What is the Invictus Games Foundation and why is it still relevant, ten years after the creation of the first event for injured servicemen and women in London in 2024? A powerful and important conversation with Dominic Reid OBE, the CEO of the Invictus Games Foundation, the international governing body for the event that promotes sport's role in re…

In the UK 500 pubs closed in 2023. By the end of June it’s predicted 750 will have closed in 2024. It’s stark, there’s no two ways about it. We asked YouGov again to help us make sense of what’s going on. They found that one in four sports fans – equivalent to 3.4m people – are going to the pub less than they did a year ago. And more than half (55%…

In 2017, Laura Youngson led a group of women to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro to play a record-breaking football match with the campaigning group Equal Playing Field to highlight gender inequalities in sport. During this experience, Laura discovered the women were all wearing boots made for men (or kids) which left their feet in pain long after the fi…

Cause and effect. If this then that. Attribution is the holy grail of marketing. The quest to provide evidence of the impact of a sports sponsorship on the sponsor's business. The digital era was supposed to solve this puzzle. But it might have made it worse. To discuss this big question are Tom Smith and Charlie Boss. Tom is Chief Product Officer …

The Bundle is our popular long running series that unpicks the latest news to emerge from the sports media and streaming marketplace. A new feature is The Bundle Bulletin, an accompanying newsletter that goes to Unofficial Partner subscribers, featuring thought starters and strands from the conversation. Each month, before we record, Richard and co…

Football shirts are front page news in England and Germany in the last week, so this is a timely conversation about our relationship with sports jerseys, and the nature of their commercial value. Guests are Mike Fordham and Kylie Bishop. Mike has worked for IMG and the ECB and played pivotal roles in the set up of both the IPL and The Hundred, and …

The Saudi Question permeates the global sports business conversation from top to bottom. Billions of pounds has been across multiple layers of the industry, including buying players, purchasing foreign clubs, developing domestic clubs and buying or developing tournaments at home and abroad. These deals have been pursued by the government itself, th…

This a live podcast recorded at the London HQ of LiveScore, to commemorate the company's 25th anniversary. It's a conversation with Sam Sadi, CEO of LiveScore about our relationship with tech, from colour television to AI. To mark the occasion, LiveScore has created the Evolution of Fan report which delves into the last quarter-century of football …

You might know Utilita Energy from the front of Luton Town's shirt, the journey of the newly promoted club is one of the stories of the Premier League season. But there's so much more to the company than that. Luton and Utilita have partnered since 2015, back when the club was still in the fourth tier, becoming front-of-shirt sponsor in February 20…

More Than Equal's mission statement is to find, nurture and develop female racing drivers, while identifying and removing the systemic barriers they face. It was founded by 13-times Grand Prix winner David Coulthard and the entrepreneur and philanthropist, Karel Komarek. Their website explains why having a woman as an F1 World Champion matters. "Im…

Thomas Hitlsperger is the former German international footballer who played for several leading British and European clubs during a career that took him to Aston Villa, VFB Stuttgart, Lazio, Everton and West Ham, culminating in over 100 Premier League appearances and 52 caps for Germany. He was director of football and then CEO of Stuttgart and now…

Manchester City are in the process of extending their most important and lucrative sponsorship deal, with Etihad, the Abu Dhabi-based airline, whose brand is synonymous with the club following the takeover by Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), which bought 90 per cent of the club from Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Th…

The Bundle is our regular deep dive news analysis podcast on the sports media marketplace, with co-hosts Yannick Ramcke and Murray Barnett. 00:27 Discussion on Discovery Fox, Warner Brothers, JV 00:58 Deep Dive into the Raptor Project 01:52 The Great Rebundling: A New Era in Sports Broadcasting 03:19 The Uncertainties and Challenges of the New Mode…

Jason Stockwood grew up in Grimsby, became a hugely successful tech entrepreneur and came back to his home town to buy the local football club, Grimsby Town FC. One of the best articulations on the reality of the football business, the mistakes and myths, the role and limits of private equity in sport and the ineffable magic that makes football so …

