Won't anyone think of Julian Alvarez; How much is too much; Where women watch; UEFA's elephant in the room vs The FA's white elephant; Bryson just Trumped; WSL and YouTube; Sonny's share; NBA v Zas
Won't anyone think of Julian Alvarez; How much is too much; Where women watch; UEFA's elephant in the room vs The FA's white elephant; Bryson just Trumped; WSL and YouTube; Sonny's share; NBA v Zas
Overthinking the sports business, for money
This week’s Unofficial Partner Newsletter is sponsored by Loughborough University London and the Institute of Sports Humanities
Leadership in Sport MA 2024 Applications Open
Applications for the next intake on the 2024 Leadership in Sport Masters are open.
The Leadership in Sport Masters is designed for sports industry executives to study part-time alongside their careers.
The programme is co-delivered by Loughborough University London and the Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH), experts in leadership education.
Loughborough University is ranked best university in the world for sports-related subjects (QS World University Rankings by Subject 2017-2023).
Find out more https://www.sportshumanities.org/masters-uk
or contact tom.rann@sportshumanities.org
What is capacity, btw?
Two big words lie in wait further down the FIFPro/European Leagues v FIFA story.
Quality and Capacity.
What happened?
This week the footballer’s union and the European Leagues, took on FIFA over its’ plans for the FIFA Club World Cup.
This event they say, will send the camel to the chiropractor.
Why do we care?
This is the tricky bit.
I suspect that FIFPro has made a mistake. Or at least, they’ve read the room wrong.
Won’t anyone think of Julian Alvarez?
Firstly, the inclusion of the European leagues adds barnacles to FIFPro’s player welfare story, shifting it in to the much less emotive territory of club v country land grabs and commercial white space.
When seeking to pull at my heartstrings, FIFPro, via the medium of Henry Winter, went a thrillingly counterintuitive route.
Rather than lead with overworked and impoverished unknown from a smaller league, FIFPro/Winter led with the case study of Man City’s Argentinean World Cup winner.
Winter’s tale was part of a FIFPro PR blitz.
The choice of victim just begs for a Google search.
Two things can be true at once. Alvarez is hugely well (over) paid AND there might be too many games in a season.
And this gets to the question that goes beyond this particular spat and takes in to every sport everywhere.
How much is too much?
The player welfare angle is just one bit of the equation.
The other is money.
At what point does the quality of the product impact on the demand for rights?
Too many games…tired and injured players…insert the phrase golden goose.
Unless you’re Jake Humphrey, we can agree that there are limits to human performance.
But what are they? Where’s the line?
And what is the relationship between tired players and media revenue?
This last question gets to the real problem.
The money doesn’t care
The media and sponsorship markets are too laggy to be good arbiters of the quality of the sporting product.
It’s too blunt an instrument.
The NBA just sold the next 11 years for $75billion FFS.
I could start for the Lakers and not impact on the league’s commercial performance.
So bad decisions go unpunished, global expansion plans get waved through, CEOs go un-sacked.
The market had one job.
Meanwhile, UEFA’S Elephant in the Room is warming its slippers by the fire
If the European Leagues are worried about over farming, it’s odd they’re going after FIFA and not UEFA.
As discussed on The Bundle, the expansion of UEFA tournaments for the new season is much under estimated.
Fans will be surprised how different the format is.
And as discussed on The Bundle, the question is the knock on effect it has on the TV rights market, as broadcasters assess its value in relation to that of domestic leagues.
Is the UEFA stuff enough to be ‘the home of football’ in your particular market?
France. Italy. Germany. Each league has found it hard to get to the number they need to service the demands of their club owners.
The Premier League went early and took a hit from haters who said they’d ‘left money on the table’ for taking more per game than previously.
That move looks pretty smart now.
The White Elephant in the Room…WSL just went from OTT to YouTube
(Note to self: Enough with the elephant and room references)
What happened?
Half of Women’s Super League (WSL) 132 games will be shown on YouTube next season. This is the inventory not taken by Sky Sports and the BBC.
This is an interesting move for several reasons, mainly because it poses the question, what’s the point of OTT?
We’ve spent a LONG time being told that every sports rights holder should build, and they will come.
From FIFA+ and The Olympic Channel down, they’ve spent a lot of money doing the building bit.
This includes The FA, whose FA Player app was where those 66 WSL games were previously housed.
WSL CEO Nikki Doucet said “The FA Player has been a hugely important part of the growth of women’s football in recent years and the free-to-air reach it has afforded our teams has been crucial in our development.”
Decoded: Thanks and all that, but now we’re going to where the people are.
Why?
The answer lies in what I’m calling (with a straight face) The Bilities - Availability, Discoverability, Usability.
Geddit?
Or should I say Reddit?
This thread sums up much about the job of being a football fan in 2024. Spoiler: The FA Player was a faff.
Where do women watch?
A build on the WSL YouTube story.
An UP source passed me some nuggets from this week’s Meta audience data release.
(To be considered with the usual UP Caveat - The Number’s Are Always Wrong).
The data shows monthly active users across Meta, Instagram and Facebook, combined and deduped (this could mean people who followed or engaged with content through to ‘people who were shown content and didn’t scroll quickly to avoid it’).
The following breakdown shows the gender split of some major sports properties, and throws in the Eurovision Song Contest for comparison.
The Billy Jean King Cup is the only sports property where women outnumber men, and that from a small base.
The rest - including some of the big global women’s sport properties - have an audience dominated by men.
6 million and counting: Trump boosts Brand Bryson, and vice versa
This week Donald Trump played golf with Bryson Dechambeau and got more viewers than most tour events. The show has nudged his channel’s subs over 1.1million, which is 300k short of the PGA TOUR’s own YouTube subscriber number.
The politics of the above show are hardly worth considering.
In a list of The World’s Shortest Sports Books, a strong entry would be Democrats on the PGA Tour.
What is D2C strategy now?
If the above stories are of interest, and you work at a sports rights holder, get in touch with us about our next live event, a closed room invite-only gig in collaboration with StreamAMG.
This is an invite only event with limited capacity however if you work for a rights holder and are interested in attending, please contact sean@unofficialpartner.co.uk.
The data behind Spurs’ Son Replacement Strategy
Tottenham are close to signing Yang Min-hyuk, a promising 18 year old Korean winger.
It’s far too soon (another promising Korean player?) to label him the Next Son Heung-min.
But it’s hard to get beyond Turnstile’s recent report finding, when it comes to the commercial value of the Korean market to the club.
Beware the will of Zas
Good piece by the ever excellent Daniel Kaplan on Awful Announcing:
“The NBA has kind of miscalculated the will of Zas,” Crakes said. “They thought he would continue to play by the rules of the game that everyone’s been playing by, which is, well, nothing like this happens, you know, ‘We don’t want to be partners with somebody who doesn’t want us.'”
Name the shirt and win a prize*
*There are no prizes.
Substitute Olympic viewers for Tory voters
From Utah to Gerrard’s Cross
Welcome to this week’s new podcast listeners.
Thanks for reading.
Share this newsletter with your friends and family.
And finally…
Now click the Fucking Like Button, I Mean How Fucking Hard Can It Fucking Be????
It’s the heart shaped thing below, you fucking bell end. It’s the lowest form of human-internet engagement and for reasons we don’t quite understand helps us appear more popular with people who don’t yet receive the newsletter, most of whom are of no value in and of themselves, but who collectively add to the story that this newsletter is popular among a group we’ve started to call industry insiders.
We’re grateful for your help in this matter.