Unofficial Partner Podcast

Wimbledon didn't ban influencers. It said it wouldn't create a creator accreditation category and would confiscate ring lights and selfie poles under existing rules. The headline ran anyway, and it tells us more about sport's gatekeepers than about creators. Richard Gillis is joined by two people who sit on opposite sides of the creator deal. Jo Tongue is CEO of Tongue Tied Management, representing athletes, broadcasters and content creators. A former BBC sports reporter, she edited 5 Live's 606 for a decade and is a director of Women in Football. Lisa Parfitt is co-founder of The Space Between, the sports marketing agency for challenger brands whose work includes the ECB's women's cricket campaigns and FIFA's Women's Champions Cup launch. She previously co-founded Engine Sport. They discuss who is responsible when creators misbehave, why rights holder channels are underdelivering for sponsors, and what sport now demands of its elite athletes.
Key discussion points
02:30 The US Open ring lights and the "Wimbledon bans creators" headline: what actually happened
04:00 Jo argues the blame lies with whoever invited the creators, not the creators themselves
06:45 Lisa on snobbery, gatekeeping, and why influencers didn't invent annoying tennis crowds
10:00 Unilever shifting 50–70% of activation budgets to creators
11:30 How agents match talent to the outcome a brand actually wants
16:00 Lisa's research showing rights holder channels reach about 27% of a sport's fans
20:00 Creators versus journalists, and paid versus earned
23:30 Who controls creator behaviour: rights holders, sponsors, or hosts
29:30 Brand risk after Callaway and Good Good, and the cost of heavy approvals
34:30 Jazmin Sawyers and the pressure on athletes to become creators
41:00 Rehab programmes, insurance and tunnel selfies: which rules actually matter
45:30 Women's sport and whether there are enough women's football creators
48:00 Women's T20 World Cup: a 70/30 split between sport and lifestyle
52:30 Taking first-timers to Lord's, and the value of the outsider's question

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.

Unofficial Partner's regular series on the sports media and streaming marketplace. Host: Richard Gillis. Co-hosts:Murray Barnett, founder of 26 West Consulting (formerly F1, World Rugby, ESPN); Yannick Ramcke, general manager of OTT at OneFootball.
The rights ceiling: NFL and IPL as warning signs on rights inflation
Exclusivity in question: co-exclusivity, mixed packages and "intelligent auctions"
India: JioStar's monopoly, monetisability, and football's stalled growth
DAZN's EverPass deal and the pivot to sport's "operating system"
DAZN and the road to a 2027 IPO
BBC cuts: Ski Sunday, the Women's Football Show, and the death of the magazine show
What free-to-air and public-service broadcasting is for now
FIBA Women's World Cup on TNT: laddering rights across platforms
Fox and IndyCar: broadcaster enthusiasm as a value driver
Local vs global: why sport resists the Netflix model
This episode is sponsored by Leaders Week London
2 Weeks To Go
Leaders Week London is now just two weeks away.
On 7 and 8 October, Stamford Bridge will become the meeting place for the global sports industry, bringing together senior leaders from across teams, leagues, brands, broadcasters, investors and more.
With three stages of insight, dedicated forums, masterclasses and plenty happening beyond the stages, it's two days built around the conversations, connections and opportunities that are much harder to create from behind a desk.
We'll be there, and if Leaders Week London is still on your radar, now's the time to make it happen.
Visit leadersinsport.com/UP for more information and use UP15 for 15% off your Summit pass.
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.

Spin Class is our regular series with experts in sports communications, PR and reputation management. 
Football's transfer window is one of the definitive sports business stories. Its cast of characters include players, agents, managers, club owners and a small number of journalists cum influencers with massive social media followings and the power to impact the market via insider intel and gossip. 
At the centre of all this is the clubs' PR teams seeking to control the narrative. 
Context: This summer's transfer window saw Premier League clubs break their all-time summer transfer record with spending reaching £3.49bn, compared to £1.13bn spent by clubs five years ago. 
A total of £506.5m was spent on deadline day itself, up from £391m last year.
The total amount spent during the window considerably dwarfs the  and underlines the power top English clubs have to attract talent, according to figures provided to BBC Sport by Paul Macdonald, founder of FootballTransfers.com.
Three of the 10 most expensive signings in the history of football have happened this summer – with all of them being Premier League signings. In fact, this summer window featured four of the top flight's five most expensive ever deals.
Kate Miller — Chief Communications Officer, Tottenham Hotspur
Dan Johnson - former Premier League communications director
Neil Daugherty — Senior Managing Director and UK Sports Sector Lead, Teneo

This episode is sponsored by Leaders in Sport
Women's Sport at Leaders Week
Women's sport isn't short on momentum; the bigger question now is what the industry does with it. At Leaders Week London this October, that's where the conversation will go next: how to turn growing audiences, investment and attention into lasting commercial growth.
Across the main agenda, the Women in Sport Breakfast and Women's Sport Lounge, you'll hear from the people building what comes next, and get closer to the ideas, partnerships and decisions shaping the market.
If women's sport is part of your business, Leaders Week London 2026 is one you'll want to make time for.
Visit leadersinsport.com/UP for more information and use UP15 for 15% off your Summit pass.
Leaders Week London tickets are available on this link.
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.

