Wrecks Em; Maximum Effort copycats; The Squeezed Middle; Whose numbers are they anyway; Geoff Boycott's guide to racism; Enshittification; Declan Rice's shirt; UP Billion Dollar Brainstorm is a hit
Overthinking the sports business, for money
This week’s UP Newsletter is sponsored by our friends at the Institute of Sports Humanities and Loughborough University London.
ISH and Loughborough University recently launched the new Leadership in Sport Master’s course, running from Autumn 2023.
Students on the MA Leadership in Sport programme will join an amazing ecosystem of sports experts – Loughborough University has been ranked the #1 university for sports-related subjects for the past 7 years. So the world’s top sports university is working in tandem with a unique sports network at ISH.
The new intake starts in October 2023 and applications are currently open.
Find out more at www.sportshumanities.org ISH and Loughborough University recently launched the new Leadership in Sport Master’s course, running from Autumn 2023.
That thing you couldn’t get in to was really good btw
Helluva night at DAZN last week for the Unofficial Partner Billion Dollar Women’s Football Brainstorm.
Invite only, velvet rope shit.
The premise: A breakaway disruptor league for women’s club football.
Angel City v Barcelona v Arsenal v NEW TEAMS NOT ASSOCIATED WITH BLOKES’ FOOTBALL.
Closed league. Independent. Outside of FIFA/UEFA World.
Like LIV Golf, but not shit.
The idea wasn’t what you’d call popular, but that was sort of the point.
You can hear the resulting podcast next week.
Wrecks ‘em?
I wish Ryan Reynolds hadn’t invested in Alpine F1.
RedBird Capital and actor Ryan Reynolds are part of a group buying a significant minority stake in Alpine Racing, a deal that values the F1 team a little north of $900 million.
The group, led by RedBird and Otro Capital, are paying $218 million (€200 million) for 24% of the team,
It spoils a story I was enjoying.
A welcome diversion from the whole Sport and P/E phase we’re going through.
The white knights of Wrexham are now revealed as serial investors with good PR.
And yes, I know, that’s what they are (and they’re really good at it).
But it’s been a fun ride. And an important one. Testing boundaries.
My fear is of contagion.
The Ryan Reynolds Playbook is being commoditised as we speak.
Sports marketing industry is a copycat machine.
Maximum Effort is this year’s Roc Nation, the coolest shop in town.
Every sponsor and new player reveal must now come with a version of Reynolds’ trademark knowing winks to camera.
The faux ingenue schtick.
Everything is irony, nothing is real.
Are you The Squeezed Middle?
And it’s where most of us live.
Ben Wells, CEO of PTI Digital put it in to a sports business context:
British Basketball Federation chairman Chris Grant this month said that, a year out from the Olympics, the organisation is so lacking in resources it cannot employ a single person full-time.
While in the last 12 months, not one major Olympic NGB was able to sign a primary sponsor, with the biggest deal of the year – British Cycling’s tier-two sponsorship with Shell – bringing significant amounts of criticism. In parallel Müller ended its long-running main sponsorship of UK Athletics after seven years. UK Athletics is currently on teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
This isn’t a situation unique to athletics. Headlines in rugby, cricket and the second and third tiers of football report of similar tales of woe – the result of unsustainable commercial models.
Hear the podcast here:
‘The culture in cricket is rotten’
The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) released a damning report in to the game in England.
The ECB has agreed to produce a full public response within three months.
The media’s coverage was revealing.
Good thread from Kick It Out chair Sanjay Bhandari:
The report states that “50% of respondents described experiencing discrimination in the previous five years” and that “the figures were substantially higher for people from ethnically diverse communities: 87% of people with Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, 82% of people with Indian heritage and 75% of all Black respondents”
Even that weight of evidence is no impediment to Nigel Farage and GB News, who sought Geoff Boycott’s view…
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Leaked Framework of the Week - The PGA LIV PIF NewCo
What happened?
The leaked “framework” agreement uniting golf’s PGA Tour, DP World Tour (formerly European Tour), and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit has detailed the creation of a for-profit subsidiary to manage commercial investments and assets for all tours.
The NewCo will be an umbrella for all future golf-related investments of the three groups and plans to create financial returns through “targeted mergers and acquisitions to globalize the sport.”
Why do we care?
There’s some stuff in it that goes beyond golf.
Two main threads to follow:
What is a Premier Corporate Sponsor?
'The PIF will invest in both the PGA Tour and DP World Tour as a “premier corporate sponsor.”
How will PIF’s ‘premier corporate sponsor’ show up?
Will it be overt and obvious, as in the PIF Saudi Open?
Or via the brands of its many investments?
Will there be blurring?
In other words, are we any closer to learning more about the difference between the words PIF, Saudi and MBS?
See also: Does Saudi money fund Chelsea?
Whose numbers will they use?
There was a long meeting in Detroit this week.
Rory McIlroy flew in, despite not playing that week.
The PGA Tour Player’s Board and some tour reps talked through the PIF thing.
The headlines were about world ranking points for LIV golfers and how they get the rebels back in quietly.
But there’s a nice bit in the detail.
Each entity is hiring outside firms to value its assets, which include everything from real estate to media and sponsorship rights. (Representatives from Allen and Company, an investment bank, attended the board meeting and explained the valuation process but did not get into specific valuations.) The parties would then mutually agree on proper valuations for each.
You’ll recall a previous UP Newsletter, which laid out the battle lines at that point:
Below is the letter sent by Andy Gardiner (PGL Founder) to the PGA Tour Player Board just over a year ago, the same board this week charged with ratifying the PIF deal.
The PIF/LIV deal has no mention of player ownership, which was the PGL’s main selling point.
As Jim Bowen used to say (Gen Z reference), this is what you could’ve won:
Hear Andy Gardiner of PGL on UP248
And then listen to Sean Bratches, one of the original brains behind LIV Golf. He left the organisation the week after this podcast.
Falling currencies and enshittification
Think of yourself as a media entertainment brand.
That’s the advice being given to every sports team, league, tournament and athlete.
The implications of this advice are discussed in this week’s podcast with Matt Locke, co-founder of Storythings.
Attention Matters is Matt’s series on the currencies of the digital era, starting with ‘the story of one of the most ubiquitous, and misunderstood, metrics of the last few decades - The Like.’
We are now coming to the end of the like as a metric of audience engagement. As the dominant social platforms all end up being video-led TikTok clones, engagement metrics have shifted from clicks to viewing. From TikTok to Netflix, the most important numbers now are not the big ones, but the long ones - it's all about how long something keeps your attention, not if it inspires you to click a button.
We discussed Corey Doctorow’s idea of enshittification.
HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Hear Matt on Friday’s UP podcast:
Inflation Watch
Meanwhile, we bagged a couple of collector’s items from West Ham’s changing room. The one on the right is Bobby Moore’s old shirt.
Which one will fetch the higher price in fifty years time?
