Inside The Six Nations: How Rugby is Changing…For the Better | Tom Harrison, Six Nations CEO (Ep.105)

28:35And, you know, in the same way where we would be taking opportunities back to our partners, not just Guinness, but any one of our partners. You know, we just assigned Capgemini. We obviously got a relationship with Breitling as well and IHG Hotels. And we do a lot of work with all of them to make sure that we're continuing to service them in the right way. And that's not always about providing more opportunities to put their brand all over the product. It's more about how do we create those authentic connections with our audience, which sometimes are not about branding. They're absolutely about digital connection and something real which gives them access to our audience in new and surprising ways.

29:24Media. Free to air, payable, make as much money as we can out of media rights. We've got a responsibility here to provide this historic legendary tournament to as many people that can access it as possible. is this a continuing friction that you you kind of um have to to manage and balance and the commitment that you've had to free to wear is amazing and as a sports fan you know you see so few of these tournaments now staying in the places where they are accessible but let's be honest the big money for so many sports now comes from those media rights deals so how does this all come together? Again, Charlie, it's a complex negotiation and it's a complex set of challenges that you set out with.

30:10Honestly, with Nations Championship having just been confirmed on free-to-air in the UK for 26 to 29 as well, plus we have free-to-air coverage for all international rugby in France. So our two biggest international markets are covered with free-to-air. So every international match is going to be on free-to-air in those two markets for the next four years. That's an amazing opportunity, but it doesn't come without, I guess, the performance of the competition being at a certain level, which demands the attention of broadcasters that in the main, the free-to-air broadcasters are finding it more and more difficult to retain premium sports rights.

30:51And you would think that there would be more available on the table from a traditional pay TV underwrite. but actually through the process of really getting beneath the bonnet of what the Six Nations is all about, understanding its cultural relevance in those markets, you soon understand that the premium that's being paid is very significant from free to air. In addition, you don't necessarily have the underlying volume of content that, for example, in my former life in cricket, you would have to support a pay TV model, which would seek to get a 1.5, 1.8, 2x kind of rights fee being committed.

31:32So I think in the end, you take a view and you say, what is the premium? And where do we write that premium? Do we write it in terms of a commercial premium? Or do we write it in terms of a reach premium? And where are the other revenue models, revenue generation opportunities that come out of providing the widest possible platform for your competition on free-to-air TV. Because the spin-off opportunities are massive, not just from an audience perspective, but obviously from commercial partnerships. From a digital reach perspective as well, all of that is enriched. All of your own direct-to-consumer ideas, channels, competitions, polls, they all benefit from having free-to-air coverage.

32:14So I think we took a very rounded view. And whilst we had very significant interest, as you would expect from the pay TV sector, from all the big players. I think we felt on balance. Six Nations playing the role that it does in the cultural significance of the UK, France and Italy and all of our markets. Let's try and make sure that this has got the biggest possible reach. Seamless access to the ultimate premium hospitality experiences at the biggest sports and entertainment events. That is what Seat Unique is all about. Now, I'm really delighted to partner with them. I've known the business for a long time.

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33:22So missing a drop doesn't mean missing the event. They know the concern around hidden fees and unclear pricing. What you see is what you pay. No nasty surprises at checkout. Discover your next premium experience by following the link in the description to seatunique.com. Now that you have external investment and external investment, private equity is very much geared towards making money. Recognizing that value can be quite interesting, I'd imagine. Your position here is, look, yes, you may leave a little bit of money on the table today, but the overall value, what we're building longer term is going to improve if we can keep the accessibility where it is.

34:00So do you find yourself on that stakeholder management piece, having to really emphasize some of those points? Yeah, look, I mean, I would say that the perception of that is not the reality in my experience. I think what I have seen through operating with CBC around the table for three years now and having known them for a lot longer, there is an absolute understanding of the broader project, the vision of what we're trying to achieve for international rugby. And it's about growth. And I don't think there are shortcuts to growth actually in this day and age. I think you have to get beneath the bonnet of everything in your power and do everything brilliantly well in this context to enable growth to happen because our competitive landscape is so significant.

34:51We're competing with everything that people spend their spare time doing. There is a premium associated with attending rugby matches, particularly Six Nations matches. That means that there's an awful lot of people who want to be there who can't be there because of the necessity and the premium associated with attendance. We are also trying to grow the game for women, for girls, for families. We're trying to help clubs ensure that they are in a healthy state going forward. We're trying to help people who are keen on rugby from all sorts of different backgrounds and that don't have an opportunity to play.

