Hutton, Fort, Reichert and Vicente are ready: So, what's your question?
I’ve been asked to moderate a panel at World Football Summit Live tomorrow afternoon.
It’s a pretty stellar group.
If you have questions you want me to ask, just respond to this email or do it live via the WFS app - click the image to go there. I’ll try my best to fit you in.
To help get you thinking, here’s the email I sent the group earlier today.
Ricardo, Ralf, Peter and Luis,
Below is my summary for tomorrow’s talk. My objective is to give it as loose a framework as possible without it becoming an incoherent free for all…so, we need a start, middle and end.
I’ll ask a question to everyone at the start, and one at the end.
In the middle, I’ve put some general themes and questions we may want to talk about. We won’t get to all of it, and feel free to throw some other themes in to the mix before tomorrow’s session.
Sports Post-Covid: Venturing in to 2021 with Confidence
Intro -
The usual answer to the COVID question is that the crisis will ‘accelerate current trends’.
So this conversation is about change - and our relationship to it.
Is change something that happens to us, or do we have agency to shape the future?
Put another way, is there a roadmap that takes us from here to there? If there is, what’s on it and who’s writing it?
FIRST QUESTION TO ALL: The panel title references confidence - how confident are you about the future? And before we talk about what we want to change, what would you fight to conserve?
THE MIDDLE BIT:
- Private equity ownership: How does the source of funding impact decision making? e.g. CVC and Serie A
- Tech platforms: what’s the ROI? Where does sport figure in their planning? Is it all about shopping?
- Esports - Many of the big trends we talk about have been present within esports since the start - e.g. athlete as creator, sport as entertainment, sponsors embedded into content, transactions as ROI etc. So what can esports tell us about sport’s near future? What are the limitations of esports as a marketing platform?
- Purpose - is it possible to put social and environmental sustainability at the centre of sport business, without jeopardising its financial and economic performance?
- ‘Fan engagement’ is a pseudonym for betting. Agree, disagree?
- Rights holders going D2C is a laudable objective, why’s it so hard in practice? How many sport subscriptions is sustainable?
- Athlete activism: what are the challenges for sponsors of aligning with sports star activists? How should the major Rights Holders respond to this trend?
- Innovation: Do fans know what’s good for them? What role can/should major governing bodies play in cultivating innovation? Do innovation labs ever work?
- Sponsorship - Ricardo has made it clear, on Twitter and elsewhere, that sport sponsorship is a business decision. It’s not Coke's job to grow the game. So, do you care about sport beyond its ability to generate a reliably large audience for your brand messages?
- Should sports rights holders define themselves as producers of entertainment content? What gets lost?
FINAL QUESTION TO ALL: The World Football Summit has given this group a few billion dollars to spend via your own SPAC. Where will you spend it?
Ends…
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