Ben Curtis is Global Brand Vice President of Sure/Rexona at Unilever, and is just back the US where he ran the brand's first-ever Men's World Cup as a FIFA official partner. He came on Unofficial Partner before the tournament to talk about what he was walking into; this is the debrief — what worked, what didn't, and what a global personal-care brand actually gets for the money, from the armpit branding on the fourth official's board (a Rexona first at a World Cup) to the New York activation built around creators rather than TV spots.

Joining him is Mayowa Quadri, head of brand at the football-and-culture publisher Versus, a creator and consultant who worked on Rexona's campaign from the other side of the table. 

What does a global brand actually get for a World Cup sponsorship? Ben breaks down how Rexona measured return in near-real time — from brand mentions, to creator content earning 10x that, to cultural moments running into the millions of engagements — and where the brand ranked against Adidas and Coca-Cola.

Was the fourth-official armpit branding a gimmick or a strategy? The Rexona sign held up at every substitution was a World Cup first. Ben argues it's a durable strategic position rather than a one-off joke; Richard presses on whether the idea has legs beyond its novelty.

How much of the marketing budget now goes to creators rather than TV? Ben's answer is the headline number: a decisive swing away from traditional advertising in the space of a single World Cup cycle.

Has the way we consume a World Cup fundamentally changed? Mayowa on clip culture, the Americanisation of the tournament, and a younger audience watching through creators and streamers rather than buying broadcast packages — and why broadcasters are now behaving like creators themselves.

What makes a brand-creator relationship work, and when does it fail? Both sides on the shift from prescriptive deliverables to briefing intent, the trust a brand has to extend, and the fast route to losing an audience by looking like you've sold out.

Is football still a sport, or is it now a culture? Mayowa's case that the footballer is a human being with interests beyond the 90 minutes — and how brands are buying into fashion, music and identity rather than match results.

What is the media agency actually for now? How Unilever identifies communities and maps creators against them, the rise of nano-creators as word-of-mouth amplifiers, and why the direct brand-to-creator connection still matters.

Can the controversies around FIFA stay 'priced in'? With Infantino in the headlines, whether the noise around the governing body touches the sponsors who fund it — and Mayowa's argument that player power, not sponsor pressure, is the variable that could actually move things.

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

A conversation recorded at the recent SportsPro Investment Summit, bringing together two very different investors: Andrea Radrizzani, media entrepreneur and former Leeds United owner, and Alistair Brownlee OBE, double Olympic triathlon champion turned investor. The through-line is what actually makes a sports asset worth owning — and where the value really resides.

Leeds United and the weight of history. Radrizzani reflects on the Bielsa era, the club's identity as the sole footballing focus of a proud Northern city, and the burden of expectation rooted in the 2004 Champions League semi-final side (then the sixth-biggest club in world football on £90m revenue). Brownlee, a lifelong Leeds fan, adds the fan's perspective — pride and connection to the city matter as much as trophies.

Turnaround clubs vs. trophy assets. Radrizzani's core investment lens: the difference between a turnaround play like Leeds (high appreciation, but one relegation can wipe out value) and buying a top club, now the preserve of sovereign wealth funds and private equity. Football as a luxury/brand asset that appreciates like real estate (the PSG example), but where capital cushions mistakes that a smaller club cannot afford. Relegation as a genuine financial cliff-edge.

The new generation of sport and the media-rights problem. Why Super Tri, PTO/T100 and others built on media-rights revenue have pivoted toward mass participation. Only premium rights are growing; the rest is flat or declining. The value of affluent, avid participant communities over passive viewers.

Mass participation economics and the HYROX model. Buying a hardcore, high-spending community; defining who your true fans are and how much more they'll pay. The customer-acquisition-cost vs. lifetime-value case, and the adjacent-business boom (apparel, nutrition, training, sports tourism). The open question: consumers now hop between HYROX, Ironman and marathons rather than staying loyal to one ecosystem — and Ironman's acquisition strategy as a response.

Owning the ecosystem. Radrizzani's thesis that value lies not in any single point but in connecting the dots across a vertical.

Athletes on the cap table. What a famous name is actually worth to a company. Consumer cynicism toward over-endorsing stars (the Neymar/Ronaldo "promiscuity" problem), the premium on authenticity and genuine expertise, and the shift from passive sponsorship fees to equity stakes that drive real ROI. David Beckham cited as the model done well.

Brownlee's path from athlete to investor. The solitary, self-reliant nature of individual-sport careers, and how he built an investment practice alongside competing.

