Do quotas work; Top 10 football club TikTok accounts; Vote for Laura McAllister; Sport-as-platform follow ups; The difference between revenue and profit; The Euros on social, Ineffective PR genres
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UP Coming - What the Euros will look like on social
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Do quotas work?
This week’s UP pod guest is Ebru Koksal, CEO of Galatasaray, the leading Turkish club. The former investment banker was appointed head of the Turkish FA and was the first woman to be elected to the board of the European Club Association (ECA) without a gender quota as part of the process.
So, does she think quotas work?
Her answer couldn’t be more relevant to what’s happening in FIFA-world next week.
Quotas work. Why? If you can avoid the whole tokenism part, it helps jumpstart the change process.
Just to give you an example, in 2010, I dared to nominate myself for the European Club Association board elections, which was very surprising for people. Nobody thought that a woman could run, they thought it was very “courageous”. And they said, ‘well, you know, good try, but you'll never win’.
I said, ‘Fine. I will never know if I don't try. So therefore I am going to try. I campaigned for the next two months, explained to people why I was the best choice and what I could do for European football, with my background in finance and my tenure experience at the top level European club.
In the end, I received the highest vote, highest votes in our division.
For the next two years, I was well-respected and was really included on the board and showed my performance. And when I was leaving, it was because I became the General Secretary of the Turkish FA and federations and clubs are seen as, you know, not rivals, but on different sides of the spectrum.
So I had to step down from the board.
But as Galatasaray, we actually wrote to the ECA saying, there's upcoming statute changes, why don't you consider changing the statutes like UEFA and FIFA, and put some reserved women's seats.
The response we got back was, there aren't enough women around and if your representative could win an election against men, others could do it as well.
Fine. It took another woman nine years to lift her head, be ready for it and go for it and be elected to the board.
So I think that's a very live example of had they made the statute changes immediately after me there would have been one woman and probably by now two or three.
So I think it definitely works, but quotas and elections also run the risk of other give and takes, and not based on merit.
We're now witnessing an interesting campaign, I hope you have seen it. Laura McAllister from Wales is running to be the FIFA representative of UEFA and she has done such a great public campaign. She's extremely well-qualified for it, but we'll see if in the end she will win or the incumbent will be reelected.
When there is an election process in a political environment, there can be other biases, rather than simply choosing somebody based merit.
She ain’t kidding.
Laura McAllister MBE’s campaign sets the former Wales international captain and professor of corporate governance against FIFA incumbent Evelina Christillin.
Graham Dunbar’s AP piece encourages the reader to join some dots.
Now McAllister is clear to face the former Italian national team skier whose career biography on the FIFA website has no soccer positions. Christillin, however, has close ties to the family that owns Juventus. The head of that family, Andrea Agnelli, sits on the UEFA executive committee and is the leader of the European Club Association.
Each of the six continental federations choose a female delegate to sit on the 37-member FIFA Council. UEFA will make its decision on April 20.
UP Yours
New on the guest blog
Read the full list here.
Personal Best
Sports Biz people list their favourite things
This week: Charlotte Richardson, marketing manager for Aspen Waite.
Best film containing a scene depicting the sports business:
Not quite a film but the opening scenes of Sunderland ‘Til I Die, Season Two when the new Marketing Director held his first team meeting entertained me greatly!
Nice threads
A digest of the social media follow up on last week’s podcast with Lucas von Cranach of OneFootball, UP Pod #154.
The view from the WhatsUP Group
Sport as a platform: What’s the role of content? What do sports teams want to be, publishers, retailers? How should they interact with the major tech platforms?
Matt Rogan: Revenue alone doesn’t drive long term value, it’s also the way it interacts with profit. What Amazon & co have done brilliantly is to drive margin once they have that installed base. Sport on the other hand has yet to show it can translate revenue growth to profit. Star players cost more than star developers etc. Whether you’re a platform business or not you’ve still got to prove you can make money.
Peter Hutton: For the Facebook group of platforms - I would say definitely not a content company - but rather a product driven group designed to solve a variety of problems, increasingly through hardware (Oculus, Portal, the a/r glasses launching soon), through direct sales transactions on platform (Facebook shops, Instagram shopping, WhatsApp and Messenger bots) and through audience development and engagement for brands and creators (Facebook, Instagram). On all these areas, the numbers are increasing worldwide - particularly the advertising income (and the advertising share back to publishers), so to underline Matt’s point the valuation is based on how the revenue interacts with profit. One of the key roles is as a funnel to new fans, driving audience to the owned and operated sites (for the clubs, for the leagues, for the OTT players).
Michael Broughton: They can’t be media companies. They’ve sold their main content already, and current content is actually to support their sponsorship business. Sports teams despite positioning themselves as media companies are sponsorship and licensing companies and use content to support that.
Suspect sports PR Genre: The betting shop-funded hot take
The font size of my name makes me feel special.
How to be a good podcast guest
Not my view, someone esle’s. But worth a look.
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