35:24They all need to be serviced in some way, shape or form, which can deliver growth in different ways other than hard currency from a media rights deal. So I think, and my experience is CBC absolutely understand that in the same way that our unions are obviously absolutely delighted that we've managed to secure free-to-air coverage for the next four years. Now we need to together make sure that we absolutely ensure that we squeeze every bit of value out of those relationships because we don't know what's around the corner and we're all trying to predict what the future holds in media. But that is such a hard question at the moment as you will know Charlie yeah um you know well basically we joke you know we said we're as much in competition with Taylor Swift as we are anything else and the fact that you'll go on to Spotify and you'll make a decision if you're going to tune into music or if you download a podcast and recognizing that and how you place yourself or prioritize you know some of those things is so key to being able to to succeed I what's what do you think about rugby's um ability to utilize the ott offerings that we've seen so much in sport over the last 10 years you know you had iconic uh documentaries like living with the lions which almost you know with the early kicking off of now what we'll see is the modern day we've had people like sam walton in here and he said it with a smile on his face because i know i don't want to see finn russell having a cup of coffee i want to see him smashing into someone in training and seeing the side of it that i that i don't get to see as a fan but we all know humanizing and And bringing that kind of rounded image to people is a huge appeal for some.

36:56Where do you look at it? Well, my view on this is if you fast forward, let's just say four years, but it could easily have been this time around. We are probably going to be looking at some form of direct-to-consumer streaming model, whether that's outsourced or whether it's owned content, like having our own channel like a rugby pass or something equivalent. At some point in the future, the deals are going to be very different to the traditional kind of pay TV or even free to air deals that are being done at the moment, where you're moving from effectively an 80 minute whistle to start, whistle to finish model, which is your live content, to an always on 24-7 servicing a sport in a completely different way.

37:38And one of the roles that we've got to do with Rugby Union over the course of the next two or three years, and we don't have long to do this, is to change the way in which we present our sport or that we are prepared to present our sport to our audience. Because even now, we've just had a relationship with Netflix where we did two seasons of Six Nations Full Contact. And that was an interesting experience of dipping our toe in this space. And I think we started to get under the, you know, start to understand how difficult some of that stuff is to get behind the curtain of a dressing room and to get in the face of coaches and performance directors and strength and conditioning coaches who are not keen to give you that access.

38:20We've got to be better at that. And we've got to get ready for a world where if you're going to attract the kind of support and rights fees that we would need to sustain the sport in a very different model, in a streaming model, then we've got to provide an awful lot more than 80 minutes to start, 80 minutes of rugby to get that revenue. Across commercial, across media, you generate all of this revenue as Six Nations. What happens to that revenue? We have a distribution to the unions. You keep some centrally that's then utilized, reinvested, dividended. How does it work? Basically, we generate the revenue.

39:01It all comes centrally into Six Nations and outside Six Nations' own very limited cost structure. It's distributed on a revenue share basis to our six unions and CBC. So effectively, it's whatever comes in comes out, less the costs of our own operation, which, as I said, share an office with PRL and URC in Victoria. We've got 38 full-time staff. So we're a pretty low-cost operation. And our job is to generate as much revenue as we can through the rights that we own as a sovereign business in our own right, the media rights and the commercial partnership rights, and deliver that back to the unions.

39:43Do you have weighted distribution? So what I mean by that to people is, you know, do England get 20 percent? Do France get 18 percent? Do Ireland get 60 percent? Without giving away any secrets here, Charlie, it is weighted, yes. It comes up a fair bit because the Premier League is a great example of an equal distribution piece to try and make sure that the collective competitive nature of that competition maintains and exists. If you have weighted distribution, are you just feeding money back into the most successful organizations that therefore become more successful because they have more money to plough back into it?

40:15And that's where the Premier League did a really good job. In rugby, in competition, you have six teams in here. you want to make sure that everyone is competing at the highest level. Is it as much in England's interest to make sure that they can sell that Italy match as much as they can sell that France match in the long term as it is to make sure that they get an extra few percent because they contribute a little bit more to that revenue pool? Yeah. Well, look, I think there's a big difference between how the models work in a club-based environment to an international-based environment. And cricket's a useful parallel to draw here.

