THE BREAKDOWN: The FA Need to Stand Up to FIFA, McCullum Gone & The Rise of Jannik Sinner (E28)

29:53Stebbings for president. It's all I can say. The campaign starts here. The 32-year-old Tyro, who will in 20 years time be, as I would call him, the next Gianni. Or the new Gianni. The next Binfantino. Right. So I totally take your point. And I think, you know, it's absolutely a point worth making that even in as much as there is a mercantile reason for sucking up to Infantino, we don't have that reason. We've already been awarded the 2035 Women's World Cup, which no one else wanted anyway. We're basically being told you're never going to get a men's World Cup under the current dispensation. So we might as well go rogue and be the moral conscience of world football.

30:37I don't disagree with that Charlie of course it will be uncomfortable for England's and to a degree the home nation's political representatives on these councils and bodies but frankly they need to be able to make that sacrifice for the good of football but let's put it this way I'm not uncognizant that it will be uncomfortable and would be uncomfortable and that in the short run it will be failed but what you're saying is is if we really want to change things going forward, then ultimately it is up to the FA to take a stand. All I'm saying is that you can sit on the outside and go, you know, God, I wish it was different, or I wish it would change.

31:16You know, if you believe that there's a way you can try and affect that change and you're as powerful as English football is, again, fine in the voting system, maybe not, but in the broader game, there's a few needles that you can move. You mentioned Debbie Hewitt, first female FA chair, is also the first female VP at FIFA, and that's a four-year term. She is in exactly that position you described. It would be an incredibly uncomfortable one. However, that can't stop you from trying to push through the right things. And Charlie, you mentioned just one thing on there that I thought was interesting because the Infantino 64 World Cup plan, you know, this is suddenly sort of rearing its head.

31:50And he started talking about it literally in the last week. I mentioned the re-election in 2027. not hugely surprising that he's suddenly just after this disgraceful uh happening with with trump and balag and drama started talking about increasing it to another 16 teams to encourage and garner more support from countries who he knows he's probably going to need if a few of the countries he's got suddenly start getting a little bit upset with the behaviors that we've shown in this world cup if you say you're going to expand the world cup you're highly likely to get more votes. So suddenly that comes into the narrative.

32:26That's certainly true. I will say one thing about the expanded World Cup is I think we're almost at the stage now where if we took it to 64 nations, could you get rid of World Cup qualifying? No, of course you couldn't. I think you can. No, because you've still got to have the hope for all the other cases. No, hear me out on this one. I think what you could say, because it's got to the stage really now where once 64 teams are qualifying, effectively even Italy will qualify. gotcha that's my Italian friends we got to the stage where even Italy will be able to qualify and so really actually what might be best is to say look okay the top 50 in the FIFA world rankings qualify automatically and then all of the rest of the countries play off for the remaining 14 places however you want to draft it because I think that would be since the World Cup's already become this big bloated thing actually adding an extra 16 teams to it probably doesn't make a vast amount of difference what inspires those teams to vote for infantino in this model it's hope right it's hope that they can reach it and if you have 14 spots up for grabs or 64 as a narrative right yeah so i'd be maybe worried if i was one of the other teams that this is actually narrowing my opportunity if there's only 14 spots yeah that i could qualify for so that would be my push on that i think he is trading this purely on the hope that these FAs of very small countries can do the impossible do the curacao do the Cape Verde and get to a tournament and benefit from it financially either way I think I think the very difficult thing is it's a much longer discussion it's a huge discussion and probably if it rears its head again in the next few weeks we'll probably have to get properly properly into it but we need to move on we do because we've got other fences to jump let's talk about something else Charlie because I think FIFA's been getting you all hot under the collar I think you may be a fan of someone after some pretty exciting tennis at the weekend.

34:22Yeah, I sort of feel guilty in retrospect when we spent part of the first past this year sort of looking a bit sort of worried about tennis and saying, you know, if Sinner becomes the next big thing, he's not the most charismatic guy around. And, you know, maybe there's an element of truth to that. But I watched the Wimbledon final from start to finish. And that was Yannick Sinner against Alexander or Sasha Zverev, the recent French Open champion and first of all I really enjoyed the match and secondly I became a bit of a Yannick Sinner fan I think that he's the real deal isn't he he's the real deal the guy has got a lot going on he is a brilliant athlete you're watching literally it's an on camera transformation he's a brilliant athlete he's an amazing competitor and he has that star quality of being able to pull out his very very best just when it's really, really needed.

