'@KarenJCarney does not exist'
In this newsletter:
New podcast: What Just Happened? Picking apart that Leeds tweet
The Buy Side podcast - Vitality, the NHS and KP peanuts
When Nike stops paying
Sport and private equity, the children of Michael Milken
Nice Threads: David Cushnan and the working habits of Warren Buffet
SportsBiz Objects - The Gray Nicholls Scoop, by Tim Crow
What Just Happened?
England footballer Karen Carney appeared as a pundit on Amazon Prime’s coverage of the Premier League match between Leeds United and West Bromwich Albion. Over the course of the programme, Carney said several complimentary things about Leeds United but also raised concerns that the team might not be able to maintain the high-intensity style that their manager Marcelo Bielsa demands towards the end of the campaign. This from Ben Nagle on Mainonline gives the context to Carney’s view:
Leeds were second and three points clear of Sheffield United with four games to play in 2018-19, but only collected one point in their final four matches to throw away the chance of automatic promotion as the Blades went up instead.
Bielsa's Marseille side also finished 14 points adrift of Ligue 1 winners Paris Saint-Germain in 2014-15 having been just two points behind the French giants with eight games remaining.
'They outrun everyone and credit to them,' she said after the Baggies were thrashed. 'My only concern would be, ''will they blow up at the end of the season?''
'We saw that in the last couple of seasons and I actually think they got promoted because of Covid in terms of it gave them a bit of respite. I don't know whether they would've got up if they didn't have the break.'
The club’s social media team clipped this last bit to its 667,500 followers. Then the club’s owner brought oil to a fire; Andrea Radrizzani retweeted the Carney clip twice on that Saturday afternoon, and those tweets remain on his feed today.
Cue a vicious Twitter pile on by Leeds fans, many from anonymous accounts. And because Karen Carney is a woman, the nature of the abuse she received was depressingly predictable. Carney has since deleted her Twitter account, closing down a valuable personal media and marketing platform that had 78,000 followers. Another win for the mindless dickheads.
The Guardian ran some of the milder stuff she received:
The abuse received by Carney was undeniable. In public messages Carney was called a “silly bitch”, a “stupid slag” and “twat of the week” and told to “get back in the kitchen”, or to “put your mic down and get yourself home there’s dishes to wash and clothes to iron”. Other users wrote they were “sick of this shit women pundits”, while another said: “Women’s lives matter but come on, women and football? Get kettle on love!” These were far from the worst examples.
Later that afternoon, Andrea Radrizzani went in to defence mode and privately briefed Jim White of Sky Sports and TalkSport, who then relayed this conversation via his own Twitter feed. Oddly, there’s no reference to White’s thread on Radrizzani’s feed.
Club social channels: Blokes tweeting to blokes
There’s a PhD in conscious and unconscious bias to be written about the Leeds tweet. But it can be summarised by Laura Weston, a board member of the Women’s Sport Trust who counsels athletes about building their media profile:
When you look at who Leeds follow on Twitter, it’s about 80 accounts and they are all men. That’s all they are interested in listening to. These small acts of bias add up to something bigger….a culture.
It’s always about incentives
What gets measured gets improved is the cliche. When it comes to KPIs, club channels can find provoking outrage is good for the numbers says Jim Dowling, former MD of Cake, the Havas sport and entertainment agency:
When Bill Shankly made his 'football isn't life or death..' quote, it's a shame more people didn't realise he was taking the piss. Male insecurity expressed through misogyny and vein bulging fury around temperate football punditry is an ugly spectacle. Women need as much support as can be mustered - and clearly that context has been completely ignored, in exchange for digital metrics.
‘A bat signal to the trolls’
Women in Football CEO Jane Purdon responded to the Leeds question, via WhatsApp:
I would love the day to come where the gender of the pundit doesn't matter, that's what I spend every day working towards. But sadly it does. Not because women should be above criticism or right to reply, of course we shouldn't. But because if you do it on an official SM account, it's like the bat signal going out to the trolls to indulge in the special brand of evil they reserve for women….
Karen Carney has closed her twitter account. There's not much that makes me angrier than women's voices being silenced through bullying. Is social media for all of us or just some of us?
It’s a good question, and about time someone answered it. Listen to the full conversation on the podcast via UnofficialPartner.com
And it’s not just men who have a problem with women…
It’s the algorithms they create too.