40:49So if you want to understand why India in the cricketing parlance gets greater distribution than any other nation, then the answer that the BCCI would give, and there's a huge amount of truth in this, is that if you want to look at the biggest opportunity for growth in the game anywhere around the world, you probably want to go to the market with 1.4 billion people. And they're not even scratching the surface in terms of how they are, you know, extracting that opportunity to grow the game. Yes, in India, but on behalf of the whole global game. So there's a very powerful argument which suggests that the biggest markets are the biggest markets because the biggest opportunity is in those markets.

41:37So I think you've got to understand that element, that if your ambition is growth, then it's not straightforward just to have an equal distribution across multiple geographies and expect growth to be the answer. What you might find is that the bigger operations, in this case, the RFU and the FFR, have the biggest and the most amount of mouths to feed. and therefore the demands on that revenue is far greater from the markets that are driving the most value back into the center. So I think it's a complex debate, but it's one which certainly I'm in favor of a weighted distribution, just to kind of answer your question.

42:17I'm not in favor of an equal distribution because I don't think the opportunity of that revenue in each of those markets is equal. And I think you need to take that into account when you're dealing with the principal revenue streams of that national governing body. Is it a conversation that you've had to have? Is this something that people have asked a question like I've just asked around it? Yeah, we've had it internally very recently. And we've had a kind of revision of our distribution model, but for the right reasons. And we have that discussion. The fact that people aren't probably aware of that shows how well that discussion went, how well it was handled, how understanding it is and how strong the connection across our seven shareholders is at Six Nations.

43:04It's a very robust, mature debate, which talks about what is fair, what is equitable, and how do we define both of those things in the context of crown jewels revenue this, you know, these are your media rights, as you rightly said earlier in our chat. This is the most valuable revenue stream you have. You should be generating proper revenue from it. What about then the match day, the live, the experience? The experience is hard to match when you go to a top international rugby match, whether it's the quality of the rugby on the pitch or the fun that you can have around it. That is such a huge part of sport.

43:40When you have these opportunities and you have just a few game weeks to really capture it, how do you look to utilise that? Well, I'm forever blown away by the fact that living in London like I do, but you can go anywhere in the country and drive around a town or a village. And during the Six Nations, your marketing is done for you by every pub in the country that's saying, come and watch the game here. The bunting's out and the blackboards are full with the schedule and the fixtures. Look, it's just, I don't know of an equivalent anywhere in the world, actually, of how it connects with people and how much it means to people.

44:18Part of it, I think, is the fact that we don't play as home nations against each other in many tournaments and not many on an annual basis. And that obviously adds some spice to our own. Every game's a derby of some description. I think that the way we capitalise on this every year is just to make sure that we have an understanding that the vast majority of people, 92 % of rugby fans, are not going to watch a Six Nations game live in the stadium as spectators. So that tells you the scale of the market that we're serving through our digital and TV content. So we're acutely aware of that. There's this stat that in Wales, and this is despite having had a hard time on the field recently, but in Wales, you will get between 75 % and 80 % of people, the population of Wales, watching Welsh rugby.

45:09Really? During Six Nations. So, I mean, I've never heard of a stat, having had a lifetime in the media space, I've never heard of a statistic like that. But that is the kind of connection and the kind of engagement that you get. And that kind of stat goes into our thinking in terms of media strategy. You better be really careful about how you, when you're talking about don't break things, then that's a really good example of something that plays a completely different role as a cultural event in one of our stakeholder markets. What do you think it is about international rugby that captures that?

45:43Is it as simple to just say, well, rugby's in the fabric? Well, I think it is about history and heritage and greatness that has been achieved on the field by quite recent teams in Wales' case. They're the most recent home nations team to win a Grand Slam. I think there is that unbelievable connection. And you only spend a bit of time in Wales to understand how enriching that and how deep that connection is. Obviously, Welsh rugby is going through some difficult moments right now, But they're just as capable of turning that round as extremely quickly, almost down to the fact that because there is such a connection, and it is so important to the people of Wales that they have something to sing about and they have something to shout about with respect to their international rugby team.

46:29You mentioned briefly your past life in cricket. You were chief executive of the ECB before you took this job on. when you were coming into rugby and you were handling these kind of moments versus how you'd look at, let's say, England playing a test match or having its short form games? Well, I have a healthy detachment in this role, which I failed to have in my association with ECB. I found it really, you'd live every ball with my job at the ECB, which I absolutely loved. And it was such a privilege to hold that role for seven and a half years. look, it's something that you live and breathe that role.