35:16And I just thought it was absolutely compelling watching. It was a champion, true champion's performance because Zverev brought his A game. And it inspired me, Charlie, my newfound fandom for Yannick Sinner. It inspired me to look a little bit more deeply into the guy because he does seem like a sort of mild-mannered kind of guy, you know, good guy, nice guy, etc. etc um but uh it it's not quite as simple as that and this is a guy who is phenomenally driven the extent of my lack of curiosity about yannick sinner extends even to the fact that various times in the last two years since he became prominent i thought a bit odd for an italian to have a german name so i mentioned this i mentioned this to my wife who is german she and she sort of clouted me around the head affectionately and said you do know that there's part of israeli which is on the austrian border where they where they speak german and i looked it up and found that janic in his first language is german and he comes from a ski village um on the austrian border and grew up skiing not ski jumping very just just in case you get excited about his recruitment prospects for naturalizing him as a norwegian ski jumper charlie um a downhill skier um and but clearly a young player of immense promise on the tennis side.

36:36He was taken in by a very prominent Italian tennis coach as a teenager. Riccardo Piatti. Who coached him through from that young age through to being a top tennis player. But since then, and as I relate in my memo for those Substack members this week, he's been quite a hard taskmaster. You know, he fired Piatti despite all the success he'd had with him and replaced him with Darren Cahill, who's an Australian, who had been coached to multiple Grand Slam champions. So when, in other words, when Sinner decided, I need to make my next level, I need to get to the next level. Thanks a lot, Piatti. Nice to see you.

37:14I'm now going to switch to Darren Cahill because he coaches Grand Slam champions. He had a physical coach, bulleted him. People may remember there was a controversy, a Rafael dope test, and Sinner fired his fitness coach for holding him accountable for that. quite a serious controversy yeah serious controversy he then um had two new um fitness coaches bulleted them because one of them he thought spoke a little bit too much in in the media about things and this type of stuff didn't want that etc so this is a guy he's not going through coaches like emma raducanu does in a sort of sort of hell male sort of sort of rather odd way in a very systematic way he is making sure that every single person who works for him is utterly dedicated to turning him into one of the all-time greats well yeah charlie that says the opposite because darren gahill was meant to leave him last year and he managed to persuade him to stay yeah so i think what he what he's incredibly good at doing is understanding exactly who he needs in his box yeah and you look up at that box and you see those people and you can you just know that every single one yeah it's yeah it's in it right yeah um and well interestingly the guy that he fired Ferreira for the, he was supposedly responsible or partly responsible for his failed test, was Klosterbolt.

38:30It's very, very specifically banned by Wadda and any physio really should know that even though, you know, he's fired him. He actually brought him back because he's after, after he's obviously served his ban, which didn't involve him missing any grand slams and cause a lot of confusion around the tennis world. Anyway, that's a deeper hole to go into. Anyway, the point is, this is a guy that in weeks where we've been talking about what it is to be professional and what it is to be absolutely elite at the top of your sport, this is a guy that does it. And actually, where I've been most interested in tennis over the last few years from a national perspective, which leads us into another part of this chat, Charlie, is how good Italy have been over the last few years at developing players.

39:11They've got four top 20 men's players, which in a truly global sport is a really significant achievement. You've got Sinner, Caboli, Berrettini. and there is another one um arnaldi or something yeah that's right he got to the semis of french yeah and then you've got jasmine paulini on the women's side yeah so this is a system which is working um now we've spoken in recent weeks in the whole debate over um pay at the grand slams how certain of the top players are whingy about how much they get paid by the grand slams and went on a rather pathetic sort of not even a media strike a sort of media downscaling of their media commitments um it was nothing no one noticed anything forget it um so um well but one thing we have noted is is that those um associations that host the grand slams which is tennis australia the french tennis federation the lawn tennis association that's here in england and the u.s tennis association so those tennis associations that are lucky enough to host a Grand Slam, hand a very significant amount of money, each of them, to the elite tennis development schemes of their country, right?

