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THE SPORTS INDUSTRY NEWSLETTER FROM LEADERS
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Welcome to Worth Knowing, the definitive sports industry newsletter from Leaders – James Emmett here, not too long back from LA and a series of West Coast events (and tacos), with David Cushnan and the Leaders team more or less fully recovered from Bangalore (and curry) and ready to go again.
Looking forward to seeing many of you next Tuesday and Wednesday (8th and 9th) in London for Leaders Meet: Innovation.
This newsletter is free and easy to sign up to – so why not use it to nudge people along your pipeline.
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🧠 5 QUESTIONS SOME OF YOU ARE ASKING YOURSELVES THIS WEEK
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1. Is it possible to do cultural transformation on the cheap?
The current processes playing out at Manchester United, the New York Jets, and even the US government (but let’s not go there) suggest that no, real organisational change requires real organisational personnel shifts, which can come with all manner of costs. Knowing more about how the world outside sport operates can only be helpful as these kind of changes are implemented: whether it’s new thinking, new approaches or new ways to structure your business, we’ve lined up experts from the likes of Waitrose, YouTube, LW Theatres, Capgemini, the Met Office, Art Basel and the Climate Change Commission to help at Leaders Meet: Innovation, next week in central London. Do drop us a line if you’d like to be in the mix for one of the last seats in a very influential gathering,
2. What’s the most impactful thing you can do at a conference?
I’ve got a patter for a pre-panel prep call these days. To get the juices flowing and to prime my panellists for excellence, one of the questions I like to ask is: ‘what’s the most impactful session you’ve seen at a conference and why was it so impactful.’ On two separate occasions in the last few weeks, the response has been ‘when the CEO of x company wore a leather jacket on stage.’ We may well be back in the 50s, but clearly you can make just as much impact with how you dress as with what you say.
3. What’s the best way for sports executives to hit back?
Is it, as IOC Communications Director Mark Adams chose, sending a letter to the Financial Times, or is it, as YES Network CEO Jon Litner decided, commandeering time on a YES New York Yankees game broadcast to – combatively – explain to viewers a distribution dispute with Comcast?
4. Is it time for LaLiga to get some flowers?
It’s certainly time for Roger Brosel and his tech-focused content team at the Spanish league to get their dues. The gentle but innovative integration of data visualisation into the league’s host broadcasts is genuinely world-leading.
5. What’s the best athlete-centric content campaign of the last 18 months?
That was one of the questions in our latest Attention Seekers workshop at Spotify’s very jazzy HQ out in LA. We had senior folks from sport, music, Hollywood and beyond in the room, and the responses offer a nice snapshot right now of what’s hot (in a particular part of the US)....
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5 other things Worth Knowing you need to know this week
1) The Boston Celtics have been sold for $6.1 billion to a group led by William Chisholm, Co-Founder of PE firm Symphony Technology Group – a record value for a North American sports franchise.
2) Silver Lake has completed its Endeavor acquisition.
3) Kirsty Coventry will assume the Presidency of the IOC in June, after winning last month's election in the first round. She will be the first woman and the first from the African continent to take on the role.
4) Brisbane has confirmed a plan to build a new 63,000 stadium for the 2032 Olympic Games – it will also become the city’s new prime cricket venue.
5) Carlsberg has rekindled its relationship with Uefa, becoming a sponsor of men’s and women’s national team football until 2030.
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🔗 WORTH KNOWING - THE LINKS
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🤝 GOOD PEOPLE, GOOD PLACES
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Hiring
• Rangers are hiring a new Chief Commercial Officer.
• Volleyball World is looking for a new CEO after incumbent Finn Taylor announced his intention to step down as the head of the International Volleyball Federation’s commercial arm at the end of April.
• London Marathon Events are looking for a Marketing Director to replace the retiring Penny Dain.
• The Ear to the Ground agency is looking for a new Strategy Director.
• The NFL has up to $300,000 a year to pay to a new VP of Global Influencer Marketing.
• Deloitte has up to $171,000 a year to pay a new Event Experience Manager for its portfolio of US sponsorships.
• Fanatics are on the hunt for a Director of Shows and Activations for its Topps International and Fanatics Collectibles division, based in London.
• Turnkey is looking after a number of C-suite hires for Relevent, including a Chief People Officer, Chief Financial Officer and a Chief Communications and Marketing Officer.
• The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games local organising committee are hiring a CMO.
• Here’s a very useful round-up of currently open mega-event roles.
Hired
• Shawn Doss will leave his role as Chief Business Officer at Elevate for a new job as Chief Revenue Officer at On Location. The dollar-getting ultramarathoner will switch agencies next month.
• Reach plc CEO Jim Mullen will take over as the new CEO of the Jockey Club on 1st June.
• Zoe Webber, Nuria Tarre, Maggie Murphy and Rafaela Pimenta have been named as new Directors of Women in Football.