47:10I'm not a federation chief executive now. And the difference is massive in the sense that you're not at the, you know, the coalface of every performance of your national team, male, female, disability teams. We would get into, you know, you really live and breathe that stuff. The difference is, I think also that the England cricket team were playing all the time. And the rugby teams internationally have got 13 weekends where they're out on the park. And I think that provides a bit of breathing space, but probably not much. And seeing the reaction of our CEOs in Six Nations Rugby, you know, you can tell they're not really, they're not always enjoying it.

47:48It's really, really stressful stuff. But yeah, the cricket was amazing. We had some amazing times and we had some tougher times too. but I loved every minute of it actually if I'm honest. But the different not having to put your flag in the sand now representing a multiple union body. Yes, I'm as French or Italian as I am English nowadays, Charlie. Correct. It's a good political answer. It's really good. The rebrand was something I was really interested in. Firstly, we sit here, we pray for people to create and push boundaries and be innovative and modernize and therefore I am really conscious and hate it when something happens and everyone jumps down the throat of it and says, no, it's the traditional thing.

48:33Why are you taking that away? Clearly from a pure aesthetic piece, it was a big shift and a shift towards far more modern thinking. How stressful, how do you even begin to go about something like that when you are playing with such a precious entity to so many people? Yeah, look, and let's be super clear about this. This is about connecting with audiences that are going to be here for the next 30 or 40 years and trying to be relevant again to a younger generation. Look, I understand it was probably created a bit of discomfort out there. Let's just say that. I think it was an important shift to make.

49:13And I think what you can expect is shifts to the brand as we sort of start to, you know, look towards how that's landed and where we go from here. So I think it will be the first of a big jolt. And what we'll see going forward is smaller jolts, which probably bring it back towards the center ground where perhaps majority of our audience live over the next couple of years. So a bit of a kind of cryptic answer there. But look, it was an uncomfortable moment. I think we were prepared for destabilizing things a little out there in respect of how Six Nations and its IP were treated. We now own the IP in a way that is undisputed.

49:57I think that was important and not to have a kind of confusing message about who owns Six Nations rugby. But it was an uncomfortable moment. I think we were OK with it. But I think we've learned and we've listened and we'll probably make some shifts over the course of the next couple of years to bring it back to a more, as I said, a more center ground perspective. How important were the M and the W to start differentiating between those? To start differentiating, they were really important. I think that once that understanding is there, the requirement for that may not be always there in the future.

50:26And if a brand is able to stand on its own two feet, once you've established that it's a separate competition with a separate brand, you can move away from those very visual indicators that this is the men's and this is the women's in the future. Time's a healer with these things as well. For people that don't like it, the aesthetic value of something is huge and no one likes change, really. Yeah, that's definitely right. And look, yeah. But look, I think the message I think is that we've listened to that. And I think the criticism was that we've had from some quarters was fair, genuinely thought it was fair.

51:02And whilst you'll get some extreme stuff and you probably need to ignore the extreme on both sides, I think we, on balance, probably didn't get it all right and we'll continue to listen and make sure that we do get it right over the course of the next couple of years. I don't want to sit here and say, oh, it's amazing and we really nailed it and we got it all right. I don't think we did. And that's on me. So we'll listen. And we generally move that into a place where I think people feel very comfortable. New forms of IP in tournaments. Let's bring cricket back into it as well. This pulls together quite nicely investment.

51:35It pulls together what you've done with the Six Nations over the last few years. It pulls together the 100. It pulls together whether the real value today often in sport sits with that kind of legacy product or is it in challenger leads. Cricket's probably been the place where it's been done most effectively. It's not just the IPL. You now look at the success something like the 100s had. Obviously, we've had something like Live. In rugby, you've had things like R360 come and try and do some different stuff. How do you look at that balance between building heritage IP and balancing it with new formats?

52:04Look, really interesting. I've always had the view that, and the experience with 100 kind of obviously goes to this, but where you have a very traditional set of stakeholders, a very traditional product that is in sport that is being turned over year after year after year and is doing very well, but externally there's a lot happening. If you're not prepared to disrupt or to think about disruption within your business, if you are a national governing body or federation, then be prepared for it to happen to you. And the 100 was about disrupting from within before external forces actually took that out of English cricket's hands and said, or the authorities of the ECB effectively, and had it done to them.

