A documentary special - UP Productions' Matt Cutler explores the changing relationship between two cultural institutions in the UK: football and the pub. The pub has an important place in both professional and grassroots football. As the place friends and family meet before the game, and dissect a win or loss afterwards. Where old school friends re…

Why has the value of the NBA's media rights tripled, from $25billion to $75billion this week? "Purely because of gambling,' says Sam Sadi, CEO of LiveScore Group, the media and gambling platform, referencing the opening up of the US gambling marketplace. 'Nothing else that would drive that. Everything was trending downwards until five years ago, an…

Leadership is one of the most important and yet misunderstood topics in sport. This summer, it has dominated the headlines. Performances of the England football team have mainly been analysed via the lens of its manager. So what is leadership and what are the mistakes we make when talking about it. Ed Smith is renowned thinker on sport, leadership …

The Buy Side is our regular series talking with brand side marketers about sport and sponsorship. This week’s guest is Mark Kirkham, the global CMO of PepsiCo, one of the biggest spenders in the sports industry, whose brands such as Aquafina, Pepsi, Gatorade and Lay’s are associated with a huge number of major events globally across a portfolio tha…

Bryson Dechambeau heads to next week’s Open Championship at Troon as the reigning US Open champion, having beaten Rory McIlroy down the straight at Winged Foot in New York three weeks ago, confirming the American’s position as one of the very best players in the world today. But this is a conversation about what he’s done off the course over the la…

FIFA+ is the global football governing bodies own media platform, created in 2020 and launched two years later. It’s one of sports biggest and most ambitious and expensive direct-to-consumer projects, and so brings together many of the threads we talk about often on Unofficial Partner; a debate that runs across the sports industry, as governing bod…

Welcome to The Bundle, our deep dive in to the sports media rights economy with regular co-hosts Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke. Today’s list of topics include trying to decipher FIFA’s media strategy around FIFA+ and the Club World Cup, we dip in to the French market and the challenges being faced by the country’s leading football league, Ligue…

Performance data has long played a role in the way sport is presented on television. From football to formula one, we’re familiar with commentators referencing statistics to help explain what we’re watching. But increasingly, the most sought after data points are those that exist within the body of the athlete. Heart rate and other biometric data i…

Sport was a big presence in the annual Cannes Lions Festival last week. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the top of the tree when it comes to showcasing the relationship between creative ideas and sport. There were 665 entries from 41 countries vying for the coveted prizes. So what’s winning awards this year, why are they wi…

This is the second episode of Other People’s Money, our regular deep dive in to the world sports investment, with my regular co-host Matt Rogan, one of the co-founders of Two Circles and a serial adviser to sports organisations. Today the conversation is about private equity. We went to the Victoria offices of Phoenix Capital to talk to Tim Dunn, a…

Tom Beahon created the Castore sportswear brand with his brother Phil in 2016. Today, their shareholding in the firm is valued at around £500million following a recent capital round, led by US merchant bank and investor The Raine Group, which values the company at £950mn. This investment will contribute to Castore’s attack on the sportswear industr…

Steve Martin and Jamie Wynne-Morgan created and developed the award-winning M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment agency over a 20-year period. Six months ago they resigned, and there's been speculation ever since as to what they'll do next. Today they answer that question. It's called MSQ Sport + Entertainment. We went to meet the pair at their new Lo…

What does sport look like from the money side of the equation? What’s the investment rationale behind buying a football team, cricket franchise, the new sports tech thing or a sports agency? What are assumptions about how the market will develop? Who’s going to win, who will lose out? These are just a few of the questions we’re looking to explore i…

Wedge Issues is a new series focused on the business of golf. Our first guest is the BBC's voice of golf Iain Carter, who leads the corporations coverage of the sport across audio and online at a time of unprecedented upheaval. The traditional men's game has been attacked by LIV Golf, backed by Saudi's PIF money, which is attempting to disrupt the …

Let us take you inside the Great Hundred Franchise Sell-Off The Hundred is the England and Wales Cricket Board’s controversial short form format. This week, the ECB has secured an agreement on a funding model between the host and non-host counties - those counties who have a Hundred franshics and those who don’t. This could have seismic ramificatio…

Jack Buckner is the former two Olympic Games athlete and 5000 metre European Champion who is now CEO of UK Athletics, the governing body for track and field in Britain. Buckner has held the same position at British Triathlon and more recently British Swimming. This followed a career in sports marketing at Adidas, in the UK, Germany and the US. The …

Our regular deep dive in to the latest happenings in sports media, with regular co-hosts Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke. The episode covers a variety of topics starting with the NFL's strategic move to stream Christmas Day games on Netflix and the broader implications for live sports streaming. They delve into Sky Sports Plus' new streaming opti…