A conversation on the potential and limits of AI technology in a sports context, both performance and commercial. What's possible, what's probable, what will get in the way of progress. Will AI be an engine for inequality between the haves and have nots of sport, and what can we do now, today, to embrace the coming wave. Our guests are two leading …

We caught up with Roger Mitchell while he was in London, to talk about his new book Sports Perfect Storm: An Industry Now Totally Adrift. Roger describes himself as 'a chartered accountant from Glasgow' who at the end of the 1990s 'made his personal passion for sport a profession' when he became CEO of the Scottish Premier League, giving him a seat…

The Super Bowl is the biggest day in sport. So who will be in Vegas for the game and how much have they paid for a ticket? And of course, has Taylor Swift had an impact on demand and price for those tickets? We're joined by Cris Miller, Chief Business Officer at StubHub and Global Managing Director at viagogo. Cris is joined by Rob Wilson, Professo…

The Buy Side is our regular series where we talk to brand side marketers about sport and sponsorship. Our guest is David Paro, Head of Global Sponsorships at MoneyGram, the financial services company which became the title sponsor of the HaasF1 team in 2022. So this is a conversation that takes us inside the business of Formula One, the sponsor's v…

Erin Ruane was vice president of content acquisition at Netflix for more than a decade, participating in the formulation and execution of the company’s strategy, from the launch of the streaming service, international, pricing and culture. Her responsibilities included negotiating and managing all studio relationships, over $350 million in annual s…

This is the story of when football met the crypto boom. Spoiler: it took the money, no questions asked. After that, everything that happened was inevitable. Martin Calladine's new book looks at how some of the most famous clubs in the world indulged in misleading marketing, grotesque failures of due diligence, unethically monetising fan relations a…

Richard Shotton, author of 'The Illusion of Choice,' joins Richard to talk about how the findings of behavioural science apply the sports market. We make hundreds of decisions every day. What club to support, what subscription to keep and how much is too much to pay for a match ticket? These decisions may appear to be freely made, but psychologists…

Richard Gillis, Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke deep dive into the media rights and streaming marketplace for sports. This episode is sponsored by We Are Sweet, the leading provider of digital platforms for the sports industry. Are you tired of the same old headaches when it comes to building digital platforms? We Are Sweet excels in crafting bes…

The big news in the sports industry is the sale of Two Circles, the sports marketing group co-founded and led by today's guest Gareth Balch. The deal values the company at £250 million (US$317.9 million), representing a big payout for George Pyne's Bruin Sports Capital, which paid $40million for 80% of the company in December 2019, when it bought i…

Luke 'The Nuke' Littler is the story of the sporting year so far. The 16 year old darts player made it to he final of the PDC World Championship at his first attempt. The media numbers were huge and Littler is now a household name in a way that many sports people aren't in these days of niche platforms and the competitive attention economy. So what…

Closed leagues, club v country, private equity, player exodus, the club pyramid and concussion. These are just a few of the issues we tackle with Will Greenwood in this special rugby business episode of the podcast. Greenwood is one of England's greatest ever rugby players, a World Cup winner and was three times picked to tour with the British and …

Richard and regular side kick Simon Moore, the award winning creative director welcome Gabi Mostert of Homeground to The Big Idea, to discuss the intersection of music and sports in advertising, looking at memorable examples from the industry and how this trend has evolved. Work referenced includes Wrigley's Extra, John Lewis's Christmas ads, The S…

Today we’re heading to the mountains, or at least, the Peak District, in the company of Molly Thompson Smith and Julian Lings. Molly is a star of one of the climbing scene, which since Tokyo has been an Olympic sport. Born in Ladbroke Grove in London, she one of very few people of colour in the sport, which becomes more relevant when you see the da…

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 …

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…

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 Exec…

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 …

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 t…

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 sp…

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 …

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, strateg…

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 …

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…

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 ta…

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 …

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 …

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…

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. Oth…

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 w…

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 £5bi…

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 …

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 a…

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 goo…

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 th…

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 surp…

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…