Martin Glenn; The FA's lost radicalism; Todd Boehly, Clearlake and Other People's Money; ICE hell; Shopatainment; Sir Clive v Big Eventers; Visit Saudi, get arrested; Adidas, Beyonce and Melvyn Bragg
Overthinking the sports business, for money
Martin Glenn on what four years running The FA taught him about institutional memory, the NGB model and Melvyn Bragg
Snippets:
“The model of a national government body is that of a monopoly provider. Monopolies never encourage innovation because it's expensive and they lose control.”
The FA’s roots are of a genuinely revolutionary group of pioneers who created the game that spread ‘like a weed’ around the world, a point made by Melvyn Bragg who included The Rules of Association Football in his 12 Books That Changed The World. The story since then has been of timidity and control.
The growth of women’s football in England will depend on the ‘enlightened self interest’ of the Premier League clubs.
Martin Glenn: The Premier League clubs are big global brands and to make the brands enduringly attractive and relevant, women's football has to be a feature.
And so I think for the big clubs, it's enlightened self-interest.They will cross subsidize women's football for a number of years because it still needs investment. It's still underdeveloped compared to men's. And they can afford to do it, and it will look good for their brand.
When people find out you’re The FA CEO, they list things they want, like winning England teams and better pitches. They don’t say ‘plough loads of money in to Wembley Stadium’ (Glenn famously was prevented from selling Wembley to Shahid Khan by FA blazers).
‘I always say The FA is an accidental stadium owner, it’s not critical to the mission’.
ICE London, The Land MeToo Forgot
Went to Excel Centre for the gaming industry’s big exhibition this week.
Tried not to hold my nose.
Failed.
Fuck me, its seedy.
Chelsea, Todd Boehly and Other People’s Money
What is Todd Boehly doing?
That’s a question you hear a lot currently. The assumption that a RICH WHITE MAN is playing four dimensional chess (see also, Musk and Twitter).
I guess we’ll find out in time.
Meanwhile, you hear less people asking, what are Clearlake doing?
The New Taxonomy
Capital Efficiency
Hollywood has entered the “churn chapter” of the streaming wars, a moment defined by the effort to keep customers happy and engaged, all while prices are increasing, content is oversaturated, and cancellation is easy.
Echoes of sport’s walled garden aspirations.
This era, of course, was followed by a mad scramble by virtually all the major players—Disney, WarnerMedia, NBC Universal, Paramount—to launch their own platforms and claw back hits to out-walled-garden each other. As Bob Iger famously put it, “We had been selling nuclear weapons technology to a third world country, and they were now using it against us.”
In this post-Covid, post-correction, belt-tightening era, Hollywood has realized that winning market share is hard, and the streaming business is expensive and comparatively low-margin.
So another, David Zaslav-articulated pivot has begun: spend less but also efficiently monetize each piece of content based on its inherent value. Suddenly every executive that I talk to is surveying their overflowing vaults to determine which titles should remain exclusive and which have more value if they’re rented out or sold entirely to third parties.
Shopatainment
Spoiler, it’s about discovery-based shopping, as opposed to search-based shopping, which is what you do currently.
And your kids are doing it already.
Sir Clive Woodward v Big Eventers…Fight! Fight! Fight!
The former England coach went to a massive piss up, and a rugby match broke out.
(Thanks to Roger Mitchell for sending me this story)
What happened?
Woodward took the Daily Mail clutching his pearls, astonished to find that people drink beer at the Six Nations.
And - spoiler alert - to buy the drink, they get up from their seats while the rugby’s on (there’s a passage where he’s a sentence away from accidentally advocating drone delivery).
Why do we care?
Growing The Game is harder than it looks.
After two decades of targeting Big Eventers, the bastards are showing up in their tens of thousands.
What we’ve got here is the wrong type of NEW FAN.
The people are revolting, etc.
Not only does the RFU need to fill Twickenham, it needs to fill it with the RIGHT TYPE OF PEOPLE.
Rugby people. Sir Clive’s people.
Clever sounding things to say on this issue
Rugby is a bundle.
Drinking beer is central to the rugby bundle.
And many - most - of the people paying through the nose for a ticket prefer beer to rugby.
Rugby is just one of the things they’re paying for.