NBC has built an audience for the Premier League in North America, creating a broadcast home for English club football for more than a decade. The television giant's latest six year deal is worth $450million-per-season to the league, more than five times the size of their original US rights deal, in 2013. Does that money buy them the right to host …

Sportradar is one of the big beasts of the sports business, providing software, data and content through subscription and revenue share arrangements to sports leagues, betting operators and media firms. It serves more than 1,600 customers across 120 countries, including DraftKings, Twitter and ESPN, and is an official partner of the National Basket…

Live from Madrid, The Billion-Euro Club Football Brainstorm. Big ideas discussed by great panelists from across the European club game, courtesy of ECA Club Connect, the inaugural business summit convened by the European Club Association. Over 350 directors and operational leaders from more than 200 clubs met at the Meliá Castilla Hotel over 24-25 …

The Buy Side is our regular series where we talk to brand side marketers about sport and sponsorship. Today's guest is Anneliese Mesilati, Head of Brand Activation and Sponsorships, Americas at UBS, the private banking group and wealth management business. We talk about the brand's extensive sport portfolio and its role within the marketing of the …

Everyone agrees the current sports ticketing market doesn't work. It rips off fans, is vulnerable to touts and is an inefficient way to manage supply and demand. But is regulation the answer? Labour will cap the resale prices of tickets and regulate resale platforms if the party wins the next general election, Sir Keir Starmer said recently. The pl…

What is the Invictus Games Foundation and why is it still relevant, ten years after the creation of the first event for injured servicemen and women in London in 2024? A powerful and important conversation with Dominic Reid OBE, the CEO of the Invictus Games Foundation, the international governing body for the event that promotes sport's role in re…

In the UK 500 pubs closed in 2023. By the end of June it’s predicted 750 will have closed in 2024. It’s stark, there’s no two ways about it. We asked YouGov again to help us make sense of what’s going on. They found that one in four sports fans – equivalent to 3.4m people – are going to the pub less than they did a year ago. And more than half (55%…

In 2017, Laura Youngson led a group of women to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro to play a record-breaking football match with the campaigning group Equal Playing Field to highlight gender inequalities in sport. During this experience, Laura discovered the women were all wearing boots made for men (or kids) which left their feet in pain long after the fi…

Cause and effect. If this then that. Attribution is the holy grail of marketing. The quest to provide evidence of the impact of a sports sponsorship on the sponsor's business. The digital era was supposed to solve this puzzle. But it might have made it worse. To discuss this big question are Tom Smith and Charlie Boss. Tom is Chief Product Officer …

The Bundle is our popular long running series that unpicks the latest news to emerge from the sports media and streaming marketplace. A new feature is The Bundle Bulletin, an accompanying newsletter that goes to Unofficial Partner subscribers, featuring thought starters and strands from the conversation. Each month, before we record, Richard and co…

Football shirts are front page news in England and Germany in the last week, so this is a timely conversation about our relationship with sports jerseys, and the nature of their commercial value. Guests are Mike Fordham and Kylie Bishop. Mike has worked for IMG and the ECB and played pivotal roles in the set up of both the IPL and The Hundred, and …

The Saudi Question permeates the global sports business conversation from top to bottom. Billions of pounds has been across multiple layers of the industry, including buying players, purchasing foreign clubs, developing domestic clubs and buying or developing tournaments at home and abroad. These deals have been pursued by the government itself, th…

This a live podcast recorded at the London HQ of LiveScore, to commemorate the company's 25th anniversary. It's a conversation with Sam Sadi, CEO of LiveScore about our relationship with tech, from colour television to AI. To mark the occasion, LiveScore has created the Evolution of Fan report which delves into the last quarter-century of football …

You might know Utilita Energy from the front of Luton Town's shirt, the journey of the newly promoted club is one of the stories of the Premier League season. But there's so much more to the company than that. Luton and Utilita have partnered since 2015, back when the club was still in the fourth tier, becoming front-of-shirt sponsor in February 20…

More Than Equal's mission statement is to find, nurture and develop female racing drivers, while identifying and removing the systemic barriers they face. It was founded by 13-times Grand Prix winner David Coulthard and the entrepreneur and philanthropist, Karel Komarek. Their website explains why having a woman as an F1 World Champion matters. "Im…

Thomas Hitlsperger is the former German international footballer who played for several leading British and European clubs during a career that took him to Aston Villa, VFB Stuttgart, Lazio, Everton and West Ham, culminating in over 100 Premier League appearances and 52 caps for Germany. He was director of football and then CEO of Stuttgart and now…

Manchester City are in the process of extending their most important and lucrative sponsorship deal, with Etihad, the Abu Dhabi-based airline, whose brand is synonymous with the club following the takeover by Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), which bought 90 per cent of the club from Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Th…

