DAZN conspiracy theories; The FIFA Question Marks; The A to Z of David Cushnan; LTA responds to Pickle pod; The funnel as cockroach; Crypto money's second coming; Aging up v Aging out; Chair shaking
Overthinking the sports business, for money
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The question marks that lie just beyond the Saudi-DAZN-FIFA Club World Cup conspiracy theories
I’m here for the Saudi-DAZN kite.
TL;DR Version:
See Martyn Ziegler’s final para on Wednesday:
Meanwhile, in Jamaica, the furniture came under pressure.
Tariq Panja had a nice bit of backstory in the NYT. Note that Fox number.
The bit where we start a list
I once irritated Giles Clarke, former chair of the ECB, by writing in Wisden that he had mucked up the Twenty20 opportunity. England’s cricket authorities had it and let it go, losing out to the entrepreneurial flair of Lalit Modi, who took the new format and created the IPL, the single most important sports property of the last twenty years. (Fwiw, my working theory is that the organisational memory of this mistake led directly to the ECB creating The Hundred, via the Allen Stanford disaster).
But, we digress.
The question we get to is this: how are we to judge the success or failure of the Gianni Infantino era as head of FIFA?
It will be very difficult to prove either way. Because money. The money covers the tracks.
And the money comes from the FIFA World Cup. It always has, always will; from Dassler and Coke to Putin, Qatar and Saudi.
This wall of money throws a protective cloak over every decision, making the job attributing credit and blame all but impossible.
All we can do is ask, what are the big decisions that have been inarguably successful?
Which new FIFA projects can we list without attaching a question mark, or an asterisk, a footnote reminder that we’ll need to revisit at some stage.
The FIFA Club World Cup is the latest addition to the scorecard.
Whatever happens next year in the US, the event is certainly not beyond the question mark stage.
Others on the list might include:
FIFA+ the governing body’s d2c play remains an enigma trapped in a riddle.
FIFA esports - the break with EA Sports - the sports arm of global video game giant Electronic Arts (EA) - unexpectedly ended its 30-year relationship last year, a licensing deal that began in 1993. The move was unexpected largely due to the game having generated a reported $20 billion, making it one of the most profitable franchises in video game history. and the cutting of the EA Sports contract for the FIFA game franchise. We used to say that Gen Z ‘know FIFA as a game not a governing body’. We don’t say that anymore.
FIFA 1904 - Next year sees the debut of a ready-to-wear collection under a licensing agreement with New York-based fashion platform VFiles. The apparel line, which comprises both men’s and womenswear, will be released under the brand FIFA 1904 — named after the year the organisation was founded — and is set to launch in spring 2025..
FIFA Sound - a strategy ‘to connect with audiences worldwide through shared passions of football and music’.
Each of these projects could be a strategic masterstroke or an expensive white elephant. It’s hard to tell, because the wall of money makes attribution all but impossible.
As mentioned previously, the sports rights market is laggy, so not a good arbiter of CEO decision making prowess.
Help! I’m going the wrong way up the funnel
I promise you I’m not trying to be contrarian just for the sake of it. But my lived experience (ahem) of sport’s scrolling era is almost the exact opposite of the intended customer journey being advocated by every digital strategist working today.
As discussed on this week’s podcast, with Finn Bradshaw and Siddharth Raman, click the link to listen to the whole thing.
The funnel is the default metaphor, the cockroach of marketing strategy since David Ogilvy was running the show.
You get them in at the top and they work their way down.
Siddharth Raman coins it brilliantly on this week’s podcast - Flirts, Fans, Fanatics. Each stage has its own set of needs to be met by agile marketers. On the podcast we talked about the relative roles of games, gamification and fantasy products at each stage.
There’s a drop-off priced in, but ultimately the more noise you make at the top of the funnel, the more zealots you get at the bottom, some of whom might even pay you for something.
But.
I’ve gone the other way.
Sports I was crazy about are now just scroll fodder, a reduction of the game I grew up devoted to, stripped of all the complicated bits, that counterintuitively were the parts of the game I treasured above all, because this hard-earned knowledge and understanding marked me out as a wizard in a world of muggles.
What I don’t know is whether I’m confusing media behaviour - from TV to the scroll - with getting older.
Maybe I’d be less interested anyway, putting away childish things and all that, cause v correlation.