40:28So it's a real windfall for those countries who happen to be lucky enough to host one of the Grand Slams. It means that their elite systems get vast amounts of money chucked at them, basically to subsidize the development of elite players. Does it work? Well, based on the data, you'd have to say it doesn't work. It doesn't work. Charlie, when we were just chatting about this, I was thinking, hang on a sec. Because just to be clear, I've been, well, we've certainly had our views on that pay discussion and one of it being, you know, very much so. If you take more money for the players, then you're taking it away from the places that actually go and develop players.

41:01But then actually, like if you put the counter to that, you'd go, well, yeah, develop players in a very specific region, actually in the richest countries because they're getting all of this revenue anyway. So what I would naturally want to see from that is if that money's going somewhere, I want to see some results. And if you look across, we had a look at those four countries and how many real champions they've produced. The statistics are quite frightening. So the UK, let's call it the UK, has had Murray and Raducanu in the last 20 years. France, could you name how many Grand Slam champions France has had in the last 20 years?

41:38I don't think there's been one. Amélie Maresmo. And that is about 20 years. And that is 2006, you did it. 2006 and that was Wimbledon so it's actually and the Australian Open she won too actually more than 20 years ago Australia Sam Stoza and Ash Barty US obviously both Williams Serena and Venus Williams Sloane Stephens Sophia Kennan Coco Gough Madison Keats so a couple of things stand out there no man from Australia since Hewitt in 2002 no man from France since Yannick Nair in 1983 no man from the US since Andy Roddick in 2003 so Andy Murray is the only man from the Grand Sound countries to have won in the last 20 years and guess what what do we all know about Andy Murray and his training he had absolutely nothing to do with the Law and Tennis Association his mother didn't believe in the Law and Tennis Association and his family who are reasonably well-to-do sent him to the Sanchez Casals Academy in Barcelona at a very young age as also happened to Johanna Conta who's one of the very few British women to have reached an elite level in in the last 20 years and if you look back at other great british players tim henman grew up in a tennis middle upper middle class tennis family was sent to a specialist private tennis school called reeds near cobham again not in the lta sets that was run by i think by john lloyd or david lloyd um greg rosetsky grew up in canada and you know transferred to england once he was already a professional tennis player then you've got um cameron norrie who is one of the other players who's reached the top 10 in recent years who grew up in new zealand and then went to tennis um to play tennis in in the u.s college system so you where you get to amongst even forgetting the grand slam champions even talking about british players who have really made anything of themselves i've come across two carl edmund and um jack draper who have what you might call been LTA kids.

43:40Now, Jack Draper, it should be noted, is the son of the former chief executive of the LTA, Roger Draper. So it's, you know, again, from a very upper middle class background, it's slightly hard to imagine that he wouldn't have had the resources to make it even if the LTA had not eased his way. So we're really looking at Carl Edmund being the only example of a successful British male tennis player, or female really, I think, maybe other than Raducanu, who has been helped through the system by the LTA. Now, the LTA spends£15 million a year on their youth programme. Sorry, by their youth programme, I mean their elite youth programmes.

44:18That's on these kids, right? £15 million a year. And then on top of that, they spend another£35 million on putting on professional events with the express purpose of helping these elite players have events to play in so that they can climb the ladder. So in that time, 15 million at the elite, 20 years. Crikey. So 300 million, let's say, has developed no one. Raducanu maybe. To win the top tournament. Because we can't call Murray, as you said. You can't say that that money has gone to him. So suddenly you're looking at that going, wow, okay, well, where's that going wrong? It's a quite extraordinary allocation of capital.

45:00Now, I sort of dug into it a bit looking at the Italian system. right because actually the italian tennis federation despite not having a grand slam still generates about the same amount of money as the lta and i wondered why that was so i looked into it and i found that we've got 2 000 tennis clubs in this country in britain in italy they have four and a half thousand now if you want to try and work out why italy is producing so many top players. It's a country of almost identical size to the UK. And it has more than twice as many tennis clubs. Clubs, interesting. Now, clubs is important. I'll show you why clubs because it's also important in golf as well.

