How reliant is sport on its army of volunteers? And how to assess Gianni Infantino’s first 10 years at Fifa?

0:04James Emmett:Hello and welcome to Worth Knowing, the sports industry podcast from Leaders, where we talk about what's worth knowing in the business of sport this week. I'm Leaders Editorial Director James Emmett.

0:15David Cushnan:And I'm Content Director David Cushnan. On the show this week, we go inside Parkrun, the participation sensation that has got 12 million people running around the world.

0:25Elizabeth Duggan:We look back at 10 years of Gianni Ampantino's reign as the king of soccer. And we look forward to what the future of sports communications could be. This is Leaders Worth Knowing. David, how are you? I am well, thank you, James. How are you? Yes, doing good. Thanks, Dave. You're doing good. Do you know what I've noticed this week? Tell me. The power of FOMO, Dave. Because you've not been here in the office? No, nothing. You have, you have. I have been here, thank you.

0:52James Emmett:Don't besmirch my good name. Whoa, what are you missing out on? It's not me, David. It's the glut of newsletter sign-ups. that we've had this week after a little post I did explaining who's signed up. Oh, you're taking the credit. Oh, you know, cause and correlation maybe, but turns out that a good driver for newsletter signups is information about who else has signed up. So we are absolutely swimming in news. You know, we've got about 50 ,000 people signed up to the Leaders Worth Knowing newsletter. It's incredible, isn't it? Which we write on a weekly - It's an incredibly round number. Yes. About.

1:23James Emmett:Do you know what? Actually, we've had a couple of thousand chalked off that in some sort of database consolidation exercise. Cleaning the data. Yeah, but needless to say, a load of sign-ups this week because sign-ups beat sign-ups. We've had Mesa, IMG, Relevant, Sony Sports, Norwich City, MotoGP, Copper90, Manchester United, the EFL. Barney Francis actually signed up as well.

1:45Elizabeth Duggan:A load of folks signing up. Where can people sign up, Dave? You can sign up via the Leaders in Sport

1:51David Cushnan:website, leadersinsport.com slash newsletters. And you should as well. And you can find all the details there it is free and it is delivered direct to inbox uh pretty much every single week free at the point of use isn't it yeah yeah what does that mean people consume it for free oh i

2:08Elizabeth Duggan:see not not that people can receive it for free and sell it on it's very expensive to produce certainly is right uh what we got this week well you had a chat with a fantastic chat a little bit

2:19David Cushnan:further down on the feed um if people haven't listened uh to the ceo of parkrun now we should clear up right from the start, how are we describing Elizabeth or Lil?

2:30James Emmett:Well, I refer to her as Elizabeth, but it turns out the internet and all the people who know her refer to her as Lil. So you had a very formal conversation. At no point. It's not her fault, but at no point did she say, call me Lil. So I didn't.

2:43David Cushnan:Fair enough. Fair enough.

2:44James Emmett:No, really interesting discussion. I really enjoyed speaking to Elizabeth. For people who maybe don't live in the UK and don't know what Parkrun is, it's a weekly volunteer-led running, a series of running events in parks across the country and beyond. It's something of a sensation, David. It welcomed its 12 millionth registrant in the last few weeks. You can't really live your life in the UK without someone talking to you about Parkrun.

3:15David Cushnan:Yeah.

3:15James Emmett:Some stage.

3:16David Cushnan:I was thinking about that as I listened and actually Parkrun, doing a Parkrun, going to parkrun is just sort of, it's just baked into the UK weekend. Nobody bats an eyelid if somebody

3:27Elizabeth Duggan:suggests that or you hear somebody's doing that. No. People talk about parkrun, sauna and paddle now. That's it. Sauna?

3:34James Emmett:Yeah. Everyone's talking about sauna. We're moving in different circles. Okay. Maybe it's more coastal. People are doing parkrun in their millions. It's obviously a charity. It's not a sort of professional sports body as we're used to.

3:49David Cushnan:It's very deliberately low production and not saying that in a negative sense it's actually as Elizabeth was explaining it it's the beauty of it that it is so scalable but it's very much not an overproduced event.

