Gunnar And The Zazmeister; Make Golf Great Again; Cricinfo as Wikipedia; Other People's Money; 20 AI Podcast headlines; Narrative Watch; RefCam in the Premier League; Fun with Parasitical Vultures
Overthinking the sports business, for money
Welcome: Unofficial Partner’s Official Partner
Big thank you to Evelyn Partners for supporting tonight’s Expected Goals Live.
It’s a sell out, with a long waitlist.
So, if you have a ticket and can’t come please let us know asap, so we can recirculate the ticket.
Big night ahead. Look out for the live podcast soon.
Gunnar and the Zazmeister
There are two trains.
There’s always been two trains.
Now we can put a face to them.
The break up of Warner Brothers Discovery has given birth to two new character archetypes in the never-ending story that is the sports business.
Gunnar Wiedenfels and David Zazlav have outgrown Linkedin to become metaphors for the great divide that runs through the sports media industry.
WBD is now two separate entities - Streaming & Studios and Global Networks.
As driver of the S&S Express, Zazlav - The Zazster, Zazman, Lena Zazaroni - is the face of monetisable upside, the driver of the Happy Future Train with carriages named Warner Bros, DC Studios and HBO Max (Btw, HT to McKinsey for the Max rebrand, which was not particularly helpful but very commercially lucrative, for them).
Going the other way is Gunnar Global Networks Wiedenfels, the Anti-Zaz, the bean counter that gets to run the down bound train (in to the ground).
Gunnar’s job is to monetise the decline curve, a private equity euphemism for sacking anyone above the age of 30 and selling it off for parts.
Both NewCos carry much of the original $71billion debt that created WBD in the first place, and sport is just a small part of the main story which is how that debt is now split, repackaged and sold to Wall Street, and how Wall Street can see a way to make a turn on that debt whilst paying as little tax as they can get away with. It’s truly a heartwarming fairy tale.
Meanwhile, real people with real jobs and real families wait to learn their fate.
TNT, the sports bit, has been broken up by geography.
The Zazperella gets UK and Ireland, Gunnar gets TNT Sports in the US, along with Discovery and Bleacher Report.
But Zazster has made noises that sport didn’t work for him at WBD. Was that just deal noise. Or a come-and-get-me signal for TNT’s collection of sports rights that runs from UEFA to rugby?
Bezos ain’t Gunnar come, but DAZN might
That is on the verge of being a good headline. The fact it makes no actual sense is irritating of course, but I’m prepared to run with it.
‘Bezos’ is a proxy for the major tech platforms more generally. One question facing Gunnar’s Global Networks is who will buy out his legacy media channels, that are watched by tens of millions of Americans, still make pots of unfashionable linear ad money but are hard to fit in to Wall Street’s powerpoint decks selling the streaming future.
The clever money says the major tech platforms can get to the audience without having to bail out the legacy media brands.
I mean, they’re parasitical vultures but they’re not stupid.
But DAZN buying TNT doesn’t sound too far fetched, according to the wise arses on the WhatsUP group, particularly if TNT are prepared to swap for DAZN equity. One to watch.
Talking of DAZN
Refcam is great - ht to HBS for the tech, part of FIFA’s World Feed coverage.
It’s the sort of thing that you can’t un-see, quickly becoming part of the expected product.
Coming to a Premier League rights auction near you soon?
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Wedge Issues - Make Golf Great Again
There’s movement in the C-Sweet. And it’s going to have ripples #CSuiteRipples.
Brian Rolapp - me neither - is leaving the NFL to be the next PGA Tour CEO, a rung below commissioner Jay Monahan, and his replacement cum Christmas.
Rolapp has been Roger Goodell’s de facto number two, and someone he’s promoted six times within the NFL.
So highly rated, despite or because he rarely gives media interviews.
Narrative Watch:
A scenario is forming: Let’s call it Make Golf Great Again.
Brian Rolapp’s first job will be to break the 'great stalemate’ that’s boring everyone from TV rights salesmen and corporate sponsors to the top 25 players and those poor saps who pay the subs and watch the ads, the collective noun for which is golf fans.
Direction of travel: Rolapp can achieve this by dint of not being Jay Monahan.
In this story, Monahan can easily be framed as the impediment to unification, the man who cited 9/11.
With Rolapp in as tour commish, he will go mano a mano with Scott O’Neill, who’s now running LIV and is most famous for not being Greg Norman.