How much athletes should earn. The 55% wage-to-revenue sustainability benchmark (and Leeds' notorious 120%). Salary caps as what makes US leagues attractive asset classes. The IOC's position on not paying athletes directly. Why economic incentives alone fail to lure athletes to new leagues — Olympic qualification and heritage tournaments still outweigh money.

Private equity moving down the value chain. PE consolidating athlete and football agencies to capture player earnings; players themselves becoming more sophisticated investors (the Courtois family-office example).

Concentration, unionisation and league design. "Big get bigger" dynamics, UFC-style overpayment at the top, gig-economy pressures on the athlete pyramid, and the collective-bargaining logic of leagues vs. the pure capitalism of boxing.

LIV Golf's lessons and what's next. LIV as an early iteration of these themes, the surprising strength of the incumbent (PGA Tour) and heritage/"playing for the shirt," and a look ahead to NBA Europe and how it collides with basketball's existing strongholds. Radrizzani closes on nearly buying a London basketball franchise a decade ago — and why football and media remain his real passion.

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Dan Jamieson secured exclusive rights for Jude Bellingham the week before the FIFA World Cup. The ICONS CEO takes us inside the complex world sporting memorabilia, where fame, fans and intellectual property collide. 

The Bellingham bet — talent-spotting as a business model

• Icons approached Bellingham three years, eight months ago while he was still at Dortmund — long before the World Cup made him a global name. The signing model is a venture bet: identify the X-factor early, earn the entourage's trust, lock in exclusivity before the price moves.
• Jamieson's read on Bellingham is the whole thesis in miniature: "treat him like he's a foreign footballer." His fame was built overseas, his value is that he transcends Englishness — the opposite of "yeoman-like" Harry Kane, who doesn't sell to kids in Macau, Australia or the Philippines.
• The signing itself is prosaic: roughly an hour of his time at Real Madrid's training complex, filmed for content. The value is manufactured afterwards through framing, licensing and authentication.

The rights stack — why one player requires three deals

• A single Bellingham product sits on top of a layered set of rights: the player (exclusive deal via a tight, family-run team), the club (Real Madrid takes a cut on image rights — their argument: the halo of the shirt inflates his global value), and the tournament (FIFA / Champions League licences).
• Notable: Icons pays Real Madrid as well as Bellingham, but does not pay the FA for the England shirt.
• The signing was split ~50/50 Madrid/England on the bet that Madrid would globalise better — but post-tournament it's England fans doing the buying. A live demonstration of how a World Cup rewrites demand in real time.

"Official, authentic, exclusive" — the three buzzwords

• The entire proposition rests on these three words. The FIFA licence buys the right to use the marks, access official channels, and — revealingly — instruct Google to stop directing buyers to unofficial sellers.
• Sharp detail on enforcement: the party responding most effectively to takedown requests is the Chinese, who ask for official IP letters so they can clear out counterfeit listings. Western platforms, by implication, are slower.

Triple Lock — authentication as the core moat

• Icons' answer to a "Wild West" market: film the entire signing, edit it, attach an NFC chip to the shirt so a phone scan surfaces the exact geolocated, timestamped, verifiable moment of signing.
• The honest tension underneath: Richard presses whether authenticity actually matters to a buyer who just wants Bellingham on the wall. Jamieson concedes there's "a world of slop out there" far cheaper than Icons — the business model only works if enough buyers pay a premium for provenance. Authenticity isn't a feature, it's the entire value exchange.

Retailtainment — the media/retail convergence

• Richard's coinage-to-steal of the episode: "retailtainment." Icons has turned itself into live commerce for the eBay "Summer of Soccer" — footballers interviewed for an hour in-studio while an Icons "World XI" is auctioned live. Effectively "QVC for the modern age."
• With three months' notice, Icons stood up a studio, trained staff into on-camera talent, and now broadcasts every three days. But Jamieson is disciplined about scale: live is ~10% of World Cup activity — a high-profile experiment, not the engine.
• The Gary Lineker / Rest Is Football anecdote is the episode's best illustration of guerrilla marketing: a Messi shirt hand-delivered to reception, an invite upstairs, then a Bellingham frame — which ends up on-screen in the show's England opener. Product placement earned, not bought.