45:39So the LTA puts a huge amount of money into tennis courts, right? That includes many, many, many thousands of courts in public parks, right? So this is a court where if Charlie and Charlie want to go and have a game of tennis, we can go and play tennis for either free or for not very much money. But that isn't going to develop an elite player. Develop an elite player you have to have a coach and the coach ain't going to be in the course in the park. The coach is going to be at a club and this is I think where the problem lies and why Italy are doing so well is they've got many more coaches. So that will be it because my counter to any critique that was levelling was going to be the real mandate of the LTA is to get participation up in this country.

46:22Last year, I think you had 5.8 million adults playing in the UK. You had 4 million children. 3 ,000 park courts renovated, which is your point. Judged on those, that was the most successful year. So for the money that, let's say, I think participation had, I had here 26 million, which is court funding, schools, competitions. That's doing great. That's doing really well. That's doing really well. And therefore, you know, grandstand champions we all want. but the most important part of their allocation is to get people playing the game okay they're doing well that doesn't mean they get a let off for spending 15 16 million pounds a year on an elite division that doesn't throw out anything and you know cumulatively over the 20 years if i was just going through it and that you know worked out that basically 2025 they got 48 million from wimbledon which was about 90 percent of wimbledon's profits as we know previously so you know just cumulatively over the years the count comes out let's say they've received about 700 million pounds over the 20 years.

47:22Yeah. From Wimbledon. Of which they're spending about half on the professional game, the elite game. Yeah, third. Yeah. Because 16 of, let's say. No, because if they're paying 35 million pounds on professional events and 15 million on the elite program. Oh, you're saying professional events. I'm saying professional events is a, I wouldn't class that as a contributor to us developing Grand Slam champions. That's how they see it. That's why the LTA do it. So that's their excuse for spending a lot of money on elite events is to help develop elite players in this country because that's what gives them the ability to give them wild cards and to get more British players playing.

47:59It's just cannon fodder to some of the other. Arthur Ferry? Yeah, the exception to the rule, Charlie. How many wild cards were there? Yeah, indeed so. So anyway, I thought it was interesting just looking at the Italians and saying it's a really good control study where you've got a country which is the same size in Europe both developed tennis economies both of them would have aspirations to producing elite players both of the national federations are making kind of quite a bit of money could afford to do things properly and the Italian system is pushing money into clubs and keeping the club system alive and kicking and the English system is not pushing money into clubs the English system is pushing money into on the one hand public participation courts on the on hand what you might call hot housing.

48:47Now there's one other bit I just want to just raise and this may be circumstantial but the top two current players who have come through that system are Jack Draper and Emma Raducanu. What is the thing that is regarded as holding both of their careers back? Injuries. Terrible injuries. I mean like catastrophic series of injuries as quite young players. We're not talking about players in their mid-30s, we're talking about players in their early to mid-20s. Injury after injury after injury. I wonder if there might be some attention which the LTA needs to pay to their performance program. Interesting point.

49:22Because it seems a bit too much of a coincidence to have your two main stars that you spent so much money on unable basically to get themselves on the court in one piece, hobbling around on crutches and casts all the time. Well, they should be in the best years of their career or coming into the best years of their career. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's an interesting thing. And if you contrast it with golf, where Britain over-indexes and does exceptionally well, what do we have many more of than other? Golf clubs. Golf clubs. Yeah. Golf clubs with qualified PGA professionals who will pick up a young player, teach them the basics, get them up to a certain level.

49:59Now, you're kind of limited, aren't you? Because golf, you can't have a park court in the same way that you can have. No. A golf course generally has to be a golf course. So you're almost forced into that model without having to make a decision. That is true. So yes, we have both many more golf courses and many more golf clubs because in golf, the two things are basically the same. But I would probably, again, think about, and do you remember one of the most interesting things you said about Norway and football last week was how many coaches they have? Yeah. The sheer number of qualified coaches.

