Unofficial Partner Podcast

The Bundle with Yannick Ramcke of OneFootball and Murray Barnett of West26 Sport. 
Agenda:
1. The Commercialisation of the Hydration Break
2. Did the Ratings Success Change US Football Broadcasting?
3. Sky's £1.6bn ITV Takeover: The Return of the Full-Funnel Broadcaster
4. Is the Sports Doc Gold Rush Over?
5. DAZN's A$5.3bn NRL Bet 
Cross-cutting threads
Reach vs revenue
Commercial innovation is a ratchet
Everyone's paying not to lose
The access era is ending
The Unofficial Partner Scholarship - Applications Now Open for the Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH)
🎓 Five 50% scholarship places are available for Unofficial Partner applicants in the upcoming Strategic Sport Leadership MA cohort, in September.
The Unofficial Partner Scholarship is designed to support ambitious sport industry professionals.
Five (5) scholarships available to successful applicants
Amount: 50% off tuition fees for those starting September 2026
Eligibility: applicants must come through the Unofficial Partner network, and work in the sports industry
Application procedure: Candidates will automatically be considered for the scholarship on the basis of your application. No separate scholarship application is required. You must reference Unofficial Partner in your application
Please contact Emma Rota at emma.rota@sportshumanities.org to learn more and secure your place in the September cohort.
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.

The 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 @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.

Today'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 Summary
Recorded 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 information
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.

FIFA 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 information

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.

Host: 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 @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.