Beyond the sports biz bubble; The World Cup on AI; The Premier League is underrated; Things we’ll miss when they’re gone; Trends are rarely hot, they’re slow, big and obvious
Overthinking the sports business, for money
I’ve spent the week outside the sports biz bubble, talking to muggles.
Two conferences - one tech, one marketing - with me sitting on panels seeking authentic segues in to conversations about smart fridges and adtech bollocks.
Some things you notice:
1. Sport is popular.
People not in sport think sport is a thriving and dynamic industry. Worth remembering among the five minutes to midnight catastrophising and existential doubt about Gen Z attention spans.
2. Our bubble is more fun than other bubbles
They’re bigger and noticeably more diverse, but the tech and generalist marketing industries are plagued by the same characteristics as any other: a small room of received wisdoms and circular, self-serving debates.
In any given sector, everyone affects an air of bored irritation staring at panels of all the same people stealing the same tropes and passing them off as hard won wisdom.
This has an upside for the ill-cast sports biz gatecrasher; if you haven’t heard it before, any old run-of-the-mill opinion sounds like Gladwellian insight.
I mentioned ‘Sport’s Napster moment’ and was chaired around the room like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.
3. The Premier League is underrated
Mention the Premier League and the audience looks up from Pornhub to make eye contact.
(The following gif of the British character actor James Mason comes up in Giphy when you type in ‘underrated’, and I like that.)
It is culturally central to the lives of millions of people of all ages and groups (the Premier League, not James Mason).
It feels like an obvious point. But worth noting anyway.
Something Will Page mentioned in last week’s (very popular) podcast: people underestimate the value of the Premier League. It’s a brilliant bundle; more than the sum of its parts.
And yet, for something so popular, so glossy and powerful looking, I suspect it’s more fragile than we think.
It would be the work of an afternoon to fuck it all up, by giving in to the conflicting objectives of its constituent parts and the noises off from cynical politicians and owners of badly run clubs further down the pyramid.
It’s not perfect. But life isn’t. (Spoiler).
4. Things are more fragile than they look
A build:
The Ryder Cup is high on my list of Things We’ll Miss When They’re Gone.
The event is one of my personal favourites (I wrote a book about it ffs).
But it feels like it’s being picked apart and could become a paler, less interesting version of itself, collateral damage in the Tours v LIV snafu.
Until one day, like the NHS, you turn around and it doesn’t work anymore.
(That analogy may or may not make it in to the final edit. We’ll see).
The upside is that this theory has echoes of a previous UP opinion: That the professional rugby era would kill off the British and Irish Lions tours. This has turned out to be completely wrong. So far, at least.
5. Things we’ll miss when they’re gone, pt 2 - Football agents
We’ve got a couple of podcasts on football agents coming up, so front of mind.
FIFA is seeking to ‘cleanse’ the sector: FIFA as moral arbiter…discuss, and share your workings.
Obviously, some agents are terrible.
But I’m not a big fan of what comes next either, a sort of death by McKinsey.
Agents add to the idiotic transfer gossip soap opera that keeps the game in the news beyond Saturday afternoon.
Other sports crave that sort of ‘fan engagement’.
Some even try to measure it.
6. The important trends are slow and obvious
Everyone’s worried about the same stuff.
Personalisation.
Discoverability.
Cultural relevance.
Sustainability.
Diversity.
AI.
The sports biz bubble conversation is just an adaptation.
A build on this last one:
ChatGPT has pushed AI in to headlines.
What this really means, is that middle class people in white collar jobs like journalism and consulting have noted their potential obsolescence and are dressing this fear up as economically damaging in a way I don’t recall them doing when it was miners and shipbuilders losing their jobs to tech (Freedom for Tooting, a Gen Z reference).
Put another way, AI isn’t new.
For confirmation of how central it is to our sports viewing experience, listen to the conversation in this week’s podcast.
It’s a view of the other World Cup, the one consumed across social and digital channels, serviced entirely by real time AI generated highlights clips.
Through this lens Qatar 2022 is made up of 30,000 clips.
But which ones really took off?
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