50:28Sorry, there was one coach every 325 people. I'm going to come back to what the number of qualified golf coaches is in Britain. I'm going to guess that it's pretty much the highest per head of population of anywhere. I mean, certainly in Scotland. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. Scotland, yeah. I mean, Scotland, I think, have got some sort of golf pro factory somewhere. And they roll them out. Wherever you go in the world, if you go and play golf at some obscure place in Thailand, it'll say PGA golf professional Hamish McTaggart. It's quite extraordinary. They get everywhere. So anyway, we'll come back to it.

51:01I'm just saying, although we're criticising, I still am not convinced that the players deserve any more money than they've been getting at the moment. Which players? The tennis players. Oh, right. Yeah, no, absolutely not. Even if we're questioning whether that distribution of cash, I still think a 19 % or 20 % increase on your Wimbledon prize money was pretty good. So, yeah, we're not changing. I'm not changing my position on that. But I do think having a look at the allocation of that and actually then holding to a standard of success is important. Agreed. Charlie, it's your time again because we're back into your favourite friends on Fall Legs.

51:37Slightly different this time. The Husses. But it is, in fact, a sport that we haven't covered. So it's going to get its moment in the sun, of which there is a lot at the moment. And it is the sport of show jumping. Now, at a moment in time when Charlie Jr. was a glimmer in his parents' eye in an era known as the 1980s, One of the biggest sports in this country, and indeed a massive sport in the rest of the world, but a massive sport in the UK, was the sport of showjumping. And it will surprise Charlie Jr. to learn that showjumping was a very regular sport being screened on national TV, the BBC, but sometimes even on primetime.

52:22We're talking about BBC One evening shows on showjumping in the run-up to Christmas. so there were two massive events the horse of the year show which is now at the nec which still attracts 60 000 to it charlie 60 000 that's why it's at the nec not in one day but over three days 60 000 wow um and then you've got the london international horse show which is held in the run-up to christmas which was founded in 1907 and was generally held at olympia throughout my well since 100 years or so it's been held at olympia and then it moved to excel in 2021 it's just it's just in that sort of brief period before christmas in the sort of week before christmas and that over you know over a three three day period will have an attendance of around about 100 000 so in terms of a live attendance sport show jumping still is a non-niche sport it lost its position as the BBC cut back on its sporting coverage in general and particularly do you remember Grandstand which was a Saturday afternoon show that had to cover it had to fill up three to four hours of TV so therefore did cover various different sports particularly the ones which weren't necessarily that expensive to cover and show jumping is a very easy sport to cover it's a it's an arena where you just have a camera traversing like this so once the BBC was cutting back on its sports coverage and once Grandstand went that then massively cut back on the amount to a show jumping that was on TV.

53:55But the show jumping stars back in the 1980s were national figures, and in some cases, global figures. There was an exceptionally famous, notorious man called Harvey Smith, who distinguished himself by flicking a V sign live on TV to the judges after they judged that he brought a fence down that he didn't think he had or some such thing. Isn't that quite black and white? And then there were the Whittaker brothers, John and Michael, who were, again, national figures. And don't forget that show jumping is also a big Olympic sport. So you had the combination of big in the Olympics and then also big in the sort of annual TV events and this type of stuff.

54:31It's one of my favourite Olympic events to watch. Like heart and mouth. When you're watching them go around the course and you see the points going at each time and you go, is she going to go around clean? Is it going to go around clean? But you've just nailed it, Charlie, which is, it's a brilliant spectator sport. Now, as everyone knows, I'm a racing guy, but as a pure spectator sport, show jumping is a better sport. Racing needs the betting. and the whole complexity of the bloodstock industry to really make it interesting. Otherwise, it is a bit flies running up a wall. Showjumping is an entrancing, really tense, really powerful spectator sport.

55:06So what's happened to it? Well, what's happened to it is that gradually over time, it has, in professional terms, become a bit niche. OK, so what we've got is we've got a sort of premier league, which is sponsored by Longines. And that league has been going for, I think, around about 20 years. And it's reasonably prominent. It does OK. And there's nothing. It's not that there's anything particularly wrong with it. It's just it hasn't somehow managed to capture the attention of the public. right so it'll often take place in some of the most prominent places um around the world and it's a sort of quite glamorous you know rather like cell gp it's going to fall into that bucket it's it's miami it's paris it's rome it's london in fact they're in london uh in two weeks time and at the royal hospital chelsea okay that's where they hold it where the chelsea flower show takes takes place the longis global champions tour is what it's called and it was founded in 2006 so 20 years ago by a former Olympic gold medalist, Dutch Olympic gold medalist called Jan Topps.

