Unofficial Partner Podcast

How is sport impacted by the cost of living crisis?
The answer depends on where you are in the marketplace.
The small global elite of sports rights holders are doing just fine. Billions of dollars in m…

Likes, Followers, Shares, Video Views: these are the currency of digital publishing.
But as Matt Locke argues in today's conversation, change is coming.
The importance of the Like as a metric of audie…

This is an episode of The Bundle, our regular deep dive in to the sports broadcast and streaming market with regular guests Yannick Ramcke, head of OTT for OneFootball, Murray Barnett, director of th…

Ed Smith returns to the Unofficial Partner podcast.

Ed is the former National Selector for England cricket. He is an author (including What Sport Tells Us About Life and Making Decisions), academic an…

Today's guest is Michael Bond, author of a new book exploring the nature of fandom, a fascinating and entertaining investigation in to worlds of obsession, belonging and human connection.
We talk abo…

Today's guest sits at the epicentre of the football business. 
Charlie Marshall is the CEO of The European Club Association (ECA), the hugely influential organisation, which is the only group official…

In April, 2019 Tottenham Hotspur football club opened a new £1 billion state-of-the-art stadium, built on top of the old White Hart Lane ground in North London. One of the sports business stories sin…

Why do we care about some events and not others? Why do some tournaments capture our imagination and interest, while others seem contrived? 
Will an expanded 48 team FIFA World Cup work in 2026, or wi…

Joanna Coates started her career as a fashion buyer at 16 and became CEO of two of UK sport's major governing bodies.
From 2015 to 2019, Joanna Coates was EnglandNetball's CEO and worked with the gov…

The Buy Side is our regular series in which we talk to brand marketers about sport and sponsorship.
This week's guest is Stuart Wareman, SVP of Sponsorship, Events and Experiences for Accor, the Fren…

The Big Idea is our series on creativity in sports marketing with regular sidekick Simon Moore, the award-winning consulting creative director.
Today we focus on one of the most awarded campaigns in r…

What's going on at UK Athletics?
The last few weeks have seen a series of stories about the financial plight of the governing body.
In the accounts released in December, UKA returned a £1.8million defi…

Sports Podge is a British sports industry institution. The invite-only networking lunch began life 18 years ago in the upstairs room at the famous Langan's Brasserie in Park Lane, London. 
Ahead of th…

Crypto.com has been one of the biggest spenders in the sports sponsorship market over the last three years, putting its brand to properties including FIFA World Cup, F1 and the Aston Martin team, UFC…

What's the difference between the US and European sports marketplace? 
Few people are better positioned to answer this question than Jon Stainer, the US based Englishman who is Global General Manager …

What's your next job? Where will it come from? What are the factors that make you more or less likely to get it?
What's your office culture like? Can you maintain culture when most people are working…

The big retailers are years ahead of sport when it comes to understanding their own customers.  
So we asked today's guests what can sport learn from Sainsbury's, Tesco, Target and Amazon. 
We're joine…

Kumar Sangakkara is one of the most important and influential voices in international cricket today and in an ideal position to offer insight in to many of the current sports business themes. The IPL…

DAZN continues to be one of the most talked about companies in the sports media world since its launch in 2016. But the story is shifting from its initial ambition to be 'The Netflix of Sport'. The l…

Marina Erakovic's family fled war torn former Yugoslavia when she was a small child, and she grew up in New Zealand where her precocious tennis talent was nurtured. After winning nine titles in a thi…