52:52And that happened once or twice before. There were various kind of threats or ideas that didn't get up and led to various different difficulties and all the rest of it. And those are all well documented. So the 100 was a way of saying, no, we're going to control this. And there is massive opportunity here. And the objectives behind this are not just disruption for disruption's sake. They're about growing the audience for the game. They're about growth. And we have a massive opportunity to, first of all, change. We know that there are 11 million cricket fans in this country. By the way, exactly the same number as rugby fans in this country.

53:26So 11.2. So there is an opportunity here. and we're only serving a very small subset of that through our current output. So we need to think differently about how we ensure the future of the game, right? And that was what we were trying to do with 100. We weren't necessarily looking at a different format for the format's sake. That was all about trying to protect the existing county 2020 competition, the Blast. So that was a kind of, if you like, an accident of thinking, but it was really, really important in being able to present something different, which enabled that new audience to say, actually, here's something I can understand.

54:07It was so bold, wasn't it? It was really bold. And, you know, it was, you know, I said all the way through that journey, we were saying to the board, this is going to make you feel really, really uncomfortable. And I think a really key moment for us, which probably isn't widely known, got to know Shane Warne pretty well through various interactions over the years. And Shane was a very big proponent of the 100. And we were having a really difficult moment in trying to get media and stakeholders to support it. And we had this board meeting and Warnie, I knew, was in London at the time. And I asked him if he wouldn't mind spending 10 minutes coming in to give his views on the 100.

54:46Completely unadulterated views. I knew he was supportive, but I didn't really know what he was going to say. And he walked in. so he came into the board in his tracksuit, he'd thrown a jacket on the top just for appearance's sake. And I said, listen, just speak your mind more. You're going to get a few questions here, but just give you a view. And it was transformative, actually, in terms of, you know, you had here probably the biggest personality in the game in terms of, I guess, views on cricket, but also obviously, you know, reputationally, just a guy who had a brilliant cricket brain and understood what made the game tick.

55:23And he came in and gave his view. And I don't think we actually had any more. He just said, look, this is going to be sensational. The game can stand this up and it will. And you need to listen to these guys because they know what they're doing. And yes, it'll be uncomfortable, but it's going to be outrageously successful. Anyway, so that was, we didn't have another problem with the board after that. That was like once Warnie had given his stamp of approval, everyone was more comfortable. the ball. Anyway, yeah, so the rest is obviously what happened. You look at the things you'd protect, you look at the things you'd change, you know, you think okay, T20 disruptive, but the rules are the same.

55:58For you to then go and change the actual way the game is played, change the number of balls in and over, change how counting up and counting down even, how you're representing it on TV. You know, it's such a shift. But again, you know, back to my point earlier, like encourage these kind of things. If you're looking at rugby now, You mentioned something like R360. Whatever people think about it, you either move and innovate or you let disruption come to you. And rugby's got so many amazing elements of it. Do you think there are things in rugby where you look at it and go, rules, that could change, need to improve quicker, ball and play more time to try and get that game as clean and as crisp and as appealing as possible?

56:40Yeah, look, I think you're absolutely right. I think there's an awful lot of work going on in this space. I wouldn't want to present the kind of sense that these things are not being worked on by world rugby, by ourselves and in the shape of the game conversations that are happening. I think we can overcomplicate things with respect to the rules of rugby and how they're presented and it becomes a difficult thing for audiences. I'm always going to come at this from an audience perspective, not a match official or a uh performance coach or um but whatever changes you you introduce you'll you'll be sure that these coaches and uh high yeah the high performance sectors of the games will find ways of being able to adapt those to their advantage that's their job and you can see that happening uh all the time in rugby union uh look what i would say is i think that disruption uh and and the r360 kind of experience.

57:34What it did was it made, it accelerated conversations. And I think that was important. And I think it gave, it put us on notice that we've got to be on this innovation conversation because there's plenty of expectation from the marketplace, from other investors, that if we don't control this ourselves, then it'll be taken from you ultimately through external sources. And We've seen a bit of that, but hopefully we're on top of it now. We can ensure that we take the lessons that our 360s brought to us in some ways and move the game forward quickly. Promotion and relegation. Do you crease at this question when it comes in?

