WiseUP; Tiger v LIV, the return of PGL; The Graeme Souness Guide to Culture War; 15% off Leaders; UEFA's Relevent hopes for UCL tender; How to ambush the World Cup; Was MCO to blame for Barnsley HEX;
Overthinking the sports business, for money
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The Graeme Souness Guide to Culture War
That moment when: You know how the next 72 hours will play out.
So much of just existing in 2022 is about avoiding tiresome phoney wedge issues.
It’s perfectly possible to both enjoy and respect Graeme Souness as a football pundit AND think him saying 'It’s a man’s game again’ was clumsy and/or probably intentional in making a point about women’s football, while sitting next to one of England’s most capped women and a couple of weeks after the Euro final.
Blah blah blah, take your positions, Woke v Gammon, go at it.
Whatevs.
But…the bigger problem is when Twitter reaches the real world.
Because in case you hadn’t noticed, in a football stadium near you, anger is back in fashion.
Or to be more precise, the latent anger that’s always been there has been given license to show itself.
It’s been given a cause. Permission.
Hannah Kumari talked about this with me - UP263 Eng-ger-land: Football, race and identity politics.
Kumari has been touring a one woman show around football clubs in England.
It’s everything the bell ends hate: a mixed race woman talking about her love of football.
But there she is, in supposedly ‘enemy’ territory. Football clubs full of working class white men, watching and loving what she’s got to say.
I think that’s brave tbh.
See also: Bruce Daisley: “Twitter wasn’t set up to be about anger and rage”
The former Twitter executive reflects on the social network’s moderation problem.
The intriguing bit:
“If a complaint was made about an incident of sexist abuse, “I know that there was a small team in the Philippines or Budapest answering that. The incentive that they had to answer was, if you banned someone and on appeal, it was overturned, you would get a strike against your name… whereas if you allowed something to stand, no one was going to appeal it. As a consequence, these people had an incentive not to intervene.”
The partnership LIV fears most: Tiger Woods and Andy Gardiner
Ok, a catchy headline. But bear with me.
What happened?
The sports business clip of the week was Tiger Woods getting off a plane and limping to his car.
Give him a big hat and it’s basically High Noon.
Why do we care?
It’s about the second bounce of the LIV Golf saga: The Return of the Tour.
This has Tiger as ‘Shadow Commissioner’ (ht Alan Shipnuck, the best golf reporter out there currently, imho).
Woods has rounded up a posse and reviewed the ammo at his disposal..(like you I sense this cowboy analogy has served its purpose).
Suddenly, it’s LIV that looks weak - did Sean Bratches see this early? Is that why he jumped?
Something’s gone wrong between the idea and the execution.
By this I mean, LIV is a really, really disappointing product.
The golf is terrible, the staging is amateur hour and patronising, and the tone of voice smacks of fifty something men second guessing the emotional triggers of twenty year olds. Golf but louder. Ffs.
This could just be, ‘early days’.
But…as mentioned to Bratches on our UP243 podcast, this is not like the early days of ESPN, when they ran truck racing for five years before anyone noticed they existed.
You don’t get long to capture people’s attention in today’s TikTok news cycle. Despite the tech cliches, you can’t test and learn in public when it comes to launching the new new thing of a major global sport.
Come ready, or don’t come at all.
So, LIV as Stalking Horse for fundamental change in pro golf.
Supporting evidence?
Tiger remains ‘the alpha’ (Rory McIlroy’s phrase).
He’s adamantly anti-LIV and tellingly, none of Mark Steinberg’s clients have taken Greg Norman’s bait. (Steinberg has been Woods’ agent since they split from IMG in 2011). Nike’s position is one to watch also.
Tiger convened a meeting of the PGA TOUR Players Board, BUT tellingly, not all of them. Just the top ranked players. This gets to the unhappiness that LIV was supposed to exploit.