The Bundle is our regular deep dive news analysis podcast on the sports media marketplace, with co-hosts Yannick Ramcke and Murray Barnett. 00:27 Discussion on Discovery Fox, Warner Brothers, JV 00:58 Deep Dive into the Raptor Project 01:52 The Great Rebundling: A New Era in Sports Broadcasting 03:19 The Uncertainties and Challenges of the New Mode…

Jason Stockwood grew up in Grimsby, became a hugely successful tech entrepreneur and came back to his home town to buy the local football club, Grimsby Town FC. One of the best articulations on the reality of the football business, the mistakes and myths, the role and limits of private equity in sport and the ineffable magic that makes football so …

A conversation on the potential and limits of AI technology in a sports context, both performance and commercial. What's possible, what's probable, what will get in the way of progress. Will AI be an engine for inequality between the haves and have nots of sport, and what can we do now, today, to embrace the coming wave. Our guests are two leading …

We caught up with Roger Mitchell while he was in London, to talk about his new book Sports Perfect Storm: An Industry Now Totally Adrift. Roger describes himself as 'a chartered accountant from Glasgow' who at the end of the 1990s 'made his personal passion for sport a profession' when he became CEO of the Scottish Premier League, giving him a seat…

The Super Bowl is the biggest day in sport. So who will be in Vegas for the game and how much have they paid for a ticket? And of course, has Taylor Swift had an impact on demand and price for those tickets? We're joined by Cris Miller, Chief Business Officer at StubHub and Global Managing Director at viagogo. Cris is joined by Rob Wilson, Professo…

The Buy Side is our regular series where we talk to brand side marketers about sport and sponsorship. Our guest is David Paro, Head of Global Sponsorships at MoneyGram, the financial services company which became the title sponsor of the HaasF1 team in 2022. So this is a conversation that takes us inside the business of Formula One, the sponsor's v…

Erin Ruane was vice president of content acquisition at Netflix for more than a decade, participating in the formulation and execution of the company’s strategy, from the launch of the streaming service, international, pricing and culture. Her responsibilities included negotiating and managing all studio relationships, over $350 million in annual s…

This is the story of when football met the crypto boom. Spoiler: it took the money, no questions asked. After that, everything that happened was inevitable. Martin Calladine's new book looks at how some of the most famous clubs in the world indulged in misleading marketing, grotesque failures of due diligence, unethically monetising fan relations a…

Richard Shotton, author of 'The Illusion of Choice,' joins Richard to talk about how the findings of behavioural science apply the sports market. We make hundreds of decisions every day. What club to support, what subscription to keep and how much is too much to pay for a match ticket? These decisions may appear to be freely made, but psychologists…

Richard Gillis, Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke deep dive into the media rights and streaming marketplace for sports. This episode is sponsored by We Are Sweet, the leading provider of digital platforms for the sports industry. Are you tired of the same old headaches when it comes to building digital platforms? We Are Sweet excels in crafting bes…

The big news in the sports industry is the sale of Two Circles, the sports marketing group co-founded and led by today's guest Gareth Balch. The deal values the company at £250 million (US$317.9 million), representing a big payout for George Pyne's Bruin Sports Capital, which paid $40million for 80% of the company in December 2019, when it bought i…

Luke 'The Nuke' Littler is the story of the sporting year so far. The 16 year old darts player made it to he final of the PDC World Championship at his first attempt. The media numbers were huge and Littler is now a household name in a way that many sports people aren't in these days of niche platforms and the competitive attention economy. So what…

Closed leagues, club v country, private equity, player exodus, the club pyramid and concussion. These are just a few of the issues we tackle with Will Greenwood in this special rugby business episode of the podcast. Greenwood is one of England's greatest ever rugby players, a World Cup winner and was three times picked to tour with the British and …

Richard and regular side kick Simon Moore, the award winning creative director welcome Gabi Mostert of Homeground to The Big Idea, to discuss the intersection of music and sports in advertising, looking at memorable examples from the industry and how this trend has evolved. Work referenced includes Wrigley's Extra, John Lewis's Christmas ads, The S…

Today we’re heading to the mountains, or at least, the Peak District, in the company of Molly Thompson Smith and Julian Lings. Molly is a star of one of the climbing scene, which since Tokyo has been an Olympic sport. Born in Ladbroke Grove in London, she one of very few people of colour in the sport, which becomes more relevant when you see the da…

Richard and Sean head to Dublin for the PFL Europe. It's a brutal world, in and out of the ring. Guests: Sean O'Connell is former professional mixed martial artist who most recently competed and won a title in the Light Heavyweight division of the Professional Fighters League. Sean fronts the event and media coverage of PFL Europe. Jon Culligan is …