Unofficial Partner Podcast

Kat Craig is an award winning human rights lawyer who has represented victims of some of sport’s most traumatising sexual abuse cases and played a central role in the remarkable story of the evacuation of women footballers from Afghanistan following the American withdrawal from the country and the subsequent Taliban-led regime in Kabul. In 2016, Craig co-founded Athlead sport and social-impact con...

How was it for you? That's the question we're asking in this final episode of 2022, in our review of the year in the sports business. Our guests are Sanjay Bhandari, who you just heard, Preeti Shetty, Joel Seymour Hyde and Matt Cutler.  Sanjay is a lawyer, investor and Chair of Kick It Out, the football anti racism charity. Preeti is non executive board member of Brentford Football Club...

This year's Commonwealth Games in Birmingham was the biggest and costliest sports event held in the UK since the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Birmingham 2022 was the largest Commonwealth Games ever held, with 72 participating nations and over 1.3 million tickets sold. It was also the first to have more events for women than men and the first integrated event, with the para compet...

The Bundle is our regular series on the sports media and streaming market with co-hosts Yannick Ramcke and Murray Barnett, both fresh from appearing at SportsPro's OTT Summit in Madrid.  Yannick is head of OTT at One Football and Murray is director of the DTC Consultancy, founder of 28West Sport and formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN.  Today, we talk about the return of Bob Iger to Disney,...

Martin O'Neill , OBE won two European Cups as a player for Nottingham Forest under the legendary management duo of Brian Clough and Peter Taylor and earning 64 international caps for Northern Ireland including captaining the side at the 1982 World Cup. As a manager O'Neill became one of the most in-demand leaders of his generation, building a reputation as a deep thinker on the game from...

There's a race on to define the next era of the sports business. The winners will reap enormous financial returns. The losers will likely disappear from view.  Sports media and gambling have always been bedfellows.  But what comes next is a complete convergence of the two, a seamless offer that puts betting at the very centre of the business model.   The appeal is obvious: Gambling companies...

Everything you need to know about ambush marketing, the dark art of associating with a major event without paying to be an official sponsor.  We've gathered a posse of the smartest experts in fields such as brand marketing, sponsorship, sports law, creative and sales promotions agencies.  Together we pick apart the idea of official partnership, that underpins the commercial model of FIFA and...

FTX, the second biggest cryptocurrency exchange filed for bankruptcy in the US, and the company's founder Sam Bankman-Fried, previously referred to as the King of Crypto, stepped down as chief executive.  In the filing, FTX estimated that it had between $10bn and $50bn in assets and liabilities and more than 100,000 creditors, including some of the biggest names in sport, from the Miami Heat...

Today’s guests are Mo Bobat, Performance Director of the England and Wales Cricket Board, and Omar Chauduri, Chief Intelligence Officer of Twenty First Group. The topic is high performance and its fundamental link to the commercial success of sport.  Mo and Omar’s teams worked extensively together on the ECB’s new High Performance Review, chaired by former England captain Sir Andrew Strauss.  This...

When they retire, some professional footballers train to become coaches, and a few rise to become the team manager or director of football. But very, very few players do what Maheta Molango has done, and cross the divide between the playing side and the C-suite, to become the CEO of a top club.  It’s a massive Church and State divide, a journey that reveals much about the person who is now in char...

The Bundle is our regular series looking deep in to the sports broadcast, streaming and media rights market in the company of Yannick Ramcke, Murray Barnett and Charlie Boss. Today's headline topics are: DAZN acquires Eleven Sport; NBA's latest D2C play; World Rugby acquires Rugby Pass; Potential Saudi (PIF) investment into BeIN sport.  For previous episodes of the series, search 'T...

This is episode 3 of For What It's Worth our regular series in collaboration with Turnstile, the sponsorship valuation service.  Today's special guest is Danny Townsend, the CEO of The Australian Professional Leagues, aka the A-Leagues, home of professional soccer, comprising men's, women's, youth and esports competitions.  Townsend formerly held global leadership roles at Repu...

