IOC on starters orders; 100million to NOT host; The small man problem; Bob Hoskins; The pain and pleasure of Lego; Rodri as Scargill; Personal Best; The rights market doesn't care; Banking on America
Overthinking the sports business, for money
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A busy week
Two live events. One last night, one tomorrow morning.
Last night it was a Bundle-esque live recording during StreamAMG’s excellent D2C Playbook event at Amazon’s HQ in London.
Tomorrow it’s golf: Wedge Issues Live from the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, supported by KORE and the European Tour.
This afternoon we record Ep3 of The 3, our heroic* attempt to create a ten minute Friday podcast, with the Leaders lot, published tomorrow.
*The first episode was half an hour, the second was 45 minutes. So heroic in the loosest sense.
The 3 stories tomorrow are:
The race for the IOC big job - aka Bach’s overtures (this doesn’t make any sense but makes me sound like I know about classical music, which I don’t, apart from that theme from the Hovis ad). Six months ago the word on the street was that Seb Coe wasn’t running, and now he is. So, was the word wrong, or did he change his mind? Probably the former. Also, is the Samaranch name an asset or liability in the crusty world of IOC voting membership, the age profile of which makes the Tory party conference look like Coachella. Also, did you know Samaranch really likes crisps, so that’s a mark in the yes column from my pov.
Why Australia are paying 100million NOT to host The Commonwealth Games - echoes of the late, great Bob Hoskins, who used to tell a story about Brian DePalma paid him a couple of hundred grand not to play Al Capone in The Untouchables. Anyhow, it’s hard to get beyond the ‘What’s the point?’ trope when the CGs is in the headlines. The messaging this week has been around Glasgow getting the games for ‘free’, but - like lunch - I suspect that major quadrennial multisport events are rarely free. Which events will get the bullet, should the event have died with the Queen, will India ever engage properly and isn’t the British Empire a bit, how do we put it, passé?
Lego’s F1 deal - I’m told by many, many women that in terms of pain, treading barefoot on one of the iconic plastic bricks is up there with childbirth. Cue outpouring of engaging Gen Alpha chat, with a smattering of hastily Googled facts about the environmental impact of the company’s failure to ‘transition to recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), which needs about 2kg of petroleum to make 1kg of plastic. ABS is used in about 80% of Lego blocks. “It’s like trying to make a bike out of wood rather than steel,” said Tim Brooks, Lego’s head of sustainability, referring to how the non-oil-based material was softer and demanded extra ingredients for durability, as well as greater energy for processing and drying.
Look out for The 3 tomorrow.
Previous episodes here and here.
SI’s Powerless list
Sports Illustrated has published its power list.
I love power lists because they are so obviously and fatally flawed.
At least money lists attempt to quantify their selections, albeit The Number’s Always Wrong.
I’ve been commissioned to do power lists in the past.
It’s enormous fun, until it isn’t.
Once you get past the top three or four, your left with the job of filling the middle bit with clickbait celebrities and then making up their source of ‘power’ - influence with Gen Z; enormous wealth; owns a social network etc etc.
It ends up revealing far more about the compilers of the list than the people on it.
No shock that Sports Illustrated views power through an almost entirely American lens.
Whoever wins the IOC vote won’t appear on the SI power list. No room either for Infantino, Ceferin or the most conflicted man in sport, Nasser Al-Khelaifi.
Erling Haaland got in though, and the presenters of ESPN’s NCAA coverage. So, swings and roundabouts.
The small man problem
There’s a stat in this week’s podcast that did my head in, so I’m now telling everyone I meet.
It’s 6%.
That’s the money spent on women-only research, of the total sports science research.
The why is the interesting bit.
Men are simpler, and therefore cheaper. The implications of this are profound for investors in to women’s sport.
Baz Moffat, The Well: 6 percent of sports science research is done exclusively on females. And that's everything to do with the female, every single thing. And so, the research isn't being done.
UP: Sorry to interrupt, but that's such a strange, weirdly low number for that. You can't help but ask why that is
Baz Moffat, The Well: Because we're expensive, because we're expensive to study. So let's say you wanted to work out how long you can run for if you had carbohydrate or didn't have carbohydrate, right. And you wanted to test it on 20 people. If you just get guys into the room, you just get 20 men and they have a daily bike ride and you might say, right, okay, I don't want you to eat overnight.
You come in, fasted training, but we'll test everybody at nine o'clock in the morning, having not eaten for 12 hours. But for women, they have a monthly cycle. So you have to kind of therefore get a group that are aligned on their cycle, and then half of them will be on the hormonal contraceptive pill.
So then half of them don't even have a monthly cycle. So you need more women and it ends up being more complicated. And so when I was at uni, people were like, ‘Oh, just study the guys. It's easier’. And that conversation is still happening because it's more expensive to study the women.
Then jump to the tropes of the sports business conversation - investment in women’s sport; athlete as asset; get the product right etc - and you start to see the problem.
The money needs to keep the asset on the pitch, but the data on her health assumes she’s a small man.
Note that FIFA is currently debating an expanded 48 team Women’s World Cup, mirroring that of the men’s tournament in 2026.
I learnt a load from our conversation with Baz Moffat and Preeti Shetty. You will too.
The rights market doesn’t care
(See previous: Won’t anyone think of Julian Alavarez?)
This week saw an escalation of the player’s revolt against FIFA’s calendar expansion plans.
Rodri mentioned the S word - suggesting that the players could go on strike.
“We're very close to that," said the Man City and Spain star. "If you ask any player, they'll tell you the same."
It’s fun to wonder what this would look like.
Are we about to see a version of the Hollywood actors and writers strike, which ended up costing the entertainment industry about $5billion (The Number’s Always Wrong).
See previous:
At what point does the quality of the product impact on the demand for rights?
Too many games…tired and injured players…insert the phrase golden goose.
Unless you’re Jake Humphrey, we can agree that there are limits to human performance.
But what are they? Where’s the line?
And what is the relationship between tired players and media revenue?
This last question gets to the real problem.
The money doesn’t care
The media and sponsorship markets are too laggy to be good arbiters of the quality of the sporting product.
It’s too blunt an instrument.
See also: this raises a good question as to FIFA’s corporate reputation in the US.
Personal Best
Sportsbiz people list their favourite things
Chief Growth and Innovation Officer - Epic Global Agency part of Feenix Group
Best dinner companions (min 4, max 6):
Kara Nortman
Natalie Portman
Rihanna
Serena Williams
Sharon Horgan
Adele
Email Sean@unofficialpartner.co.uk if you want to list your own PB.
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As an unwashed colonial, I find the barbarically-titled Commonwealth Games SO gauche, darling.