The Business of Sport

The IOC have announced today that the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games will be postponed until 2021. Many are asking, why did the IOC take so long to make the decision? UEFA made a swift call to postpone Euro 2020, but the Olympic Games is a far more complex beast. Here are just some of the considerations that the IOC will have been mulling over in recent weeks: The Host City Contract As is typi...

Today we will focus on how Italian Sports industry is facing up the outbreak. After more than a month from the outbreak, Italy has now the highest death toll of the world with more than 10 thousands victims. The country, still completely quarantined, was the first country in Europe to take serious measures toward sports events. All Sport leagues in the land had to stop. While the main heads of the...

"The ball is still rolling on the pitch in Belarus" Who would ever thought that FC Minsk vs Dynamo Minsk would be the only match broadcasting in Europe? Belarus Premier League are still playing. The derby of Minsk with an attendance of 3000 inside the stadium, attracted also foreign watchers. Someone even entitled it as the "the only football match on the earth". With fans all around the world lef...

The coronavirus pandemic is the defining crisis in the modern sports event industry.  Like me, you will have had the conversations with colleagues, clients and assorted sector experts, where you go in search of precedents. We want to gauge how bad this is, to put some sort of order on the chaos as it unfolds. That list probably that starts at the 2007 banking crisis, then 9/11, and on through a ca...

Sir Keith Mills, successful businessman, America's Cup entrant, founder of a charity helping children through sport, and former leader of the London 2012 Olympic Games, is Callum Murray's guest on the third edition of the Business of Sport Podcast with the International Sports Convention. With a background in advertising and marketing, Sir Keith, who also chairs the Invictus Games for wounded ex-s...

In the second edition of the Business of Sport Podcast with the International Sports Convention, Callum Murray talks to Sandy Brown, Commissioner of USA's Major League Lacrosse. The podcast airs at a pivotal moment in MLL's 20-year history, with the league having just voted to become a single-entity league, discarding the franchise model on which it was founded. The change, which means that the le...

In the first in a series of Business of Sport podcasts with the International Sports Convention, Callum Murray speaks to Sarah Lewis, secretary general of the FIS, the international ski federation. One of the very few women in a senior administrative and governance role in an international Olympic sport federation, Sarah joined the FIS in 1994, having been a member of the British Alpine Ski Team f...