From insurance payments to courtroom sentencing, AI makes increasingly complex decisions about our lives. And our belief that data is neutral allows algorithms to get away with murder. The fight back is being led by those most likely to find themselves on the wrong side of a computer’s decision…women and black people.
The Buy Side - Vitality
Is Vitality’s sport strategy aimed at normalising private health insurance in the UK and therefore undermining the primacy of the NHS? You can hear how Nick Read answered that question on the new podcast.
It struck me during this conversation that for a property that doesn’t yet exist, the The Hundred is a very flexible marketing platform. The ECB’s new cricket format is able to simultaneously carry Vitality’s healthy lifestyle messages alongside KP Snacks crisp and peanut campaigns (no judgement here btw, I’ve very little moral high ground when it comes to Skips or a family bag of dry roasted).
Episodes 1-3 of The Buy Side are available from UnofficialPartner.com
When Nike’s money stops
Here’s a perspective you don’t often get: triple gold medal athlete Tianna Bee on the psychological and financial fallout when Nike dropped her from their roster. It gets worse as she waits for that all important last quarterly cheque that doesn’t come.
…the reduction was for not competing at the Olympic Games.
Oh. The Games that never happened. The Games that I could not have even qualified for because the Trials never happened.
The children of Michael Milken
Something Luis Vicente said in UP Pod #124 has stayed with me.
I have a warning for sports industry: investment funds are not banks.
As media money fades, the sports biz conversation around private equity, venture capital and private investment often feels beguilingly familiar. It’s all ‘mutual objectives’, ‘synergies’ and ‘shared values'. But there’s a difference between p/e and sport’s other sources of investment: TV and sponsors don’t tear the house down when they leave.
BIG by Matt Stoller is a great newsletter about the role of monopolies. His bit on the genesis of private equity’s business model is worth a read.
I’ve written a lot about private equity. By ‘private equity,’ I mean financial engineers, financiers who raise large amounts of money and borrow even more to buy firms and loot them. These kinds of private equity barons aren’t specialists who help finance useful products and services, they do cookie cutter deals targeting firms they believe have market power to raise prices, who can lay off workers or sell assets, and/or have some sort of legal loophole advantage. Often they will destroy the underlying business. The giants of the industry, from Blackstone to Apollo, are the children of 1980s junk bond king and fraudster Michael Milken. They are essentially super-sized mobsters who burn down businesses for the insurance money.
Nice Threads
If only for the chance to put the names Cushnan and Buffett in the same sentence.
David Cushnan’s annual A-Z of the sports business year has become a thing.
How Warren Buffet works, for all you aspiring sports investors.
Sports Biz Objects
The Gray-Nicholls Scoop
#SportsTech #Cricket #Innovation
By Tim Crow
Growing up as a cricket-mad kid in Yorkshire in the 1970s, it felt like there was always something big happening on and off the field, because there usually was. 1970s cricket was full of paradigm shifts: the Establishment’s World Cup, Kerry Packer’s World Series, and Clive Lloyd’s West Indies. But there was another which was no less game-changing: it revolutionised the cricket bat, and created one of the summer game’s most beloved sporting objects.
Before the Gray-Nicolls Scoop arrived in 1974, cricket bats had been indistinguishable for decades. The Scoop changed that forever, irresistibly blending a stunning, radical and above all unmistakeable design with a ‘better tech, better performance’ story that blew the competition away. Before long, it felt like every pro you saw on TV was using one, and if you played cricket you wanted one too. I can still remember vividly the first time I picked up a Scoop, in a sports shop in Halifax. It felt like handling Excalibur.
One of the many things I love about The Scoop is the story of its genesis (link to Guardian article below). Like many great innovations, it very nearly didn’t happen. The Scoop’s two inventors – a golf club engineer and a golf course designer – were turned down by every other cricket bat maker before they got to Gray-Nicolls. Imagine turning down The Scoop. It’s cricket’s equivalent of turning down The Beatles.
Deep dive Gray Nicolls Scoop, the bat every kid wanted for Christmas, turns 40 | Cricket | The Guardian
Check out more #batporn here: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/jul/23/gallery-celebrating-the-gray-nicolls-scoop
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