There’s a great snippet from Alan Shipnuck’s Phil Mickelson book, laying out the intellectual position of the top 20 tour golfers:
“The Tour likes to pretend it’s a democracy, but it’s really a dictatorship,” he told me. “They divide and conquer. The concerns of the top players are very different from the guys who are lower down on the money list, but there’s a lot more of them. They use the top guys to make their own situation better, but the top guys don’t have a say.” Players are a minority on the all-powerful PGA Tour Policy Board, holding only four of the nine seats, with the other five being filled by luminaries of the business world who, by age and experience, have more in common with the commissioner than the jocks. Mickelson’s idea for governance is, he says, based on the U.S. Congress: The Tour’s vast middle class would be like the House, voting on ideas that would then be rejected or tweaked and ultimately ratified by a much smaller Senate-like body composed of the game’s biggest stars. “That way nothing will get done without the approval of both sides,”
With that in mind, back to Tiger getting off that plane.
What’s the plan?
Without getting too Kodak, this feels like we’re in The Innovator’s Dilemma territory: A Tiger Woods-led official breakaway.
A LIV that exists within the PGA Tour, sort of.
This is where it gets technical and where - modestly - Unofficial Partner was ahead of the game.
Listen to Andy Gardiner, founder of the Premier Golf League, on UP248 in May.
Tell me that this, or a version of this, is not in Tiger’s strategy deck.
Andy Gardiner: The model that we're now proposing, which is to set up a JV that will be owned 60% by the voting members of PGA Tour, Korn Ferry Tour, and DP World Tour addresses that issue because everybody gets to benefit significantly from the value that's being created. In the past, when there was talk of a breakaway, players who are already very wealthy were getting nervous about how that would play out in terms of the PR. Completely understandable.
You asked me earlier, you know, the difference between the three models and the difference is actually quite simple. The PGA Tour model is understood by everybody. The LIV model is different from ours in the sense that there's an awful lot of money being put on the table upfront. And obviously to generate a return on that investment you've got to own it.
Yeah? The 300, 400 million whatever, whatever it takes, whatever they're prepared to spend: There's very few people in the world, very few institutions in the world who would put up that sort of cash without having a reasonable idea of the nature of the return they're going to get on their investment.
And the difference is that if you go down that route and you're putting a lot of money on the table, then you've got to own 90 or 100 percent of the business to get your return on your investment. Whereas if you go the route that we're proposing, you're still creating exactly the same amounts of value, which we're we're saying is 10 billion and is probably a lot more, but you do it on the basis that everybody who has a stake in the sport at this level, which are the voting members of those tours get a choice.
Some might think it's going to happen anyway. Now the idea of a split occurring is I think a genuinely realistic prospect. We're just saying, well, there isn't a need for split because what you have within the PGA Tour is an overarching umbrella structure, which is called PGA Tour Inc.
It operates six tours. If you include China, which is some would say is irrelevant for the time being. That's what it does. And if you've read its mission and you understand the principles of being a 5 0 1 C6, you see it as an umbrella that sanctions and administers. But nobody owns it. And what we've seen in terms of a reaction to us and probably LIV is the creation of probably a three tier economic structure within the existing membership of the PGA Tour.
A perfectly natural response is to say, okay, if we want to keep the top players here, we've got to make sure they are getting more of the purse allocation is. So what you've had over the last couple of years is probably an extra $150 million allocated towards the top 10. And to a degree, the top 50.
Now that makes an awful lot of sense. Because you know, when we started out, there was a genuine feeling amongst the best players in the world that they were probably over subsidizing the rest of the membership. And we heard that from sponsors and we heard it from broadcasters because they said, yes, we really only care about 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 guys.
Those are the ones who move the needle. That's why we're paying the money we're paying. So if you're going to if you're going to make that allocation, then you're going to push more money towards those top players, nothing wrong with that, because that is the principle of what Premier Golf League will do, of course, but why create that three tier structure and yet not create the corporate structure, the corporation that would enable all of those voting members to benefit in what is being created.
And that's the key message: The top players can have their cake. They can turn up 18 times a season and play 18 times a season for 20 million bucks, which is what they should be doing quite frankly, because it's what they're worth. But if you do that within a corporation and you're listed, then you're talking about the creation of value that is currently untapped by golf.
I was looking again at the most recent Formula One Group numbers, and a lot of the conversations we've had of late is all around the $10 billion valuation. And that's because to an awful lot of people, that sounds like an awful lot of money. And of course it is, it's $10 billion, but in the commercial world of sport is actually a relatively modest sum.
