What Man Utd's sale price says about us; Rorschach Tests; Will TMWR ever come; Being Martin O'Neill; Rugby's alt-history; Bridgepoint, The Hundred and Damascene conversions; Reaching for Nietzsche
They were wrong after all. You should meet your heroes.
Hear this week’s podcast with the legendary Martin O’Neill.
Having won two European Cups with Nottingham Forest under the legendary Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, it’s fair to say the Super League didn’t fit well with him.
O’Neill: The idea that a provincial side can beat a superpower. Well, sure, isn't that what football's supposed to be about?
Featuring:
Brian Clough IRL v Brian Clough in The Damned United.
What Peter Taylor was really good at.
The end of the guvnor.
Dermot Desmond’s Celtic siren call.
The importance of story in the success and failure of football managers.
John Delaney’s face when O’Neill said he was bringing in Roy Keane as his Ireland assistant.
What the Super League told us about money, power and control.
Then read his book, it’s really good: Days Like These by Martin O’Neill.
The Man Utd Rorschach Test
Where you sit on the spread of valuations reveals your hopes, fears and assumptions of sport’s near future.
Here’s a handy cut out and keep guide.
See also: No Context Graph
What if, TMRW never comes?
Two thoughts on TGL, the ‘innovative golf league in partnership with the PGA TOUR fusing advanced tech and live action in primetime’.
It’s the Anti-LIV: a Tiger-led, PGA Tour sanctioned tech infused team tournament for these Gen Z obsessed times.
It’s a PowerPoint slide that’s been elevated to strategy (see above) by circumstance, creating the illusion of competitive tension in the market for ‘THE FUTURE OF GOLF’ with a start date far enough in the distance to allow the Tour to be seen to be doing something while working out a more considered LIV response.
We’ll see I guess.
What if…Rugby’s alternative history
It’s easy to blame today’s leadership for rugby’s current crisis. So that’s what the politicians did. This goat won’t scape itself etc.
But the demise of Worcester and Wasps (and more to come?) is a thirty year story.
What if…
It’s 1995 and rugby goes professional.
A closed league of the best club sides in the world is created.
The club season runs in the Sept-Jan NFL slot every year, leaving space elsewhere for the international game, putting player welfare at the centre of the calendar, growing genuine global week-in week-out tribal interest and offering a viable runway for investors to build sustainable value in team brands and associated infrastructure.
Build: Women’s professional football in 2022 feels A LOT like men’s rugby 1995. Governing bodies with their own commercial incentives seeking to create more events which carry the dangers of uneven rollout of professionalism, inbuilt competitive imbalance, greater club v country tensions and excessive demand on a nascent but limited talent pool.
Many of the component parts that led to last week’s Select Committee are in place.
Hope I’m wrong.
The Hundred, Damascene conversions and institutional memory
Bridgepoint put down a $484.2 million bid for a 75% stake in The Hundred.
This supports Mo Bobat’s intriguing point in last week’s podcast, that the ECB’s tournament may come to offer a point of difference in a blizzard of T20 leagues.
The money has certainly focused ECB Chair Richard Thompson’s mind. He voted against The Hundred in his previous job as Surrey chair.
Now he’s talking longer term ownership:
“In two-or-three years' time, or whenever, I think the game might be surprised what The Hundred is worth. Four years ago, when I was against it, that was not an argument I necessarily saw. Rights holders have never seen a rise like the one they have [recently], and the Hundred will undoubtedly get more and more interest. The worst thing would be to do something too early, then see the value go through the roof, and you’ve lost out and someone else benefits. It’s just two years old, we can’t get greedy, we have to see it play out.”
Interesting quote that one, and talks to the institutional memory of the ECB.
When I spoke to Tom Harrison, when he was ECB CEO, I wondered if The Hundred was in part, a response to the failure of earlier regimes to capitalise fully on T20, which started in England but was transformed in to a mega hit by the IPL, via BCCI.
The ECB’s current deal with Sky Sports ends in 2024 and is worth $260 million annually. The Hundred is locked in for at least four more years after Sky Sports extended its rights deal in July with the ECB until 2028.
Build: Bridgepoint is often quoted as being ‘in sport’ already via it’s ownership of Dorna, the MotoGP rights holder.
The tenure of that ownership is exceptionally long in private equity terms. Bridgepoint bought Dorna in 2006 in a deal that valued the company at about €500m.
So 16 years and counting.
This is due to some financial chicanery that sees the company selling Dorna back to itself every few years.
Nietzsche Schmeitzsche
Which leads to two quotes from this week:
Agnelli’s letter to Juventus employees before resigning: ‘I will continue to imagine and work for a better football club, comforted by a phrase by Friedrich Nietzsche: "And those who saw themselves dancing were considered crazy by those who did not hear the music".
Reminded me of this comment on the cynical investment strategy of banks in the run up to the financial crisis: ‘Keep dancing but stay near the door’.
Links
Who are we? A build on a previous thread on DNA and national team identity. This time it’s Germany’s football self image.
The Mexican Wave: Where football fans meet Big Eventers
Would Adidas have fronted this release if it was Messi being denied the goal?
Needed: Different voices
To Lord’s last night, for the launch of Two Circles Diversity in Sport internship programme.
Well done to all involved.
Watch the vid and apply below.
Who can apply?
The programme is open to anyone who has faced barriers preventing them from fulfilling their potential in the sport industry. This includes, but is not limited to – your beliefs, sexuality, race, disability or gender, to individual challenges such as socio-economic, geographical, health, or family situation.
How to apply
Applications for 2023 will open in January.
If you have any questions, contact the team at mentoring@twocircles.com
See also: A word of praise for Pranav Soneji, one of the driving forces behind the Diversity in Digital scheme, which started life under Livewire Sport, before the agency was acquired by Two Circles.
We spoke to Pranav on an early podcast about that scheme. Then we found out we grew up a hundred yards from each other in deepest west London….funny old world sometimes.
We did a to and fro on the idea of diversity with reference to Brexit here.