Fanatics — the elephant, as platform and as frenemy

• Icons' relationship with Fanatics is deliberately pragmatic: it's a distribution partner (15 years with the memorabilia team) and a subcontracting client (Icons signs players for Topps and Panini, but doesn't produce cards itself).
• Jamieson's framing of Fanatics' ambition is the sharpest strategic line in the conversation: they want to "build a multi-story car park of tents" — own "all the goodies in the sweet shop." Fanatics Live is "Comic-Con for sport,"and the model is league rights plus individually-contracted superstars who also do PR, events and the "white party in the Hamptons."
• The Topps/FIFA card rights deal gets a diplomatic "let's say it was a surprise" — Jamieson can't see how you award a licence five years out (it reverts to Fanatics/Topps at the 2031 Saudi World Cup). Read: a big cheque, future-proofing, and Infantino goodwill from the on-site deal.

The trading-card vs. memorabilia distinction — two different markets

• Crucial clarification of where Icons sits. Trading cards are a "free-flowing frictionless" tradable commodity — American-centric, increasingly international (Ohtani, Pokémon, Japan), an asset class with whales and secondary markets.
• Icons' product is deliberately not tradable. Jamieson refuses to call it an investment: "you are a fan, you love this guy... put it on your wall and enjoy it." He's wary of the unrefereed secondary market. He acknowledges Icons is "thinking about" making its product tradable — a live strategic question they haven't resolved.

NFTs — the dog that didn't bark

• Jamieson stood on the sidelines through the NFT boom by instinct — a "real world tangible product person."Tellingly, no one ever came with a big cheque, so Icons was never tested.
• His one genuinely interesting idea: the Maradona shirt with a cigar burn — a true one-of-one that could pair a physical artefact with a blockchain-owned digital twin. But the digital-native builders "were obsessed by the digital nature of it" and never bothered with the physical/digital combination that would have interested him.
• On digital signatures: blunt dismissal — "I hate that stuff. It's just rubbish." Worth maybe £2 on a merchandising cup, meaningless to a collector.

The supply-chain reality — where the money actually gets made and stuck

• The least glamorous, most revealing theme. Icons believes it's the biggest buyer of football shirts in the world — thousands at a time, "round the back of the bike sheds" at Classic Football Shirts.
• The Messi 2022 lesson: three years' revenue in three days, but entirely on pre-orders, because there were no Argentina shirts left on Earth. Adidas took six months to remanufacture; customers waited until summer. Right now Jamieson is "buying Argentina shirts" pre-emptively to avoid a repeat. England shirts are easier — the market is so vast Adidas "produce billions"

The through-line question — what is a media outlet now?

• The thread Richard keeps pulling: retail, media, rights and IP are collapsing into one space. eBay Live, Fanatics Live, Netflix moving from Rest Is Football into live FIFA rights (the Women's World Cup in Brazil on Netflix), and Icons building its own broadcast studio — all point the same way.
• The strategic uncertainty left open: is the American World Cup an outlier or the new template? Jamieson is inside it and still can't fully call it — which is the honest and interesting place to leave it.

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

The Bundle with Yannick Ramcke of OneFootball and Murray Barnett of West26 Sport. 

Agenda:

1. The Commercialisation of the Hydration Break

2. Did the Ratings Success Change US Football Broadcasting?

3. Sky's £1.6bn ITV Takeover: The Return of the Full-Funnel Broadcaster

4. Is the Sports Doc Gold Rush Over?

5. DAZN's A$5.3bn NRL Bet 

Cross-cutting threads

1. Reach vs revenue
2. Commercial innovation is a ratchet
3. Everyone's paying not to lose
4. The access era is ending

The Unofficial Partner Scholarship - Applications Now Open for the Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH)

🎓 Five 50% scholarship places are available for Unofficial Partner applicants in the upcoming Strategic Sport Leadership MA cohort, in September.

The Unofficial Partner Scholarship is designed to support ambitious sport industry professionals.

• Five (5) scholarships available to successful applicants
• Amount: 50% off tuition fees for those starting September 2026
• Eligibility: applicants must come through the Unofficial Partner network, and work in the sports industry
• Application procedure: Candidates will automatically be considered for the scholarship on the basis of your application. No separate scholarship application is required. You must reference Unofficial Partner in your application

Please contact Emma Rota at [email protected] to learn more and secure your place in the September cohort.

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

The Two Circles Sports IP Revenue League 2026 is full of numbers. The headline is that sports IP is worth $174billion. But the story is more interesting and nuanced than that. 

Richard went to the agency's offices in Holborn to hold the report up to the light. 

