A user's guide to the prediction genre; The why of football; Fuse, Pepsi and Barclays; Crouchian culture wars; Pound predicts parasites; 2021's 10 best deals; Sports tech market irrationality
The newsletter of the podcast
The why of football sponsorship
For UP215, Fuse helped us get Adam Warner of Pepsi and Tom Corbett of Barclays around a table at Omnicom Media Group’s Southbank HQ, our first face to face pod recording since the pandemic, if you don’t count the Leaders live session.
The conversation could be loosely entitled: Football sponsorship, wtf?
Some of the themes covered:
Marketing a bank in the decade since the financial crisis, and how this plays out in a sports sponsorship context; The balance between strategic utopia and the sausage machine of the rights market; How many global sports properties are a genuinely always on marketing platform for an FMCG super brand; The experiment of decoupling women’s partnership rights; What happens when you come off the title of the Premier League; What’s the difference between having presenting sponsors and the UEFA Champions League model; The first party data opportunity of ticketless stadia and who’ll benefit; What role do the big banks play in the age of crypto currency; Can you do purpose and be entertaining; Has Pepsi given up on galacticos football ads?
PS. There’s an extended bit about WSL and UEFA women’s properties that has been given greater news relevance by this week’s announcement of Barclays 30 million quid WSL extension.
PPS. Another inadvertent news hook: The bit on decoupling women’s rights coincides with FIFA’s new sponsor plan, again released this week.
Predictions Schpredictions
It’s that time again. That hardy perennial, the trends piece, is back among us.
From Philip Tetlock-esque Superforecasters to sports biz Mystic Meg knock offs, there’s room for everyone.
Here are the 11 rules of the genre:
If you don’t have any of your own, borrow gravitas from other people via the medium of famous quotes.
‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future’
This is often attributed to Yogi Berra or Samuel Goldwyn. The source is probably Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist. Merely pointing this out makes me feel clever.
‘The market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent’
I think of this a lot when I listen to sports tech and web3 evangelists.
Again, attribution is murky. Usually credited to John Maynard Keynes, but might be one of two less well known economists).
It’s a useful quote, lending the wannabe soothsayer an air of Wall Street worldliness that is only sometimes merited.
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
If we’re playing futurism quote top trumps, this would be the Ferrari-Testarossa-highest-speed-category of the whole thing.
From Farnam Street: The most probable source is Roy Amara, a Stanford computer scientist. In the 1960s, Amara told colleagues that he believed that “we overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run.” For this reason, variations on that phrase are often known as Amara’s Law. However, Bill Gates made a similar statement (possibly paraphrasing Amara), so it’s also known as Gates’s Law.
Amara/Gates Law suggests old prediction are more useful than this year’s batch. So here are some old ones…
In 2000, Vernon Pugh, then head of IRB (now World Rugby), predicted rugby league would disappear by the end of the decade, which will come as a bit of bummer for the organisers of next years’ Rugby League World Cup.
In 2010 Darren Rovell called 3D as the shoe-in new sports tech innovation.
Also in 2010, Jason Peck put together a host of American sports business types to ponder the following decade. Some winners among them.
For Forbes, 2015 was going to be about milliennial cliches and semi-automatic weaponry:
Big 4 consultant’s tip: Embrace vagueness
I invite you to guess to which year this trends doc from PwC applies. It’s essential genius is that it could’ve been written in any year over the last two decades, sitting at the nexus between the general and the specific, making it both vaguely interesting and useless, all at the same time.
That my friends, is where the money is.
Hail Dick Pound, predictor of private parasites
IOC VP Dick Pound has always one of the most interesting people in Olympicworld.
In the run up to the Sydney Games in 2000, he called this:
Pound believes the prospect of 'parasitical commercial organisations' especially broadcasters, bidding to set up money-making unofficial super leagues will be one of the biggest threats to sport in this decade.
'The breakaway European football super league that was projected last year is a harbinger of things to come,' Pound says. 'Big organisations want to go around cherry-picking sport. They see an opportunity to profit from sport without having to invest in its infrastructure. There's certainly a danger in them luring players and teams away with big pay cheques.' He cites basketball, ice hockey, volleyball and even individual sports such as athletics and boxing as the most likely targets.
