Unofficial Partner Podcast

Today's conversation is about how one of the world's biggest sponsors tackles the shutdown in the sporting calendar. For this we sought the views of Ben Blanco, currently the global sponsorship lead for Heineken, based in Amsterdam and prior to that was head of sport and entertainment marketing at Samsung.Ben's role at Heineken is to oversee the beer giant's relationship with sport, that includes sponsorship of the UEFA Champions League, F1, The Heineken Cup rugby and of course Euro 2020, which was due to take place in 12 cities around the continent this summer. None of that is happening, so what decisons does Ben need to make now, and how does a big brand deal with the ramifications of such a massive disruption to its marketing plans.The Unofficial Partner podcast is now published daily, and we're proud and grateful that our conversations are being listened to by thousands of people across the sports business every week of the year. If you'd like to enquiry about advertising, sponsorship or branded podcasts, please get in touch with Sean via email sean@unofficialpartner.co.uk or you can reach us via the website 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.

Aidan Cooney is founder and CEO of InCrowd, the fan experience technology company and is probably best known as the guy who created and ran Opta, the world’s leading sports data business, which he sold to Perform Group in 2014.The story of Opta is the story of the rise of sports data, from a marginal, nerdy backwater to the billion dollar industry it is today. Aidan played a central role in this evolution and this is part of an occasional series of podcasts we’ve done that goes deep in to the history and future of sports tech. If you’re a new listener, you might want to go back to previous podcasts we’ve done with Oli Slipper, Andrew Croker and Sam Seddon, all of which tackle a similar theme.To help recall the key moments, we invited Simon Banoub along to InCrowd’s offices in London, Simon is a leading b2b sports marketer who worked with Aidan as the company's head of marketing. He’s a Middlesbrough fan, which makes two in a week, after Adrian Bevington’s Unofficial Partner debut on Tuesday.Stay safe and listen to 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.

Alexandra Willis is having a very good career, as she oversees strategy and execution of communications, content and digital for the All England Club, otherwise known as Wimbledon.We went to SW19 - before the lockdown! - to talk to Alex for some careers advice and to ask her two of her favourite questions: can we get a ticket (two together for 2021?) and what does she do for the other 50 weeks of the year when there’s not one of sport’s greatest events taking place outside her office window.You’ll have noticed that we’ve been putting out more podcasts recently in response to a large jump in listeners during the current lockdown. This week we’ve done one every day, and we’ll do the same next week.When it all settles down a bit, we’ll look again at how many podcasts we do, whether we go back to one a week, or whether there’s an appetite for more, perhaps three a week, each with a slightly different focus.More than anything we want to be useful, and to do that we need your help to tell us what’s good and what isn’t. To that end, get in touch via email on the site where you can sign up for the Unofficial Partner weekly newsletter. In the meantime, stay safe and listen to 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.

Q. Which leading sports business personality do we need to hear from most during this current shitfest?There's only one answer to that one.Barry Hearn needs no introduction, but we’ll give him anyway.Today, Matchroom is one of the biggest producers of live sport in the world, from boxing, snooker and darts to tenpin bowling, ping pong and carp fishing, the company hosts 150 events and creates 10,000 hours of available programming a year.When it comes to managing, packaging, marketing and selling sport, there’s nobody with more real world experience than Barry Hearn, and it helps that he’s laugh out loud funny...Boris Johnson, Karren Brady, DAZN, KSI, Frank Maloney, Anthony Joshua, Tyson Fury…they’re all here.Enjoy this one, it’s great.A big thank you to our mate Gary Linke for helping set this 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.