58:16We talk about innovation. I guess it will also come back into the revenue distribution, growth of the game, that whole piece of where are we putting our focus. Rugby's got an incredible pool of very good nations. but we also now have a lot of emerging nations who have provided some great moments in recent years but there's no doubt there are significant gaps between that top tier. So promotion and relegation to Six Nations is something people have talked about for a long time. Where are we at with it? So we're not going to introduce promotion and relegation into Six Nations anytime soon. I think that whilst there is a proper debate around promotion and relegation, in fact it's actually been part of the package for Nations Championships, It's a completely different debate.

59:02And I think promotion relegation is something we, you know, as a principle in European sport, we're all kind of really used to that. But I don't see an equivalent example where there is an international competition that has promotion relegation where relegation is tantamount to bankruptcy or, you know, the end of your organization. That doesn't feel like whilst the benefits of promotion are well understood, right? like the not having a glass ceiling, the opportunity question is super, super important. And we need to think hard about that. But let's not get that mixed up with, imagine if in the insistence of introducing promotion and relegation, we lost a union that was, you know, generating really good young talent.

59:50We're just going through a bad, had a couple of bad results, managed to get relegated from something and as a result of that you know clubs had to close programs had to be shut down people had to lose their jobs you know that that is not the objective of the theme and theory behind promotion relegation which is all about opportunity development i'm sorry just to be clear on that because if you drop out these unions rely so heavily on some of the revenue generated that's by being a part of the Six Nations to cover that a tier two competition isn't going to be able to survive. So we've got to generate, before we start talking about the benefits of it, we need to talk about the consequences for the team that is no longer part of that competition for however long.

1:00:39And there has to be a better answer other than we don't have one yet. But no one's against the principle of giving opportunity to second tier nations or developing nations. What we don't want to do is create that opportunity at the cost of a major tier nation, a major rugby power, not being able to exist. It seems. You would have had similar issues, I'd imagine, in cricket when you look at a set of emerging nations coming in and developing versus or the established ones and trying to find that balance. Yeah, and look, cricket had a little bit more kind of flexibility in its calendar, actually.

1:01:20So you could do things like introduce a wider tournament, a qualifying two or three week period before a World Cup or a World T20 to give the Bahrains and the Amands and the Hong Kongs of the world an opportunity to break through into the main competition. now those opportunities are much much more difficult to create in rugby because of the calendar because of the pressure on club on clubs and the ownership of of those weekends between club and international rugby but also welfare i imagine you know i mean the big difference between rugby and those other sports is a player cannot physically play more than a certain number of games yeah you play once a week and and you can only play a certain number of weeks in a row And, you know, those are critical elements to us being able to put players in the right space from their health and welfare perspective.

1:02:09It's also really important from presenting the right kind of level of competition on the field. You want to know that players are at their best when they're playing and they're healthy and fit, both mentally and physically. That's when you get incredible things happening on a rugby field. How do you look at rugby players as superstars? I loved a comment from Steve Borthwick, I think it was this week, where he was virtually encouraging. I'm going to call it encouraging. The England players to embrace TikTok, the use of social media to engage with their fans, that video around the New Zealand game doing 22 million views or I think whatever it was.

1:02:44But, you know, to hear that from a head coach, to hear a person in that position historically where managers are the complete opposite, recognising that value, recognizing that rugby right now needs the stars it needs the Henry Pollock type characters how do you look at that as well as a as a format, as a competition where the bigger the players the bigger the stars coming in is massively going to influence how you can operate as a business yeah it's so true and you know we are I think it shows how the game is shifting that Steve came out with that kind of backing for one of his younger superstars to give him effectively a license to do that And look, I think we've got to understand that this is the way that young sports people are connecting with their audience and they have every right to do that.

1:03:32There's got to be a way in which rugby can do that without effectively betraying its values as team first and those ethics that make rugby so special. But we've got some absolute superstar athletes in the game, in the men's and the women's game. We've actually seen the women's game kind of take a lead in this space, actually. I think we'll get there. We've just got to let rugby do it in its own way and its own time within the context of those team values. And they'll be different with every team. And look, increasingly players are doing this through their own channels. And I think it's an understanding thing.