Joining him is Gareth Balch, CEO of Two Circles, and Charlie Dewhurst, Chief Commercial Officer of SailGP — the race sailing property founded by Larry Ellison of Oracle fame.

Who's in, who's out and why should you care?

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Today's guest Adam Kelly has been at IMG since 2001, connecting the business back almost to the McCormack era. Now President of IMG within TKO Group — which also owns UFC and WWE — he oversees IMG's media rights, production, digital, brand partnerships, and events businesses. This is his second appearance on Unofficial Partner; the first was in 2022, when he laid out a vision for reimagining IMG as a full-service growth partner rather than a transactional rights broker.

Episode Summary

Recorded during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, this conversation uses the tournament as a launchpad for a broader argument about where sport sits commercially in 2026. Kelly's central thesis is that the entry of global streaming and technology platforms — Netflix, Apple, Google, Amazon — is the single most important shift in the sports media landscape, and that it is unambiguously good for sport. Richard pushes back throughout: on the financial extraction argument, on the volume fallacy, on whether global streaming actually serves the kinds of sports that real fans love. It's a genuinely spiky conversation.

This episode of Unofficial Partner is sponsored by The Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH) 

ISH educates sport’s current and future leaders around the world, as the leading independent provider of sports leadership education and insight.

Their Strategic Sport Leadership Masters (MA) is for sports industry executives to study alongside their careers – designed for professionals who want to build on their experience, strengthen strategic thinking, and connect with a global network of peers working across sport.

Applications for the next intake on the 2026 Strategic Sport Leadership MA, starting September, are open.

Visit sportshumanities.org for more information

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

FIFA will make $13bn from the four-year cycle culminating in this summer's tournament — nearly $9bn of it landing this year alone. For comparison, the Paris 2024 Olympics, the other Greatest Show on Earth, generated $5.24bn. Total. For the whole Games.

It wasn't always this lopsided. The World Cup actually trailed the Olympics financially until 2010, when South Africa's edition pulled in $4.19bn against London 2012's $3.23bn. Since then the gap has only widened: 18% revenue growth from Russia 2018 to Qatar 2022, and FIFA is projecting another 73% jump by the end of this summer. They've already raised the budget for the next cycle to $14bn — before this tournament has even finished.

So this episode isn't really about football. It's about how a governing body turned a month of matches into the most lucrative event in the history of sport — and how that changes our relationship with the World Cup.

My guests are Joey D'Urso, Times journalist and author of More Than A Shirt, and Carla Bilche of Off-Ball Logic, who's spent months tracing the commercial history of the World Cup to understand exactly how we got here. Carla has a name for it: "revenuemaxxing." Once you hear the numbers, the word makes total sense.

This episode is sponsored by the Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH) 

ISH educates sport’s current and future leaders around the world, as the leading independent provider of sports leadership education and insight.

Their Strategic Sport Leadership Masters (MA) is for sports industry executives to study alongside their careers – designed for professionals who want to build on their experience, strengthen strategic thinking, and connect with a global network of peers working across sport.

Applications for the next intake on the 2026 Strategic Sport Leadership MA, starting September, are open.

Visit sportshumanities.org for more information

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Host: Richard Gillis (Unofficial Partner) Co-host/analyst: Andy Shora (TFG Labs)

Three stories this episode:

• The Mythos/Fable shutdown — Anthropic ordered by the US government to disable its two most powerful models for all foreign nationals globally, with ninety minutes' notice. First-ever export control action against an AI model. Discussion covers the jailbreak vulnerability cited as justification, the EU's response (calling for "technological sovereignty"), and what abrupt model withdrawal means for any organisation building critical workflows on a single frontier-model provider.
• AI slop hits sports marketing — The Manchester Super Giants' AI-generated kit-reveal video (formerly Manchester Originals, 70% RPSG Group / 30% Lancashire) becomes a viral case study in what happens when cost-cutting meets low-effort generative content. Errors included six-fingered batsmen, three batsmen on the pitch at once, bowlers sprinting the wrong direction, and floodlights on in daylight. Conversation moves from "is this actually bad PR or accidental virality" to the deeper implications for trust, craft, and physical/skeletal modelling in sports performance AI.
• Yann LeCun and the case against LLMs — LeCun's exit from Meta, his $1.3bn raise for AMI Labs, and his Viva Tech argument that the industry has gone "LLM-pilled." Explains "world models" and contextual intelligence, the stochastic parrot critique, and why LeCun believes open-source, physically-grounded models are a more credible path than scaling language models alone.

