The Unofficial Partner Billion Dollar Business Brainstorm™; Andy Holt is right; Nearly understanding NFTs; Thought leadership made easy; Raducanu x Tiffany, too soon?; Gen Z v Gammon-faced Boomers
The newsletter of the podcast
Join the thousands of people who subscribe to Unofficial Partner.
We publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday.
These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport.
This newsletter is our way of picking up the threads, and is published every Thursday.
Our entire back catalogue of 180 sports business conversations are available free of charge here.
Each pod is available on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app.
If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us by replying to this email.
The Unofficial Partner Billion Dollar Business Brainstorm™
We’re doing a turn at Leaders London - use the code below to get 15% off the ticket price.
The session is recorded live in front of a restricted 50 person audience* in the broadcast suite at Twickenham Stadium on the first day.
It’ll be edited to become an Unofficial Partner podcast co-published via the usual UP and Leaders channels.
The conceit
We’re going to come up with a plan for a billion dollar sports property.
Fifty of us, locked in a room for an hour.
How will it work?
There’s a stage, in the round, as we say at The Old Vic.
There are four chairs, facing each other.
We’ll have some invited guests to kick us off.
Audience members are welcome to take a chair and make a point.
Sean captures The Unofficial Billion Dollar Blueprint™ on a virtual screen or crappy whiteboard, budget dependent.
Finale: We arrive at an uncertain conclusion and hilarity ensues.
No boring and self important panel chat or interminable non-questions from the obsequious moderator.
Fancy it?
Some prep, aka things to be thinking about if you’re going to come along:
What sport or sector is ripe for disruption? Virtual or IRL? What’s the format? Who are we targeting? Gen Z or Gammon faced boomers? Where’s the money coming from? Anyone speak private equity? What’s our Why? Fat kids or climate dystopia? Who’s buying rights? Big screen telly or Buzzer type clips? How would we package it? Long tail and niche or Big and obvious? Yada yada yada…
*Who’s in the room?
Genuine sports sector experts; Wannabe thought leaders; Lazy and complacent C-Suite executives; Motivated second jobbers with a great attitude to personal development and a Passion For Sport™; Failed Apprentice candidates; Boring and earnest Americans; Maverick detectives working the system from the inside; Flat-Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers and American golfers; Cynical misanthropes; Women’s sport virtue signallers; Data bores; Bitter former athletes; Dim public schoolboys; Agency veterans looking for one last payout; That new biz bloke who has a different job every time you see him; Depressed lawyers; Prisoners on day release; you get the picture...
If this is you…
Go here: Leaders London, Twickenham Stadium.
When: 12pm noon, Wednesday 6th October 2021
To get 15% off the full ticket price, go via the Leaders Week London website and use the code UnofficialPartner15
Does it matter if Derby go bust?
Accrington Stanley FC owner Andy Holt is making a really important point.
I get the argument (against government regulation of football).
But you can't trust the people that are in it to do it now because they haven't done it. They've had enough chance. I don't want an independent regulator, but we're failing. We're not doing the job. Rick Parry's not doing the job. He's not resolving the issue. It would have to be resolved if it were me, even if it meant breaking up with the Premier League, it's so important, this fundamental issue, and it's not the quantum of money, it's the gaps. It's not about Man Utd being five hundred million and us being three, it's the gaps in between that's causing the problem. So, the argument against an independent regulator, for me, there's no merit in it because we are where we are, we've got clubs going bust. We've had Bolton in administration, we've had Wigan in administration, we've had Bury go bust.
I end up thinking to myself, well, does it really matter to the EFL or the Premier League, if Bury go bust? There's a Wrexham behind them, where you've got movie stars coming in blowing money that’s going to take their place.
What is a football club? How important is it to a local community? I know it's massively important to Accrington. But does it really matter to the guys that are running the league? Because they'll still have a league and there'll still be 72 clubs. So does it matter that clubs go bust? Does it matter, the situation at Derby? Does it matter that Wigan was sold from one owner to another owner, who put it in to administration two weeks later? If it's a one off problem caused by one rogue owner, I can understand that, but it's not. The system is creating rogue owners because to succeed, you've got to gamble money.
The journey toward understanding NFTs
Talking about NFTs while drunk is my new favourite thing.
I was sitting next to Si Oliveira at the Sport Industry Awards.
And I asked him about how Beckham could use NFTs.
He spoke a lot.
And there was a moment when I thought I’d got it.
I’d reached a place of absolute clarity and could now proceed to make my fortune by selling one to some other mug.
Then it was gone, like the bit just after deja vu when you try to reimagine the feeling but know you can never get back there.
A few weeks later, I was less drunk while talking to Will Brass from the Premier League at one of our UP private events.
Will’s job is to take NFTs and make money from them for the league.
So he’s been on a voyage of discovery, having taken briefings from people who presumably want to be the official vendor or use the Prem badge to add value to their own generic product when it’s out there in the wild.
We talked about Beckham’s goal from halfway.
Is that valuable? Who owns it? Why would you buy it when you could look at it for free anyway? Lisa Parfitt made a comparison between owning a Picasso and having a postcard of a Picasso, and then we wondered what happens if Damien Hirst does something odd and inventive with the Beckham jpeg; does that turn it in to something else or is it…oh fuck it.
It’s gone again.
More when we have it.
The Generic-to-Specific thought leadership genre
One of my favourite ways of appearing clever is to take something from another sector and apply it to sport.
I like this for two reasons.
It positions me as a thrillingly radical outside the bubble thinker with a hinterland beyond the parochial sportsbiz conversation.
It’s really easy.
Here’s a user’s guide:
A. The Worrying Title
Breaking: Most sports face extinction if they don’t innovate
B. Provide evidence for alarm
Link to ‘AN INTERESTING BUT GENERIC BIT OF RESEARCH’
C. Insert quote that’s vague enough to allow us to project on to it with a sports biz lens.
“A new survey of large corporations shows the pandemic has driven home the need for innovation, while demonstrating just how hard it is to do. Companies that can keep successfully innovating can reap outsized rewards, while those that fail, risk being left permanently behind.
"In the past, if you were a major company with large market share, you held onto your distribution channel and it was hard to get around you. That barrier just doesn't exist anymore."
"If you're an innovation laggard in any industry, the penalty now is far worse."
D. Hint at a solution, just an email away
The final paragraph suggests THE ANSWER lies in a Bespoke Black Box Methodology (BBBM), available at the usual hourly rate.
Raducanu x Tiffany - Too soon?
Interesting thread of conversation below Steve’s tweet.
More Raducanu stuff from last week’s UP newsletter.
Personal Bests
Sports biz people list their favourite things
This week: Hannah McKay, Director, International Partnerships & Experiential Marketing for American Express
Best influence on your career:
I’ve been lucky to work for and learn from so many inspirational women, to name a few: Lenah Ueltzen-Gabell, Belinda Stevenson, Vikki Ginks, Mariana Gavela-Llopis, Brandy Sanders, Lindsay Ulrey, Deb Curtis and Shiz Suzuki.
Enjoy the Unofficial Partner newsletter? Tell your friends
Subscribe to the Unofficial Partner podcast.
Help us game the Substack algorithm by liking this newsletter and spread the word on social media.
Follow @RichardGillis1 and @PaulPingles (aka the ill-judged Twitter handle of Sean Singleton, the UP co-founder).
Read over 100 gushing five star reviews for UP on Apple Podcasts - click the link to add yours.