56:19Great name. Good name. Great name. The Dutch have some great ones, don't they? I mean, if you're going to be a sportsman, it'd be called Jan Topps. Jan Topps. Yeah. Known to your mates as double.

56:31Anyway, so look, Jan Topps created this global tour. And it's, as I said, basically done okay. The annual prize money is about 30 million euros. And that's spread through about 100 riders will take part in this tour. They can't all compete in every single event because they don't have enough horses to be able to do that. So you will see different riders competing in different events. If you've got your, whatever it is, about 15 races, then maybe one rider might take part in 8 or 10 if they're one of the top riders. So on it goes. Anyhow, at some point around about, I think, 2013, Jan Topps takes in a minority investor.

57:15And this is a man called Frank McCourt. Frank McCourt is also the owner of Marseille. Marseille. And has been since he bought it from my old... Was it Louis Dreyfus? From Louis Dreyfus family, from my old partners at Sunderland, the Louis Dreyfus family. So he's been at Marseille for about the same time, actually, since he became an investor in show jumping around about 2014. So he was an investor and a director of the Longines Global Champions Tour until he left. And that happened around about 2021. And his shares were bought by a very controversial person, also somebody who's got a history as a football club owner, a guy called Lars Windhorst, who used to be at Hertha Berlin.

58:02And the whole thing went to court. Now, it's not quite clear why it went to court or exactly what was being examined in court, but it ended up in court. And that tends to mean that the separation was not necessarily amicable. I can't comment more than that. I don't know. Anyhow, lo and behold, five years later, up pops McCourt again and says, I'm going to launch my own global show jumping league. It's going to be called the Premier Jumping League, the PJL. and it's going to launch in March 2027, but not with 30 million in the prize money. 300 million. Yeah. Right? Charlie, my alarm bells started ringing exactly at this point when we've been critical of other leagues and organizations that have broken away.

58:50And we haven't even got to the bottom of that, Charlie. There's another league. There's another one. So the other one, which is run by the global governing body, the show jumping equivalent of FIFA, the FEI. Okay. They run something called, well, it used to be called the Nations Cup. But rather unfortunately, they've renamed it the League of Nations, which I don't know if anyone knows their geopolitical history, but that was the rather useless organization that Mussolini and Hitler trampled all over in the 1930s. So I'm not sure it was the most, is the cleverest name for it. Anyhow, the League of Nations is the thing where riders compete amongst representing their countries.

59:29And that's what qualifies you for the World Championship and the Olympics. So if you want to ride in the Olympics, you're going to need to compete in that. If you want to make some money, you're going to need to compete in the Global Champions Tour. And now there's also going to be the Premier Jumping League. So effectively, you're going to have for the top riders, you're going to have these three competitions, all of them different, all of them happening mostly at different times, but sometimes at the same time. and all of them critically confusing everybody you know who's winning what which is more important why is this person riding in this series one week and riding in that series the next week the whole thing is to my mind you know when we think about the critical elements of narrative clarity right what Bernie Eccleston achieved with Formula One was narrative clarity what we're seeing here is fragmentation and albeit there's a lot of money washing around is it really ultimately going to be good for this sport to have three separate competitions and also like to be fair to something like a live and when the critique we've you know put on other people's doorsteps is that is that a sustainable model moving forward because 300 million in prize money you got 16 teams reportedly right you got multiple venues around one of those reportedly correct me if i'm wrong 50 million dollars the first franchise yeah i mean you know this is big money big money and again you know the sale gp conversations we had i have for a very specific reason it's the values in the eye of the beholder you can't always unjudge or pretend to understand why something has been priced at that especially when it's a sport like this which you've highlighted may have some serious premium value to it but the challenges that you've got in generating enough of that money consistently to keep paying out the 300 million in prize money plus the cost plus it plus plus plus plus when that's on one individual pif and live let's say you put a lot more pressure on yourself so just from you know it's hard to comment at the beginning of something and you don't want to be inherently negative about things when they're starting out but the model was just something i was looking at going oh no not again yeah sure and you sort of think crikey o'reilly you know of all sports that you know of a type of sport that can't really afford to have lots of different competitions and to not have a sort of clear way of being this type of sport is very much very much that type of sport now one of the things interesting that mccourt is investing a lot of money into as part of the premier jumping league he's putting a lot of money into the media side of it he believes and i think your reaction earlier on which i found absolutely fascinating as a sports marketing person was show jumping bloody exciting right is that the main problem here is exposure yeah that's his that's his view is it actually and i when i hear that for most sports i go well you would say that wouldn't you you love that sport but actually when it comes to show jumping i find it so exciting and you find it so exciting but actually this is potentially the case.