Pound predicts disaster if any world leagues are established. 'They would end up being no different from certain leagues which exist already, such as the NFL, NBA and NHL, which are more entertainment than sport these days, are run totally for profit and in which doping controls are lax and violence is encouraged to help them compete with WWF wrestling and extreme sports.'
Not bad Dick, not bad at all.
Every 2021 sports biz trends list, condensed
Web3 adaptations will simultaneously excite and infuriate; teams and governing bodies won’t care and will take the money under the guise of fan engagement; the limits of the athlete-as-activist trend will be discussed more rationally; Financially incentivised CEOs of major event bodies will sell events to dictators and seek to pass off human rights abuses as a comms issue.
Crouchian culture war update
It’s not enough to have read Tracey Crouch’s review in to English football, you must pick a side.
Them v Us; Yes v no; Mao v Thatcher; open v closed; private v public; excellence v mediocrity; big six v the pyramid; the bastards v the people; Tesco v the corner shop; left v right; Keynes v Rand; competing in the global market for Paul Pogba’s wages v won’t anyone think of the children; NFL type ocean front property for the billionaire boys club v perverse incentives in the EFL and the most expensive lottery ticket in sport.
Into this maelstrom, steps Unofficial Partner wielding the faux-rationality of SMALL DATA, in the form of a low rent poll posed to the WhatsUP Group aka The Top Table of Decision Makers (it’s open to all now, click the image to vote).
With just over a hundred votes in, the results have horribly familiar feel.
Polling still open. Click the image to register your vote.
See also: some facts, courtesy of Swiss Ramble.
WhatsUP member and Octagon’s football know-it-all Phil Carling (UP118) wrote a really good piece arguing against regulation. Read it here.
More from the WhatsUP Group:
Sanjay Bhandari, chair of Kick It Out:
Does anyone seriously think that (for example) the Board of the Financial Conduct Authority is a bare proxy for government or not independent simply because the FCa is subject to parliamentary oversight to ensure that it operates its delegated powers within the limits of its legislative authority? Is the assumption in the article of undue government interference in any regulator a fair one? It would be unfair based on my experience (I spent most of the last 30 years in the most heavily regulated sectors doing a lot of regulatory compliance work). That said, not all regulators are the same and we have about 90 of them just in the Uk. And any regulator would automatically become subject to judicial review which is also an effective check on governmental interference. Just saying.
Alex Horne, former FA CEO:
I’d love thoughts on what we think this “regulator’s” main role is - and any parallel industry bodies.
I see 2 areas that are at risk of being conflated.
Who WRITES the rules - and ensures they stay upto date with new developments.
This is the bit the FA, PL and EFL struggle with cos of vested interests. But also is it not madness to let a completely independent body do it? Who are they accountable too? This is more nuanced than, say, consumer rights (as rehearsed a lot above).
Who ENFORCES the rules is actually quite straightforward and pretty clear within football. Badly communicated often (in the case of FL points deductions / News takeover etc). But the rules are there and there are (I guess/hope/assume!) people making these decisions in accordance with the rules ….
The other question is whether you can truly disentangle financial regulation from other aspects of regulation
The 10 best sponsorship deals of 2021
Gary Linke’s choices, only one of which is one of his. Gaz is very good on the reality behind the PR spiel.
Themes: Growth categories; crypto buying trust; differentiation in fast home delivery; Covid related category exploitation; Vegans on the march; Rashford inspired community causes.
Sport as entertainment goes mainstream
As (I think) Zadie Smith once said, life isn’t narrative shaped. The bits that aren’t interesting are left out.
How that applies to the final lap of a grand prix is less than clear.
Martin Samuel on the questions overhanging the great F1 finale.
And that's why F1 is at a crossroads. Is it sport, which won't always conform to the desires of the box office, or is it a content provider for a streaming service that will bend accordingly to the whims of producers?
And if it chooses to be the latter, why would anyone come screaming around a track in a rocket on wheels when much of the sacrifice, the risk, the danger could be disregarded if inconvenient to the script?
UPcoming
Tomorrow’s podcast is with Baroness Tanni Grey Thompson and Ben Rogers, founder of Hong Kong Watch, the lobbying group.
The topic is China, and sport’s relationship to it.
It’s good. Have a listen, usual places.
This is (probably) the last newsletter before the Christmas and New Year break kicks in.
Have as good a one as you can manage.
See you in 2022.