Unofficial Partner Podcast

It goes without saying that we wanted to find a guest with a big enough reputation in the industry to withstand the enormous pressure of celebrating our 100th show. So, it’s a great pleasure to say hello to Donald Dell, one of the real legends of sports marketing folklore.He was the agent who signed the two most valuable and enduring shoe deals in sports history, Stan Smith and Adidas and Michael Jordan and Nike.Dell, now 83, is the Yale educated lawyer and former pro tennis player, who captained the US Davis Cup team in the 1960s containing Smith and Arthur Ashe, two megastars who became the founding clients of Proserv which Dell co founded in 1970.  In an extraordinary career, Dell represented many of the giants of sport, from Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl, Stefan Edberg and Pete Sampras to Nancy Kerrigan, Patrick Ewing and for a while at least, Jordan. So this is an hour of conversation that moves around from star to star and decade to decade, taking us inside the room with some of the great characters of the sports business, including Phil Knight, Horst Dassler and Mark McCormack to name just a few.If you’re a latecomer to Unofficial Partner, you can go back and listen to our entire back catalogue, for free, via the website or Apple Podcasts. and if you’ve been with us since episode one, we’re really grateful for your support and interest, and rest assured we’re just getting going. We spoke to Dell from his home in Maryland, Washington and we’re grateful to Steve Horowitz of Innercircle Sports for putting us in touch. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

Today’s conversation takes us inside Snapchat as we talk about the platform’s relationship with sport, head of partnerships Anmol Malhotra. Snapchat burst on to the scene in 2011 as the anti facebook, a photo and messaging app aimed directly at a much younger target audience and with an entirely new visual grammar. It now claims to reach 90% of 13-24 year olds in America.This stat has led many teams, leagues and athletes to attempt to build an audience on the platform with mixed results. So we ask what works and what doesn’t, and delve in to what Snapchat knows about its audience when it comes to consuming sports related content, and how this is likely to evolve. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

This is the second in our Tomorrowland series on sports technology and innovation.Our guest is Jean Baptiste Alliot who’s in charge of UEFA’s Innovation Hub, which is described as ‘a vehicle for future proofing UEFA and ensuring UEFA stays one step ahead of the latest trends to shape the game’.So, what does that mean, how does one of sport’s biggest and most commercially successful right owners view the future, what is its strategy on how we watch and play the game now and over the next decade. More specifically, I wanted to know how will they play nice with the giant tech platforms who, depending on your point of view, are either essential partners to reach football’s next audience or parasites seeking to use sport to collect and own ever greater reservoirs of first party data. So, as ever, we weren’t short of things to talk about. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

This is episode 4 of The Bundle, our fortnightly series that goes deep in to the world of sports media with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke.Today’s we’re looking in detail at the value of tv rights beyond the domestic market, and ask what drives fan interest and therefore the price of international sports rights, is it the big clubs or the competitiveness of the league or tournament, and we look at the markedly different way that money is distributed by the Bundesliga and the Premier League.There’s also a new report out from Two Circles, which calls for rights owners to hedge their bets when it comes to media income streams by shifting towards a hybrid approach to distribution strategy.All of this questions the value of sports properties at a time when some areas are being circled by new private equity investment groups.As ever there’s plenty of news and analysis about the big questions facing the sports business.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

David Wheldon began his career as an ad exec at Saatchi and Saatchi in 1983 and retired as CMO of Royal Bank of Scotland earlier this year.In between these dates, Wheldon established himself as one of the most influential marketers of his generation, a career in which sport and sponsorship played a big role. His name is associated with several of the biggest spending sports sponsors of the last three decades, from Coca Cola to Vodafone, and more latterly across the big bank brands of Barclays, NatWest and RBS. So he brings an informed and experienced eye to bear on the biggest sports properties in the world, from the OIympics and Fifa World Cup to the Premier League, Formula One, Ferrari, McLaren, Manchester United, the England cricket team and the Six Nations rugby championship to name just a few.What has David Wheldon learnt about how sport works and when it doesn’t.This is a conversation that starts by going back to one of his earliest and most famous marketing campaigns.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

There were already plenty of people worried about what was going to happen to their jobs and their careers in the sports business, as new technology and the data era made them question the relevance of their skills in today’s talent marketplace. Covid has amplified that fear at every level, from college leavers aspiring to break in to the industry, through first and second jobbers right up to the C-suite.All this at a time when the diversity of that talent pool looks so narrowly defined, by gender, ethnicity, age and mindset. So in today’s podcast I talk to Amanda Fone, founder and CEO of F1 recruitment, who brings 35 years of experience to these questions. In addition to running F1, Amanda is the co founder of the BAME2020 diversity programme, which launched in 2016 as a way of raising the issue of inclusion, diversity and social mobility within the sports sector. We talk about white fragility, office culture and the very potential that covid will create a lost generation of sports business talent.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

Mundial started life in 2014 as the football hipster's magazine of choice, and built a publishing brand around the culture and obsessions of fans, from retro boots and exotic European kits to cheap continental travel and South American derbies. James Brown, the former loaded editor and previous guest of Unofficial Partner, described Mundial’s appeal as ‘the draw of the unfamiliar and the thrill of discovery’. So we today we talk about the past, present and future of Mundial with Owen Blackhurst the journalist and head of business about the company’s post-print strategy, digital transformation and the market for football content. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

This is episode 3 of The Bundle, our regular look at what’s happening in the market for sports media rights with co-host Yannick Ramcke.If you enjoy our podcasts, you might like to follow Yannick on Twitter and read his blog posts that go deeper in the topics we cover on the pod.And if newsletters are your thing, subscribe to the unoffiicial partner weekly briefing, via unoffiicalpartner.comUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

This is a podcast about sports tech and innovation with our guest Angela Ruggiero.Angela is a four-time US Olympian and Gold Medalist in Ice Hockey and has been an IOC Executive Board Member for over a decade and served as the Chief Strategy Officer for the successful Los Angeles 2028 Olympic bid. This is mentioned here because we barely reference it in the podcast, because this is a conversation about the future and sport tech, it’s potential and its limitations. Angela is CEO & Co-Founder of The Sports Innovation Lab, a tech-powered market research firm and we start by talking about what that means, where she thinks the real excitement is when it comes to innovation in sport, both from an early adopter perspective but also to ask about what the challenges are when it comes to applying technology to the sports business.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

In previous episodes of our digital series, All Models Are Wrong we’ve talked to people from across the industry about how digital transformation is impacting the sports business. Today we continue that conversation with Elliot Richardson, co-founder and chairman of Dugout, the football digital platform part owned by the biggest clubs in the world, including Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, Chelsea, Manchester City and Bayern Munich.Dugout is interesting because, as I say to Elliot during our conversation, it exists to solve a problem the football clubs have when it comes to digital, which is how maximise the return from their global popularity. So I ask him whether we’re at the end of the first social platform era, to sum up what the pros and cons have been of distributing football clips across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the rest and how will the next era of digital alter the value of football clubs as a sponsorship and commercial proposition. As ever, Elliot has plenty to say, backed up by numbers.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.