Podcast
Unofficial Partner Podcast
Hosted by Unofficial Partner · EN
Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. Our guests are a who's who of the international sports industry talking about the big issues.
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UP561 Is your name on the list? The winners and losers in Two Circles' $174bn sports IP revenue league table
2d ago00:59:07Tap to summarizeThe Two Circles Sports IP Revenue League 2026 is full of numbers. The headline is that sports IP is worth $174billion. But the story is more interesting and nuanced than that. Richard went to the agency's offices in Holborn to hold the report up to the light. Joining him is Gareth Balch, CEO of Two Circles, and Charlie Dewhurst, Chief Commercial Officer of SailGP — the race sailing property founded by Larry Ellison of Oracle fame.Who's in, who's out and why should you care?Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.
Transcribe →UP560 What is IMG now?
1w ago00:53:28Tap to summarizeToday's guest Adam Kelly has been at IMG since 2001, connecting the business back almost to the McCormack era. Now President of IMG within TKO Group — which also owns UFC and WWE — he oversees IMG's media rights, production, digital, brand partnerships, and events businesses. This is his second appearance on Unofficial Partner; the first was in 2022, when he laid out a vision for reimagining IMG as a full-service growth partner rather than a transactional rights broker.Episode SummaryRecorded during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, this conversation uses the tournament as a launchpad for a broader argument about where sport sits commercially in 2026. Kelly's central thesis is that the entry of global streaming and technology platforms — Netflix, Apple, Google, Amazon — is the single most important shift in the sports media landscape, and that it is unambiguously good for sport. Richard pushes back throughout: on the financial extraction argument, on the volume fallacy, on whether global streaming actually serves the kinds of sports that real fans love. It's a genuinely spiky conversation.This episode of Unofficial Partner is sponsored by The Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH) ISH educates sport’s current and future leaders around the world, as the leading independent provider of sports leadership education and insight.Their Strategic Sport Leadership Masters (MA) is for sports industry executives to study alongside their careers – designed for professionals who want to build on their experience, strengthen strategic thinking, and connect with a global network of peers working across sport.Applications for the next intake on the 2026 Strategic Sport Leadership MA, starting September, are open.Visit sportshumanities.org for more informationUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.
Transcribe →UP559 Revenue-maxxing: How FIFA Changed The Game
2w ago00:35:58Tap to summarizeFIFA will make $13bn from the four-year cycle culminating in this summer's tournament — nearly $9bn of it landing this year alone. For comparison, the Paris 2024 Olympics, the other Greatest Show on Earth, generated $5.24bn. Total. For the whole Games.It wasn't always this lopsided. The World Cup actually trailed the Olympics financially until 2010, when South Africa's edition pulled in $4.19bn against London 2012's $3.23bn. Since then the gap has only widened: 18% revenue growth from Russia 2018 to Qatar 2022, and FIFA is projecting another 73% jump by the end of this summer. They've already raised the budget for the next cycle to $14bn — before this tournament has even finished.So this episode isn't really about football. It's about how a governing body turned a month of matches into the most lucrative event in the history of sport — and how that changes our relationship with the World Cup.My guests are Joey D'Urso, Times journalist and author of More Than A Shirt, and Carla Bilche of Off-Ball Logic, who's spent months tracing the commercial history of the World Cup to understand exactly how we got here. Carla has a name for it: "revenuemaxxing." Once you hear the numbers, the word makes total sense.This episode is sponsored by the Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH) ISH educates sport’s current and future leaders around the world, as the leading independent provider of sports leadership education and insight.Their Strategic Sport Leadership Masters (MA) is for sports industry executives to study alongside their careers – designed for professionals who want to build on their experience, strengthen strategic thinking, and connect with a global network of peers working across sport.Applications for the next intake on the 2026 Strategic Sport Leadership MA, starting September, are open.Visit sportshumanities.org for more informationUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.
