Wedge Issues is Unofficial Partner's business of golf series. Ryan Howsam is the insurance entrepreneur behind the giant Staysure organisation, who liked golf so much he bought the European Seniors Tour, beginning as a sponsor and turning that in to a majority ownership stake, rebranding it as the Legends Tour. This gives him a fascinating angle in…

In a sports industry obsessed with data and measurement, brand is the great intangible asset, the bit of the balance sheet that remains largely opaque, which is why it’s so important. But mention brand in the vicinity of fans or the football media and there's a row. It’s no surprise that the kit launch genre has evolved during this period, growing …

A special live episode of the podcast recorded at BAFTA in Piccadilly in London, in collaboration with HBS, or Host Broadcast Services, the leaders in sports broadcast production, which was celebrating 25 years in the industry and the opening of it’s London office. The company has produced every FIFA World Cup and many other events since establishe…

This is the first episode in a series of four podcasts made in collaboration with Redtorch, the research and creative agency that’s been at the heart of Olympic sport for over 20 years, working for many of the key international federations. We’ve used Redtorch research insights several times on the podcast because they ask really good questions tha…

The conversation dissects sport’s relationship with the phone, how that differs depending on the nature of our fandom, and the specific roles played by mobile games and fantasy league products in attracting, building and retaining fans. Finn Bradshaw, head of digital at ICC, the global governing body for cricket, and held similar roles at Tennis Au…

Welcome to The Bundle, our regular series on the sports media and streaming marketplace with co-hosts Yannick Ramcke, General Manager of OTT at the streaming service OneFootball and Murray Barnett, founder of 26West Consulting and formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN International. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport…

Two Circles is predicting the global sports fanbase will grow from 3.2billion to 4billion by 2033. But below that bullish headline, there’s some nuance. For example, two thirds of consumption comes from just 20% of the most dedicated fans. So there’s a race on to get at that remaining 80% of casual fans, who make up the famous long tail. But how? C…

The Buy Side is our regular series talking with brand side marketers about sport and sponsorship. Today's guest is Willem Dinger, global head of sport and entertainment partnerships at Unilever. The Buy Side is sponsored by KORE Software the global leader in engagement marketing solutions. More than 900 brands, venues, and sports organisations trus…

Other People's Money is our regular series on sports investment, with co-host Matt Rogan, co-founder of Two Circles. Today the subject is sports tech, with our guest Dugald Macdonald co-founder of Sportable. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's wh…

There’s a row going on over who should run the nascent and potentially commercially valuable sports of padel and pickleball. This issue has a universal application across many sports, as NGBs seek to wrap their arms around what they might call strategic adjacencies. So, what are pros and cons of the LTA owning Padel and Pickleball. Is the NGB model…

A special live episode recorded on stage at Sportel Monaco, the global sports television and technology convention. Guests: Glen Killane, Executive Director of Sport, European Broadcast Union, the EBU. Claire Kelly, Managing Director of Gemba Europe and Middle East. Yannick Ramcke, General Manager of OTT at OneFootball. Unofficial Partner is the le…

Dame Tracey Elizabeth Anne Crouch DBE (born 24 July 1975) is a British Conservative Party politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Chatham and Aylesford from 2010 to 2024. Crouch was appointed as Minister for Sport, Civil Society and Loneliness in 2017, but resigned in 2018 due to a delay over the introduction of reduced limits on…

A special bonus episode of Expected Goals, Unofficial Partner's sister podcast on the women's football business, with co-hosts Maggie Murphy and Matt Cutler. Joining them is Polly Bancroft, CEO of Grimsby Town FC, who was formerly head of women's football at Manchester United and lists Brighton and Hove Albion, Nottingham Forest and UEFA on an exte…

Welcome to The Bundle, our regular series on the sports media and streaming marketplace with co-hosts Yannick Ramcke, General Manager of OTT at the streaming service OneFootball and Murray Barnett, founder of 26West Consulting and formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN International. This week’s podcast is sponsored by We Are Sweet - helping you tell…

The Big Idea is our regular series on creativity, with co-host award winning consulting Creative Director Simon Moore. We ask a guest to bring three of their favourite sports related creative campaigns. This week it's Gundeep Anand in the hot seat. Gundeep founded The Last Stand and is a docu-style Director & Photographer whose work is influenced b…

Fresh from an excellent Leaders Summit at Twickenham, or should we say Allianz Stadium, is a conversation with Gareth Balch, founder and CEO of Two Circles agency about the agreement to buy KORE Software, a deal announced this week. Two Circles is buying the company from Serent Capital, the private equity firm that bought Kore in 2018. Earlier this…

Other People's Money is our regular series on sports investment, with co-host Matt Rogan, co-founder of Two Circles. Today we get in to the minutiae of deal making, with Steve Hacking, managing partner at Latitude Partners, who has worked on more than 200 company acquisitions for clients across both buy and sell side of investment deals in sectors …

