Unofficial Partner Podcast

Today we talk to Yannick Ramcke, who has established a reputation for being one of the most insightful observers of the sports media market and specifically the convergence of tech platforms, and the growth of streaming and Over The Top services. I first came across Yannick on Twitter, and then via his work at OneFootball and on his own blog  OffTheFieldBusiness.de . What’s striking is both the de...

This podcast is a conversation about the commercial questions hanging over women’s sport. It was organised by Lisa Parfitt, the managing director of Engine Sport, who helped us pull together two great guests, England cricketer Georgia Elwiss and former Chelsea and England footballer Claire Rafferty. Georgia Elwiss is a right arm medium fast bowler and right handed batsman who first played for the...

Garry Dods is founder of the sports marketing agency We Are Fearless. the week before we recorded this interview me and Sean were at the European Sponsorship Awards and saw Garry and his team win the coveted Agency of the Year award, and so we reference that in the conversation, along with talking about his previous roles at Octagon, what he thinks is the point of difference between his new agency...

Daniel Geey is a sports lawyer and a partner at Sheridans, an author of Done Deals a book about football transfers, he has a blog and a podcast of his own and appears regularly on news and sports channels where he discusses the impact of the law on football. So I didn’t really want to talk about the law with Daniel as he does that a lot elsewhere. I’m actually more interested in unpicking the way...

Today’s podcast guest is Steve Martin, Global CEO of M&C Saatchi Sport and Entertainment. We interviewed Steve last year, when he announced he was relocating from the agency's Soho office to Sydney, Australia and it’s fair to say quite a bit has happened in the intervening eight months or so, from the terrible fires that swept through Australia last summer to the current Coronavirus shutd...

Today's conversation is about how one of the world's biggest sponsors tackles the shutdown in the sporting calendar. For this we sought the views of Ben Blanco, currently the global sponsorship lead for Heineken, based in Amsterdam and prior to that was head of sport and entertainment marketing at Samsung. Ben's role at Heineken is to oversee the beer giant's relationship with...

Aidan Cooney is founder and CEO of InCrowd, the fan experience technology company and is probably best known as the guy who created and ran Opta, the world’s leading sports data business, which he sold to Perform Group in 2014.The story of Opta is the story of the rise of sports data, from a marginal, nerdy backwater to the billion dollar industry it is today. Aidan played a central role in this e...

Alexandra Willis is having a very good career, as she oversees strategy and execution of communications, content and digital for the All England Club, otherwise known as Wimbledon. We went to SW19 - before the lockdown! - to talk to Alex for some careers advice and to ask her two of her favourite questions: can we get a ticket (two together for 2021?) and what does she do for the other 50 weeks of...

Q. Which leading sports business personality do we need to hear from most during this current shitfest? There's only one answer to that one. Barry Hearn needs no introduction, but we’ll give him anyway. Today, Matchroom is one of the biggest producers of live sport in the world, from boxing, snooker and darts to tenpin bowling, ping pong and carp fishing, the company hosts 150 events and crea...

Today we go behind the scenes in football with Adrian Bevington.   There are very few people better qualified to talk about what’s really happening in the corridors of power at a national level and within the club game.   Adrian is best known for his work at The FA over nearly two decades, first as the go-to comms guy and then as managing director of Club England, a role he held for five years til...

Today we’re going deep in to the business of cricket with Tim Wigmore, who has broken a few stories over the past week in The Daily Telegraph around the consequences of coronavirus on the English county game, and the broader Twenty20 calendar from iPL to the Big Bash. We talk about the economics of T20, the development of the game around the world and how cricketers earn a living. Twenty20 cricket...

Nobody - literally nobody - has written more words on the impact of Coronavirus on sport than Matt Slater, staff writer on The Athletic. So we got him on the podcast to see what he’s learnt. For 16 years, Matt was the BBC’s sports correspondent and more recently PA’s chief sports reporter. Also, he’s the spitting image of Chris Froome. Then we look at esports, and specifically the story that the s...

There’s no point in pretending we can get away with business as usual, so we’ve put our regular podcasts to one side to focus on the only issue anyone cares about: what’s happening to the sports business during the coronavirus pandemic? In this first episode of a special series, we talk to people from across the business to get a quick sense of what they’re feeling, their worries and the decisions...

