Billion Dollar Women's Football Brainstorm; The Difficult Problems; London playbook; The cult of Finlay Andrews; Web3 WTF pt2; That 777 piece; Super League as Brexit
Overthinking the sports business, for money
Anatomy of a Brainstorm
100 invited guests, each with varying degrees of skin in the game when it comes to women’s football.
So, a smart crowd.
No need to rehearse the usual arguments.
The spirit of the thing was, what if?
And running in parallel: if disruption is coming, what are its implications, how can it be shaped to the benefit of a broader constituency of people across the game?
Not easy.
The Premise: A Disruptor League for Women’s Club Football - The UPL
The Rationale: It solves The Difficult Problems
The Timeline
2:10 Welcome to DAZN HQ from Marc Watson
3:26 The Set Up: A Disruptor League for Women's Football
6:00 The Initial Audience Vote: Are you in or out?
6:39 Group 1 - The Investors and the Players
18:45 The Status Quo is failing: 'Women's football will be men's club rugby in ten year's time'
22:10 Group 2 - The Media
23:34 Will a broadcaster get their money back?
26:03 Renting rights v Co-ownership?
26:14 What is YouTube now?
29:03 Will YouTube pay for media rights?
30:09 Was Infantino right?
38:52 Group 3 - The Sponsors
41:42 Do we know who watches women's club football?
45:24 'I'd bite your hand off for a billion quid'
50:03 Do closed leagues have to be boring?
52:22 What did TeamViewer buy when they bought the Man Utd shirt?
58:45 Group 4 - The Clubs
58:54 'It's a really, really boring idea'
1:06:52 '70% of Saints Women's fans had never been to a men's game'
1:08:33 Liberated from the men’s game, free to experiment
1:12:04 Audience questions got weirdly detailed
1:20:43 Alice nails the final question
Takeouts
Super League as Brexit
Faced with several really hard, intractable problems to solve, a closed best v best Super League can start to look like a beguilingly simple solution.
Sound familiar?
By contrast, the reality is messy and nuanced, and requires leaders to come to the challenge with an open mind and a spirit of compromise.
See previous: The Statesmanship Deficit
The shadow of rugby
The careers of a generation of footballers rely on good decisions being made today by people in positions of authority.
Men’s club rugby is our best comparable.
Here’s where that is:
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Women’s football is a microcosm of the broader sports business question
Jeopardy differs depending on who you are, which role you’re playing: fan, parent, governing body, investor, marketer, club owner, media owner…each has their own wish list of what they want from sport.
‘Sport’ gets freighted with many jobs.
Sport as Entertainment; Sport as Investment Asset; Sport as Public Good.
Can each vision co-exist?
We know that perfection is a mirage.
So what does an imperfect future look like?
Hear the full brainstorm here:
A huge thank you to Marc Watson, Daisy Wells, Dan Johnson and the team at DAZN.
And to Alex Cowell and his team at Sponsorworks, our ticketing and event management partner. They’re really good.
‘These men are pigs’
Extraordinarily powerful deep dive in to sports investment firm 777 Partners by Paul Brown and Philippe Auclair at Josimar.
The Big Idea: When in doubt, go to Tower Bridge
Red buses, black taxis, Dick Van Dyke accents…there comes a time in every sports marketing brainstorm when someone mentions Tower Bridge.
Exhibit A: It’s Wimbledon week, so Fila reached for the ‘London Playbook’.
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A worthy entry in to the UP Tower Bridge Big Idea Hall of Fame #UPTBBIHOF
See also: When LIV comes to London
Future MBA students will study the brand building era of the LIV teams.
And they will say, WTAF were they thinking?
Finlay Andrews is your next hire
Finlay is the bloke rugby tackling the Just Stop Oil campaigner at Lord’s.
He won’t be free for long.
Finlay Andrews: I’m pretty sure this 👇🏼 wasn’t on the job description when I signed up for a couple of hospitality shifts at The Ashes this summer whilst on the hunt for a different kind of ‘runner’ role.