By selling THE EXPERIENCE, a generation of marketers have downplayed the sport bit because they lack confidence in the core product - in this case rugby - which is unreliable in terms of entertainment value, particularly if the rules are difficult to understand and the ball is invisible most of the time.
By reframing a rugby match as a BIG DAY OUT, they’ve been able to raise prices and sell more beer.
See also, former Spotify economist Will Page’s counter intuitive analysis of why people go to music festivals: Sex, Drugs…and somewhere down the list comes…Music).
NOW ADD WOMEN
A build, based on a really interesting bit of research in to The Hundred, passed to me this week, carried out by a team at Bournemouth University in collaboration with Women in Sport.
I’ve tried to find it to link, I’ll circulate when I have it.
Bouncing off the above bit, some of the recommendations land on the beer question.
My question is, what is the women’s cricket bundle?
And can that cohere with the men’s cricket bundle, if as seems the case, it is a beer based bundle?
There’s a lot of love for The Hundred’s double headers, mixing men’s and women’s matches on the same evening.
But how do those two bundles work together?
Sponsorship Corner
Some marketing stories that caught the eye this week.
FIFA’s tin eared Saudi deal
Really good piece on why it’s a bad idea.
Fans of women’s football know, and deeply feel, a sense of safety, purpose and belonging around the sport they love. In particular, there will be many LGBTQ+ players and fans at the Women’s World Cup for whom football is a place where they can express themselves. Many more will be watching from afar, seeing players like Sam Kerr and Megan Rapinoe being awesome, adored and gay – all at the same time – in a team that accepts them for who they are.
So a deal with Visit Saudi fundamentally misunderstands the asset FIFA has stumbled upon.
The most recent State-Sponsored Homophobia Report by ILGA World – which campaigns for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex human rights – lists Saudi Arabia as a country where, “We have full legal certainty that the death penalty is the legally prescribed punishment for consensual same-sex sexual acts”.
For FIFA to tell LGBTQ players and fans they should “Visit Saudi” is to send them to a jurisdiction where they are regarded as criminals (and where all women face seriously restricted rights, notwithstanding recent encouraging progress). FIFA would be selling them into persecution. It’s hard to imagine a greater mismatch for the unique and valuable audience the women’s game has accrued.
Probably best not to delve too deeply in to South Africa’s domestic politics. But it’s worth noting the tone of the country’s tourism chief, which frames sport sponsorship as a frivolous luxury.
Brand Africa chairman Thebe Ikalafeng labelling the deal an 'irresponsible use of tax'. Describing it as a 'vanity investment', Ikalafeng urged that the money should instead be put towards 'safety for travellers, lights and maintenance'.
Political party Democratic Alliance said: '(The proposal is) a slap in the face of every South African whose hard-earned tax will be used to sponsor a first-world football team. (It is) an insult for the South African tourism and travel sector which was decimated, and in many cases completely destroyed, during and post-Covid.'
3. Join the dots: Teddy Sheringham, Man City, trust and fun…
With Man City in the news this week, it’s worth revisiting this investigative piece into the club’s mystery sponsor, 8Xbet.
Good quote to open:
Its ‘global ambassador’ Teddy Sheringham calls it “the place where trust and fun go together”.
No Context Graph
(Thanks to Richard Johnson for the steer to this chart.)
DataViz of the Week
From Ye to Bey
The cultural merger of Adidas and Beyonce looks iffy.
Some nice numbers in this WSJ scoop.
Ivy Park sales were on track to hit about $40 million at the end of last year, down from $93 million in 2021, according to the documents. For 2023, the documents show Ivy Park sales are projected to reach $65 million, compared with an earlier Adidas target of reaching $335 million.
Adidas was on track to lose at least $10 million on the partnership in 2022, according to the documents. Meanwhile, Beyoncé was slated to receive about $20 million in compensation, the same as previous years, the documents show
Adidas, a global sportswear seller with a roughly $30 billion market capitalization, lowered its earnings outlook in November after it cut ties with Mr. West following antisemitic comments by the rapper and workplace complaints involving him. Adidas had worked with Mr. West, who goes by Ye, for years to build the Yeezy brand into one of its biggest sellers.
Sportsbiz Job of the Week
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