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 it from previous owner WPP. So why is the company that amount of money and what does it tell us about how the finance community values...

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 does Littler tell us about darts, the sports marketing industry and what we want from our sports stars in 2024? Guests: James Tattersall,...

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 Irish Lions. He made his International debut in November 1997 at Twickenham against Australia and remains the second highest try scorer in English...

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 Smiths in David Fincher's film The Killer, Spotify-Barcelona's collaborations, Honda's 'Ghost Lap'.  They explore the dynamics of sports marketing,...

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 data, that 90% of the UK’s black population have never considered climbing or mountaineering as a hobby. A five time national champion by the age of...

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 Partner at Portas Consulting, the global consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.   00:05 From esports to MMA, Copenhagen to...

Victoire Cogevina Reynal is asking some really interesting questions about the value of women’s football, now and in the years to come. She is the founder of Mercury 13, an investment consortium created to build a multi club ownership group in women’s football clubs across Europe and Latin America. The consortium includes former players such as the ex-England forward Eni Aluko, who is also a former Aston Villa and Angel City sporting director, the former Italy goalkeeper Arianna Criscione,...

Tia White is Amazon's General Manager of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services (AWS), responsible for owning go-to-market, product, and engineering for a portfolio of services on track to exceed profits of more than $25M including one of the fastest-growing services at AWS.  Joining her is Wyndham Richardson, Group Executive Director at Two Circles, previously founder of Pulselive, digital partner to some of the biggest names in sport which was acquired by Sony...

Unofficial Partner podcast: Insights from Blast's eSports event in Copenhagen In this episode Richard and Sean travel to Copenhagen to go behind the scenes at the BLAST Fall Finals, one of the big esports moments of the year, featuring the leading Counter Strike teams including FaZe Clan, Vitality and Cloud9 at the Royal Arena, Copenhagen. We talk to Tom Greene, COO of BLAST, who shared his insights about eSports, the event and esports ecosystem business model, the dynamic between...

What you need to know about what's happening in the sports media and streaming market, with regular co-hosts Yannick Ramcke and Murray Barnett. We analyse both sides of the negotiation table ahead of a busy time for European soccer league rights deals. From Viaplay's exit, Premier League go to market strategy and Ligue 1 reserve prices through to the NFL, Taylor Swift and Toy Story, via ESPN Bet, Amazon and Recast. So, a broad church.  00:00 Introduction to Unofficial Partner 00:22 Exploring...

How will the ESG agenda impact sport? ESG is short for Environmental, Social and Governance, and is a set of standards measuring business's impact on society, the environment, and how transparent and accountable it is; an attempt to capture all the non-financial risks and opportunities inherent in a company's day to day activities.  It relates to sport in a number of very significant ways.  For example, some major corporations are using ESG as a framework with which to shape their sport...

The third episode in our Project 2030 Series, made in collaboration with Two Circles that models the next decade in the sports marketplace.  The idea is to test some of the assumptions about where sport goes from here.  What type of sports property will be rewarded by the marketplace, and which ones will be punished? They’ve modelled the size of the market - everything, media rights, sponsorship, merch, tickets. That number is £220billion in 2032, a rise of 50% in a decade. So, our podcast...

This live panel discussion brings together a group of experts to debate the issues arising from The Pirates vs The Premier League, our successful podcast series that investigated the world of illegal streaming in sport. Joining Richard on stage at Sportel in Monaco are Simon Bryden, head of sport and video network, Synamedia Carlo DeMarcis, strategic advisor, Cleeng Thibaut Fresse, sales and marketing director, TMG Guillermo Rodriguez, chief operating officer of Sportian, a joint venture...

At the recent IOC session in Mumbai a number of IOC members called for IOC President Thomas Bach to go another term in the job. This would give Bach a further four years. The optics aren’t great. It’s all a bit North Korea. Jens Sejer Andersen of Play the Game wrote this: Eight-to-12-year term limits for Presidents to prevent accumulation of power are the single most important principle of governance reforms across Olympic sports. If Thomas Bach’s term is extended, hundreds of sports...

This is the second episode of our series made in collaboration with Two Circles, where we model the market for sport over the next decade. Today we analyse the role of the athlete, and to help us we're delighted to welcome Jazz Sawyers, British track and field athlete, two time Olympian, five time national champion who recently won gold in the Long Jump at the European Indoor Championships in Istanbul, where she broke the British record by breaking the 7 metre barrier for the first time. Off...

