Inside Wimbledon: Usama Al-Qassab on managing partners, maintaining the brand and mastering AI

0:03Welcome to another edition of the Leaders Sport Business Podcast, the podcast for and about leaders in sport from and by leaders in sport. We've really got to work on that tagline. I'm David Cushman, I'm the content director here at Leaders. James Emmett is away on holiday. But here we are, it's that time of year again. It's Wimbledon, aka the biggest global sports event within walking distance of the leaders office. So we're fairly excited about it. The championships underway once Again, third Grand Slam of the season. And we thought, what better moment to bring in? Sama Al-Khassab, Wimbledon's commercial and marketing director for a chat about Wimbledon in general, the next couple of weeks and how that's shaping up from a commercial and marketing standpoint, but also his wider thoughts on his two and a bit years working at the All England Lawn Tennis Club.

1:02Lots of good stuff in here around the continual challenge of balancing history and tradition with technology and innovation, something that Wimbledon has a pretty good track record of doing well over many years now. Plus how he's thinking about AI in tennis, some of the demands that official partners of Wimbledon are making and how Wimbledon is responding to those challenges. He goes through what's new for 2025, including a new start time for the men's singles final. He is, it's fair to say, a busy man with a packed diary. So delighted to have Sama with us for a few minutes. So here he is, Sama Al-Khassab, the Commercial and Marketing Director at Wimbledon.

1:56Sam Al-Khassab, thank you very much for joining us on the Leaders Sport Business Podcast. I always thank our guests, but I'm going to particularly thank you because we're talking as the championships get underway for another year. So I would imagine that this is a fairly hectic period for you. Is hectic the word you would use? I wouldn't quite say hectic. I'd say that we're coming to the crescendo. Oh, nice. That's such Wimbledon language there. I love that. Yeah. Well, but hectic isn't really our style. I mean, we're pretty lucky because we're 147 years young. And that means that we've got a good playbook and of our temporary staff that come back, 80 % of them have done a Wimbledon before.

2:37So we sort of know what we're doing, but it's never quite the same. Good stuff. What does a Wimbledon fortnight look like for Wimbledon's commercial and marketing director? Well, the first thing to say about it is it's a ton of fun. If you don't love the Wimbledon Fortnite, you shouldn't really be working in live sport or entertainment. So that's why you do it. Seeing the smiles on people's faces, having half a million people pop through the gates and, you know, maybe tick off something that's on their bucket list. But I wouldn't say that it's a walk in the park. It's certainly a busy time and across the various areas of the business which I'm fortunate enough to to lead there's a lot to do so it could be that I'm working with the ticketing group and making sure that everything's working smoothly with the queue and the gate it could be that I'm talking with our hospitality team during the championship period we become the largest sporting hospitality event in in the world with 300 ,000 meals sold.

3:48Working with our broadcast, you know, our broadcast is done by Wimbledon Broadcast services that are absolutely top notch, making sure that all of the pictures go out across 18 courts, eight cameras per court, and that that's working perfectly. Our marketing teams, the shoulder content, our communications and all of the interviews that we do with the coaches and the players and the pundits, or it could be with the retail arm as well. So it's very varied. But the best thing really about the champs is that I'm guaranteed to meet all the key stakeholders that I may not be fortunate enough to bump into and see face to face throughout the year.

4:27You're hosting the world's best garden party. Your words, not ours. We like to say we're putting on a wedding for half a million guests. Yeah, because it's food, it's drink, it's entertainment. But it's more than just that. I mean, it is the pinnacle of tennis, we believe. and we aim to be not just at the pinnacle of tennis, but the pinnacle of sport. So yeah, it's absolutely brilliant. The gates open at 10.30. We shut the gates at 11 o 'clock at night and it's a long day, but it's well worth it. Take us a level deeper inside what, you know, you talked about talking with your team constantly and you can only imagine the sort of communications and it's the classic thing.

5:08And we have it to a certain extent with Leaders Week London, for example, where there's a lot going on beneath the surface. So how does it work? How many WhatsApp groups are you part of? Do you do it via a different means? What is the actual method of getting stuff done, little problems solved during the championships? Well, there are a number of different groups that work across different departments. And we've got everything from the professional tennis group to our state management, looking after everything within our grounds and our operations team as well. And that would include everything, including security, which is incredibly important for a global event such as Wimbledon.

