry, through first and second jobbers right up to the C-suite.All this at a time when the diversity of that talent pool looks so narrowly defined, by gender, ethnicity, age and mindset. So in today’s podcast I talk to Amanda Fone, founder and CEO of F1 recruitment, who brings 35 years of experience to these questions. In addition to running F1, Amanda is the co founder of the BAME2020 diversity programme, which launched in 2016 as a way of raising the issue of inclusion, diversity and social mobility within the sports sector. We talk about white fragility, office culture and the very potential that covid will create a lost generation of sports business talent.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.