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

AI commoditises knowledge production and throws judgment into scarcity. In this episode, Ed Smith asks what that means for sport, education and the people building careers in the business — and why the humanities might be the most undervalued edge in an age of machines.

About the guest

Ed Smith is an unusual hybrid in today's sports world. An academic, he left Cambridge with a Double First in History, and is the author of several excellent books including Luck, Making Decisions and What Sport Tells Us About Life. He served as Chief Selector for England men's cricket from 2018 to 2021, and is the current President of the MCC. In 2019 he co-founded the Institute of Sports Humanities, which offers the Strategic Sport Leadership Master's — a programme designed for ambitious sports industry executives looking to accelerate their careers while continuing to work. Applications for the next cohort, starting at the end of September, are now open: sportshumanities.org

What we cover

• The Moneyball hangover. Why the lazy reading of Billy Beane — "scouts are idiots, if it's not data it's not real" — was always wrong, and how elite sport has swung back to data as one source among many, not the whole story.
• The limits of scientism. Ed on "creeping scientism," the idea that nothing's true unless it can be proved — and why some decisions (COVID policy, selection calls) carry intrinsic radical uncertainty that probability can't resolve.
• Can judgment be taught? The case that the entire humanities tradition — criticism, history, weighing competing evidence — is really an apparatus for honing judgment, the skill AI makes scarce rather than obsolete.
• Orchestration and the curated platform. What happens when a creative questioner goes straight to a powerful AI platform with curated data — near-instant insight — and why the bottleneck becomes asking the right question.
• The apprenticeship gap. If AI absorbs the entry-level rungs of knowledge work (in law, in sport), how does anyone climb to the judgment seat at the top? Ed's two answers: institutionalised challenge, and getting your hands dirty early.
• Sport as the last human product. Why Ed is "long sport" in the age of AI — live, embodied, uncertain competition as the most anti-fragile asset there is — and why the Tech Titans buying into London Spirit were buying the green grass, not the gadget.
• The purpose problem. As production gets frictionless, meaning becomes the scarce good. Where the humanities, the arts and sport come into their own.
• Careers without bosses. Charles Handy's "look for customers, not bosses," the death of the 50-year career path, and what an ideal student looks like: someone who doesn't know what's coming but trusts they can cope with it.

People, books & ideas referenced

• John Kay & Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty · Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods
• Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things (and his left-brain/right-brain work)
• Michael Lewis, Moneyball · Howard Marks, Oaktree memos · Charles Handy
• Institute of Sports Humanities — MA delivered with Loughborough University London

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Jonathan Licht, Chief Sports Officer at Sky Sports, discusses Sky's dominant position in UK sports broadcasting, strategic partnerships, and the future of sports media.

Key topics:

• Sky's portfolio dominance: 225 Premier League matches, 1,000+ EFL games, 118 WSL matches, Formula 1, cricket, golf, NFL, tennis, darts, netball
• The growth paradox: How building sports audiences creates competitive tension at rights renewal time
• Sky Labs & The Hundred: Co-creation process that helped develop franchise cricket format and broaden appeal
• Money & certainty: Why "our money is good" matters to rights holders vs. global streamers
• National champion positioning: Local expertise, bespoke market strategies, and talent relationships as competitive advantages
• On-air talent strategy: Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, and the blurring lines between Sky platforms and independent creator channels like The Overlap
• YouTube & highlights distribution: Free-to-view content as funnel vs. risk of training audiences not to pay; cricket highlights on YouTube
• Women's sport investment: Business rationale + "higher purpose"; WSL growth (20% audience increase), ICC T20 World Cup, position as UK's biggest investor in women's sports
• Streaming vs. linear: Resilience of traditional broadcasters; Sky Sports+ adoption; why global scale doesn't equal market-specific value
• Competitive landscape: Paramount (Champions League), Netflix, Amazon, DAZN; lessons from Ligue 1 direct-to-consumer failure
• Premier League production transition: In-housing away from IMG; operational implications for Sky's hosting role

This podcast is sponsored by The Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH) 

ISH educates sport’s current and future leaders around the world, as the leading independent provider of sports leadership education and insight.

Their Strategic Sport Leadership Masters (MA) is for sports industry executives to study alongside their careers – designed for professionals who want to build on their experience, strengthen strategic thinking, and connect with a global network of peers working across sport.

Applications for the next intake on the 2026 Strategic Sport Leadership MA, starting September, are open.

Visit sportshumanities.org for more information

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.