Unofficial Partner Podcast

Louis Theroux's documentary about the manosphere didn't at first seem to have much to do with sports digital strategy?
Until you get to the platforms: Kick. Rumble. A whole ecosystem of streaming channels that the sports business conversation barely mentions, yet where significant numbers of young men are spending serious time.
So we brought in Dan Ayers, VP of Transformation Digital at IMG, to ask: is the industry optimising for the wrong platforms?
What follows is a conversation that starts with Kick and ends somewhere much more interesting: in the weeds of Reddit moderators, Discord quiz nights, Iron Maiden's fan base, and what a thousand true fans is actually worth. 
Dan makes a strong case that the non-obvious channels aren't really about reach at all. Reddit and Discord represent a qualitatively different kind of engagement — audience-to-audience, not brand-to-audience — and the sports organisations that understand that distinction are building something that turns out to be genuinely valuable precisely when things go wrong.
There's also a sharp thread running through this about numbers — what a view is worth now that TikTok set the floor at zero seconds, why 15,000 concurrent viewers on a cycling stream is a better result than it sounds, and why the industry's fandom claims may be heading for a Barcelona email database moment.
Dan is a rare guest: someone who's been inside platform change long enough — from Sony Music in the early 2000s through to IMG's YouTube CMS work today — to have real opinions rather than consulting hedges.

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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.

Craig Hepburn sits at the intersection of enterprise technology and cultural institutions. He spent years as UEFA’s Chief Digital Transformation Officer, overseeing its digital ecosystem, OTT platform build, and Innovation Hub. He moved to Art Basel as CDO in 2023. He is now an independent AI strategist, Perplexity Fellow, and prolific writer on the structural implications of AI for organisations and industries. His Substack has become essential reading on the gap between AI hype and implementation reality.
Hepburn’s central thesis is that most people and organisations are “tourists in someone else’s architecture.” He draws a sharp distinction between using AI (prompting chatbots, generating content) and building with AI (constructing proprietary systems, workflows and tools). He argues the latter is what will separate winners from losers — and that the window for making that shift is narrowing fast.
Crucially, Hepburn’s argument extends beyond sport. His recent writing on “The Builder and the Billion Dollar Lie” contends that entire industries — consulting, systems integration, transformation programmes — were built inside the gap between the person who understood a problem and the person who could build the solution. Agentic AI, he argues, is starting to close that gap. That has profound implications for the agency model in sport.

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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.

This week we go behind the curtain of the 25th Sport Industry Awards, ahead of the big night at Battersea Evolution on Thursday 30th April. 
With an illustrious group of people from across the industry, Richard and Sean went to EY’s London Bridge offices in London to discuss the shortlist for the Business Moment of the Year Award.
The winner will be announced on the night. 
Seven groundbreaking moments over the past 12 months were judged by a panel of industry experts:
Brett Gosper, NFL Head of Europe & Asia-Pacific
Allan Noble, Partner at EY
Fiona Harold, CEO of World Netball
Nick Keller, Chairman of Sport Industry Group.
THE BUSINESS MOMENT OF THE YEAR 2025/26 SHORTLIST
1. CVC restructures its sports portfolio in to Global Sports Group
2. Creative Artists Agency (CAA) acquires Portas Consulting
3. Red Bull’s takeover of Newcastle Falcons
4. Public Investment Fund (PIF) acquires EA Sports
5. F1 The Movie 
6. The Bundesliga’s UK streaming strategy
7. Genius Sports acquires Legend

For full details of the shortlist, visit the Sport Industry website
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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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.

A live podcast recorded at MSQ Sport and Entertainment HQ in London for the launch of Callaway Golf's new brand film 'At Last'. 
You can see the film by clicking this link. 
As the golfing world looks to Augusta for The Masters, the first major event of the golf calendar next week, it was a good time to take the temperature of the business of golf with four experts from across the game.
Ben Sharpe, MD of Europe, Middle East, Africa, Pacific and India, Callaway Golf
Jason Wessely, Director of Golf, Sky Sports
Georgia Ball, YouTube Creator and PGA professional
Rob Spedding, Director of Content, Future Publishing
Topics discussed:
The State of the Game
Brand Over Product
The Influence Ecosystem 
Sky Golf's Numbers 
Women's Golf 
World Cup Overlap 

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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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.

Digital advertising has a dirty secret: most of what you're paying for never reaches a human being. Dr. Augustine Fou is a world leading expert in digital ad fraud and has spent 20 years watching the internet fill up with bots, fake impressions, and dodgy metrics; and the advertisers funding it often know, but keep spending anyway. The incentives are too comfortable to disturb.
Sound familiar? Sport has built valuation models, rights deals, and global expansion strategies on fan numbers that deserve the same scrutiny. This conversation is about the mechanics of self-deception, and why the moment of reckoning may finally be arriving.
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 @UnofficialPartner

We 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.