Cut to: Rolapp and O’Neill spend Christmas wrestling naked in front of the fire like Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, the moustachioed seventies thesp from Women in Love, not the whistleblowing hero of the Post Office scandal, which now I think about it would be a mismatch of Mickey Duff proportions.
Sitting Zeus-like above this spectacle will be the billionaires of both sides - Strategic Sports Group and PIF, who just want to get on with the job of making even more money by creating the MAGA-Saudi Global Golf Tour Cum League that sews together the constituent parts of the Tour schedule with whatever the fuck LIV is at this point in a manner that Ol’ Doc Frankenstein would dismiss sniffily as ‘a bit thrown together’.
All of this works well for Bryson DeChambeau, who is currently negotiating in public for his LIV re-up.
Prediction: Bryson signs a mahoosive contract with LIV just before they all jump ship back to the mainland, which gives O’Neill/PIF some much needed leverage - #LIVLeverage.
The most important player in the world and his YouTube following of Barstoolian betting bros are coming back to Full Swing, the not-very-good Drive to Survive wannabe on Netflix.
Rolapp is the new head of the all swinging and dancing, golf but now really loud League of Nations Golf, a box of tricks that contains everyone’s money, and Bryson.
OPM x AI - Fun with LLM generated headlines
Based on this Unofficial Partner podcast transcript for this week’s Other People’s Money, I got Claude to offer up ‘20 hard-hitting headlines for Linkedin promotion’:
"Traditional Private Equity is 'Completely Misaligned' with Sports - Euro Venture Builder Raises €500M Fund"
"Why American PE Firms Don't Understand European Sports: Ex-Eurosport MD Reveals All"
"22 Sports Ventures, 90 Staff, Zero Exits: The 'Permanent Capital' Revolution Hitting European Sports"
"From Paddle Sensors to Portuguese Football Clubs: Inside Europe's Most Unusual Sports Portfolio"
"'I Hate Hockey Sticks': What This Sports Investor Really Looks for in €50M Deals"
"Bill Gates Predicted 16-Hour Work Weeks - This Sports Investor is Banking €500M on It"
"Why UFC Champions Started in This Unknown Dutch MMA League"
"The AI Tool That Screens 50 Sports Investment Deals Per Week (93% Accuracy Rate)"
"€50K to Train Like a Pro: The Portuguese Football Club Monetizing American Dreams"
"Drone Tech, Blockchain Tickets, Padel Sensors: The 40-Person Team Building Sports' Future"
"Former Eurosport Chief: 'European Sports Are Still Massively Undervalued'"
"Why This €500M Sports Fund Will Never Sell: The 'Evergreen' Strategy Disrupting PE"
"From Beach Volleyball Arenas to Boxing Championships: The Sports Conglomerate You've Never Heard Of"
"Management Beats Ideas 10-1: What Sports Startups Get Wrong About Investment"
"ITF 'Missed Something Big': Why Paddle Tennis is Eating Traditional Sports"
"Sports as Asset Class or Red Herring? Inside the €500M European Experiment"
"Barcelona, La Liga Clubs Using This Dutch Startup's Drone Tech for Training Analysis"
"'We Get First Pick of Champions': How Lower-League MMA Feeds the UFC Pipeline"
"World Boxing Revolution: Olympic Style Combat Sport Gets Private Investment Makeover"
"Why Single Founders Are 'Tricky': The Sports Investment Rules You Haven't Heard"
Cricket’s impressionists
We emptied Alex Balfour’s brain for our own selfish purposes.
Balfour co-founded Cricinfo, was head nerd at London 2012 and now advises everyone on how to do everything.
For Inside Edge, UP’s cricket business podcast series, myself and Mike Jakeman got Alex to tell the tale of one of sport’s great digital artefacts.
The podcast is here.
But really, it’s the story of sport’s relationship with the internet, the early assumptions and dreams of long tails and real people connecting with each other across the globe.
Cricinfo was built by enthusiasts, more wikipedia than Facebook. So the conversation was tinged with melancholy about roads not taken, and paths not followed, of walled gardens and lost value.
Somewhere between that dream and today’s dead internet botscape, the sports marketing industry pivoted from serving fans to chasing impressions.
The swap from fan to user wasn’t a good trade.
The new fans never existed. But as Augustine Fou put it to me on our podcast, sport and marketing became addicted to the numbers.
To be honest is to fail.