It's not a lot of money.
So, a ready made alternative to LIV.
DJ, Brooks et al get a route back in to the official game, tails between legs.
They keep their OGWR place and so play in the Majors next year.
Team Tiger v Team TaylorMade v Team JP McManus whatever.
Woods as captain-owner for the next twenty years, every TV appearance builds his franchise value, giving his post-career era a centre point.
Or, we can stick with Pat Perez’s dollar bill shirt and some Majesticks merch.
Game on.
15% off Leaders tickets
Leaders Week London returns this September - mark your diaries.
A slightly earlier date than you may be used to, this year it will be from 26 to 29 September 2022, so just 6 weeks away.
For those who don't know, Leaders Week London is so much more than just your average conference - it's a 4-day festival of industry insight, connection building and relationship nurturing.
The Summit, part of Leaders Week, will be held at Twickenham Stadium on 28th and 29th September.
Use UP15 for a 15% discount on your Summit passes.
Visit leadersinsport.com/UP for more information.
Bundle Unbundle
Coming tomorrow: The Bundle on Relevent Sport and the post-TEAM Champions League tender in North America.
There’s nothing better than stumbling on a key deadline just as we record, thus rendering the conversation newsworthy.
Monday 15th August was the deadline for bids for UEFA Champions League rights in the US market.
The current situation has CBS/Univision paying $150m a year until the 23/24 season.
It’s thought (aka, Murray Barnett thinks) 9 bidders have expressed interest.
We talk about whether the timing of the tender is either good or terrible; the UCL as a TV asset in the US - midweek lunchtimes are not a magnet for ad sales - and the viewer irritation factor of Amazon’s pick and choose strategy.
Then there’s Relevent, who nicked the work off TEAM by putting down a $250m/season guarantee. Does the current market support that?
There’s also a bit dissecting ESPN’s recent price rise.
Nugget: For the first time ever, ESPN+ ($9.99/month) is now more expensive than ESPN cable subscription ($8.15/month) — ESPN+ has 22.3M subs, and ESPN has 75.7M subs.
The episode features regulars Yannick Ramcke and Murray Barnett, with Charlie Boss given time off for his new baby’s good behaviour.
But he’s on Twitter talking alternative bundles, so he’s with us in spirit.
In other Walmart news, the heir to its fortune just paid four and a half billion for the Denver Broncos.
And this.
6 Randoms
Lessons from the music biz: How Old crowds out New
Steph Curry & Snoop Dogg: Rebuilding Youth Basketball in Long Beach
The aging of Roblox. No sooner do you start using a platform as a clumsy catchall proxy for Gen Z media behaviour, then you find out it’s more nuanced than that. Nuance can do one as far as I’m concerned.
Stop what you’re doing, you’re almost certainly doing it wrong.
90% of people who exercise are doing it wrong. It could be incorrect movement, speed, range of motion, heart rate, rest time, or the type of exercise for their physiology. Since Covid-19 emerged, “there have been more sports injuries than ever before,” he says, “because people are trying things on their own without guidance.”
Big Gaming as harbingers of doom.
Last month, Sony reported a 15 per cent drop in PlayStation engagement year-on-year. On Monday Nvidia, which is a heavyweight in gaming chip production, reported lower second-quarter revenue because of weakness in its gaming business. Gaming revenue in the second quarter fell 44 per cent from the previous quarter and 33 per cent from a year earlier to $2.04bn.
Barnsley’s Hex
A great dissection of football’s crypto delusions and obvious red flags, by Pet Betrisha.
Who made the decision? Was it local or central? The question is relevant because Barnsley is owned by Pacific Media Group, one of the leaders in the field of multi club ownership in European football. One selling point of MCO is that commercial decisions can be centralised across several teams, cutting back office costs. Was that the problem here?
Hear our podcast with Paul Conway, founder of Pacific Media Group, part of Re:Thinking Sport, our Portas Consulting collaboration. It’s one of our all time best performing pods.
Till next time.
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Lots to digest this week, but Tiger/LIV and golf's scenario, plus the Google guide to ambush marketing the upcoming FIFA WC piqued my interst!