Unofficial Partner Podcast

Dame Tracey Elizabeth Anne Crouch DBE (born 24 July 1975) is a British Conservative Party politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Chatham and Aylesford from 2010 to 2024 . Crouch was appointed as Minister for Sport, Civil Society and Loneliness in 2017, but resigned in 2018 due to a delay over the introduction of reduced limits on the stakes of fixed odds betting terminals . In...

A special bonus episode of Expected Goals, Unofficial Partner's sister podcast on the women's football business, with co-hosts Maggie Murphy and Matt Cutler.  Joining them is Polly Bancroft, CEO of Grimsby Town FC, who was formerly head of women's football at Manchester United and lists Brighton and Hove Albion, Nottingham Forest and UEFA on an extensive resume. Expected Goals is pu...

Welcome to The Bundle, our regular 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 Consulting and formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN International. This week’s podcast is sponsored by We Are Sweet - helping you tell compelling stories in-the-moment, as they happen,...

The Big Idea is our regular series on creativity, with co-host award winning consulting Creative Director Simon Moore . We ask a guest to bring three of their favourite sports related creative campaigns. This week it's Gundeep Anand in the hot seat. Gundeep founded The Last Stand and is a docu-style Director & Photographer whose work is influenced by his background as an ex-youth worker,...

Fresh from an excellent Leaders Summit at Twickenham, or should we say Allianz Stadium, is a conversation with Gareth Balch, founder and CEO of Two Circles agency about the agreement to buy KORE Software, a deal announced this week. Two Circles is buying the company from Serent Capital, the private equity firm that bought Kore in 2018. Earlier this year, Two Circles themselves sold a majority stak...

Other People's Money is our regular series on sports investment, with co-host Matt Rogan, co-founder of Two Circles. Today we get in to the minutiae of deal making, with Steve Hacking, managing partner at Latitude Partners , who has worked on more than 200 company acquisitions for clients across both buy and sell side of investment deals in sectors ranging from technology and telecoms to medi...

The 3 is a failed experiment in podcast format innovation.  The 3 is a creative collaboration between Unofficial Partner and Leaders in Sport.  The 3 picks three stories from the sports business week and dissects them on a Friday morning.  The 3 may return, and it might not. This week Richard Gillis, David Cushnan and James Emmett pick these three stories: Will the cool kids be wearing FIFA 1904? ...

This is a follow up to our popular series of last year, The Squeezed Middle, which was a collaboration with PTI Digital, the independent strategy and technology consultancy. This episode looks in to a new report, The Sports Leadership Benchmark, based on a survey of sports CEOs, carried out by PTI. You can download the report, for free, at ptidigitalgroup.com Joining Richard are Ben Wells, CEO of...

The ECB is currently seeking investors for The Hundred franchises, the short form cricket competition and are selling a 49% stake that values them at up to £150m each. Today’s guest Lalit Modi disagrees. The founder of the Indian Premier League explains exclusively to Unofficial Partner why: “Based on the information memorandum a 100% stake in a team would be between £5m and £9m [for] outside Lond...

Three stories, three opinions, ten minutes (50minutes) What's in a name? FIFA's Club World Cup stadia naming snafu What is streetwear? The deeper meaning of Arsenal's style collab How old is too old? Sportfive and Tendulkar launch International Masters League This podcast is sponsored by Leaders in Sport - Get 15% off Summit passes Leaders in Sport connects the most influential peop...

This is a live episode recorded at StreamAMG's excellent Direct-to-Fan Playbook event, held at Amazon's Liverpool Street headquarters in London.  A big thank you goes to the team at StreamAMG for inviting us along, we learnt loads. Joining Richard on stage was Murray Barnett, one half of the regular Bundle presenting team, founder of West26 Consulting and formerly ESPN, F1 and World Rugb...

Today, we're launching a brand new show called Expected Goals, hosted by Matt Cutler and Maggie Murphy. Together Matt and Maggie will explore the business of women's football. Matt Cutler is the former editor of SportBusiness and was Director of Communications at Two Circles. As the head of Unofficial Partner Productions, Matt led on our hit series, The Pirates Versus The Premier League...