• Shana Ferguson will leave her role as Interim CEO of USA Swimming to become the Chief of Sport & Games Delivery at LA28.
• Ruth Shaw is leaving her role as CEO of the Premier League Charitable Fund and will take up a role as an independent consultant at Affleck & Co.
• Doug Jossem has been hired by Madison Square Garden Entertainment as Executive Vice President, Global Sports Partnerships.
• According to Sport Business, Mediapro has hired Libero 33 founders Sunil Kaikini and Austin Houlihan to run a new London office.
• Aly Wagner has been named Chief of Strategy for new seven-a-side women’s football competition World Sevens Football, a new club competition which will start in May with a prize fund of US$5 million. It is being fronted by Gotham FC minority owner Jenifer Mackesy and investor Justin Fishkin, who will be CEO.
• Yannick Ramcke has been promoted by OneFootball to General Manager, OTT.
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⚽ THE BUSINESS OF SOCCER IN FOCUS
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I was out in LA a few days back for the inaugural Business of Soccer summit that we put on in tandem with Concacaf and Major League Soccer, as well as with our Stateside cousins SBJ. 150 North American soccer powerbrokers convened in one room across two days to discuss the state of play for the sport ahead of what is hoped will be another transformative moment in the World Cup next year.
1. In administrative terms, Concacaf is ultimately responsible for growing the game across a very disparate region in North and Central America. The 2026 World Cup will of course be hosted across three of Concacaf’s nations: USA, Canada and Mexico. The excitement – and the preparedness – across all three is palpable. But if it feels like every man and his dog is trying to commercialise soccer in the USA right now, that’s because they pretty much are. The message from Concacaf President Victor Montagliani was clear: “At times it does feel like oversaturation. The market will bear what it can bear. But you can’t just come here and expect full stadiums. A lot of these games are Instagram games; if you want to see a real game in the US, go watch MLS.”
2. For MLS, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, the onset of another home World Cup is exciting, but not the be all and end all. For the many team owners and CEOs in the room at the Business of Soccer, the consensus seemed to be that it would be, above all, a great opportunity to show domestic club partners the major scale – and therefore value – that soccer could have. Born in the aftermath of the 1994 World Cup in the USA, the league is a very different beast today to the one it started out as then. Its Commissioner, Don Garber, who is not far off 30 years at the helm himself, has proven himself as something of a Svengali as a billionaire-whisperer-cum-real-estate-guy. MLS is now a league of 30 teams with franchise valuations hovering in and around the billion-dollar mark. Fuelled by Garber’s storytelling prowess – and the trend for entertainment plaza real estate projects with sports teams at the core – there is appetite across the country for more. That’s some achievement given – as LAFC owner Bennett Rosenthal pointed out – the league is rated ninth in the world for quality of football. “With all the infrastructure and advantage that we have here,” he continued, “we should be top three at least.”
3. The ambitious talk wasn’t limited to club football. Alexi Lalas – a Fox Sports pundit and a stalwart of the USA team that competed at the home World Cup in 94 – was adamant about what the national team’s goals should be next year. “We are America; we want the best and we want to be the best. Winning the World Cup should absolutely be the goal.” The team’s limp 0-1 defeat to Panama in the Concacaf Nations League semi-final at SoFi Stadium later that afternoon provided an immediate reality check. But all the best sports stories need some adversity to triumph over, right? Montagliani and the Concacaf crew expect one of their participating nations to reach the semi-finals (though they wouldn’t be drawn on which one!). Of more importance, though, is that the tournament resonates “from corner stores to corner offices” across the host countries.
4. Montagliani and Garber were both in fine fettle in a no-holds-barred conversation with Abe Madkour to round out the event last week. Garber had a nice line – given to him in the form of a piece of commissioner-to-commissioner advice by his old boss, former NFL boss Paul Tagliabue: “You’ve got to keep the owners who hate you away from the ones who are undecided.” Table planning at league get togethers is clearly an underrated skill, but Garber obviously has a knack for it. He'll need that nous more than ever this year as the sometimes-tense discussions around changing the MLS calendar to fall in line with the European model continue. The issue is complicated and could be a huge headache for cold market teams like Minnesota and Chicago. Unravelling contracts – player and sponsorship – could also be tricky. But the prospect of alignment is a potential gamechanger. It would give MLS clubs a level of parity in the international transfer market that could deliver a substantial uplift in revenues and a huge surge in the quality of players that suddenly becomes available.
5. Garber was also in pithy form when he summarised the three most common buckets of questions he’s had thrown at him over his time as commissioner: “Questions about Beckham; questions about Messi; and questions about promotion and relegation.” On the latter, he made the point that while the league’s owners are in build phase – investing capital in infrastructure and real estate projects across the country – a multi-tiered MLS pyramid won’t work. “But we’re smart,” he said. “Maybe in 10 years, promotion and relegation will make sense.”
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