Hello from Monaco, where UP is taking the temperature of the sports media industry as it wrestles with some big questions.  We’re at Sportel, the sports media and tech convention, where the deals that underpin the sports economy get done; the big leagues are here in force to connect with broadcasters and tech platforms. But what are people really talking about in the bars, hotels and restaurants that surround the Grimaldi Centre? We recorded this  conversation in the bar at the luxurious...

At the end of Leaders Week London we gathered some smart people together in the podcast booth, to get their views on the highlights of the event, both on and off stage. Our guests include: Claire Kelly, General Manager of Gemba Europe Preeti Shetty, Director of Brentford FC and CEO of Upshot    Amar Singh, Senior Vice President, MKTG Jon Rest, Global News Reporter, SportBusiness Alex Inglot, Commissioner, ESL Pro League Giancarlo Bernini, Vice President, Deltatre   This podcast is sponsored...

This is part of our Squeezed Middle series on the strategic options available to the people running professional sport. The focus in this episode is the impact of those choices on the commercial income and capital value of sports teams, leagues and federations. Our guests are Ben Wells and Andrew Umbers. Ben is CEO of PTI Digital, the strategy and technology consultancy.  Andrew is co-founder and partner of Oakwell Sports Advisory, the leading strategic and financial advisor in sports and...

Unofficial Partner has become a media partner of SPORTEL Monaco, the world’s leading Sports Content Media Rights and Technology Convention, which runs from 23rd  to 25th of October. So in a couple of week time we're heading to Monaco for four days of deal making, networking and generally taking in the atmosphere of one of the big weeks in the sports industry calendar. This is a conversation about what we should expect when we get there, from three of the event's organisers, Joanna Merchie,...

This podcast is a live recording of the UP Billion Dollar Brainstorm which took place at the recent Two Circles Client Summit in the Kelvin Theatre, within the beautiful Institute of Engineering overlooking the Thames in London. It's the first of a series we're doing in collaboration with Two Circles, where we model the sports business in 2030. Other episodes will follow, looking at specific themes such as the athlete, content and technology. The on-stage guests were divided in to three...

The Unofficial Partner Brainstorm is a podcast recorded in front of a live audience, in partnership with Livescore Group.   The event took place at the top of the iconic ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London.  The subject was the relationship between sport, media and the gambling industry in the US and the UK. What role will gambling firms play in the new converged sports economy?  What is the role of fantasy games in the sports ecosystem, and how important is...

Our guest is Richard Scudamore, who was CEO and then Executive Chairman of The Premier League from 1999 to his retirement in 2018, a transformational period in the history of English football and the sports business more broadly. Scudamore's reign in charge saw the media rights for the league rise from £1.2billion for the 2001-04 cycle to over £5billion for 2014-16. He was formerly chief executive of the Football League, now EFL, and is a founding board member of the Football Foundation. A...

The Buy Side is our series of conversations about sport and sponsorship with brand marketers.  Our guest is Kevin McNair, Marketing Director of KP Snacks, whose career includes previous senior marketing roles at Unilever and PepsiCo.  We discuss the high profile sponsorship of The Hundred, the ECB's controversial short format cricket competition and discuss the work of Professor Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg Bass Institute for Marketing Science, which shapes the decision making of KP Snacks and...

Every market has a top, middle and bottom. The Premier League is among a small global elite of sports rights holders which is doing just fine, thank you. Billions of dollars in media revenue chases must-see content. But even within the league, different business models apply. The elite 'top four, or six' are chasing European football, and with it an additional pot of TV money flowing from UEFA competitions. Then there's the rest. The clubs that exist outside that bubble, for whom life is...

The Price of Football is the hit podcast that talks about the finances of the beautiful game, and today we're joined by its creators: comedian Kevin Day, football finance academic Kieran Maguire and former BBC producer Guy Kilty. Now they've written a book. It's called Unfit and Improper Persons, An Idiot’s Guide to Owning a Football Club. It's good, and can be pre-ordered on the Bloomsbury website. This episode of Unofficial Partner is sponsored by Leaders Week London, taking place on...