UCCSA RFP WTF; The most conflicted man in sport; Warming Up; The Three Ps of Sports Marketing; Women in Union; John Collard RIP; Premier League shirts hit a billion
Overthinking the sports business, for money
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Spoiler: The big European clubs want more money
What happened?
The UCCSA bids went in this week.
UEFA Club Competitions SA (UCCSA) is the commercial joint venture between UEFA and the European Club Association (ECA).
Tuesday was the deadline for UCCSA’s RFP (acronyms assemble).
This covers the commercial rights to UEFA’s men’s international club competitions for 2027-2033.
So, the money coming in from UEFA Champions League, Europa League and Conference League competitions.
Who cares?
On one level this is just a fight among the big swinging dicks of the agency world. See SportBusiness’ exclusive on the runners and riders here.
Beyond that though, the nature of the responses to the RFP tell us something about the ongoing relationship between sport and money and the timing is intriguing given the fevered gossip hovering over the agency sector.
It’s also about power in European football: who has it, who wants more of it and what will they do with it.
What’s really happening?
The incumbents are Team Marketing and Relevent Sports, the latter added to the party to sell UEFA to the American market last time around.
TEAM Marketing has been the incumbent since the inception of the UEFA Champions League in 1992, creating and then iterating one of the most commercially successful models in sport, much copied never bettered. (UP 45 The Champions League Model).
The decision to issue a tender fell out of the post-Super League bunfight, as the big clubs sought to get more money from UEFA.
For TEAM, this is existential.
Making enormous amounts of money for UEFA is just about all it does, has ever done.
They’ve also played a useful role as human shield for UEFA when the clubs moan about wanting ever more money and demanding innovation to the model in the style of F1’s Liberty-era American adventure.
Relevent’s promise last time around was to lift the value of UEFA’s inventory in the US, a promise they delivered on, upping the value extracted by around x3.
That last tender, for 2022-27, felt like a rush job.
This one feels different. If there is to be seismic change in the way UEFA sells itself, the next few weeks will be when they do it.
That could mean breaking up the portfolio by geography and parcelling out each market on an agency by agency basis.
Or it could mean breaking it up by category and selling media, sponsorship and licensing separately.
Or it could mean something more fundamental.
What is UCCSA, really?
Currently, not much.
It is a JV between UEFA (51%) and ECA (49%).
It has no staff and is essentially a committee, headed by Alexandr Ceferin and the most conflicted man in sport, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, who as chair of ECA, UEFA Exco member, owner of PSG and chair of BeIN Sports is both seller and buyer in this process.
What could UCCSA become?
One scenario sees UCCSA become UEFA’s defacto in-house agency, replacing TEAM and probably manned by ex-TEAM personnel and some assorted UEFA and/or ECA execs.
Another scenario sees Two Circles - which has UEFA women’s rights in the US - using the opportunity to build a full service media sales offering, backed by the Charterhouse p/e cash pile.
Currently, 85% of UEFA’s money comes from media sales.
See also, Someone’s about to make the biggest promise in sports business history
How many Ps in sports marketing?
GCSE Business Studies students know the four Ps - Price, Promotion, Product, Place, not necessarily in that order.
In sport, there are two Ps - Profit and Performance.
That’s the divide that runs through the industry.
Every sports team and event rights holder runs along these lines that split commercial and the playing side.
The other P that gets lost in all this is the Planet.
And it gets to the conundrum that underpins sport’s globalisation drive.
From FIFA and the IOC down, mission statements contain two conflicting ambitions, to grow the game and contribute to mitigating global warming.
Madeleine Orr, author of Warming Up and co-founder of Sports Ecology Group, laughed when I asked about this.
‘Welcome to the growth versus de-growth conversation’.
Is it possible to take money from fossil fuel industry sponsors while claiming to be pursuing net zero emissions targets?
No, it isn’t.
Remembering JC
Horrible news came in from the AGW last night that John Collard has died.
I’m really shocked by it, because I’d spoken to him only recently and he was on great form, full of fun, gossip and mischief.
I’ve known John for over twenty years.
One story:
He was PRing a golf brand, I can’t remember which, but who had snagged Seve Ballesteros as ambassador.
This was mid-2000s, and at this stage Seve was putting his name to anything that came through the door.
John got me down to Druid’s Glen in Ireland as part of the media access around the deal.
I had a couple of feature interview pieces commissioned for a national newspaper and a golf mag.
But Seve wasn’t happy.
I sat in the hallway of the hotel, outside the room where JC had lined up - many, many - other journalists, all of whom had been promised time with the great man.
I was last on the list.
Through the door I could hear that famous Spanish voice.
‘Fuck off! No more, just go and tell him to fuck off, I’m not doing it’.
John poked his head around the door, smiling.
‘Seve’s ready for you now’.
RIP JC x
A billion quid on Premier League shirts
Feels like a moment.
Women in Union
Congratulations to Ali Donnelly and Jenny Mitton for the launch of Women in Union, a much needed movement within the rugby business.
Excellent, optimistic and insightful evening.
Lucy Wray put it well: everyone can see the opportunity. But women’s sport can’t thrive in the shadow of men’s sport. It needs dedicated resources, patient capital and focus.
Women in Union will be canvassing opinion from people across the game and sport more broadly. Make sure you get involved.
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Deeply substantive column. Thank you for sharing that beautiful anecdote in the end, Richard.
The uncertainty surrounding the new Euro anacronym process is very reminiscent of the College Football Playoff (CFP--another anacronym you all will appreciate) media rights negotiations. For UEFA there is an intermediary guaranteeing (vs direct sale to the media companies in the CFP negotiations), but the tremendous uncertainties over basics like "changes in future formats", "will there be a super league/super conference", "will linear tv still exist that far out in the future?" are quite similar. In these cases, the strongest, most confident bidder is usually the one who feels they have the greatest influence/control over those future uncertainties.
In the case of the CFP, it's Disney/ESPN, who has been written about in many forums as being the purchaser of the rights and then the man behind the curtain that reinforces the value of those rights by moving massive schools from other conferences into the conference that they control the rights on. ( https://awfulannouncing.com/ncaa/fbs-ad-fox-espn-realignment-valuations.html ).
I know nothing about the Euro process but the interesting bidder for me is someone who believes they can influence format/participant changes in the future that will give them high confidence or a "guarantee" they hit the number. Think: they can influence including teams from the US or Brazil into future Champions league and thus be able to sell massive "domestic" rights in those markets that mitigates a lot of the uncertainty about how the European media rights market will evolve.
This example isn't the right one but that's the kind of the thinking or capacity to influence that could drive someone to bid "confidently" on the guarantee that Euro Anacronym is seeking.
Thank you for writing the most thoughtful piece on this topic that has been published to date.