Transcribe →UP558 Chat_UP: What The Mythos Shutdown Means For AI in the Sports Business
2w ago00:46:45Tap to summarizeHost: Richard Gillis (Unofficial Partner) Co-host/analyst: Andy Shora (TFG Labs)Three stories this episode:The Mythos/Fable shutdown — Anthropic ordered by the US government to disable its two most powerful models for all foreign nationals globally, with ninety minutes' notice. First-ever export control action against an AI model. Discussion covers the jailbreak vulnerability cited as justification, the EU's response (calling for "technological sovereignty"), and what abrupt model withdrawal means for any organisation building critical workflows on a single frontier-model provider.AI slop hits sports marketing — The Manchester Super Giants' AI-generated kit-reveal video (formerly Manchester Originals, 70% RPSG Group / 30% Lancashire) becomes a viral case study in what happens when cost-cutting meets low-effort generative content. Errors included six-fingered batsmen, three batsmen on the pitch at once, bowlers sprinting the wrong direction, and floodlights on in daylight. Conversation moves from "is this actually bad PR or accidental virality" to the deeper implications for trust, craft, and physical/skeletal modelling in sports performance AI.Yann LeCun and the case against LLMs — LeCun's exit from Meta, his $1.3bn raise for AMI Labs, and his Viva Tech argument that the industry has gone "LLM-pilled." Explains "world models" and contextual intelligence, the stochastic parrot critique, and why LeCun believes open-source, physically-grounded models are a more credible path than scaling language models alone.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.
Transcribe →UP557 Ed Smith: What Sport Got Wrong About Moneyball
3w ago00:53:00Tap to summarizeAI commoditises knowledge production and throws judgment into scarcity. In this episode, Ed Smith asks what that means for sport, education and the people building careers in the business — and why the humanities might be the most undervalued edge in an age of machines.About the guestEd Smith is an unusual hybrid in today's sports world. An academic, he left Cambridge with a Double First in History, and is the author of several excellent books including Luck, Making Decisions and What Sport Tells Us About Life. He served as Chief Selector for England men's cricket from 2018 to 2021, and is the current President of the MCC. In 2019 he co-founded the Institute of Sports Humanities, which offers the Strategic Sport Leadership Master's — a programme designed for ambitious sports industry executives looking to accelerate their careers while continuing to work. Applications for the next cohort, starting at the end of September, are now open: sportshumanities.orgWhat we coverThe Moneyball hangover. Why the lazy reading of Billy Beane — "scouts are idiots, if it's not data it's not real" — was always wrong, and how elite sport has swung back to data as one source among many, not the whole story.The limits of scientism. Ed on "creeping scientism," the idea that nothing's true unless it can be proved — and why some decisions (COVID policy, selection calls) carry intrinsic radical uncertainty that probability can't resolve.Can judgment be taught? The case that the entire humanities tradition — criticism, history, weighing competing evidence — is really an apparatus for honing judgment, the skill AI makes scarce rather than obsolete.Orchestration and the curated platform. What happens when a creative questioner goes straight to a powerful AI platform with curated data — near-instant insight — and why the bottleneck becomes asking the right question.The apprenticeship gap. If AI absorbs the entry-level rungs of knowledge work (in law, in sport), how does anyone climb to the judgment seat at the top? Ed's two answers: institutionalised challenge, and getting your hands dirty early.Sport as the last human product. Why Ed is "long sport" in the age of AI — live, embodied, uncertain competition as the most anti-fragile asset there is — and why the Tech Titans buying into London Spirit were buying the green grass, not the gadget.The purpose problem. As production gets frictionless, meaning becomes the scarce good. Where the humanities, the arts and sport come into their own.Careers without bosses. Charles Handy's "look for customers, not bosses," the death of the 50-year career path, and what an ideal student looks like: someone who doesn't know what's coming but trusts they can cope with it.People, books & ideas referencedJohn Kay & Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty · Peter Bernstein, Against the GodsIain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things (and his left-brain/right-brain work)Michael Lewis, Moneyball · Howard Marks, Oaktree memos · Charles HandyInstitute of Sports Humanities — MA delivered with Loughborough University LondonUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.
