Unofficial Partner Podcast

"With men, with FIFA, you will find open doors. Just push the doors. They are open." That was Gianni Infantino, FIFA President, in the run up to last Sunday's Women's World Cup final between England's Lionesses and La Roja, Spain's national team, the tournament winners. But how open are those doors, really? New research from Women in Football sheds light on the realit...

Manchester United and Adidas are two of the sports worlds most iconic and valuable brands. So the new £900million, 10 year deal, signed recently, has a significance that goes beyond the two organisations and offers a glimpse as to how the sports economy might evolve over the next decade. What are the ripple effects of this deal, on other football clubs and other sports? Did Man Utd benefit from Ad...

The Pirates vs The Premier League is a new, standalone podcast documentary series, in to the illicit world of illegal sports streaming. It's the first project to emerge from Unofficial Partner Productions, led by Matt Cutler, former SportBusiness Editor and Two Circles communications director, who has joined UP to lead on this new venture, with a brief to create interesting stuff for business...

What's the role of a National Governing Body for sport in 2023?  Is the NGB business model relevant or sustainable?  These are questions running through this episode of The Squeezed Middle, our series created in collaboration with PTI Digital, the technology and strategy consultancy. Our focus is on the hugely popular sport of cycling, which at an elite level has been one of the great British...

The Buy Side is our regular series on creativity in sports marketing, with regular co-host Simon Moore, award winning Creative Director. Joining us for this look at creative work around the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup are Jane Purdon, former Premier League, Sunderland FC and author of The Homecoming: The Lionesses and Beyond, Sarah Batters, of P&G and more recently Southampton FC and Char...

The Buy Side is our regular conversation with brand side marketers about sport and sponsorship. This week's guest is Eike Doerte Burgel, Global Head of Olympic & Paralympic Programme at German based insurance giant, Allianz. Joining the podcast are regular Buy Side collaborators, Sally Hancock and Shaun Whatling. This week’s episode is brought to you by our friends at the Institute of Spo...

The Big Idea is our series on creativity in sports marketing with regular co-host Simon Moore , award winning Consulting Creative Director. Our guest is David Proudlock , Chief Strategy Officer at Crispin Porter Bogusky London. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is home to the world's most prestigious advertising awards. The blurb says that Cannes celebrates 'creativit...

A few months ago Unofficial Partner was invited to join The RugbyDAO WhatsApp group. As of today, the group consists of 232 people from across the sport, made up of some famous ex players, administrators of governing bodies, club owners and coaches, grassroots activists and other interested parties from around the world. It felt like a good time to ask, what is RugbyDAO? Why does it exist, and wha...

Today’s guest are Mervyn King and Ed Smith. Lord Mervyn King, Baron King of Lothbury, was formerly Governor of the Bank of England and is an Expert Lecturer at the Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH).  Ed Smith is an author, journalist and former National Selector for England cricket. As a professional cricketer, he played for Kent, Middlesex & England and is the Founder of ISH. The conversat...

What is a football club? Bohemian FC (Bohs) has a different answer to that question than most.  The story of the Dublin team is an antidote to the usual diet of Super League ambitions, big money transfers and private equity buy outs that populate much of the football business conversation today. Bohemians compete in the Premier Division of the League of Ireland, and are the oldest League of Irelan...

Unofficial Partner and DAZN Present…The Billion Dollar Women’s Football Brainstorm. An invited audience and VIP guests build the future of women’s football, live on stage at DAZN's London headquarters. What if...we create: The IPL of Women's Club Football. A closed league of the best players from around the world. Angel City, Barcelona, Arsenal and new teams that don't yet exist. Ou...

Alex Amsel  is better known as SillyTuna, the award winning game developer, investor, and blockchain expert. He was one of the stars of the Unofficial Partner Web3 Brainstorm Live event at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium last September, which was the absolute peak of NFT mania. Now the hype around web3, blockchain and NFTs has dissipated, so we've asked Alex to give us an update on where we a...

How is sport impacted by the cost of living crisis? The answer depends on where you are in the marketplace. The small global elite of sports rights holders are doing just fine. Billions of dollars in media revenue chases must-see content, from the NFL in the US, Premier League in England, the IPL in India through to the major quadrennial extravaganzas such as Olympics and World Cups. Likewise, the...

