This is a blatant attempt to appear up-to-date with tech trends impacting sport #sportstech. We were just coming off a very successful web3 event at The Emirates, and were very aware that the hype around NFTs etc was dissipating quickly. The audience poll is a nice touch. We’d been talking to a few people about monetising the UP community and my New Year resolution was to engage the newsletter audience on a more systematic basis. And like all resolutions, my enthusiasm lasted about a week before I thought fuck it, I don’t actually care what the newsletter readers think, they’ll have to take what they’re given and be grateful, which sort of remains my default position. But 40 votes! 40 fucking votes. You go to all the trouble of setting up a simple binary culture war yes/no type question aimed at generating valuable data (aka new oil) by taking the temperature of UP’s audience of sports industry insiders, and only 40 of the cunts bother to press a button.
This feels very random and I can’t actually remember where it came from. It was probably a Christmas Day conversation with my daughter about future plans post-University and her saying some of her mates are staying on for another year. From this starting point, I seem to have gratuitously slagged off the sports business higher education sector for no other reason than I liked the phrase Panic Masters. Bit of a drive-by. Don’t @ me.
Joining the dots a year on, I can see that I was looking for a fresh angle in to the decline of crypto and wanted to meld that with some generalised anti-Tory sentiment, which is always latent, just below the surface. I think we’d just done a podcast on the FTX scandal and I was looking to shoe horn in something that positioned me as a left leaning pseudo intellectual, with good hair.
A year on and I think this opinion still stands up. A theme of the last few years, that runs through some of the podcasts and the newsletter, is the chase for new audiences and how that chase impacts the current one. There’s a broader thing here too about how so much of the sports business conversation is taken up with nebulous abstractions such as the future or fans or sport, or women’s sport. An aside: I remember one morning working on a strategy deck for some random sports client and a young bloke in the office said, quite wistfully, ‘Nothing we talk about actually happens’. It made me really laugh because it’s so true. Bad Strategy is so often about an imagined future, and the job of the Bad Strategist is defined as saying something clever and surprising and then post rationalising it, ideally with numbers.
I really love shit ideas. I find misplaced optimism funny rather than inspiring. New products are often delivered with an earnestness that makes them ripe for piss taking. I’m very aware that this response reveals more about me than it does the new thing, whether it’s The Super League or FIFA’s World Club expansion or the latest hipster sportainment format. There’s a podcast series to be done on 100 Shit Ideas That Defined Sport. Btw, I’m not sure why I capitalised venture capital in the above clip.
Think this was a filler, or half an idea that I couldn’t be arsed to finish. Funny how the term FAANGs fell out of favour.
This bit got more reader response than anything else in 2023.
