Unofficial Partner Podcast

Louis Theroux's documentary about the manosphere didn't at first seem to have much to do with sports digital strategy?

Until you get to the platforms: Kick. Rumble. A whole ecosystem of streaming channels that the sports business conversation barely mentions, yet where significant numbers of young men are spending serious time.

So we brought in Dan Ayers, VP of Transformation Digital at IMG, to ask: is the industry optimising for the wrong platforms?

What follows is a conversation that starts with Kick and ends somewhere much more interesting: in the weeds of Reddit moderators, Discord quiz nights, Iron Maiden's fan base, and what a thousand true fans is actually worth. 

Dan makes a strong case that the non-obvious channels aren't really about reach at all. Reddit and Discord represent a qualitatively different kind of engagement — audience-to-audience, not brand-to-audience — and the sports organisations that understand that distinction are building something that turns out to be genuinely valuable precisely when things go wrong.

There's also a sharp thread running through this about numbers — what a view is worth now that TikTok set the floor at zero seconds, why 15,000 concurrent viewers on a cycling stream is a better result than it sounds, and why the industry's fandom claims may be heading for a Barcelona email database moment.

Dan is a rare guest: someone who's been inside platform change long enough — from Sony Music in the early 2000s through to IMG's YouTube CMS work today — to have real opinions rather than consulting hedges.

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.

Craig Hepburn sits at the intersection of enterprise technology and cultural institutions. He spent years as UEFA’s Chief Digital Transformation Officer, overseeing its digital ecosystem, OTT platform build, and Innovation Hub. He moved to Art Basel as CDO in 2023. He is now an independent AI strategist, Perplexity Fellow, and prolific writer on the structural implications of AI for organisations and industries. His Substack has become essential reading on the gap between AI hype and implementation reality.

Hepburn’s central thesis is that most people and organisations are “tourists in someone else’s architecture.” He draws a sharp distinction between using AI (prompting chatbots, generating content) and building with AI (constructing proprietary systems, workflows and tools). He argues the latter is what will separate winners from losers — and that the window for making that shift is narrowing fast.

Crucially, Hepburn’s argument extends beyond sport. His recent writing on “The Builder and the Billion Dollar Lie” contends that entire industries — consulting, systems integration, transformation programmes — were built inside the gap between the person who understood a problem and the person who could build the solution. Agentic AI, he argues, is starting to close that gap. That has profound implications for the agency model in sport.

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.

 This week we go behind the curtain of the 25th Sport Industry Awards, ahead of the big night at Battersea Evolution on Thursday 30th April. 

With an illustrious group of people from across the industry, Richard and Sean went to EY’s London Bridge offices in London to discuss the shortlist for the Business Moment of the Year Award.

The winner will be announced on the night. 

Seven groundbreaking moments over the past 12 months were judged by a panel of industry experts:

Brett Gosper, NFL Head of Europe & Asia-Pacific

Allan Noble, Partner at EY

Fiona Harold, CEO of World Netball

Nick Keller, Chairman of Sport Industry Group.

THE BUSINESS MOMENT OF THE YEAR 2025/26 SHORTLIST

1. CVC restructures its sports portfolio in to Global Sports Group

2. Creative Artists Agency (CAA) acquires Portas Consulting

3. Red Bull’s takeover of Newcastle Falcons

4. Public Investment Fund (PIF) acquires EA Sports

5. F1 The Movie 

6. The Bundesliga’s UK streaming strategy

7. Genius Sports acquires Legend

For full details of the shortlist, visit the Sport Industry website

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 live podcast recorded at MSQ Sport and Entertainment HQ in London for the launch of Callaway Golf's new brand film 'At Last'. 

You can see the film by clicking this link. 

As the golfing world looks to Augusta for The Masters, the first major event of the golf calendar next week, it was a good time to take the temperature of the business of golf with four experts from across the game.

Ben Sharpe, MD of Europe, Middle East, Africa, Pacific and India, Callaway Golf

Jason Wessely, Director of Golf, Sky Sports

Georgia Ball, YouTube Creator and PGA professional

Rob Spedding, Director of Content, Future Publishing

Topics discussed:

• The State of the Game
• Brand Over Product
• The Influence Ecosystem 
• Sky Golf's Numbers 
• Women's Golf 
• World Cup Overlap 

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.

Digital advertising has a dirty secret: most of what you're paying for never reaches a human being. Dr. Augustine Fou is a world leading expert in digital ad fraud and has spent 20 years watching the internet fill up with bots, fake impressions, and dodgy metrics; and the advertisers funding it often know, but keep spending anyway. The incentives are too comfortable to disturb.

