Unofficial Partner Podcast

Richard and Sean head to Dublin for the PFL Europe. It's a brutal world, in and out of the ring. Guests: Sean O'Connell is former professional mixed martial artist who most recently competed and won a title in the Light Heavyweight division of the Professional Fighters League . Sean fronts the event and media coverage of PFL Europe. Jon Culligan is Partner at Portas Consulting, the globa...

Victoire Cogevina Reynal is asking some really interesting questions about the value of women’s football, now and in the years to come. She is the founder of Mercury 13, an investment consortium created to build a multi club ownership group in women’s football clubs across Europe and Latin America. The consortium includes former players such as the ex-England forward Eni Aluko, who is also a forme...

Tia White is Amazon's General Manager of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services (AWS), responsible for owning go-to-market, product, and engineering for a portfolio of services on track to exceed profits of more than $25M including one of the fastest-growing services at AWS.  Joining her is Wyndham Richardson, Group Executive Director at Two Circles, previously fo...

Unofficial Partner podcast: Insights from Blast's eSports event in Copenhagen In this episode Richard and Sean travel to Copenhagen to go behind the scenes at the BLAST Fall Finals, one of the big esports moments of the year, featuring the leading Counter Strike teams including FaZe Clan, Vitality and Cloud9 at the Royal Arena, Copenhagen. We talk to Tom Greene, COO of BLAST, who shared his i...

What you need to know about what's happening in the sports media and streaming market, with regular co-hosts Yannick Ramcke and Murray Barnett. We analyse both sides of the negotiation table ahead of a busy time for European soccer league rights deals. From Viaplay's exit, Premier League go to market strategy and Ligue 1 reserve prices through to the NFL, Taylor Swift and Toy Story, via...

How will the ESG agenda impact sport? ESG is short for Environmental, Social and Governance, and is a set of standards measuring business's impact on society, the environment, and how transparent and accountable it is; an attempt to capture all the non-financial risks and opportunities inherent in a company's day to day activities.  It relates to sport in a number of very significant way...

The third episode in our Project 2030 Series, made in collaboration with Two Circles that models the next decade in the sports marketplace .  The idea is to test some of the assumptions about where sport goes from here.  What type of sports property will be rewarded by the marketplace, and which ones will be punished? They’ve modelled the size of the market - everything, media rights, sponsorship,...

This live panel discussion brings together a group of experts to debate the issues arising from The Pirates vs The Premier League, our successful podcast series that investigated the world of illegal streaming in sport. Joining Richard on stage at Sportel in Monaco are Simon Bryden, head of sport and video network, Synamedia Carlo DeMarcis, strategic advisor, Cleeng Thibaut Fresse, sales and marke...

At the recent IOC session in Mumbai a number of IOC members called for IOC President Thomas Bach to go another term in the job. This would give Bach a further four years. The optics aren’t great. It’s all a bit North Korea. Jens Sejer Andersen of Play the Game wrote this: Eight-to-12-year term limits for Presidents to prevent accumulation of power are the single most important principle of governa...

This is the second episode of our series made in collaboration with Two Circles, where we model the market for sport over the next decade. Today we analyse the role of the athlete, and to help us we're delighted to welcome Jazz Sawyers , British track and field athlete, two time Olympian, five time national champion who recently won gold in the Long Jump at the European Indoor Championships i...

Hello from Monaco, where UP is taking the temperature of the sports media industry as it wrestles with some big questions.  We’re at Sportel, the sports media and tech convention, where the deals that underpin the sports economy get done; the big leagues are here in force to connect with broadcasters and tech platforms. But what are people really talking about in the bars, hotels and restaurants t...

At the end of Leaders Week London we gathered some smart people together in the podcast booth, to get their views on the highlights of the event, both on and off stage. Our guests include: Claire Kelly, General Manager of Gemba Europe Preeti Shetty, Director of Brentford FC and CEO of Upshot    Amar Singh, Senior Vice President, MKTG Jon Rest, Global News Reporter, SportBusiness Alex Inglot, Commi...