What’s the point of a sports minister? This was the first question to Tracey Crouch MP, who carried out the role between 2015 and 2019, before resigning on a point of principle - a rare thing these days - over the government’s delay in acting to reduce the harms inflicted by fixed odds betting terminals in betting shops. The conversation ranges from how things work in Westminster, or don’t, the ro...

We went to Stratford to meet Carsten Thode, the former Synergy and Engine strategy director to talk about his new startup business, Aphetor. This is a conversation we’ve been wanting to have since Carsten left Engine nearly a year ago, one because his views on sports marketing are really interesting and challenging, and secondly because we're nosy and wanted to know what his plan was. His new...

At any sports business conference, there will be a moment when a strategy geek or rights owner will say they are pivoting to ‘more of a Champions League model’. So we asked one of the architects of the UEFA Champions League to explain why it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. Craig Thompson was a founding member of TEAM Marketing in the early 1990s, creating one of global sport’s most resilien...

This week we’re peering in to that weird world of international PR, with a particular reference to the big major event bidding campaigns over the years and how the cottage industry around the Olympics is faring now and in the future. There are very few people better qualified to talk about this stuff than Jon Tibbs, so we went to the London offices of Jon Tibbs Associates to talk to the man himsel...

Richard and Sean are in a very cold and sunny Paris for the first Global Sports Week, hosting our first Unofficial Partner Live podcast recording. Our panel included Tracey Russell, COO of McCourt, the family investment company that owns Olympique Marseille and was an early investor in Dugout; Andreas Zakglis the Secretary General of FIBA, the international basketball federation and Richard Brisiu...

Seb Carmichael Brown was early to the whole ‘KSI YouTube influencers in to real sport‘ thing, first as the commercial guy for his brother Spencer FC’s empire, and then via Hashtag Utd, which they created together. Now Seb is a golf influencer in his own right, with 106k followers and a gig as a pundit in mainstream media. How did he do that? Is it as easy as he makes it look? And what’s it like wh...

Simon Dent was a lawyer then a sports memorabilia shop owner, then a sports agent to his flat mate Martin ‘Chariots’ Offiah and then a football agent. In 2016, he co-founded Dark Horses, a creative sports marketing agency that sits within Lucky Generals, one of the most successful independent advertising agencies in London. We went to the Exmouth Market office to talk to Simon and join the dots. N...

This week we're talking about why the sports business looks like it does, which is predominantly white, male and middle class. Our guest is Pranav Soneji, co-founder of Livewire Sport, who have launched a mentoring project aimed at tackling some of the barriers people from under represented groups face when they start a career in sport and Digital industries. We talk about what diversity mean...

This week we talk to Alex Fynn the former Saatchi and Saatchi adman turned author who played influential roles at two pivotal moments in football’s recent history. In the 1980s Alex was commissined by the FA to write a blueprint of the Future of Football, a document that ultimately led to the formatin of the Premier League. It was a piece of work that caught the eye of Silvio Berlusconi, then owne...

This week we talk to Arron Shepherd, the co-founder of The Goat Agency, the influencer marketing agency at the company’s headquarters on Finsbury Square in London. In 2015 Arron launched Sportlobster, a niche football social platform that used Cristiano Ronaldo as an ambassador. This experience shaped his approach to what he’s doing now, and how he looks at the whole idea of influencer marketing....

This week Richard and Sean head to the Wimbledon home of sports business legend Andrew Croker to talk about his life and career. It’s a story that boasts an extraordinary cast of extraordinary characters such as Rupert Murdoch, Mark McCormack, Horst Dassler and Len Blavatnik among many, many others, stopping off at the great landmark moments of the past 40 years, from the 1966 World Cup through to...

This week we went to the BOA’s Headquarters in New Cavendish St to meet Vicky Gosling OBE, chief executive of GB Snowsport. Vicky had a highly successful 21 year career in the Royal Air Force, rising to the rank of Group Captain, serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, for which she was awarded the MBE in 2004. She left the forces to become CEO of the Invictus Games, the international multi...