Likes, Followers, Shares, Video Views: these are the currency of digital publishing. But as Matt Locke argues in today's conversation, change is coming. The importance of the Like as a metric of audience engagement is quickly diminishing. As the dominant social platforms are converging to become video-led TikTok clones, engagement metrics have shifted from clicks to viewing. From TikTok to Ne...

This is an episode of The Bundle, our regular deep dive in to the sports broadcast and streaming market with regular guests Yannick Ramcke, head of OTT for OneFootball, Murray Barnett, director of the D2C consultancy and formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN. And we welcome Carlo De Marchis for his first appearance. Carlo spent 35 years building Deltatre until recently, where he's developed an...

Ed Smith returns to the Unofficial Partner podcast. Ed is the former National Selector for England cricket. He is an author (including What Sport Tells Us About Life and Making Decisions), academic and journalist (New Statesman, BBC and Sunday Times). As a professional cricketer, he played for Kent, England and was club captain of Middlesex when they won their first major title for 15 years. Ed is...

Today's guest is Michael Bond, author of a new book exploring the nature of fandom, a fascinating and entertaining investigation in to worlds of obsession, belonging and human connection. We talk about what connects Spurs fans with Potterheads, Trekkies, Swifties and MAGAs. We ask whether fandom fills the gap left by the decline of organised religion, what happens to the club-fan relationship...

Today's guest sits at the epicentre of the football business.  Charlie Marshall is the CEO of The European Club Association (ECA), the hugely influential organisation, which is the only group officially recognised by both UEFA and FIFA as the sole, independent body for football clubs at European level. We talk about the big issues facing the game in the post-Super League era, as ECA seeks to...

In April, 2019 Tottenham Hotspur football club opened a new £1 billion state-of-the-art stadium, built on top of the old White Hart Lane ground in North London. One of the sports business stories since then has been the club's aspiration to deliver a naming rights sponsorship deal that surpasses those traditionally seen in Europe. Reports in media outlets claim the club is looking to strike a...

Why do we care about some events and not others? Why do some tournaments capture our imagination and interest, while others seem contrived?  Will an expanded 48 team FIFA World Cup work in 2026, or will it lead to a boring tournament? Where do you stand on closed leagues? Does the 'Super League' idea of Best v Best work in the real world?  Why do we cheer for underdogs, but only in the e...

Joanna Coates started her career as a fashion buyer at 16 and became CEO of two of UK sport's major governing bodies. From 2015 to 2019, Joanna Coates was England Netball's CEO and worked with the governing body for almost ten years. She was part of the team during her time in charge which led the Vitality Roses to victory at the 2018 Commonwealth Games where they won their historic gold...

The Buy Side is our regular series in which we talk to brand marketers about sport and sponsorship. This week's guest is Stuart Wareman, SVP of Sponsorship, Events and Experiences for Accor , the French multinational hotel group that owns, manages and franchises hotels in over 5300 locations in 110 countries and is the biggest hospitality company in Europe, the sixth biggest in the world.  It...

The Big Idea is our series on creativity in sports marketing with regular sidekick Simon Moore, the award-winning consulting creative director. Today we focus on one of the most awarded campaigns in recent years: Burger King's Stevenage Challenge. If a brand wants to sponsor the best football players, they have to pay millions. But Burger King found a way to endorse them without paying them a...

What's going on at UK Athletics? The last few weeks have seen a series of stories about the financial plight of the governing body. In the accounts released in December, UKA returned a £1.8million deficit for 2021-22 with reserves falling from £2.2m to £430,000 in the space of a year. Subsequent stories have referenced job losses and most recently the decision to close its Alexandra Park head...

Sports Podge is a British sports industry institution. The invite-only networking lunch began life 18 years ago in the upstairs room at the famous Langan's Brasserie in Park Lane, London.  Ahead of this week's event at the Kia Oval, we took Podge creator Phil Jones, his daughter and business partner, Clare Jones, along with Sports Podge co-founder Jimmy Worrall back to Langan's to d...