1:02:18Charlie, Sebastian Solway wins the marathon. The first question we asked, great, but where can we watch them next week? I watch show jump in the Olympics, right? I love it. I get hooked for a few days. Where do I go now? Where do you go next? Massive problem. And it's even a sport where two of the top five performers in the world are British. And multi-gold medal winners. No, that's eventing. This is Ben Maher and Scott Brash who won the team gold in both the last two Olympics, I think, but someone will pick me up on that. no doubt um so anyway he mccourt has hired the production company who did drive survive and he wants them to do a similar kind of series on show jumping this could be a winner this could be a winner because show jumping rather like formula one is one of those sports that lends itself quite naturally to this type of things it's a it's a circuit where the same people are going from place to place right and they're quite glamorous places for the most part um but it did set me thinking i think so the one thing that show jumping could do with which would really change it i don't know if you've seen but it's one of the i think one of the five biggest tv hits of the last two years in the anglosphere has rivals has been rivals now what was her what was jilly cooper's first book oh i don't know charlie riders it's called riders and it was um published in 1985 is one of the fun yep indeed it was published in 19 you're talking about yourself or me you i mean no i look this up i don't know it's off my head um it was published it was it was it was published in 1985 and actually related the story of the run-up to the 1984 olympics right and it was the rivalry between two characters one of them a gypsy from the wrong side the tracks called jake lavelle the other one an aristoke or rupert campbell black and that book which sold millions of copies now given that the success of rivals on tv if i was had anything to do a show jumping i'd be saying right make sure that the next jilly cooper that they turn into a big international tv classic is riders because that will really pique people's interest in all of the riders private lives which can be quite interesting let's just say so watch this space um show jumping we'd get jilly cooper into i just also also i just wonder charlie i just wonder um the um since it's going to be at the royal hospital yeah in 10 days times two weeks should we go well i was thinking we might do a sort of breakdown sub stack um event and combine two things that have caught our attention in the last few months think about where it is what could we do as a lead up to attending the show jumping we could do the ben stoats pub crawl oh which finishes at the show jumping or maybe even the other way around we could do it in reverse way around because then i don't think we could risk turning up at this lovely event going full ben duckett or harry brooke hello can we get it can i see your tickets smash very good thanks a lot Charlie I do like that that's a very good idea brilliant thanks thank you so much as always for joining us a slightly tough one I'm actually very pleased that we did record that before England went out because I think the the anticipation of that result probably kept us in good spirits and I'm a little bit more flat today having watched that so I'm pleased that we did that but I'm also very conscious that as I said I think it was the last thing that we all wanted to hear at the beginning.

1:05:54However, I hope you enjoyed the other topics that we did talk through. And there's a huge amount of talking points in there. And, you know, as always, we'd love to have your thoughts and takes on what we talked about. So please comment, leave all of your questions for us. We will, of course, pick them up. We have a great sub-stack segment this week, which was the Q &A from everyone that talked about the viability of Test Cricket as a business. It talked about Tottenham's transfer strategy. Charlie talked about what were his biggest learnings and mistakes from running Sunderland and Charlton. So there's plenty in there, but for now thank you as always for joining us and come over and see us on Substack but if not we'll see you next week.

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