This is part of our Squeezed Middle series on the strategic options available to the people running professional sport. The focus in this episode is the impact of those choices on the commercial income and capital value of sports teams, leagues and federations. Our guests are Ben Wells and Andrew Umbers. Ben is CEO of PTI Digital, the strategy and technology consultancy.  Andrew is co-founder and...

Unofficial Partner has become a media partner of SPORTEL Monaco, the world’s leading Sports Content Media Rights and Technology Convention , which runs from 23rd  to 25th of October. So in a couple of week time we're heading to Monaco for four days of deal making, networking and generally taking in the atmosphere of one of the big weeks in the sports industry calendar. This is a conversation...

This podcast is a live recording of the UP Billion Dollar Brainstorm which took place at the recent Two Circles Client Summit in the Kelvin Theatre, within the beautiful Institute of Engineering overlooking the Thames in London. It's the first of a series we're doing in collaboration with Two Circles, where we model the sports business in 2030. Other episodes will follow, looking at spec...

The Unofficial Partner Brainstorm is a podcast recorded in front of a live audience, in partnership with Livescore Group.   The event took place at the top of the iconic ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London.  The subject was the relationship between sport, media and the gambling industry in the US and the UK. What role will gambling firms play in the new converged sp...

Our guest is Richard Scudamore, who was CEO and then Executive Chairman of The Premier League from 1999 to his retirement in 2018, a transformational period in the history of English football and the sports business more broadly. Scudamore's reign in charge saw the media rights for the league rise from £1.2billion for the 2001-04 cycle to over £5billion for 2014-16. He was formerly chief exec...

The Buy Side is our series of conversations about sport and sponsorship with brand marketers.  Our guest is Kevin McNair, Marketing Director of KP Snacks, whose career includes previous senior marketing roles at Unilever and PepsiCo.  We discuss the high profile sponsorship of The Hundred, the ECB's controversial short format cricket competition and discuss the work of Professor Byron Sharp a...

Every market has a top, middle and bottom. The Premier League is among a small global elite of sports rights holders which is doing just fine, thank you. Billions of dollars in media revenue chases must-see content. But even within the league, different business models apply. The elite 'top four, or six' are chasing European football, and with it an additional pot of TV money flowing fro...

The Price of Football is the hit podcast that talks about the finances of the beautiful game, and today we're joined by its creators: comedian Kevin Day, football finance academic Kieran Maguire and former BBC producer Guy Kilty. Now they've written a book. It's called Unfit and Improper Persons, An Idiot’s Guide to Owning a Football Club. It's good, and can be pre-ordered on t...

Manchester United's famous red shirt is a prime piece of sporting real estate. So why is TeamViewer ending its deal early? What do you buy when you buy the United shirt? And what does it say about the relationship between football and the commercial sector? Welcome to Sports News Upload, with Richard Gillis and Matt Cutler. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport....

How to get ahead in the sports business is our series on talent, leadership and professional development. Today we get the perspective of two young people at the start of their careers in sport, and discuss the challenges they faced to get a toe in the door, what mistakes they made that could be of use to others in a similar position, and what surprised them about the industry they now call home....

The Commonwealth Games is in crisis, without a host city for 2026 and possibly beyond. The last Olympic Games bidding process received just two hosting bids, with Paris and Los Angeles awarded 2024 and 2028 respectively. Beyond that 2032 has one current bidder. Five potential host cities for the 2022 Winter Olympics withdrew after voter referendums and public polling indicated a lack of local supp...

Major General Bill Wright CBE, is the senior British Army officer in charge of Career and Talent Management across the entire British Army, responsible for running and transforming the Army’s Career Management organisation covering c.110k personnel from the rank of private soldier up to 3* General. Previously, Bill was Chief Executive/Commander of The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He joins Ric...

Occasionally a story breaks that reveals the direction of travel for the rest of sports business. One such story is Disney-owned ESPN's move in to the US gambling market, courtesy of a $2billion, ten year deal with betting operator Penn Entertainment, which sold back its ownership stake in Barstool, with which it was previously building a sports and gambling offer. “We are confident that the...