Unofficial Partner Podcast

Michel Masquelier entered IMG as an intern and left as chairman. The intervening 30 years saw a transformation in the sports economy, led by the boom in media rights values, an area in which Masquelier became a world expert as head of IMG Media, first under Mark McCormack, then Ted Forstmann and finally Ari Emanuel’s Endeavour.  We talk about private equity, bundles and betting, and his new book,...

This is another episode in our series Talking To Women About The Sports Business, with my regular co-host Laura Weston, the global PR consultant and trustee of the Women’s Sport Trust.  Earlier this year Eni Aluko was appointed sporting director of Angel City FC, the new expansion team in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) which begins playing in 2022. The Los Angeles based franchise has a...

Richard  first met Simon Bazalgette when he was chief executive of The Jockey Club, the organisation that owns some of the UK’s biggest racecourses including Aintree, Epsom and Cheltenham.   But this isn’t really a conversation about horse-racing, because Bazalgette was very early to some of the big themes that we talk about on this podcast. things like media streaming services, data, betting, fin...

This is another episode of The Bundle, our regular look at the sports media and streaming market, with my co-host Yannick Ramcke. This week’s guests are Hannah Brown, the Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer at Formula E, who lists Sky, Relevent Sports, FuboTV and KPMG in her CV, and Murray Barnett, ex ESPN, World Rugby, F1 and now the D2C Sport consultancy. We look in depth at the Prem...

This is episode 9 of ReThinking Sport, our series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.   One of the big ambitions of this series has been to look at the football market through the eyes of the people who own and control the clubs and the people in charge of the leagues and the sports’ governing bodies.  So previous episodes...

This week the Women’s Sport Trust released some new research, commissioned by them and carried out by the Futures agency, who monitored UK media coverage of women’s sport over the course of the last year.  The data is available via the Trust’s website . What are the key findings of this research, what works and what doesn’t when it comes to the job of attracting more people to watch and to stay wa...

This week we’ve assembled another group of very expensive expert advisers to brainstorm a new sports property that will make billions for its creators (minus Unofficial Partner commission, cash only).   The idea comes from our friend and former podcast guest Gundeep Anand, who in 2016 created The Last Stand, a street football tournament  aimed at uniting communities and breaking down social, cultu...

Today’s guest is John Amaechi OBE, the former NBA basketball player who has built a global reputation as an organisational psychologist via his own APS Intelligence consultancy. His book The Promises of Giants was a New York Times bestseller, and is a manifesto for a new type of conversation about leadership.  A Chartered Scientist, John was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health...

This is episode 8 of ReThinking Sport, our series made in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.  Our guests today are Kieran Maguire and Nic Coward.  Kieran is a British academic, author and broadcaster best known for The Price of Football, the hugely popular podcast he hosts alongside comedian Kevin Day, which is based on Kieran’s boo...

For people under 30, FIFA is a computer game not a governing body. That’s become almost a cliche of sports marketing, and like all cliches, there might be some truth in it.  Which is why the noises recently coming from EA Sports, the company which makes the game, are so interesting.  There’s talk of a split between the governing body which licenses its name for around $150million a year and the co...

This is the episode 2 of our series Esports Economics in collaboration with Nielsen Sport, the world’s leading source of sports measurement and analytics. The conversation is focused on sponsorship and the key question of return on investment and builds on some of the threads we covered in episode 1. Our guests are Carlos Alimurung and Nicholas Bruce.  Carlos is CEO of ONE Esports, the esports joi...

We were at Leaders London this week and did a live session in front of a carefully selected audience of sports biz execs. The premise was simple enough, how can two amoral chancers like me and Sean build a new billion dollar sports property by cobbling together all the best bits from elsewhere and selling it to private equity, venture capital, media, sponsors or anyone else with deep pockets and a...

The Hundred was one of the sports business stories of the summer in the UK. A new short form cricket event concept that was created and owned by the ECB, the governing body for the game in England and Wales.  Our guests today were central to the planning and execution of the tournament. Beth Barrett Wild is Head of The Hundred Women's Competition & Female Engagement for the ECB and Rob Ca...