Sound familiar? Sport has built valuation models, rights deals, and global expansion strategies on fan numbers that deserve the same scrutiny. This conversation is about the mechanics of self-deception, and why the moment of reckoning may finally be arriving.

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 latest dissection of the sports media and streaming marketplace from the ever popular, long running series featuring expert analysis from Yannick Ramcke and Murray Barnett. 

This episode goes deep in to:

• Why Premier League chose Singapore as the all important test market for its direct to consumer platform. 
• What is Apple's sport strategy, is there such a thing? 
• FIFA offers a 'ten minute hook' for YouTube viewers at the 2026 World Cup
• The NFL has chosen to begin negotiating with Paramount’s CBS before any of its other media partners because a change-of-control provision

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.

Three highly experienced communications professionals join Richard to dissect some recent high profile PR gaffes.

Guests:

Henry Chappell, Founder and CEO of Pitch Marketing Group

Neil Daugherty, Senior Managing Director at Teneo

Jon Tibbs OBE, Founder and Chair of JTA Group.

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.

Ted Knutson's career tracks a remarkable arc: professional gambler at Pinnacle, architect of Brentford's analytics-driven recruitment model, founder of StatsBomb — built from a blog written during cancer recovery into a global data company sold to Hudl in 2024 — and now Strategic Director of Football at Crux, Bex Smith's women's multi-club platform, while running The Transfer Flow newsletter and podcast. This is a conversation about what data actually means when real money is on the line, and what happens when you try to port a proven model into entirely new territory.

In this episode:

• Why the football media's early hostility to analytics was really about power, not methodology
• The betting-to-football pipeline: transfers are just bets on humans with a longer cycle
• What StatsBomb's sale to Hudl reveals about consolidation risk in sports data
• Why professionalising operations matters more than data sophistication in women's football right now
• The three layers of data application in sport — and where the real edge lives next
• Transfers as hope: why fan demand for transfer content is really about optimism

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, we are joined by Ben Curtis, Global Brand Vice President for Rexona—the brand known as Degree in the US, Sure in the UK, and Shield in South Africa. Ben oversees the global strategy for a brand that Unilever identifies as the "cultural engine" of its Personal Care business group, making it the primary vehicle for activating their massive FIFA and UEFA partnerships.

As the marketing world prepares for the unprecedented scale of the FIFA World Cup in North America, we are diving deep into the strategic blueprint required to activate at this level. This isn't just a conversation about logos on LED boards; it is a masterclass in how a global giant moves a brand from a three-second-a-day consumer habit into a "culturally sticky" space where it can build a genuine emotional connection with an audience of billions.

In this episode, we explore:

• The Strategy of Confidence: How Rexona is leveraging the concepts of science, performance, and control to align with elite sport and solve the "problem" of sweat and odor on the world’s biggest stage.
• Managing Global Complexity: The challenge of maintaining distinctive brand assets (DBAs) across fragmented brand names like Rexona and Degree, and why the "tick" and the "it won't let you down" promise are the keys to global consistency.
• Activation at Scale: An inside look at the "House of Fresh" content studio, limited edition player-ambassador packs featuring stars like Vinny Jr., and the "world-first" in-game authentications being planned with FIFA.
• The Gender Balance: Why Unilever is giving equal billing to the Men’s and Women’s World Cups, treating the 2027 tournament in Brazil as a major commercial priority rather than a mere "purpose play".

For any executive navigating the geopolitics, logistical hurdles, and cultural nuances of a 48-team World Cup in the US, Ben provides a rare look at the high-stakes decision-making happening inside one of the world's most sophisticated marketing organizations.

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.

Bex Smith, is our guest today on Other People’s Money, Unofficial Partner’s sports finance series presented with regular cohost Matt Rogan. 

Bex Smith was captain of the New Zealand Women’s football team, appearing at World Cups, two Olympic Games, and enjoyed a stellar club career including winning German football’s triple. 

Crux Football is her investment vehicle for investing in to the women's club game. The organisation currently owns Montpellier in France and Sweden's Rosengard club. 

It is the latest firm seeking to make investments in multiple women’s soccer clubs. US businesswoman Michele Kang has established a multi-club ownership network, with her portfolio including the National Women’s Soccer League’s (NWSL) Washington Spirit, London City Lionesses in the WSL and French club Olympique Lyonnais Feminin.

Mercury 13, Monarch Collective and Sixth Street each has their own multi-club women’s sports organisations.

Smith has secured investment in Crux Football from several notable figures, including the former Netflix vice-president Cindy Holland and her partner, Anne Imhof, who were previously early-stage investors in the NWSL club Angel City. Also part of the group is Ted Knutson, the founder and chief executive of StatsBomb, and the global head of sport at EssenceMediacom, Misha Sher.

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.