Unofficial Partner Podcast

This week we talk to two of the most influential sports news journalists working today. Martyn Ziegler is Chief Sports Reporter of The Times and Sunday Times newspapers and Martha Kelner has recently moved from a similar role at The Guardian to become Sports Correspondent of Sky News. The conversation took place at the Royal Thames Yacht Club in Knightsbridge just before the annual sports news lob...

This week’s guests are Mark Catlin and Kevin Rye. Former Bury director and Spanish telecommunications business leader Mark Catlin is chief executive of Portsmouth football club, and a recent winner of the Football Business Awards CEO of the Year and a judge at this year’s event. We talk to Mark about who assisted fans in the saving the club from administration in 2012, the acquisition of the club...

This week Richard and Sean head to Putney to talk to Oli Slipper about the expensive mistakes that await sport’s OTT boom; the secret of the Maradona documentary and commercial appeal of long form sports films; why DAZN sold Perform and what Len Blavatnik’s really like; Barry Hearn’s sweary advice and the challenges of selling football club websites in the days of dial up internet connections. The...

This week we talk to Henry Chappell in Pitch Marketing Group's Soho office overlooking the NCP Car Park on Brewer Street, which is now above a posh boutique but used to be a really good vintage magazine shop. The conversation is wide ranging, running from his time at IMG and then Freuds, before he launched Pitch in 2002 with help from then shareholder Matthew Freud. What I wanted to know is w...

This week Richard and Sean go to IBM’s headquarters on the South Bank to talk to Sam Seddon who guides the company’s relationship with the sport sector, most notably their long time partnerships with Wimbledon and England Rugby via the RFU. As ever, we want to know who have been the big winners and losers in the last thirty years when it comes to sport and tech, and we ask Sam for the inside line...

Ellie Norman was Head of Advertising and Sponsorship at Virgin Media when Sean Bratches asked her to become the first ever Head of Marketing for Formula One. That was 2017 and much has happened on her watch, so we went to F1’s Mayfair office to talk boring drivers, grid girls, perception versus reality and what she learnt about the power of dreams while working at Honda. Unofficial Partner is the...

Richard Ayers has been selling the future for his whole career, since teaching John Humphreys to read out the BBC Today Programmes’ website address, to his current guise as a thought leader in sport’s great journey of digital transformation. We visit Richard at  Seven League ’s HQ deep in Islington, the epicentre of the north London metropolitan elite. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for...

This week Richard and Sean visit the Hampstead home of Dave Bedford, legendary runner and 10,000 metre world record holder who played a pivotal role in the London Marathon for over three decades. We talk about the breaking the 2 hour barrier, Nike’s new shoes are different than drugs when It comes to running faster, the role of tech in sport and visiting all 92 pubs on the London Marathon route. D...

This week Richard and Sean meet  Claire Parnell , Emma Newell and  Laura Weston the organisers of a vital new business network called the Mums in Sport Community (Misc) - a positive, supportive community for women who work in sport, and who are also mums. This is a conversation that touches on some big themes that impact on every element of the industry. We talk about confidence, guilt, money and...

What’s it like moving from brand marketer to rights holder? We talk to Nathan Homer and Tim Ellerton, two high profile sports business execs who have made the jump and have tales to tell. Nathan was Global Sports Marketing and Olympics Director at Procter & Gamble and head of global partnerships at Barclays before moving over to the other side, as Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer of Euro...

This week's guest is Lucien Boyer who we interviewed at the private members club,  Home House . Lucien is the Chairman and Co-Founder of the  Global Sports Week , which launches in February 2020 in Paris. We talk about his time as global head of Havas Sport and Entertainment, the difference between the British and French sports markets and got in to the politics of the Olympic Games, comparin...

This week’s guest is  Martin Bayfield, the former England International rugby player who is now one of the busiest and most popular presenters and after dinner speakers. We talk about the upcoming Rugby World Cup, his hopes and fears for the sport he loved since his days balancing a playing career with being a police officer in the amateur era. It was at one speaking engagement that his career as...