Today we go behind the scenes in football with Adrian Bevington. There are very few people better qualified to talk about what’s really happening in the corridors of power at a national level and within the club game. Adrian is best known for his work at The FA over nearly two decades, first as the go-to comms guy and then as managing director of Club England, a role he held for five years till 2015. During his period at the FA he worked with seven England managers Howard Wilkinson, Peter Taylor, Kevin Keegan, Sven-Göran Eriksson, Steve McClaren, Fabio Capello and Roy Hodgson. and worked with several chief executives, including Brian Barwick, Adam Crozier and Ian Watmore. Adrian was born in Middlesbrough and started his career at ICI as a trainee reporter on the company newspaper C&P News in 1987. He is a lifelong fan of his hometown football team Middlesbrough Football Club, whose media team he later joined. He has also written books on the club, one with fellow press officer Dave Allen, "From Doom to Boom: The Most Dramatic Decade in the Life of Middlesbrough FC" published in 1996), about the dramatic rebirth of the club following their financial woes in mid 80s. In 2018 Bevington moved back to his hometown and became Middlesbrough’s Head of Recruitment Operations a role he left at the end of last year.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 going deep in to the business of cricket with Tim Wigmore, who has broken a few stories over the past week in The Daily Telegraph around the consequences of coronavirus on the English county game, and the broader Twenty20 calendar from iPL to the Big Bash. We talk about the economics of T20, the development of the game around the world and how cricketers earn a living. Twenty20 cricket was an early example of some of the big themes in the sports business, from the rise of short form sport, private equity in sport and how vulnerable governing bodies are to apparently rich men arriving in helicopters.Tim Wigmore and Freddie Wilde have written a great book called Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution, out now and available via Amazon.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.

Nobody - literally nobody - has written more words on the impact of Coronavirus on sport than Matt Slater, staff writer on The Athletic. So we got him on the podcast to see what he’s learnt. For 16 years, Matt was the BBC’s sports correspondent and more recently PA’s chief sports reporter. Also, he’s the spitting image of Chris Froome.Then we look at esports, and specifically the story that the sector is a safe haven in the sports market. For this we talk to Leo Matlock, chief commercial officer of Blast, the leading esports company, which owns some of the leading teams, including world #1 Astralis in CS:GO, and Origen in LoL, and have created a brand new esports tournament - BLAST Pro Series.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 no point in pretending we can get away with business as usual, so we’ve put our regular podcasts to one side to focus on the only issue anyone cares about: what’s happening to the sports business during the coronavirus pandemic? In this first episode of a special series, we talk to people from across the business to get a quick sense of what they’re feeling, their worries and the decisions they are going to have to consider in the coming days and weeks. Featuring conversations with Henry Chappell of Pitch Marketing, Murray Barnett, formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN, Ashley Blake, General Counsel of The Sports Consultancy and TSC Legal, and Simon Dent, founder and CEO of Dark Horses.If you want to join the conversation as we track the impact of the current crisis on the sports biz, get in touch with us via unofficialpartner.comStay safe.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.

What’s the point of a sports minister? This was the first question to Tracey Crouch MP, who carried out the role between 2015 and 2019, before resigning on a point of principle - a rare thing these days - over the government’s delay in acting to reduce the harms inflicted by fixed odds betting terminals in betting shops. The conversation ranges from how things work in Westminster, or don’t, the role of lobbying, the limits of government power and the peculiar remit of the sports portfolio. There’s plenty of other stuff too, like her Spurs fandom - yet another high profile sports biz person who supports the right side - and the future of women’s football in the UK.Our thanks to The Playbook for helping organise this podcast and for hosting us at their brand new offices in Farringdon.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 went to Stratford to meet Carsten Thode, the former Synergy and Engine strategy director to talk about his new startup business, Aphetor.This is a conversation we’ve been wanting to have since Carsten left Engine nearly a year ago, one because his views on sports marketing are really interesting and challenging, and secondly because we're nosy and wanted to know what his plan was.His new business is a multi sport event that brings together around 40 of the biggest online influencers and creators for a week of competition in May of this year.Regular listeners of Unofficial Partner will find that Carsten is asking some very good questions of how things are done currently and why the influencer market might be a good route in to disrupting what he sees as the usual restrictions and frustrations faced by many sponsors when they get in to sports marketing.Have a listen and feel free to get in touch afterwards, we'd love to know whether you agree that he's on to something.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.