Transcribe →UP556 'Serviette Maths': Sky Sports Boss On The Premflix Threat
3w ago00:58:29Tap to summarizeJonathan Licht, Chief Sports Officer at Sky Sports, discusses Sky's dominant position in UK sports broadcasting, strategic partnerships, and the future of sports media.Key topics:Sky's portfolio dominance: 225 Premier League matches, 1,000+ EFL games, 118 WSL matches, Formula 1, cricket, golf, NFL, tennis, darts, netballThe growth paradox: How building sports audiences creates competitive tension at rights renewal timeSky Labs & The Hundred: Co-creation process that helped develop franchise cricket format and broaden appealMoney & certainty: Why "our money is good" matters to rights holders vs. global streamersNational champion positioning: Local expertise, bespoke market strategies, and talent relationships as competitive advantagesOn-air talent strategy: Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, and the blurring lines between Sky platforms and independent creator channels like The OverlapYouTube & highlights distribution: Free-to-view content as funnel vs. risk of training audiences not to pay; cricket highlights on YouTubeWomen's sport investment: Business rationale + "higher purpose"; WSL growth (20% audience increase), ICC T20 World Cup, position as UK's biggest investor in women's sportsStreaming vs. linear: Resilience of traditional broadcasters; Sky Sports+ adoption; why global scale doesn't equal market-specific valueCompetitive landscape: Paramount (Champions League), Netflix, Amazon, DAZN; lessons from Ligue 1 direct-to-consumer failurePremier League production transition: In-housing away from IMG; operational implications for Sky's hosting roleThis podcast is sponsored by The Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH) ISH educates sport’s current and future leaders around the world, as the leading independent provider of sports leadership education and insight.Their Strategic Sport Leadership Masters (MA) is for sports industry executives to study alongside their careers – designed for professionals who want to build on their experience, strengthen strategic thinking, and connect with a global network of peers working across sport.Applications for the next intake on the 2026 Strategic Sport Leadership MA, starting September, are open.Visit sportshumanities.org for more informationUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.
Transcribe →UP555 The Lord's Question: What Does The MCC Brand Stand For?
Jun 1600:53:43Tap to summarizeThe £295million sale of London Spirit franchise was one of the big sports business stories of the last year. Some of Silicon Valley's most successful and famous leaders buying 49% of The Hundred's Lord's based franchise, in partnership with The MCC, one of the most storied names in cricket.So what is the MCC today, and how is that changing in one of the most important years in the great ground's history? In this episode, Richard Gillis is joined by Katie Maier, Chief Marketing Officer at MCC, and Ellie Roach, Senior Consultant at InCrowd, to ask that question directly. The conversation moves through the central tension of the brand — a 200-year-old members' club, still 97% male, now sitting alongside a 51% stake in The Hundred, a property built on the language of inclusion. Who is an MCC digital follower? What does the MCC look like from India? What's the thesis behind the Silicon Valley investmentWe go in to, the data-led case for not chasing vanity metrics in overseas markets, and a content strategy built on six pillars that runs well beyond the cricket itself. The episode lands just weeks before the most significant summer in the ground's history for women's cricket: the first ever women's Test at Lord's, alongside the Women's T20 World Cup final, fifty years after the first women's international was played there.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.
Transcribe →UP554 The Bundle World Cup Special
Jun 1200:53:02Tap to summarizeRichard, Murray Barnett and Yannick Ramcke convene for a World Cup special, using the 2026 tournament as a lens on how sports broadcasting is shifting beneath the surface. The conversation moves from Qatar-to-2026 comparisons (more accelerated change, more fragmentation, but a still-basic mainstream default) through the "AI slop mountain" that the expanded tournament and unfriendly European kickoff times will generate, into the rise of creator- and personality-led shoulder programming — anchored by Goalhanger's Netflix deal for The Rest Is Football.The panel pushes back on the easy consensus. Yannick's central argument: free-to-air, creator-led distribution cannot sustain the economics FIFA needs, and the real risk isn't broadcasters losing matches — it's the complement becoming a substitute. The trio then dissect FIFA's failed India and China deals, separating intrinsic value from negotiating theatre (the "aspirational vs delusional" exchange), and the structural mismatch between billions of eyeballs and uncertain monetization in "numbers markets" rather than "willingness-to-pay markets."They close on FIFA's designation of YouTube as a "Preferred Platform" — which Yannick reads not as value creation for broadcasters but as a short-term revenue-maximizing tax on platforms that hadn't paid before, a net new nine-figure sum with little practical change to the ecosystem. Throughout, the recurring tension is reach versus revenue, and whether risk-averse broadcasters will actually use the first-10-minutes rights they've been handed.This episode is sponsored by The Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH) ISH educates sport’s current and future leaders around the world, as the leading independent provider of sports leadership education and insight.Their Strategic Sport Leadership Masters (MA) is for sports industry executives to study alongside their careers – designed for professionals who want to build on their experience, strengthen strategic thinking, and connect with a global network of peers working across sport.Applications for the next intake on the 2026 Strategic Sport Leadership MA, starting September, are open.Visit sportshumanities.org for more informationUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.
