Unofficial Partner Podcast

On Wednesday 8th September, more than a thousand lucky invitees will make their way to Battersea in south London for the 20th edition of the Sports Industry Awards, which has grown from the inaugural event back in 2001 to a staple of the UK industry calendar, boasting a cast of world famous faces from sport, politics, showbiz and the media. So, enjoy the next fifty minutes or so in the company of...

This is another episode in our series Talking To Women About The Sports Business with my regular co-host Laura Weston.  Our guest today is Sue Anstiss MBE, who has written a good book called Game On: The Unstoppable Rise of Women’s Sport, featuring many of the guests from Sue’s own successful podcast series The Gamechangers, where she interviews trailblazing women from across sport and beyond.  Th...

This is episode five of our series of Re-Thinking Sport, with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.  Today we’re talking about government regulation of football with our guests Rick Parry , the chairman of the EFL , and Adam Paker from Portas.  Rick Parry is the former chief executive of Liverpool , the original CEO of the Premier League and a board memb...

The Buy Side is our series with brand marketers about sport and sponsorship. Today we’re talking about how Microsoft views sport, with Monica Robbins, the tech giant’s global Director of Sports Partnerships who oversees relationships with among others the NFL, the NBA and more recently, the ECB, the governing body of cricket in the UK among several others. So this is a conversation about tech, the...

Today we’re talking about one of the most fundamental parts of the sports business: the product. And specifically the process of creating and adapting competition formats to increase jeopardy, fan connection and commercial value.   This is a conversation about the way in which leagues, tournaments and competitions are structured, and its relationship to the commercial value of sport, both as a way...

This is episode 12 of The Bundle, our regular deep dive in to the media rights market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke and our guest is Murray Barnett, ex ESPN, World Rugby, F1 and current founder of D2C Sport . If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday....

What would you do if you had a blank sheet of paper and wanted to create a new type of sports rights holder.  That’s the question posed in this conversation with Sam Renouf, Chief Executive of the Professional Triathlete Organisation, a body part owned by the best athletes in the world and backed by Sir Michael Moritz, one of the most successful tech investors of the last twenty years, via his com...

This is a podcast about cookies, the tiny strands of data that follow us around the internet, allowing advertisers and websites to remember us, the pages we visit, our passwords and the contents of our shopping carts.  So, we ask what they are, who’s using them, why Google and Apple are trying to remove them and what the specific implications of this will be for sports marketing, from the perspect...

Re:Thinking Sport - The Players and P/E This is the fourth episode in our series ReThinking Sport, organised in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultant dedicated to sport and physical activity. Today’s topic looks at the role of private equity in football through the lens of the players. This alters the perspective on the conversation and I think, like me, you’ll find it opens up...

Steve Nuttall is one of the true pioneers of sport media and technology, working within some of the biggest companies in the world including notably, leading YouTube’s sport and UK business and managing the Google owned business’s relationships with major rights holders such as the IOC, FIFA and UEFA.  Nuttall has also held leadership positions within Sky Sports, Telepiu (now Sky Italia), and Spor...

The Cannes Lions awards are synonymous with excellence in marketing creativity and in 2019 they launched a sports specific category. Because of Covid, the entries for 2020 and 2021 have been combined and a short list of the best creative work in sports marketing was produced. The head of the judging panel for the awards was Ben Hartmann, chief client officer for Octagon, and he’s our guest today....

Today is day two of the Wimbledon championships, a fortnight of tennis, polite queues and Pimms. And as of this year, Sipsmith gin following the brands five-year deal with the All England Club, the rights owner of the grand slam tournament. So we talked to Alex Willis, Head of Communications, Content and Digital, at the All England Club and Shelley MacIntyre, who's Senior Global Marketing Dir...

Today’s podcast is the first of a series in which we look at sports market through the lens of one of the biggest media and marketing networks in the world, Omnicom.  This allows us to get beyond the bubble of the sport sponsorship industry and look at sport through a wider lens and allows us to ask some broader questions as to the value of sport to brand clients.  So this is a conversation about...

Today’s guest is Roger Mitchell, who you may know from another sports business podcast, Are You Not Entertained, where he uses his background in sport, finance and the music industry to great effect in questioning what’s happening in sport. Roger is great to talk to on a range of subjects, so that’s what we do, from podcasts and private equity to Spurs, Celtic, The Verve, machine learning and Tige...

This is another in our series where Richard and co-host Laura Weston look at the sports business through the lens of women from within and outside the industry.  Our guest today is Jennifer McClearen, author of a fascinating new book, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC The book raises issues about the role of women in sports marketing, the difference between their vis...

Charlie Sale is a legend of sports journalism, often credited with creating the sports news genre, most famously as the feared and fearless writer of the daily Sports Agenda column in the Daily Mail and before that in the Express.  Charlie was one of our early guests on the podcast, following his premature retirement due to ill health in 2018, so it’s great to have him back on to talk about his ne...

This is the third in our series looking at the formative years of the sports business with industry legend Patrick Nally. The first two episodes are on Fifa and the Olympics respectively, and in this episode we branch out in to athletics, starting in the late 1970s and early 80s, a period of called the golden era of track and field but which saw as much competition behind the scenes as on the trac...

Our guest is Matt Locke, whose previous Unofficial Partner appearance remains one of our most popular ever episodes. Matt is the co-founder of Storythings, a consultancy specialising in the understanding of audiences and the entertainment formats that attract them across a variety of spheres from entertainment to cause marketing and the public sector. Clients include the B BC, PBS and the Bill &am...

This is episode 11 of The Bundle, our series on the media and streaming rights market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke.  Topics include the AT&T decision to merge WarnerMedia and Discovery, the state of the international football rights market, the Premier League renewals and we hear the buzz around Buzzer, the new short form mobile streamer which has just done a deal with the NBA.  If you...

Today we’re talking to Tim Hollingsworth OBE the Sport England chief executive and former chief executive of the British Paralympic Association (BPA).  Tim leads Sport England’s mission to get us all moving, by investing government money in sport and physical activity. This gives him a perspective in to some really important questions, such as what’s the role of government in sport, what does it w...

This is episode 3 of our regular collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity. This week’s topic is media strategy with special guests Glen Killane, Executive Director of Eurovision Sport, Andrew Ryan, Managing Director of FIBA Media and Wissam Khalaf, Partner at Portas. The media rights market is central to the sports economy, but we often ta...

Andrew Craig is today’s guest, someone whose career in the sports business dates back to the mid-1980s, when he was one of the first recruits to ISL, the hugely influential sports marketing agency that played a central role in the commercial programmes around both FIFA and the IOC. Andrew was in charge during the formative years of the Olympic TOP programme before leaving to run CART, the American...

Paul Nolan was headhunted to The FA by then CEO Adam Crozier, a decision that kick started Nolan’s career as one of the most influential people in the field of sports recruitment, leading to the creation of Nolan and Partners, one of the first specialist sports industry recruitment consultancies. So, this is a conversation about jobs, how to get them, how to keep them and how much you should be pa...

This is the second instalment in a series of podcasts looking at how the sports business has evolved over the past half century in the company of Patrick Nally, one of a small handful of people who can lay a genuine claim to have created the industry as we know it today. This episode is devoted entirely to the business story of the Olympic Games, starting in the crisis torn era of the 1970s, a per...

Tom Harrison is a former professional cricketer who now runs the game in the UK. As CEO of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), Harrison overseas every element, from the amateur club game, through to the first class county system and on to the England men’s and women’s teams across test, one day and Twenty20 formats. Harrison’s sport business career started with the launch of  PlayCricket.co...