This podcast is a recording of the Unofficial Partner Web3 brainstorm which took place at Emirates Stadium in London, the home of Arsenal Football Club, who were our collaborators on the project. The subject matter covered NFTs, blockchain, crypto and DAOs. To make things interesting, we gave a group of experts a problem to solve over the course of the evening. The conceit of the brainstorm was th...

Ed Smith is one of the most innovative thinkers in sport. The former test cricketer turned author and broadcaster co-created the Institute of Sports Humanities , and in 2018 was made chief selector for England men's cricket. His new book is called Making Decisions: Putting the Human Back in the Machine , in which he asks some very important questions facing sport and business today, offering...

Kara Nortman is one of the three founders of Angel City Football Club, along with Julie Uhrman and the actor Natalie Portman, and it’s the first women’s professional soccer team in Los Angeles for over ten years. But the story has been about far more than football.  A host of famous people have come on board, Serena Williams, Alexis Ohanian, Mia Hamm, Eva Longoria and Jessica Chastain to name just...

Our guests today are Ben Nicholas and David Tryhorn, the creators behind a new Netflix documentary, The Figo Affair : The Transfer That Changed Football. The film chronicles a three week period in 2000 when the superstar Portuguese player Luis Figo left Barcelona for arch rivals Real Madrid. The result was a political storm, the legacy of which remains in place today. The deal heralded the beginni...

September always has a back to school vibe and with it comes the start of conference season, an opportunity for all us to get away from our computer screens and meet people out there in the real world. This brings with it the subject of networking, the skill of building valuable relationships with people who may or may not be of use to your personal professional development.  To talk about the bes...

Adam Kelly has been at IMG for over twenty years and is now the president of IMG Media, overseeing the four core units of rights sales, production, betting and digital media, the latter part via the recently acquired Seven League. In May this year IMG announced a twelve year strategic partnership with The Rugby Football League (RFL) and Super League Europe, with the headline objective to ‘reimagin...

The acronym OTT has become ubiquitous in recent years, but what does it really mean, and what are the implications of the decisions being made today by sports organisations big and small.   OTT stands for “Over The Top” and refers to the way a streaming service delivers content over the internet. The service is delivered “over the top” of another platform. The term has become ubiquitous across the...

Today we're going deep in to football's relationship with NFTs, crypto, blockchain and all things web3, as preparation for our inaugural Unofficial Partner event: Wise UP - the Live Web3 Brainstorm which his being held on the evening of Wednesday 21st September at The Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal Football Club in London. Tickets are £50 each and are available to buy here. Our guests...

The Bundle is our regular deep dive in to the sports broadcast and streaming market with regular guests Yannick Ramcke, head of OTT for OneFootball, and Murray Barnett, Director of D2C Sport, specialists in direct to consumer media, and Founder of 26West Sport, a sports commercial advisory consultancy. This conversation was recorded just after the deadline for broadcaster submissions for UEFA&apos...

Who, or what, is a Southampton (Saints) fan? It's a trickier question than it first appears, because when the sports business conversation moves to describing fans, it often refers to them as a homogenous blob of cliches and replica shirt wearing stereotypes. In reality, obviously, they are a collection of individual people, with different reasons for supporting a club. This makes pleasing th...

Actor and playwright Hannah Kumari has been performing her own one woman play 'Eng-ger-land' at football clubs around Britain. The play was written in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and is inspired by Hannah’s own experiences of going to football matches as a mixed-race teenager in the 90s. ENG-ER-LAND blends 90s nostalgia with themes of racism, identity politics, lad cultur...

This is episode 4 of our series looking at the business of esports, in collaboration with Nielsen Sport, the world’s leading source of sports measurement and analytics. Today’s conversation moves the focus to the subject of influencer marketing: what is it, who is being influenced, how much brand marketing money is being spent, what evidence is there of its impact and what is the effect on the spo...

This is an episode of ReThinking Sport, our series created in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity.   Our guests are Dawn Airey, who chairs the Barclays FA Women's Super League and Championship board and Elise Kossaifi, head of the women and sport practice at Portas.  The conversation was recorded a few days after England's L...