Unofficial Partner Podcast

Today's guest Adam Kelly has been at IMG since 2001, connecting the business back almost to the McCormack era. Now President of IMG within TKO Group — which also owns UFC and WWE — he oversees IMG's media rights, production, digital, brand partnerships, and events businesses. This is his second appearance on Unofficial Partner; the first was in 2022, when he laid out a vision for reimagi...

FIFA will make $13bn from the four-year cycle culminating in this summer's tournament — nearly $9bn of it landing this year alone. For comparison, the Paris 2024 Olympics, the other Greatest Show on Earth, generated $5.24bn. Total. For the whole Games. It wasn't always this lopsided. The World Cup actually trailed the Olympics financially until 2010, when South Africa's edition pull...

Host: Richard Gillis (Unofficial Partner) Co-host/analyst: Andy Shora (TFG Labs) Three stories this episode: The Mythos/Fable shutdown — Anthropic ordered by the US government to disable its two most powerful models for all foreign nationals globally, with ninety minutes' notice. First-ever export control action against an AI model. Discussion covers the jailbreak vulnerability cited as justi...

AI commoditises knowledge production and throws judgment into scarcity. In this episode, Ed Smith asks what that means for sport, education and the people building careers in the business — and why the humanities might be the most undervalued edge in an age of machines. About the guest Ed Smith is an unusual hybrid in today's sports world. An academic, he left Cambridge with a Double First in...

Jonathan Licht, Chief Sports Officer at Sky Sports, discusses Sky's dominant position in UK sports broadcasting, strategic partnerships, and the future of sports media. Key topics: Sky's portfolio dominance: 225 Premier League matches, 1,000+ EFL games, 118 WSL matches, Formula 1, cricket, golf, NFL, tennis, darts, netball The growth paradox: How building sports audiences creates competi...

The £295million sale of London Spirit franchise was one of the big sports business stories of the last year. Some of Silicon Valley's most successful and famous leaders buying 49% of The Hundred's Lord's based franchise, in partnership with The MCC, one of the most storied names in cricket. So what is the MCC today, and how is that changing in one of the most important years in the...

Richard, Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke convene for a World Cup special, using the 2026 tournament as a lens on how sports broadcasting is shifting beneath the surface. The conversation moves from Qatar-to-2026 comparisons (more accelerated change, more fragmentation, but a still-basic mainstream default) through the "AI slop mountain" that the expanded tournament and unfriendly Europ...

A first for Unofficial Partner: six years and 550+ episodes covering every sport going, we'd somehow never devoted an episode to the sport of horse racing. So we fixed that — live, in front of an audience at The Big Belly Comedy Club, London .  We had as a starting point Spotlight Sports Group's new report, The Horse Racing Audience Opportunity . Compiled by the Racing Post's parent...

Chat_UP is Unofficial Partner's AI series created in collaboration with TFG Labs. The brief: cut through the AI firehose, work out what matters, and bring it back to the business of sport. Three stories this week. Story One — Google I/O 2026 Google used its developer conference to reposition from "a search company that does AI" to an AI infrastructure company. Headlines: Gemini 3.5,...

On 22 April 2026, Coca-Cola unveiled Cole Palmer as its newest football brand ambassador, fronting Premier League and World Cup activations. A month later, Tuchel left him out of the England squad. We use the Palmer story as a way into a wider conversation with Ricardo Fort — former global head of sport at Coca-Cola, now advisor to brands betting billions on the World Cup — about how personal endo...

Richard Gillis, Mike Jakeman and invited guests dissect the business of cricket. The IPL auction has become one of the most watched events in world cricket — part financial instrument, part entertainment spectacle. This episode gets under the bonnet: how it actually works, what it means for players, why it's reshaping cricket's global talent economy, and whether any of it translates to t...

The news agenda around this summer's FIFA World Cup in North America has been dominated by the price of tickets.  Why are they so expensive?  What's it got to do with changes made by FIFA specifically for this tournament?  Guests: Professor Rob Wilson, Dean of University Campus of Football Business (UCFB) and Shaun Stewart, vice president of StubHub, known as Viagogo in Europe. Unofficia...

