Unofficial Partner Podcast

Ryan Norys is the Chief Revenue Officer at Tottenham Hotspur. This is a candid conversation about the commercial fortunes of the club as it brings the front of shirt sponsorship to market at a time of genuine uncertainty.
Spurs finished 17th last season. Commercial revenue grew 40% in three years. That tension runs through the entire discussion.
Norys' journey to Spurs was via City Football Group, WME, the LA Dodgers and Miami Dolphins. Now he's navigating the post-Levy era, the post-Son era, and a Premier League shirt market about to be reshaped by the gambling ban.
Why do the naming rights to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium remain unsold, six years after coming to market?  
What do the London NFL games actually look like from the US side? 
How commercial revenue climbed while league position collapsed
The governance shift under Vinai Venkatesham and what it signals to partners
Why Tottenham stopped actively selling stadium naming rights
The honest assessment of life after Son Heung-min
Local versus global fandom and what football clubs actually know about their audiences
The view from Miami when the NFL comes to London
Building value around what you can control when you can't control team performance 
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 BILLION DOLLAR RACE: WHO WINS SPORTS AI?
There's a race on. Bloomberg Terminal for sport. Sports Business GPT. The industry's operating system. Who builds it first?
THE LAST FRONTIER
"Once you give away that level of knowledge, it's gone. This is the last frontier before all your intelligence is gone." — Craig Hepburn
Live from Fuse UK, featuring Craig Hepburn (ex-UEFA), Richard Ayers (Rematch), Sean Betts (Omnicom), Andy Shora & Chris Woodcock (TFG Labs and 21st Group).
BIG QUESTIONS
Will sports bodies repeat the platform mistakes? Is your archival footage the new gold? What happens when AI commoditizes entertainment?
KEY INSIGHT: Data isn't spreadsheets anymore—it's everything. Your match footage trains robotics. Your highlights feed Google's models. Are you selling or building moats?
"Don't give it away. Build your own API layer. Make them pay for your oxygen." — Craig Hepburn
The optimistic take: live experiences become priceless when AI makes content free.
Who adapts fastest wins.
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.

What if we could fix the conference panel? You know the format—interesting people, good intentions, and about ninety percent of it forgotten by the time you reach the bar.
Chat_UP Live was held at FUSE headquarters in London. Rather than just another AI panel, we ran an experiment. Working with the team at TFG Labs, we built a custom AI co-pilot that captured the onstage conversation in real time, took in audience questions, and offered evidence-based responses that pushed the discussion in genuinely non-obvious directions. Think of it as a second brain for live events.
Did it work? Partly. Was it interesting? Very. This is test and learn in public—and we're sharing the results.
In this episode, you'll hear how we approached football club valuations with the system running behind us. If you want to interrogate the model yourself, there's a link in the Unofficial Partner Substack newsletter—but it won't be live forever.
Part two drops Friday, where we go deeper into the race to build the operating system for sports business.
A huge thank you to our friends and partners in this experiment, in particular the following people:
At FUSE: Helen Burford, Louise Johnson, Monica Conway, Zainab Zaman and Annabel Wilson, Lucy Basden Smith and Sean Betts.
At Twenty First Group: Blake Wooster, Andy Shora, Omar Choudhuri, Dan Zelezinski, Chris Woodcock and Conall Milligan.
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.

Welcome to The Bundle, our regular series on the sports media and streaming marketplace with co-hosts Yannick Ramcke, General Manager of OTT at the streaming service OneFootball and Murray Barnett, founder of 26West Sport and formerly of F1, World Rugby and ESPN.
This episode of the Unofficial Partner podcast is brought to you by Sid Lee Sport.
Sid Lee Sport is the fame-making creative and sponsorship agency for brands in sport. Through exceptional creativity, deep sponsorship expertise, and flawless on-site delivery, they help brands, sponsors, and rightsholders unlock their full potential in sport - most recently picking up a Leaders Sports Award for their work with Lidl at UEFA EURO 2024.
Everything they do is driven by a culture of effectiveness - because in sport, performance matters. Not just on the pitch, but in the work too. So whether you want to build buzz, connect with audiences, or do something that actually cuts through, Sid Lee Sport knows how.
Visit sidleesport.com 
Sid Lee Sport - where brands become champions.

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.

Nikki Doucet has the most interesting job in British sport and one of the most difficult. Certainly, everyone in the sports business has an opinion on what the CEO of WSL Football should do to capitalise on the potential of women's professional football in England. 
The role wrestles with many of the conflicts and trade offs currently at play across the sports business - open vs closed leagues, sport as entertainment, the anti-DEI lobby vs progressives culture wars, the changing definition of a sports fan in the digital platform era, the role of private investment in leagues and teams. The tenure of her job may be a few years, but the decisions taken will have a disproportionately large impact on women's football for a generation. Some want her to go quicker, to bring in private equity and blow it up. Others want her to focus on the long term, and build with the entire pyramid of women's football in mind. 
But what does Nikki Doucet think?
Listen to find out.
This episode of the Unofficial Partner podcast is brought to you by Sid Lee Sport.
Sid Lee Sport is the fame-making creative and sponsorship agency for brands in sport. Through exceptional creativity, deep sponsorship expertise, and flawless on-site delivery, they help brands, sponsors, and rightsholders unlock their full potential in sport - most recently picking up a Leaders Sports Award for their work with Lidl at UEFA EURO 2024.
Everything they do is driven by a culture of effectiveness - because in sport, performance matters. Not just on the pitch, but in the work too. So whether you want to build buzz, connect with audiences, or do something that actually cuts through, Sid Lee Sport knows how.
Visit sidleesport.com 
Sid Lee Sport - where brands become champions.

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.