Ted Croker is still right; Snoop's Olympic Rorschach Test; End Visa's monopoly game; Twitter's end of days; Allianz v West Ham; Adidas Gazelles RIP; Voyage of Discovery+

Overthinking the sports business, for money

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This week’s Unofficial Partner Newsletter is sponsored by Loughborough University London and the Institute of Sports Humanities

Leadership in Sport MA 2024 Applications Open 

Applications for the next intake on the 2024 Leadership in Sport Masters are open.

The Leadership in Sport Masters is designed for sports industry executives to study part-time alongside their careers.

The programme is co-delivered by Loughborough University London and the Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH), experts in leadership education.

Loughborough University is ranked best university in the world for sports-related subjects (QS World University Rankings by Subject 2017-2023).

Find out more https://www.sportshumanities.org/masters-uk

or contact tom.rann@sportshumanities.org

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The Snoop Olympic Rorschach Test

Look at this picture and what do you see?

1. An abuse of Olympic IP undermining the TOP commercial model?

Or

2. What happens when you let creators spread the Olympic message to a vast and non traditional sports audience? Done with wit and a sense of fun, which are not words often associated with the Olympics and/or the IOC.

While we’re on Olympic marketing, is there a more annoying thing in sport than the IOC’s Visa exclusivity clause, which precludes everyone else from buying stuff without fannying around with prepaid Visa cards.

Reward Visa customers, but don’t punish Mastercard users.

Give me Snoop’s approach to marketing any day.

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“If people in sport really want to do something meaningful, I think the key immediate thing is how you assure black and brown people of our safety”

The following is from the Unofficial Partner WhatsApp group this morning.

Sanjay Bhandari, Chair of Kick It Out wrote:

One thing we learned from the expressions of solidarity after George Floyd was that very little of the expressions of solidarity turned into meaningful sustained change so, in hindsight, most social media posts were virtue signalling.

Expressions of solidarity are great but they are not enough.

I have spoken to quite a few people this week who are frightened to even leave the house (especially hijab wearing women some of whom are advising each other to remove their hijabs when out in public). I’ve been going to football for 40+ years but even people like me are thinking twice about going to games (I am due to be at 4 matches in 8 days and for the first time in a long time, I am slightly nervous for my own safety). Yesterday was the first time I had been into London since the Farage Riots and I found myself sub-consciously on high alert, not making eye contact with people, hyper-vigilant and avoiding certain streets. It’s mad and illogical but that is the visceral survival reaction to seeing people tell us loudly we are not welcome. I’ve seen it before but this feels like the 1970s and 80s again.

If people in sport really want to do something meaningful, I think the key immediate thing is how you assure black and brown people of our safety.

Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. Over the last week, our trust and confidence in our basic personal safety has galloped away. It’s time to get walking again to rebuild that trust …last night’s anti-fascist demonstrations across the country were a great start!

The Ted Croker Question

It’s a famous exchange, which cost Croker a knighthood.

In the crisis meeting after Heysel, Margaret Thatcher asked what was to be done about football's hooligans.

Croker, then Chief Executive of the FA, is said to have replied: "these people are society's problem, and we don't want your hooligans in our sport, Prime Minister."

Croker was the only FA Secretary not to be knighted when he retired, but it’s worth noting he already had a proper gong, having received the King's Commendation For Bravery as a wartime pilot.

(If you’re interested in this bit of history, I strongly recommend the Margaret Thatcher Foundation library of files, which has all the declassified private papers, letters and notes from this time. Be careful, it’s a rabbit hole).

I was thinking of Croker because I saw this next clip.

It’s a call from ‘a concerned parent and grandparent’ to the Football Lads Alliance (FLA) to come together, ‘bury our differences’ in the common good of smashing up town centres and setting light to hotels. It’s quite chilling.

We talk a lot about fans.

The marketing process takes the bloke above and rinses the racism and thuggery away, turning him in to a demographic abstraction, where he re-emerges as customer data.

This week Football clubs and The FA may be about to sack their own customers, by banning rioters from their grounds.

Back to Ted Croker and Thatcher.

To paraphrase Stewart Lee’s Brexit gag:

Not all football fans are racist thugs. Some of them are cunts.

Note the karma account above is a blue ticked Russian bot boosted by Twitter’s disinformation algorithm.

I asked the WhatsApp Group for their thoughts on Twitter, something we at UP have been thinking about for a while.

Here’s Sanjay again:

There’s two bits to this.

The first is the moral argument, outlined by Sanjay above.

Should rights holders and sponsors be on there given Musk’s agenda?

The second is whether it works as a marketing channel anymore.

If you don’t pay for a blue tick the engagement has fallen dramatically.

The medium is the message, as someone clever once said.

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Questions To Ask About That Allianz Twickenham Deal

Why did Allianz dump The London Stadium for Twickenham?

Was it chairman’s whim - the CEO’s a rugby fan - or to Ben Cronin’s note here, about brand fit (rugger v porn?).

Was it about Karren Brady’s desire for a bigger split of the money from the stadium they don’t own, or did Allianz suddenly stop and wonder if they really wanted to work with her for the next ten years?

And what of the Tottenham Stadium? Why do a deal with Twickenham in the knowledge that the name will never stick? What price did Spurs want that was so far out of reach of the rumoured £10-£12m a year with the RFU?

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Voyage of Discovery+

How many punters will stay on Discovery+ once the Olympics are over?

That’s the question The Guardian’s Mark Sweney didn’t get to until the final paragraph in his gushing report on the app’s recent subscriber growth.

“Discovery+’s higher churn rates will present challenges moving forward, especially for households attracted by specific content,” said the bloke from Kantar.

The final sentence seems important…“Sport is great at bringing in new subscribers, keeping them is the key.”

You can say that again.

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Won’t anyone think of Adidas?

Another sinister right wing plot is uncovered.

A concerted and organised campaign to punish the German trainer makers.

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