Today’s guest is American golf blogger, journalist, podcaster and broadcaster Geoff Shackelford, who’s just back from Whistling Straits after covering the Ryder Cup.  Geoff’s one of the best and most astute observers of the game, his website and newsletter are essential reading not just for the golf industry but for the wider sports business too.  We talk about golf’s perennial pursuit of youthful...

Today’s guest is American soccer journalist, podcaster and broadcaster Grant Wahl, who’s first book The Beckham Experiment was a bestselling insight in to sport, celebrity and the market for the game in America. He followed that up with an attempt to get elected as FIFA President against Sepp Blatter. This failed, but in very entertaining and revealing ways. We talk MLS valuations, Ted Lasso and w...

Andy Holt is the hugely successful entrepreneur who in 2015 stepped into save his local football club Accrington Stanley FC from financial ruin. The club was one of the English Football League’s original founding members in 1888 and remains one of its smallest. But the club has been transformed under Holt’s ownership, winning promotion to EFL League One in 2018.  “Let's be clear," he sai...

Today is part of our Talking To Women About The Sports Business series, with my regular co-host Laura Weston. Our guest is the English golfer Meghan MacLaren. MacLaren is one of the most interesting people in golf at the moment and as you’ll hear we’ve been wanting to get her on the pod for some time, but because she’s currently playing mainly in the US at the moment, her schedule is very full.  B...

This is episode 7 of our series Re Thinking Sport in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.  The subject is multi club ownership in European football, and our guest is Paul Conway, head of Pacific Media Group, one of the pioneers of the genre. Pacific Media recently completed the takeover of Dutch club FC Den Bosch, which becomes the se...

This is another episode in our regular series on the sports media, broadcast and streaming market. My regular co-host Yannick Ramcke are joined by Charlie Boss, Chief Commercial Officer at The Jockey Club and former Disney ESPN executive.  This podcast is sponsored by Leaders in Sport, which is back live at Twickenham Stadium between the 5th to the 7th of October. The guest list is looking good, a...

This summer football transfer window has been about massive names moving between so-called super clubs. Messi to PSG, Ronaldo to Man Utd. Mbappe apparently not moving to Real Madrid.  A theme of the business conversation is the commercial value of the individual player to the club. This complex issue is often dumbed down to a narrower conversation about shirt sales.  But, as you’ll hear over the n...

Today’s guest is Ed Warner OBE, who was Chair of UK Athletics from 2007 to 2017, and has been Chair of World Para Athletics for the International Paralympic Committee since 2011. He led the successful bid to stage the 2017 World Athletics Championships in London’s Olympic Stadium, and was subsequently Chair of the London 2017 organising committee.  And as you’ll hear he brings a view from what he...

This is the first in a new series looking at the business of esports, in collaboration with Nielsen Sports, the world’s leading source of sports measurement and analytics. Today’s guests are Matthew Archambault, head of partnerships for North America at Riot Games, publishers of the phenomenally successful League of Legends franchise. Matt manages strategic partnerships, national sponsorships, med...

Today’s guest is Mike Keegan, sports news correspondent of the Daily Mail, who inherited that paper’s Sports Agenda column from the legendary Charlie Sale, a two time guest on the podcast.  So we talk about some of the regular themes that crop up as part of the sports news agenda, what he describes as the ‘cult-like’ obsession with youth audiences at BBC Sport, what it was like attending the Euro...

This is a special episode of Re:Thinking Sport, our collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.   Our guest is Mark Bullingham, who is the Chief Executive of The FA, the governing body for football in England, one of the biggest jobs in sport.  His remit covers the entire game, from England teams to grassroots, the Women’s Super League to We...

It’s become fashionable to use the term Gold Rush to describe the North American betting market. In 2018 the US Supreme Court overturned a federal bill banning gambling, which effectively signalled a shift that turned sports betting from an unregulated market to a regulated one.  Estimates as to the size of the sports betting marketplace vary wildly. But all agree that it’s growing quickly, and th...