The 3 is a failed experiment in podcast format innovation. The 3 is a creative collaboration between Unofficial Partner and Leaders in Sport. The 3 picks three stories from the sports business week and dissects them on a Friday morning. The 3 may return, and it might not. This week Richard Gillis, David Cushnan and James Emmett pick these three sto…

This is a follow up to our popular series of last year, The Squeezed Middle, which was a collaboration with PTI Digital, the independent strategy and technology consultancy. This episode looks in to a new report, The Sports Leadership Benchmark, based on a survey of sports CEOs, carried out by PTI. You can download the report, for free, at ptidigit…

The ECB is currently seeking investors for The Hundred franchises, the short form cricket competition and are selling a 49% stake that values them at up to £150m each. Today’s guest Lalit Modi disagrees. The founder of the Indian Premier League explains exclusively to Unofficial Partner why: “Based on the information memorandum a 100% stake in a te…

Three stories, three opinions, ten minutes (50minutes) What's in a name? FIFA's Club World Cup stadia naming snafu What is streetwear? The deeper meaning of Arsenal's style collab How old is too old? Sportfive and Tendulkar launch International Masters League This podcast is sponsored by Leaders in Sport - Get 15% off Summit passes Leaders in Sport…

This is a live episode recorded at StreamAMG's excellent Direct-to-Fan Playbook event, held at Amazon's Liverpool Street headquarters in London. A big thank you goes to the team at StreamAMG for inviting us along, we learnt loads. Joining Richard on stage was Murray Barnett, one half of the regular Bundle presenting team, founder of West26 Consulti…

Today, we're launching a brand new show called Expected Goals, hosted by Matt Cutler and Maggie Murphy. Together Matt and Maggie will explore the business of women's football. Matt Cutler is the former editor of SportBusiness and was Director of Communications at Two Circles. As the head of Unofficial Partner Productions, Matt led on our hit series…

Wedge Issues is Unofficial Partner's business of golf series, where we take some of the big trends from across sport and apply them to golf. This is a special live episode recorded in the boardroom of the DP World Tour's headquarters at The Wentworth Club on the Friday morning of the BMW PGA Championship, the Tour's flagship event. Around the table…

The 3 stories are: 1. The race for the IOC big job - aka Bach’s overtures (this doesn’t make any sense but makes me sound like I know about classical music, which I don’t, apart from that theme from the Hovis ad). Six months ago the word on the street was that Seb Coe wasn’t running, and now he is. So, was the word wrong, or did he change his mind?…

Earlier this year, The Football Association has became the first national governing body to mandate training on female health, with Women’s Super League and Championship clubs benefitting from a new league-wide support plan covering pregnancy, the menstrual cycle and pelvic health. The FA is working in partnership with The Well, specialists in deli…

The journey to creating a ten minute podcast is not a linear one. That's fancy talk for saying that rather than cut last week's half hour episode, this one went one for 45 minutes. Three stories: James Emmett reports from IMG's breathing and finance retreat. Richard Gillis on the big agency bun fight over UEFA rights. David Cushnan on the launch of…

Madeleine Orr is a leading sport ecologist and professor at the University of Toronto. A Forbes 30 under 30 inductee, she is the founder and co-director of The Sport Ecology Group, who consult on international climate issues for sports organizations such as the Commonwealth Secretariat, the UNEP, World Athletics, Adidas, F1 teams, and the NCAA. Mad…

We tried to make a short form ten minute podcast and failed. It's supposed to be three stories in ten minutes. Think of this as a work-in-progress. UP's Richard Gillis is joined by James Emmett and David Cushnan from Leaders in Sport. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking co…

For millions of people, Rick Shiels' YouTube channel is how we watch golf in 2024. Shiels is our very special guest today. He started by uploading golf tips to YouTube 12 years ago to attract people to the Trafford Golf Centre in Manchester. Now there are 900 golf channels on the platform, but only one Rick Shiels, with more than 3 million combined…

Other People's Money is our regular series on sports investment, with regular co-host Matt Rogan, co-founder of Two Circles. Our guests today are Jonathan Lenson and Sam Johnson, CEO and head of sport respectively at Milltown Partners, the communications and public policy consultancy co-founded by Paddy Harverson, the former PR to Manchester United…

NBA v TNT – Exclusive Negotiating Periods and Last Matching Rights are central to the big row over NBA rights. But how they work and why does everyone hate them? Click here to read The Bundle Bulletin for the homework notes from this episode, compiled by regular co-hosts Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast f…

Ben Sharpe, one of the most influential people in the golf business, as Managing Director & President of Callaway Golf across Europe, Middle East and Asia. Callaway is the largest manufacturer of golf equipment in the world and as such is a bellwether for any conversation about the commercial health of the game. Its tentacles run from the very top …