The Bundle is the original and much copied series on the sports media and streaming marketplace with co-hosts Yannick Ramcke, General Manager of OTT at the streaming service OneFootball and Murray Barnett, founder of 26West Sport and formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations w...

Picks and Shovels: The Sports Investment Thesis That Doesn't Need Media Rights to Work Altman Solon's seventh annual Global Sports Survey lands with a central argument: sport is maturing into a full-stack asset class. But the more interesting story isn't at the top, it's in the layer underneath. Richard Gillis talks to David Dellea, Christophe Sommer and Matt Del Percio about w...

The NBA Europe franchise sale process has moved from speculation to live transaction. Franchise fees of $500m to $1bn. No broadcast deal. Governance terms that European investors have already pushed back on. And a city map — London, Paris, Madrid, Rome — that looks more like a premium real estate index than a list of places where people actually watch basketball. Lenz Balan is right in the middle...

Louis Theroux's documentary about the manosphere didn't at first seem to have much to do with sports digital strategy? Until you get to the platforms: Kick. Rumble. A whole ecosystem of streaming channels that the sports business conversation barely mentions, yet where significant numbers of young men are spending serious time. So we brought in Dan Ayers, VP of Transformation Digital at...

Craig Hepburn sits at the intersection of enterprise technology and cultural institutions. He spent years as UEFA’s Chief Digital Transformation Officer, overseeing its digital ecosystem, OTT platform build, and Innovation Hub. He moved to Art Basel as CDO in 2023. He is now an independent AI strategist, Perplexity Fellow, and prolific writer on the structural implications of AI for organisations...

 This week we go behind the curtain of the 25th Sport Industry Awards, ahead of the big night at Battersea Evolution on Thursday 30th April.  With an illustrious group of people from across the industry, Richard and Sean went to EY’s London Bridge offices in London to discuss the shortlist for the Business Moment of the Year Award. The winner will be announced on the night.  Seven groundbreaking m...

A live podcast recorded at MSQ Sport and Entertainment HQ in London for the launch of Callaway Golf's new brand film 'At Last'.  You can see the film by clicking this link.  As the golfing world looks to Augusta for The Masters, the first major event of the golf calendar next week, it was a good time to take the temperature of the business of golf with four experts from across the g...

Digital advertising has a dirty secret: most of what you're paying for never reaches a human being. Dr. Augustine Fou  is a world leading expert in digital ad fraud and has spent 20 years watching the internet fill up with bots, fake impressions, and dodgy metrics; and the advertisers funding it often know, but keep spending anyway. The incentives are too comfortable to disturb. Sound familia...

The latest dissection of the sports media and streaming marketplace from the ever popular, long running series featuring expert analysis from Yannick Ramcke and Murray Barnett.  This episode goes deep in to: Why Premier League chose Singapore as the all important test market for its direct to consumer platform.  What is Apple's sport strategy, is there such a thing?  FIFA offers a 'ten m...

Three highly experienced communications professionals join Richard to dissect some recent high profile PR gaffes. Guests: Henry Chappell, Founder and CEO of Pitch Marketing Group Neil Daugherty, Senior Managing Director at Teneo Jon Tibbs OBE, Founder and Chair of JTA Group. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversatio...

Ted Knutson's career tracks a remarkable arc: professional gambler at Pinnacle, architect of Brentford's analytics-driven recruitment model, founder of StatsBomb — built from a blog written during cancer recovery into a global data company sold to Hudl in 2024 — and now Strategic Director of Football at Crux, Bex Smith's women's multi-club platform, while running The Transfer F...

Today, we are joined by Ben Curtis, Global Brand Vice President for Rexona —the brand known as Degree in the US, Sure in the UK, and Shield in South Africa. Ben oversees the global strategy for a brand that Unilever identifies as the "cultural engine" of its Personal Care business group, making it the primary vehicle for activating their massive FIFA and UEFA partnerships . As the market...

Bex Smith, is our guest today on Other People’s Money, Unofficial Partner’s sports finance series presented with regular cohost Matt Rogan.  Bex Smith was captain of the New Zealand Women’s football team, appearing at World Cups, two Olympic Games, and enjoyed a stellar club career including winning German football’s triple.  Crux Football is her investment vehicle for investing in to the women&ap...