Unofficial Partner Podcast

Of the +125 pods we’ve done over the past 2 years or so, today’s conversation must rank as one of our all time favourites. It’s with Norway’s greatest export Jan Age Fjortoft, the former international, Bundesliga and Premier League footballer turned media star and strategic sports consultant. In 1992, Fjortoft was one of just 39 foreign players in the Premier League during a career that saw him sc...

This is Unofficial Partner’s news analysis series, where we look in depth at one recent story impacting the sports business. Today we look at the role of The FA following the publication of its Strategic Plan covering the next four years to 2024.If you work in sport, it’s worth ten minutes of your time to read. The FA is the governing body for football in England, with a remit that goes from the E...

Nic Coward currently chairs UK Athletics and England Golf and several other organisations both in and beyond sport. He began his career working as a lawyer for The FA and has since held leadership roles at many of the UK’s biggest sports rights holders including the Premier League, British Horseracing Authority and he advises an array of international rights holders across motorsport, football and...

Today’s podcast is episode 9 of The Bundle, our regular series of conversations about sports media and the streaming market with co-host Yannick Ramcke. We start in France by picking apart the ongoing saga in the country’s top football league following Mediapro’s premature exit from its huge domestic rights agreement, which leaves a trail of uncertainty among clubs, players and fans, with Canal Pl...

Today we unpick the recent incident involving England footballer turned media pundit Karen Carney and Leeds United, the newly promoted Premier League club. The story starts out as just another Premier League matchday, with football pundits lined up to give their opinions ahead of the game between Leeds United and West Bromwich Albion which was being aired on Amazon Prime. One of those match analys...

Today’s podcast is episode 4 of The Buy Side, our regular series of conversations with brand marketers about sport and sponsorship. Our guest is Nick Read, Managing Director of the Vitality programme, the health and lifestyle insurance company which has become a very visible presence around sport, receiving plaudits for its approach to sponsorship of a variety of women’s sport properties, Parkrun...

Dr. Augustine Fou is a world renowned expert in digital advertising fraud who consults to major advertisers and publishing groups. He was formerly Group Chief Digital Officer of Omnicom’s Healthcare Consultancy Group, a $100 million group of 8 agencies serving pharma, medical device, and healthcare clients. So today’s conversation is about what has gone wrong with digital marketing and how the ris...

The Financial Times has always had an on-off relationship with the sport sector over the years, with some very good journalists covering the beat in a brief that also included other sectors such as Leisure, Hotels and Gambling. That’s changed and under the leadership of Murad Ahmed, the paper is treating sport as a standalone asset class, with a dedicated transatlantic team and a set of sport spec...

This is episode 5 of Money Talks, our series on sport’s relationship with finance, venture capital and private equity. Our guest is Marcus John, CEO of Sports Capital Advisors based in Singapore, who was an early stage investor in Formula E and Extreme E and advises private equity funds and family offices on sports investment strategy and execution. Marcus was previously at IMG, during the Teddy F...

This is episode three of The Buy Side, our series of conversations with senior brand marketers about sport and sponsorship. Today’s conversation is about life at the top end of the global sports market with Stephen Day, Vice President Sponsorship, Visa Europe. The Visa brand has become part and parcel of the big event experience for millions of people around the world. The company’s partnership st...

The IPL is one of only two professional sports leagues in the world where all of its franchise teams are profitable. Twelve years since launch, the IPL is valued at $6.3billion, accounts for over 30% of global cricket revenues and over 60% of India’s sport economy. These numbers are why every rights owner and governing body seeks to learn lessons from both Twenty20 cricket and the IPL.But what are...

Luis Vicente began his sports career as a lawyer working for toy car company, where his job was to haggle over the price of IP with well known Formula One teams. Then he became a football agent, with a player roster that included Luis Figo, Ronaldo and Andriy Shevchenko. Since the mid 2000s however, Vicente main role has been to foster a culture of innovation within some of the most famous sport’s...