On our recent podcast with Two Circlers Christian Harrall-Baker and Laura Andriani (below), we talked about the idea of Aging Up, that those pesky Gen Zers are starting to behave a bit less like alien species and more like their parents, craving Boomer-ish affectations like big screen TVs and sports bundle subscriptions - it was always about money rather than fundamental generational differences (there’s a PhD there for someone).
We’ll see, but what about Aging Out? Could that be a thing? The advertising industry wet dream of a Gen Z/Alpha getting on the sport consumption escalator, just as someone with their own house and a track record of paying through the nose for stuff is leaving.
That pod is here, good it is too.
The LTA responds our padel and pickleball podcast
You’ll recall our recent podcast on the future of pickleball in the UK, and the ongoing question of whether the LTA is the right home for the sport - a question that is currently going through the various sports councils of the UK.
Our guests were Karen Mitchell, CEO of Pickleball England and Alex Inglot, a former Board member of the ATP Tennis Tour, and a padel investor.
We were really keen to get the LTA on to the podcast, but they declined. So we offered them a right of reply, which we happily publish here.
The LTA Response: ‘There were a number of specific allegations and assertions made in the podcast which we would also like to correct.’
The podcast is here:
See previous UP Newsletter note: The Tennis Funnel
First they came for David Cushnan, and you said nothing
There’s a difficult ethical issue to be tackled in relation to the liberal elite’s anti-Muskian Twitter exodus.
What happens to the David Cushnan’s Christmas A-to-Z Review of the Sports Business?
Cushnan - the breakout star of The 3, the recent UP box set hit podcast series - has created a seasonal niche for himself on Twitter by listing the year’s key moments, movers ‘n shakers in alphabetical order.
Starting with A, Cushnan moves through the potentially treacherous territory of Q (part of the jeopardy of this year’s list will be how the great man deals with the passing of the Qatar-based FIFA World Cup, which for many years has solved this problem).
On and on he goes, until he reaches the ejaculative denouement of X, Y and Z.
It remains single greatest piece of seasonal sports industry vertical socially shareable IP thus created.
And it must be allowed to continue. We can’t let Musk and his band of bots and nutjobs fill the space, where once Cushnan reigned supreme. It is the hill I die on.
See also: the Bluesky echo chamber:
There’s a big issue lurking for sports sponsors, and it relates to brand purpose activation campaigns.
There’s the what and the why, which is going to be tested by the free-speech-but-only-about-things-I-agree-with lobby, emboldened by Trump’s two and a bit percent electoral victory, who will take their pitchforks to any sign of woke marketing.
But there’s also the where.
This from the FT is excellent on the bifurcation of social channels along political lines.
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My favourite substack…
In which a graph is worth a thousand words, at least.
Trump 2.0 = Crypto 2.0 = Sponsor Gold Rush 2.0
Pet Berisha has written a really good piece on the recent Crypto.com golf deal, which sees the shitcoin exchange backing the PGA TOUR v LIV not quite Ryder Cup event, coming soon.
He raises a good question, about the impact of Trump on the crypto market, and by extension, the second coming of crypto marketing budgets in to sport.
The timing could make a lot of sense, as many consider the U.S to become a crypto haven in the coming years under the new administration. Interestingly, the press release emphasizes Crypto. com’s intent to strengthen its presence in the U.S:
And this bit, toward the end:
Over the past three years, crypto sports sponsorships have matured and become integral to many rights holders' commercial strategies. Crypto sponsorships in 2024 appear to be making a comeback, though they haven’t reached the highs from a volume perspective that they hit in 2021. However, the size and headline-grabbing nature of recent deals suggest we’re approaching similar territory. The key question remains whether these deals will differ from their 2021 predecessors, which largely involved logo placements on jerseys and simple Return On Investment (ROI) metrics like user acquisition and funded accounts.
Their aim seems to be building unmatched brand recognition, akin to the “mindshare” strategy of companies like Manscaped. By hammering the market with their branding, they aim to become the default choice for potential crypto consumers when they consider entering the space. I don’t think they care about the direct ROI or fan engagement as much, and are positioning to create headlines, brand awareness and amplifying their name after hitting critical mass. And this isn’t a bad strategy, it’s just not one that many others apart from Coinbase, Binance and Kraken can follow or compete with. There is nuance to this, rather than just saying they are wasting money on more brand marketing.
BAFTA was great, thanks for asking…
Very high end. Thanks to our friends at HBS and all who came along to take part.
Till next time.