NEW Unofficial Backchannel; 1000 Doors and The Prem's Project Fear; George Osborne's 2012 legacy; Buy high, sell low, Fanatics gets out of NFTs; ROI of Athlete tech investments v footballer's pubs
Overthinking the sports business, for money.
Backchannel
We’ve launched a new community platform.
You’re welcome to join.
Why?
Unofficial Partner has grown. A lot.
Which means we’re not just talking to a few mates, we’re talking to tens of thousands of people, some of them grown ups, with jobs and mortgages, who have REAL KNOWLEDGE AND INSIGHT on the way sport works.
So, why not find a way of learning from that massive reservoir of talent?
What topics are we missing? What mistakes are we making, what are the questions we’re not asking?
Through 2023 we’re going to be doing more live events of many shapes and sizes: What conversations should we be having? Who should we be talking to?
And of course, our podcasts will remain the central part of what we do.
We’d love to get a regular Q&A going - either write them in the replies or send a voicemail and we’ll play it on air.
Your shout. It’s easy and free. Click here to get in to the conversation. Some good people are on it already.
New Year, Project Fear
What happened?
The Daily Mirror ran a story that went across the regional press.
Officers will knock on 1,000 doors after identifying customers from a database in a major ongoing criminal investigation. They have warned that people found to be using "dodgy boxes" could face prosecution.
‘1000 doors’ is a catchy line. Suspiciously so.
Odd timing too.
Feels like a New Year’s resolution.
But. Context.
Have you tried to report a stolen bike recently? Or even a burglary?
Getting the police to knock on 1000 doors is quite the achievement.
For whom are West Mercia Police doing all this great comms work? Sky, BT and Amazon? The Premier League? The owners: PIF, David Sullivan and the Glazers? Agents and players?
Not many PR wins there.
Pan out just a bit and you get to other questions relating to the price of football in a cost of living crisis.
This sort of chart makes punters angry.
To add some jeopardy, 1000 doors comes with fear buttons:
Porridge: Two men have gone to jail for watching illegal streams since 2021.
Risk: The dodgy fire sticks can expose you to bad people exploiting your personal data. Like Facebook without the Metaverse promos.
Latent guilt: Like middle class coke heads, illegal streamers know that the end of the line is drugs, trafficking and the worst people in the world. 1000 doors aims to jolt some of the streamers from this cognitive dissonance.
Below the 1000 door rhetoric, illegal streaming is about demand and price.
And a real fear on the part of rights holders that what happened to music and porn, will happen to them.
Warning: The returns for tech-led disruption can go down aswell as up.
Join Peter Hutton and Danny Bowerin discussing this on Backchannel right now:
This graphic, via Pedro Avery, supports Danny’s view. Simple it ain’t.
Project Fear, pt2: Netflix blames its own punters
Meanwhile.
Like January ads for gym membership, Netflix has announced its own slut shaming strategy.
It wants us to stop sharing our passwords.
Summary: Tired of trying to attract new subscribers, it’s seeking to punish its existing ones.
In an age of SVOD, IP and VPN, linking location to user is a mug’s game.
Mike Darcey says its a bit of huff ‘n puff bluff.
Netflix will huff and puff, publicise the initiative and send a few emails, and hope that some people who are password sharing change behaviour off their own bat. But Netflix won’t follow through, won’t assert that someone’s IP location patterns mean they need to pay twice and shut them down if they don’t.
It was George Osborne all along
Spoiler: Those kids ain’t getting any thinner.
What happened? Sport England got a bollocking for participation rates.
What really happened? Politicians saw a goat and scaped the shit out of it.
The London 2012 legacy wasted...medals over buildings…reset required…blah blah blah.
Etc.
Meanwhile, the real villain was elsewhere talking about lost (Elgin) marbles, enjoying a 30% raise as director of the family firm, trousering £650k a year for a day a week from private equity and being showered with prize cultural jobs, on the boards of the BBC and British Museum.
George Osborne is the primary architect of the shit show we now call British life.
The Vandal-in-Chief.
As Chancellor in the 2010 Cameron-Clegg coalition, Osborne’s austerity programme cut the funding for school sport before the Olympics even happened, ensuring any pretence of legacy was stillborn.
As Polly Toynbee points out here, it’s weird that Osborne is allowed to walk around in public, let alone be allowed near a TV studio, given the damage he’s wreaked.
Yet it was Osborne who broke any pretence of a social security safety net by freezing and cutting benefits below inflation. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation regularly sets a minimum income standard (MIS), a good benchmark for an “acceptable” living standard arrived at by asking the public what they regard as the minimum basket of goods for “needs, not wants”. It includes such basics as a winter coat, two pairs of shoes, clothes priced at Primark and Matalan, food for four at £122.37 a week, cheapest mobile for adults at £10 a month, £20 for a child’s birthday present, one week a year holiday in a UK caravan park and an allowance for a child to go swimming.
Careful what you wish for.
Golf’s Drive to Survive play rolled out this week.
As mentioned on The Bundle - out tomorrow - it’s worth pausing on what the golden era of behind the scenes documentaries really means for sports rights holders.
Access is like the genie in the bottle.
It’s reluctant to get back in.
The current crop of docs takes us inside the ropes.
But there’s plenty of hallowed ground still to be fought over.
The half time team talk, live.
The Ryder Cup team room.
The real stuff is still up for grabs.
The next round of media rights conversations will put increased access front and centre.
The performance side of sport will moan.
But it’ll be hard to refuse entry.
Buy high, sell low. Fanatics guide to Web3
Fanatics is divesting its 60% stake in Candy Digital, the Dapper Lab-ish company it helped found in June 2021, the peak of NFT-mania.
According to CNBC, Candy Digital had raised a $100 million Series A round in October 2021, valuing it at $1.5 billion at the time. Investors in that round included SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, Insight Partners, and Pro Football Hall of Famer Peyton Manning.
Michael Broughton questions the timing and what it means for the ‘Gen Z values digital goods’ storyline.
Further down the thread, Charlie Beall of IMG/Seven League makes a salient sounding point.
Any recovery likely doesn't align with the IPO horizon. Best to have it off the books.
What exactly do Serena and Lewis bring to the table?
A build on that Peyton Manning reference above, this week’s podcast was on the reality behind the athlete investor trend, what’s being traded and how NIL is changing the personal endorsement market.
Guests are Ishveen Jolly, founder and CEO of OpenSponsorship, the Serena Williams backed marketplace. And Andrew Petcash, who runs Profluence Sports, the very good NIL and investment newsletter of that name.