How piracy works; Hiding in plain sight; Cheap Currys; How not to ambush WWC; Lifetime Basket Value; The cost of a Utd fan; Golf gets even more confusing; Best Premier League kits; Be more Luton

Overthinking the sports business, for money

Aug 17, 2023

The Pirates vs The Premier League is live.

Our new series launched this week, with episode two dropping tomorrow (Friday).

Matt Cutler and I preview it here.

Nero, and other voices

One of the objectives for the series was to take the conversation beyond the bubble of the sports business.

Voices you don’t hear at conferences, or sports business podcasts.

Football fans, for example, are discussed ad nauseam but rarely allowed in the building.

The bit when Matt goes to the pub is compelling for this reason.

Spoiler: many football fans feel that the business of football is not working for them…

The other voice we wanted on the podcast was that of the pirates.

That’s where Nero comes in, the standout character in episode two.

Nero is not his real name.

We think he’s from the Balkans.

Nero didn’t want his voice on tape.

So we got an actor to do it.

This was the other option:

Some pirates are hiding in plain sight

If piracy is defined as profiting from someone else’s intellectual property, then consider the sports betting business model.

The FIFA Women’s World Cup is a good moment to raise this question.

A side effect of the rise in viewer interest, has been the enthusiasm of the betting firms to build another potentially very lucrative market.

Much is made of the rise in women bettors (see note from The Gist, via Chris Hurst):

The vast majority is still done by men, who view events such as WWC and other domestic women’s leagues as just more betting inventory.

This quote jumps out from the link above…

Dominic Grounsell, Entain Chief Commercial Officer: “The facts say it all. More of our customers are finding new ways to support their favourite teams – and that’s with a bet. This can only be brilliant for women’s sport.”

I’m trying to join the dots on that sentence.

Is betting really linked to fandom?

And, if I have a punt on England to beat Australia, why is this brilliant for women’s sport?

The money doesn’t go anywhere near the players, or the organisations who pay them and/or stage the events.

With no IP required to be purchased by them, Entain, Flutter et al can make significant profits from FIFA Women’s World Cup, with no value passing to the rights owner, and therefore no return to women’s football.

Bet or don’t bet, it’s not my business.

But spare me the betting brand purpose play ffs.

See also: What other models will emerge around the relationship between sport and gambling?

Join us for The UP Convergence Brainstorm, at the top of the ArchelorMittal Orbit Tower at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, on the evening of Thursday 28th September.

Buy UP Brainstorm Tickets Here

This is a bad time to be caught ambushing…

I’m ambivalent about ambush marketing at major sports events.

My complacency irritates many working on the rights holder side, and their official partners, who pay for the rights.

For a more detailed view of my position, listen to our How To Ambush The World Cup episode, pre-Qatar.

With that caveat, I really don’t like what Curry’s have been doing around this event.

Witless, cynical, opportunistic bottom of the funnel shite.

If marketing is about signals, the message from Curry’s is: ‘We’re too cheap to pay for a ticket’.

See also, Paddy Power’s WWC ad.

Context is everything.

And is what makes this a bad tournament to ambush.

Big, wealthy firms clambering on the Lionesses bandwagon for free, while the players are in a row over bonuses.

As suggested by Ed Warner, the stakes are higher for the women’s team:

Their immediate issue was the FA’s intransigence over bonuses, the governing body being unwilling to agree anything beyond the formulaic payments put in place by FIFA for all 32 teams. Other leading nations have agreed deals on top of the FIFA mechanism. But not England, who the PFA - the players’ union - have argued are consequently on a par with the likes of Haiti.
This is only part of a broader unhappiness about terms and conditions, in particular the players’ ability to benefit commercially from their part in the collective success of the team. The stakes are higher for England’s women than men, their income from international football constituting a far greater proportion of their overall rewards from the sport.
As well as noise in the media, expect threats to boycott promotional activity on behalf of FA corporate partners and demands for a more direct say in the governance of the fast-developing women’s professional game.

That last bit is intriguing.

The salary spread in the WSL goes from £12k a year to over £300k, with average salaries around the £30-40k mark.

Sponsorship income is disproportionately important.

Memo to Curry’s CMO: Stop taking, and start giving.

Hear also: Kieran Maguire on The News Agents, was suggesting that the players had been badly advised by their agents…

The £900million Question

This week’s episode has travelled extensively across football twitter and Linkedin.

Leo Thompson was at Man Utd during the ‘changeover period’ between Nike leaving and Adidas joining.

This was a key moment.

The details on lifetime basket value and the cost of acquisition of a United fan is fascinating.

If LIV Golf wasn’t so shit, we’d have to invent it

The DP World Tour just released its new season event calendar.

In a thrilling departure from received wisdom, the Tour has resisted the temptation to simplify its schedule and instead gone for Thomas Pynchon levels of narrative complexity.

Other innovations include binning the tedious and predictable Greg Norman - sorry, that’s Gregorian - calendar and opting to make 2024 thirteen months long, and start in November.

The 2024 Race to Dubai will feature three new and distinct phases – five innovative ‘Global Swings’ from November 2023 to August 2024; an historic ‘Back 9’ from September 2024 to October 2024; and two ‘DP World Tour Play-Offs’ in November 2024.
As in previous years, the consistent thread throughout the course of the season will be the five Rolex Series events – the premium category of events on the DP World Tour.

An UP Red Flag is when a schedule release comes with two pages of footnotes.

Golf’s calendar is a car crash more generally.

It’s mad that there’s no men’s golf majors beyond The Open in early July.

Geoff Shackelford was right (on the State of the Game podcast) when he said that the sport’s entire professional calendar is being upended to accommodate two things golf fans don’t much care about: the Olympics and the FedEx Cup.

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They’re building an online platform - www.valeursport.com - that will allow women in sport to benchmark their pay and learn the skills needed to challenge existing norms, advocate for transparency in compensation structures and create a level playing field where healthy competition flourishes.