4:01James Emmett:No exactly and the reason that I thought I would invite Elizabeth in to talk to her is because I think there is it's such a success story and it's so sticky and it's so sort of viral I suppose in a physical sense, that there must be lessons for sports organisations, many of whom have participation goals and objectives at the heart of what they do. And I think there are probably all sorts of lessons that we can learn from how Parkrun has done what it does.

4:36David Cushnan:Absolutely. A couple of things that came to mind listening into that, really just how data rich as an organization Parkrun is. So they've got 21 years of participation data available to them. They're sending every single weekend, they're sending half a million results emails. So it's a huge data operation. And she was talking about how that they have acquired an app fairly recently, I think, to help sort of spur some of that data capture, I suppose. And it's probably the kind of data bank that at one end, governments from a sort of health agenda point of view would love to get their hands on. And then at the other end, you know, if you think about professional sports, British athletics, maybe even world athletics would love, I think, to have that kind of data, that kind of analytics to be able to pour through.

5:29Elizabeth Duggan:And I think that's, you know, that's incredibly valuable. It's not just participant data as well as participants and organisers, right?

5:36James Emmett:So, So it's the participant, the people who run, but also the people who volunteer. And that is super critical. Those are two sides of the participation coin. And there's loads of potential in that. And Elizabeth talks in the interview about being data rich, but not data driven yet. And clearly there are conversations in the works about maybe how to commercialize that, how to do more with it. But definitely that simple data capture and sort of data insight that's spun up and sent out to the participants afterwards has always been at the core of what Parkrun is. And it's one of the key reasons for its success.

6:17James Emmett:Basically, we're living in the Spotify wrapped era, the Strava year in sport era. And Parkrun has been doing that for participants for way longer than that. You know, it's got your times every week. It's got where and when you competed. It's got everything. It's a treasure trove of information. It's sticky. It makes you want to continue doing what you're doing, compare, spread the word. Another thing that Elizabeth talked about was the growth that Parkrun has seen. 80 % of it has come from essentially word of mouth referrals. That data at the heart of it is doing a large part of driving that word of mouth.

6:55David Cushnan:And I think word of mouth is so interesting and it's an incredible example. And to your point about what other organizations, maybe professional sports organizations, might be able to learn, it did strike me that the whole sports industry is really focused on agencies, service providers around sport that try for good reason to codify, to explain, to structure and control everything and be able to have an influence. And my sense is that word of mouth is really the one thing that you can't fully control. You can probably do certain things to sort of nudge and help and try and sort of chivvy people along.

7:37David Cushnan:But you really can't artificially create that sort of word of mouth sensation that Parkrun has over many years now. As we said, it sort of baked into that weekend rhythm for so many people in the UK. And coming back to the volunteering side, clearly those volunteers, just as much as the participants, are the lifeblood of this whole thing. And they're the marketing arm. They're the drive. They are the impact all rolled up into one. It did get me thinking about something that probably the sports industry doesn't talk about as much as it should. but the sort of volunteer core that the industry absolutely relies on for big events,

8:17Elizabeth Duggan:all sorts of major events. The sports industry's dirty secret, the free labour driving sport.

8:22David Cushnan:Well, that's it. Where, you know, the point at which volunteering blends into, you know, compensated work is an interesting one. And I did some research, James, some light research on the train in this morning. So Parkrun has around about 40 ,000 people volunteering worldwide each week, around 20 ,000 of those in the UK alone, which is a big number. And I'm sort of thinking, OK, so how does that compare to other stuff? So if you take big international stuff, the just finished Milan Cortina Winter Olympics had 18 ,000 volunteers, which actually came from 130 ,000 applicants, which says something about sort of interest and demand.

9:03David Cushnan:Euro 2024 in Germany had 16 ,000 volunteers. Paris 2024 Olympics, 45 ,000 volunteers. The World Cup this year in the US, Canada and Mexico, looking for 65 ,000 volunteers. It's going to be big in all ways. But then you look at some others sort of outside of those sort of mega events, I suppose. Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games, obviously a slimmed down Commonwealth Games, are looking on the hunt and sort of in the process of building up a group of 3 ,000 volunteers. You've got the Tour de France Grand Depart in Scotland next year, or Scotland and parts of England next year, 7 ,000 volunteers being secured for that.