This week’s guest is Jimmy Worrall , founder and CEO of Leaders in Sport , the conference and event business which he created in 2006. We talk about his career in sport which has included successful stints at The English FA, Soccerex and ENIC. The interview took place at Leaders’ offices in Wimbledon. During our conversation, Jimmy referenced Toby Hester , the leading sport sponsorship executive w...

Lynsey Hooper is a sports journalist and broadcaster who is one third of the Offside Rule podcast, with fellow Sky Sports reporters Hayley McQueen and Kait Borsay, which has been taking football to a majority female audience since 2012. The idea came from conversations the three had while working at Sky in the Andy Gray and Richard Keys era. If this is your first time with us, feel free to dive in...

Football fans are rarely invited to talk about fan engagement. So we changed that. Very few football rivalries match the north London derby for intensity. In this week’s podcast we bring the supporters of Spurs and Arsenal together to talk about the role of fans in the business of football. Katrina Law is co-chair of the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust, and Tim Payton plays a similar role for A...

In this week’s podcast, Richard and Sean take Harry The Talented Intern to visit the brand new London HQ of The Athletic, the sports publishing launch that has caught the attention of everyone in the sports media world. They sit down with editor in chief Alex Kay Jelski , one of the main architects of the new service and who was instrumental in the company’s rapid recruitment of some of the best w...

This week’s guest is Dame Heather Rabbatts Heather began her career as a Barrister at Law, before becoming a government advisor and chief executive of Lambeth Council, making her the youngest local authority CEO in the UK. She was a Governor of the BBC followed by an appointment as a senior executive at Channel 4 She has held many senior roles in football including Executive Chair of Millwall Foot...

Elliot Richardson is co-founder and chair of Dugout , the football media company co-owned by some of the world’s biggest football clubs, including Real Madrid, Barcelona, Chelsea, Bayern Munich and Manchester City. We talk about the changing media ecosystem around football, the economics of branded content and what the insurance industry knows about data. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast...

Faris Yakob is an award winning advertising strategist, creative director, writer and public speaker. He was chief innovation officer at Naked Communications in the noughties and his book Paid Attention is a great primer on the way media and marketing are evolving. He’s also very good on Twitter . We talked to Faris at City and Islington College in London. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast...

Ed Smith is the former test cricketer turned writer and TMS commentator who is now the chair of England cricket selectors and co-founder of the Institute for Sports Humanities . We spoke to Ed at the Mortimer Club in London before the recent Cricket World Cup, which England won in such dramatic fashion at Lord’s. We talk about leadership, the commercial history of sport and the role of luck in cri...

The M&C Saatchi Sport and Entertainment Global CEO is one of the industry’s highest profile figures, leading the agency from its inception to an unprecedented six Sport Industry Agency of the Year Awards. Now he’s moving to Sydney. His reasons for the change are an insight in to how the agency market is evolving in the UK and globally.   Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the busine...

Jackie Fast was robbed! The sponsorship entrepreneur was the stand out star of Lord Sugar’s reality business show only to get the short stubby finger of fate in the boardroom. We talk about what it was like in the loser’s cafe, ask what happens in the Apprentice house and how the show helped build her brand. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining...

To understand Facebook’s relationship with live sport, it’s a good idea to talk to one of its key architects. Peter Hutton' s move to the social media giant in 2018, set expectations of a new sports rights bonanza to fill the gap created by declining pay TV fees. But a year on, there’s little sign that Facebook want to play the rights game in the same way. ’I understand the desire for simple...

Over a thirty year career in sports news, Charlie Sale was the most read and feared diarist in the business, and his Sports Agenda column in the Daily Mail was scoured by everyone from the England football manager to the lowliest PR intern. When he retired at the end of last year, some of the biggest names in sport lined up to pay tribute to one of the hardest working journalists on Fleet Street....

This week Richard and Sean delve deep in to esports following Google’s big launch at E3, the gaming expo in LA. We talk cloud based streaming platforms, find out how in-game programmatic media works, who will win the race to build a PPV esports channel and whether teams have a Galacticos problem. This week’s guests are Leo Matlock ( RFRSH Entertainment ), Rob Dagwell ( BidStack ) and Jack Stewart...