Wedge Issues is Unofficial Partner's business of golf series, where we take some of the big trends from across sport and apply them to golf. This is a special live episode recorded in the boardroom of the DP World Tour's headquarters at The Wentworth Club on the Friday morning of the BMW PGA Championship, the Tour's flagship event. Around the table were people representing many of t...

The 3 stories are: 1. The race for the IOC big job - aka Bach’s overtures (this doesn’t make any sense but makes me sound like I know about classical music, which I don’t, apart from that theme from the Hovis ad). Six months ago the word on the street was that Seb Coe wasn’t running, and now he is. So, was the word wrong, or did he change his mind? Probably the former. Also, is the Samaranch name...

Earlier this year, The Football Association has became the first national governing body to mandate training on female health, with Women’s Super League and Championship clubs benefitting from a new league-wide support plan covering pregnancy, the menstrual cycle and pelvic health. The FA is working in partnership with The Well , specialists in delivering female health strategies across sport and...

The journey to creating a ten minute podcast is not a linear one. That's fancy talk for saying that rather than cut last week's half hour episode, this one went one for 45 minutes.  Three stories: James Emmett reports from IMG's breathing and finance retreat. Richard Gillis on the big agency bun fight over UEFA rights. David Cushnan on the launch of Juventus Creator Lab.  An Unoffic...

Madeleine Orr is a leading sport ecologist and professor at the University of Toronto. A Forbes 30 under 30 inductee, she is the founder and co-director of The Sport Ecology Group, who consult on international climate issues for sports organizations such as the Commonwealth Secretariat, the UNEP, World Athletics, Adidas, F1 teams, and the NCAA. Madeleine has worked closely with the BBC and ESPN to...

We tried to make a short form ten minute podcast and failed.  It's supposed to be three stories in ten minutes.  Think of this as a work-in-progress.  UP's Richard Gillis is joined by James Emmett and David Cushnan from Leaders in Sport.  Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of...

For millions of people, Rick Shiels' YouTube channel is how we watch golf in 2024. Shiels is our very special guest today. He started by uploading golf tips to YouTube 12 years ago to attract people to the Trafford Golf Centre in Manchester. Now there are 900 golf channels on the platform, but only one Rick Shiels, with more than 3 million combined subscribers whose videos have attracted more...

Other People's Money is our regular series on sports investment, with regular co-host Matt Rogan, co-founder of Two Circles.  Our guests today are Jonathan Lenson and Sam Johnson, CEO and head of sport respectively at Milltown Partners, the communications and public policy consultancy co-founded by Paddy Harverson, the former PR to Manchester United and King Charles, among others. The convers...

NBA v TNT – Exclusive Negotiating Periods and Last Matching Rights are central to the big row over NBA rights. But how they work and why does everyone hate them? Click here to r ead The Bundle Bulletin for the homework notes from this episode, compiled by regular co-hosts Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining a...

Ben Sharpe, one of the most influential people in the golf business, as Managing Director & President of Callaway Golf across Europe, Middle East and Asia. Callaway is the largest manufacturer of golf equipment in the world and as such is a bellwether for any conversation about the commercial health of the game. Its tentacles run from the very top of the professional tours down to the particip...

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games are over, the medals have been won and lost. And now the sports business conversation shifts to who won the other game, played between some of the biggest companies in the world, each seeking to stand out in the crowd of global and local brands sponsoring, or ambushing, the Olympics.  What worked, what didn’t and how has the proliferation of digital channels changed ho...

“As soon as the Southport murders happened, the way Muslims specifically were targeted has made you question again whether we do belong, whether deep down in the end, we're always having to justify our existence,” says Azeem Rafiq, the former professional cricketer on today’s podcast. “On an individual level. I’m not sleeping, I’m patrolling around the house, covering letterboxes up, that sor...

We go deep in to the North American market today with Daniel Kaplan, one of the very best reporters covering the US sports business beat. I’ve known Daniel for over twenty years, first when he covered tennis and the NFL for SportsBusiness Journal, and then more latterly at The Athletic, Front Office Sports and Awful Announcing, the sports media news site.  We dissect three recent stories involving...