1:04:09And as I said, when we move, as we start to move into this direct-to-consumer space, that is an organic, that will happen organically. Of course it will. But, you know, one of the things that we're trying to do at the moment is use some of the issues in the game to our advantage. So, for example, one of the things that we've been talking about recently is Scrum Resets, which is obviously a moment where everything has to be right before a referee is happy to effectively launch the Scrum. We are using that moment now to create commercial inventory, which was one of the key reasons why we were able to get the ITV deal across the line.

1:04:50We've got effectively a squeeze back in that moment before a scrum is reset to enable us to, we do it once every half, we manage to agree that within the Ofcom guidelines and stuff. So there are elements where the game is being more flexible. We are trying to be innovative about how we can create new moments of commercial upside. The players have a role to play in that too. So at some point, you know, having player interviews at halftime or even, you know, when the weather is in the summertime and we're playing rugby, water breaks and that kind of thing. You know, we're not too far away from that and interviewing coaches at halftime.

1:05:30These sort of things shouldn't be too hard, but they've just been really difficult conversations in the game so far. Yeah. Two more from me. Firstly, when you sit down and you have these kind of chats and, you know, we're always trying to understand better, We're trying to get a greater insight into organizations now. Demand for access is at its highest. Are there any things that you find people don't ask that you don't talk about as much that are actually really influential in how you do your job or how the tournament operates? That's a good question. I think that happened a lot more in cricket, actually, where, you know, I used to find it really interesting how people would never talk about what happens on the days when they don't play, even in match days when a two day game when a test match is over in two days you know what happens in the in the space after those matches in return that you know you've got broadcasters who suddenly have three days of empty content you've got commercial partners who are unhappy how do you cater for that kind of thing I think it for us there's a perception that you know at the end of Six Nations we just go on holiday for nine months that's the one that really gets my goat that's the one that winds me up yeah but look we We find that there is so much opportunity in this game.

1:06:48There's so much for us to do in terms of, you know, rugby's never been in a stronger position than it is right now. We're on the cusp of a brand new year where the calendar is, you know, the best it's been in respect of fan engagement. Now, we've got more work to do on that, but this is the best it's been for years and years. And we've got some unbelievably exciting international content and, of course, everything else as well. but every game matters this year in a way that we haven't had that kind of context and meaning to every single fixture and that matters to rugby fans and I think you'll see us take big leaps this year in respect of where this game is positioned.

1:07:29So go on, what are you doing for the other 45 weeks of the year? Yeah, that's it. I was working on the golf handicap obviously and I was just taking a huge amount of time off. Beautiful, lovely, what a job. I mean, I guess that feeds into the final bit which you know do you do you love it do you enjoy it yeah i love it i mean of course i've had i've had i've been so lucky i've had a an amazing opportunity in my two favorite sports right so the two sports i actually managed to play at least to some level um i've managed to have sort of senior roles in in both of them uh and whilst that's risky because it's also how you like to spend your spare time um it's been a huge privilege um and i i never forget that and i've never had a problem getting out of bed in the morning to come to work and be excited about what's happening and yeah so I feel very grateful for the opportunity amazing stuff look such an exciting time I'm sure everyone here can't wait to see what happens over the next few weeks lots of different allegiances but really great to take a look behind the curtain and thank you so much I know you haven't done many of these so it's a real privilege that you felt that this was a place where you wanted to come and have this chat so thank you and uh thanks for seeing this few enjoyed the time thank you Thank you so much to Tom for coming in and feeling that this was the place he wanted to have this conversation.

1:08:47We've done some excellent rugby shows and it's been a privilege to get stuck into the challenges the sport is facing and how the top executives are looking to address these to maintain and even grow the sports position in a wider sports ecosystem. As always, I'm very much looking forward to this year's tournament and no doubt they'll put on an amazing show. Now, if you want to see more from today's show, you can do so by going to YouTube or any of our other social channels across Instagram. and TikTok. There are more snippets to share and bite-sized chunks to consume. And while you're there, please do like, subscribe and follow the show.

1:09:20As you'll hear from your other favourite pods, it makes a huge difference when bringing you the best guests and conversations from the world of sport, which is, of course, our endless aim. Thank you again for tuning in and we'll see you next week. Did you know less than half of football transfers produce a return on investment? I'd argue the reason for that is most sporting directors don't have the information they need as fast as they need it in a format they can understand. Sometimes transfers can feel like back when you had music on your iPod, playlists on your computer and mixed CDs in your car.

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