Transcribe →UP553 Live: The Business of Horse Racing
Jun 900:57:02Tap to summarizeA first for Unofficial Partner: six years and 550+ episodes covering every sport going, we'd somehow never devoted an episode to the sport of horse racing. So we fixed that — live, in front of an audience at The Big Belly Comedy Club, London. We had as a starting point Spotlight Sports Group's new report, The Horse Racing Audience Opportunity. Compiled by the Racing Post's parent company, a deep dive in to the commercial future of the sport.Panel 1: Charlie Boss (Bristol City CEO, formerly CEO of The Jockey Club), Josh Apiafi (ex-Betfair, founder of Rewards4Racing), Tom Kerr (Editor of The Racing Post / SSG).Panel 2: Brant Dunshea (CEO of the British Horseracing Authority), Sharon O'Regan (CEO, Weatherbys), Sam Houlding (SSG).Where's the money coming from beyond betting? Does the product fit the audience? How do investors look at racing today? All that and more. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.
Transcribe →UP552 Chat_UP: Google's AI pivot and the end of the subsidised era
Jun 200:57:41Tap to summarizeChat_UP is Unofficial Partner's AI series created in collaboration with TFG Labs.The brief: cut through the AI firehose, work out what matters, and bring it back to the business of sport. Three stories this week.Story One — Google I/O 2026Google used its developer conference to reposition from "a search company that does AI" to an AI infrastructure company. Headlines: Gemini 3.5, Gemini Omni (real-time processing) and Gemini Spark, a proactive always-on agent that brings agents to search. Plus "Ask YouTube" — pulling answers out of videos rather than watching them.Why it matters for sport: if fans send agents to fetch scores and highlights rather than searching themselves, the SEO-built internet shifts under everyone's feet. It raises hard questions for the sponsorship measurement economy (it's an agent engaging, not a fan) and for anyone building on someone else's land — Google can devote a team to your idea and eat your company. Andy's takeaway: get your house in order, own and structure your own data so you can switch foundation models at will.Story Two — The End of the AI Subsidy Era?A cluster of cost stories: Microsoft cancelled internal Claude Code licenses over token-based billing, Uber reportedly burned through its 2026 AI budget in four months, and US AI software prices jumped 20–37% in six months. Is the bill finally landing?Why it matters: SaaS-era seat pricing is breaking down as agentic systems do the work of many. The in-housing dream — replacing agencies with "two smart people and a model" — looks shakier once you absorb the price volatility the vendor used to carry. For low-margin, high-volume businesses (betting being the obvious one), a few percentage points on cost-per-inference is existential, not a line-item. Andy's counter: much of this can run locally on open-source models, and Chinese models are catching up fast at a tenth of the price.Story Three — Bryson DeChambeau & the Athlete CreatorThe golfer-turned-YouTuber, in contract talks with LIV, is a proxy for the athlete-creator question. He's been on the AI train for years — using and then leading an eight-figure acquisition of AI coaching start-up Sportsbox AI.Why it matters: the collapse of production cost liberates the wannabe Brysons, but the real change is top-line — launching clothing lines, apps and realistic content without occupying an athlete's training time. The deeper thread is disintermediation: leagues being routed around by their own star athletes, and the old rights-holder puzzle of making space for personalities while selling exclusive TV deals.About the co-hostAndy Shora leads TFG Labs. His background is QuantumBlack, McKinsey and BCG Gamma — a wealth of experience from outside sport, brought to bear on the sector.About TFG LabsTFG Labs is the innovation engine of TFG, a business evolving from data-and-insights into an "augmented intelligence" company serving sports organisations. Labs was set up to get ahead of AI and build practical agentic systems that solve real problems in sport — deliberately not chasing the hype cycle.Got questions or voice notes? Send them to Richard via the Unofficial Partner Substack newsletter.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.
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