9:44David Cushnan:Even something like the British Grand Prix at Silverstone every year has just over 1 ,000 volunteers. The World Table Tennis Championships coming to London in April, 300 volunteers required to look after that. Glastonbury Festival, 2 ,000 volunteers. And something like the National Trust, which might be actually sort of perhaps the closest equivalent to something like Parkrun, 40 ,000 to 53 ,000 volunteers seems to be the number. That's some light Googling, but it does, I think, make the point that there is an enormous amount of running, staging, organizing all of these events that is frankly put on volunteers.

10:26James Emmett:And there's an art form, I think, to making an organization or an event sort of volunteerable. There are many things that draw volunteers. I think partly it's to do with brand and wanting to be associated with something. A large part of it will definitely be community and a feeling of being in something together, but also don't underestimate the power of a little bit of free merch, a bit of stuff as a souvenir of what you did. And all of those things that you ran through there definitely do all of that. Definitely. And sorry, Elizabeth did talk about the volunteer thing and a really important part of what Parkrun does is not try to over complicate or overburden volunteers.

11:09James Emmett:They've been really judicious about expansion. They rely on this volunteer force and they don't want to overburden them. So Parkrun at its core, it's a 5k run around a park, wherever you are, it has to be, the locations are determined by whether there are volunteers in the place who want to do it. Elizabeth considers the Parkrun organization to be a facilitator rather than an operator. And, you know, sociability is built into it as well. There are lots of moments and events within the event where coming together, talking, chatting, having a good time is all part of it.

11:43David Cushnan:Yeah. And I think all of that is so important. And to be able to demonstrate that, and again, comes back to the word of mouth, you are talking to the volunteer next to you who's been doing it for a while and you start to get, you know, you form those relationships. I remember talking to somebody who worked in operations in quite a senior role at the London Stadium, which had hosted obviously the Olympic Stadium as was now the home of West Ham, but they also host athletics every so often. And I remember him saying to me as we were chatting about volunteers that one of the biggest operational challenges issues is people coming for day one and everybody's very excited, but they're not coming back for day two.

12:21David Cushnan:And that drop off is a key moment for any multi-day event. And you have to build that into your planning, that just for whatever reason, people will not necessarily always come back having had an experience of it. And, you know, but these are, we talk about it being something that's not really talked about that much. These are enormous HR projects to find these volunteers, to train them up, and then to keep them, as you say, keep them motivated, excited, and actually convert them, frankly, into your ambassadors, into another arm of your marketing strategy through the course of whether it's an Olympics or whether it's something that runs for multiple days, or whether it's something like Parkrun that continues on an ongoing regular basis.

13:05James Emmett:Yes, we do have in the newsletter as well a six-step spell for boosting sports participation. So again, another driver to sign up to that newsletter if you don't already. Shall we look at some other bits and pieces, David?

13:20David Cushnan:Let's do that, James. Let's do some signings. And Uniqlo has signed Emma Raducanu as its first female tennis endorser.

13:30James Emmett:Great move there from Max Eisenbud, Emma's agent, who continues to reinvent himself as the premier tennis agent.

13:40David Cushnan:A deal I saw that I found somewhat amusing, if I'm completely honest. Audi is the new official car of Silverstone. Just the idea of a racetrack having an official car. But of course, there's lots of uses around safety cars and vehicles around all sorts of events like the British Grand Prix. So it actually does make total sense. And former NFL international lead Alistair Kirkwood is back in the game. He's back on LinkedIn after a self-imposed absence by the sounds of it as the founder of 5FL, a new professional flag football league intended for launch in the UK in late 2027.

14:13James Emmett:Former World Athletics CEO Olivier Gers has a new role at Extraordinary AI as practice lead of the sports and private equity practice. Rebecca Matthews is the new sports and talent marketing lead at WHOOP. And Scott Greyston has joined MNC Saatchi Sport and Entertainment as PR director for the Middle East.

14:39David Cushnan:Belinda Moore will leave the WRU, the Welsh Rugby Union, for a new role at the ECB as growth director for The 100. Lon Rosen is the new president of business operations at the LA Lakers. He moves over from the Dodgers, replacing Tim Harris, who announced he is stepping down. And Hamish Harris is the new broadcast and media technology director at Formula E. He joins the organization from Gravity Media.

15:07James Emmett:There's always things happening, aren't there?