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games are over, the medals have been won and lost. And now the sports business conversation shifts to who won the other game, played between some of the biggest companies in the world, each seeking to stand out in the crowd of global and local brands sponsoring, or ambushing, the Olympics. What worked, what didn’t and how has…

“As soon as the Southport murders happened, the way Muslims specifically were targeted has made you question again whether we do belong, whether deep down in the end, we're always having to justify our existence,” says Azeem Rafiq, the former professional cricketer on today’s podcast. “On an individual level. I’m not sleeping, I’m patrolling around…

We go deep in to the North American market today with Daniel Kaplan, one of the very best reporters covering the US sports business beat. I’ve known Daniel for over twenty years, first when he covered tennis and the NFL for SportsBusiness Journal, and then more latterly at The Athletic, Front Office Sports and Awful Announcing, the sports media new…

We’re in the middle of the Olympic Games in Paris so it’s a good time to ask some bigger questions as to the future of the Olympics and mega sports events more generally, with regular contributor Ed Smith, founder of the Institute of Sports Humanities and fellow guest Dr Simon Rofe, a world leading expert in the field of sports diplomacy, and himse…

A documentary special - UP Productions' Matt Cutler explores the changing relationship between two cultural institutions in the UK: football and the pub. The pub has an important place in both professional and grassroots football. As the place friends and family meet before the game, and dissect a win or loss afterwards. Where old school friends re…

Why has the value of the NBA's media rights tripled, from $25billion to $75billion this week? "Purely because of gambling,' says Sam Sadi, CEO of LiveScore Group, the media and gambling platform, referencing the opening up of the US gambling marketplace. 'Nothing else that would drive that. Everything was trending downwards until five years ago, an…

Leadership is one of the most important and yet misunderstood topics in sport. This summer, it has dominated the headlines. Performances of the England football team have mainly been analysed via the lens of its manager. So what is leadership and what are the mistakes we make when talking about it. Ed Smith is renowned thinker on sport, leadership …

The Buy Side is our regular series talking with brand side marketers about sport and sponsorship. This week’s guest is Mark Kirkham, the SVP & Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo, one of the biggest spenders in the sports industry, whose brands such as Aquafina, Pepsi, Gatorade and Lay’s are associated with a huge number of major events globally acr…

Bryson Dechambeau heads to next week’s Open Championship at Troon as the reigning US Open champion, having beaten Rory McIlroy down the straight at Winged Foot in New York three weeks ago, confirming the American’s position as one of the very best players in the world today. But this is a conversation about what he’s done off the course over the la…

FIFA+ is the global football governing bodies own media platform, created in 2020 and launched two years later. It’s one of sports biggest and most ambitious and expensive direct-to-consumer projects, and so brings together many of the threads we talk about often on Unofficial Partner; a debate that runs across the sports industry, as governing bod…

Welcome to The Bundle, our deep dive in to the sports media rights economy with regular co-hosts Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke. Today’s list of topics include trying to decipher FIFA’s media strategy around FIFA+ and the Club World Cup, we dip in to the French market and the challenges being faced by the country’s leading football league, Ligue…

Performance data has long played a role in the way sport is presented on television. From football to formula one, we’re familiar with commentators referencing statistics to help explain what we’re watching. But increasingly, the most sought after data points are those that exist within the body of the athlete. Heart rate and other biometric data i…

Sport was a big presence in the annual Cannes Lions Festival last week. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the top of the tree when it comes to showcasing the relationship between creative ideas and sport. There were 665 entries from 41 countries vying for the coveted prizes. So what’s winning awards this year, why are they wi…

This is the second episode of Other People’s Money, our regular deep dive in to the world sports investment, with my regular co-host Matt Rogan, one of the co-founders of Two Circles and a serial adviser to sports organisations. Today the conversation is about private equity. We went to the Victoria offices of Phoenix Capital to talk to Tim Dunn, a…

Tom Beahon created the Castore sportswear brand with his brother Phil in 2016. Today, their shareholding in the firm is valued at around £500million following a recent capital round, led by US merchant bank and investor The Raine Group, which values the company at £950mn. This investment will contribute to Castore’s attack on the sportswear industr…

Steve Martin and Jamie Wynne-Morgan created and developed the award-winning M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment agency over a 20-year period. Six months ago they resigned, and there's been speculation ever since as to what they'll do next. Today they answer that question. It's called MSQ Sport + Entertainment. We went to meet the pair at their new Lo…

What does sport look like from the money side of the equation? What’s the investment rationale behind buying a football team, cricket franchise, the new sports tech thing or a sports agency? What are assumptions about how the market will develop? Who’s going to win, who will lose out? These are just a few of the questions we’re looking to explore i…