Nigel Rushman is one of the most effective operators in the modern sports business — a fixer and dealmaker who spent four decades at the delivery end of major events, building a parallel international career brokering deals across governments and industry. 
After a start in restaurants — London, Paris, a Michelin three-star kitchen — he built a catering company, sold it, and moved into commercial events and then crisis-management PR. His breakthrough sporting client was Peter de Savary's 1992 America's Cup challenge, and de Savary went on to take a 20 per cent stake in the business. In 1991, Rushman's company won the media-management and accreditation brief for the Rugby World Cup across five nations — a complex, pre-internet logistics operation that, for a good few years, almost nobody else could deliver. That became Rushmans: accreditation, media services, security consultancy and event delivery for major tournaments, later including the 2007 Cricket World Cup across nine Caribbean countries, where he was Event Director.
In the mid-1990s he bought a two-page photocopied newsletter called Sport Business from its founder, installed Kevin Roberts as editor, modelled it on PR Week, and later swapped it out of his business in a share deal — a transaction from which, by his own account, he made £7 million. The title went on to become the sector's best-known trade brand.
Rushman also served as a strategic adviser on Qatar's successful bid to host the 2022 World Cup, and did significant business in Cuba, selling the country's baseball rights. He now lives between Monaco and Dubai and runs Rushmans Decision Intelligence, an AI-assisted advisory platform he pitches as faster, cheaper and sharper than the big management consultancies.
This conversation ranges across his career, the vanished world of the sports-rights "pirates and bandits", the financialisation of football, diversity and inclusion, the future of clips and betting, and what he is building now.
The recording took place in Soho at the offices of Spectacle Partners, thanks to Scott and Richard for their help. 

This episode is sponsored by Leaders Week London
There's a new home, a new set-up and plenty more to get excited about at Leaders Week London 2026. The move brings The Summit into central London, with a new campus-style experience designed to make it easier to move between the people you want to meet, the conversations you want to hear and the business you're there to do.
There'll be all-new agenda formats, three stages of insight, and more ways to connect throughout the day. When day one finishes, Leaders After Dark takes the networking into the evening across Stamford Bridge. It's a proper evolution of Leaders Week, and one we're looking forward to this October.
Visit leadersinsport.com/UP for more information, and use UP15 for 15% off your Summit pass.
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.

Few people sit closer to the epicentre of the sports digital economy than Daniel Kirschner. As co-founder and CEO of Greenfly, he oversees the connective tissue running between rights holders, athletes and fans; the infrastructure that turns a moment on the pitch into content on your phone within seconds. 
Creator strategy and the platform deals. How rights holders selectively route content to favoured creators (Goldbridge as proxy) and to TikTok/YouTube. Richard presses the FIFA-TikTok/YouTube deals as a "tax" to stop leakage; Kirschner reframes winning as getting the highest-quality version out first.
Clips as crown jewel vs top of funnel. The central tension. Richard argues clips are now the product, not the trailer; Kirschner holds that short-form is top-of-funnel for fandom and complements rather than cannibalises live—but concedes it should be a meaningful revenue pillar, not something dumped on social.
Who pays. If not the broadcaster, then who? Discussion of separate short-form rights deals (NFL–Bleacher Report), YouTube revenue-sharing, and sponsors/brands paying to attach to viral moments (the Messi Smartwater example) with earned-media-value tracking.
US vs Europe market structure. Centralised US leagues vs fragmented European clubs with promotion/relegation instability; more friction means more need for the technology. College sports as the closest US analogue to the European model.
Athlete economics and authenticity. Athletes get content free, aren't paid, yet treat access as a favour. Editorial-versus-commercial distinction, and the authenticity question when agencies get involved.
Measurement, impressions and AI slop. Richard's scepticism about impression numbers and the YouTube view-counting change; Kirschner on transparency of measurement, the coming flood of AI slop, and live sport's authenticity as the hedge against it (Kushner/Lakers).
How the platforms see sport. Whether an eyeball is just an eyeball—Kirschner argues sports content is undervalued because of its emotional resonance and, distinctively, its joy: fans relive wins, not losses, which makes the content more valuable to advertisers.
The SportsPro short-form showcase. Closing plug for the awards recognising ~40 short-form producers, and the broader argument that the craft has shifted from throwaway to a properly valued discipline attracting serious marketing budgets (Unilever's 80% shift toward short-form creators).
This episode is sponsored by Leaders in Sport
The 2026 Leaders Week London agenda is live, and there’s already plenty we’ve got our eye on. Across three stages at Stamford Bridge, Leaders in Sport will bring together senior figures from across the industry to get into the questions, challenges and opportunities shaping where the business of sport goes next. From leadership and commercial growth to creativity and technology, there’s a lot packed into the two days and no shortage of sessions worth making time for. We are looking forward to hearing Gary Lineker talk about The Art of the Story: Pitches, Publishing and Podcasts. 
We’ll be there on 7 and 8 October, hopefully we’ll see you there too. 
Visit leadersinsport.com/UP for more information and use UP15 for 15% off your Summit pass.

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.