There’s been a major sports agency acquisition this week as Two Circles bought the rights sales house TRM Partners for what the Wall Street Journal estimate to be in the region of $45million, a number that is roughly equivalent to the price paid for Two Circles last year, by George Pyne’s sport and entertainment holding company Bruin Sports Capital. So, this podcast is going to unpick what this me...

This is Episode 8 of The Bundle with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke, where we go deep in to the world of sports media rights and distribution, asking the questions that  everyone in the sports business wants answers to. This week we cover the following stories:* Overthinking Amazon’s Italy UCL play* F1’s YouTube experiment* Premier League PPV RIP* Money v Morals. Sport’s Saudi dilemma* Infront’s w...

We’re talking about the various sports markets across Asia today with one of the region’s highest profile entrepreneurs, Marcus Luer, who founded Total Sports Asia as a 28 year old in 1997 based Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Since then the business has generated $500million in commercial revenue for its portfolio of clients including Premier League Football Clubs, Formula One teams, WWE, US Open Tennis...

Robbie Lyle created Arsenal Fan TV (now AFTV) in 2012 as a platform for fans to have their say. And they did, in enormous numbers, making it one of the biggest fan networks in world football, and its mix of controversy and raw post-match reaction is much copied across both unofficial and official club channels. We talked about the reaction of mainstream media to this new upstart genre, the commerc...

Today we’re talking about leadership with the founding members of a new initiative, The Professional Body of Sports Leadership (PBSL) which has just launched as a network for current, and aspiring, senior executives, high performance specialists and non-executive directors in the sports industry. It aims to drive the development of a new standard in sports industry leadership and governance, safeg...

Today we’re talking about the business of European football with one of the most experienced and respected people working in the industry today. Phil Carling started his career as Arsenal’s first ever head of marketing before moving to head up the commercial department of the FA. Since 2004, Carling has been head of football for the sports marketing agency Octagon, managing their clients relations...

Today we pick over the remains of Project Big Picture, the controversial report in to the future of English professional football, that was instigated by the owners of two of the Premier League’s biggest clubs, Liverpool and Manchester United. Our guests are Dan Johnson, former Director of Communications for the Premier League and Joel Seymour Hyde, the UK managing director of the sports marketing...

Today we’re talking about the NFL and specifically its relationship to the international market. To do this we have Neil Reynolds, who has created a niche as the face and voice of the NFL in the UK, fronting Sky Sports tv coverage and the Inside the Huddle podcast, all alongside his own show The Neil Reynolds Podcast. So we talk about that hardy perennial topic of the sports business, the long dis...

This is the second in our series called The Buy Side, conversations about the reality of sport and sponsorship with CMOs and other senior brand side marketing decision makers. Today’s guest is Peter Markey, CMO of TSB Bank. Peter is responsible for all of TSB’s marketing and digital sales activity including brand, analytics, research, effectiveness, strategy, social media and marketing communicati...

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs was a term I didn’t know a couple of months ago, and now I see them everywhere, particularly in relation to sport. So, this podcast goes in to what they are, why they’re very popular and what are the implications of this new investment vehicle for the sports business. To do this, I’ve asked Michael Broughton for help. Michael was co-founder of Sports...

This week we’re looking in to the long tail of grassroots sport and ask if streaming technology has created a much needed commercial opportunity for teams, clubs and governing bodies who make up the vast majority of the sports participation pyramid. To do this we’re talking to Michael Emery, CEO of Joymo , a streaming platform which allows parents, fans, players and coaches to film games and train...

We’ve been wanting to talk to Timo Lumme for ages - but he’s been quite busy apparently. It’s sometimes said Lumme has had the perfect sports business career: IMG then Nike then Disney/ESPN then for the last decade and a half, the IOC’s big commercial job overseeing broadcast revenue and the TOP sponsorship programme, the largest of its type in sport.(And we haven’t mentioned a stint running Quokk...

This is episode 7 of The Bundle, our fortnightly show about the sports media market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke. We revisit our controversial podcast with media analyst Claire Enders, look in depth at some of the stories coming out of the US market, and we ask what the big leagues can do to combat the enduring threat of piracy which is having real impacts on the value of rights in various...