5:47There are tons of different ways in which we report, and we've refined that over the years so that we can track, we can measure, and we can look at things in real time, and we can escalate if need be. So those groups are alive. They're alive on screens, small and large. They are alive through radio communication. Yes, we do still walk around with walkie-talkies, and so we know exactly what's going on. And it's really important for us because otherwise we won't be able to solve something if it starts to go a little bit squiffy. But normally it's about making sure that we can deliver at the right time because the two things that are unpredictable are A, the weather and B, the length of a match.

6:34There is something comforting actually thinking about it. You mentioned walkie-talkies there, seeing organizers of stuff. with walkie-talkie, something more comforting than just being on the phone, actually. So, I think there's something in there. Do you have a codename? I wish I did have a codename. If I did, I'm not sure I'd tell you though, David. No, fair enough. Fair enough. As you sort of hinted at, your role is quite a wide brief you've got. I was doing the kind of preparation that you would expect for this by having a little route through your LinkedIn profile and you've got listed out the sort of all the various areas that you work across.

7:16You've been in the role for a couple of years now. I mean, maybe pick out a couple of areas where you have maybe been a little bit surprised. And what do you know now that you didn't know when you started a couple of years ago about how Wimbledon works? I think the one area that surprised me, not just within the areas that I'm sort of mainly focused on, but the broader business is how we scale up. I'm now approaching my third champs and my first champs. I was, you know, watching the grounds and seeing more people come in. And normally Wimbledon's about a little over 350 odd people working on Wimbledon working at the club day in day out we are a working tennis club we are a members club but we scale up to 8 000 and to suddenly scale up for a couple of weeks by 20 times and being able to have people who work alongside you who really understand what we're doing what our ethos is our culture what we call it is the Wimbledon way is a huge effort and it's an effort on recruitment it's an effort on annual retention of those people coming back and it's an effort on each year upskilling them and cross-skilling them across different areas because they don't always stay working with one area another and the scale up isn't just in things like security and chefs and drivers if I just look at my content team it scales up from two to 52 and they're no slouches throughout the year they won the sport industry award two years ago for best social content, best content and best in social rather.

9:02And this year we're nominated. But to go from two to 52 and maintain those high standards is pretty exceptional. Absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about scarcity. And obviously there's, I guess when it comes to Wimbledon, a couple of ways we can talk about scarcity. as the fact, and you talked about being a working club year round, but there is an obvious focus on these two weeks of the year. So there's a sort of scarcity element there. And then obviously in terms of the way that partners activate around the grounds, there has traditionally been a scarcity of branding. So I just wonder, as you think about that word in relation to Wimbledon, as you've come into the role and now sort of fully established in the role, both from a marketing and a commercial standpoint, because I guess there are maybe slightly different approaches to it.

10:01How do you think about Wimbledon and scarcity? And I suppose you use that to your advantage. Well, I think there's a couple of things that come even before scarcity. The first is you want to be relevant and you want to be distinctive. And at Wimbledon, we see it as tennis in an English garden and we are very distinctive in our look and feel. When you enter some people will say you look more like a National Trust you know residence than you do a sporting arena. It's great we've got Centre Court what I believe is the greatest sporting arena in tennis where the gladiators go you know racket to racket across the net and can have all of the capabilities around us at Wimbledon to be at the very peak.

10:55But you're correct. If you looked around the grounds, you're not going to see a huge amount of logos. You won't see that a court is named after a brand. And that's intentional. We are distinctive. We know that broadcasters like us to be distinctive. We know that our guests who visit appreciate that. and also so do our members. So it stays familiar to them. What's really important is that scarcity works in our advantage by only having a few logos on court. The media value actually goes up because of that scarcity, because we're not dealing with what I might term logo soup. And because of that continuity of logo throughout the entire tournament, it doesn't change for the ladies and the men's and you won't see it rotate.

11:46And if you look around the grounds, yes, there will be a degree of activation and that activation will be with all of our official partners. But what we do is we do it in a very considered manner and they're very much our partners. They provide a service to us and they therefore within the grounds provide a service to our guests as well. And with partners, as you bring them on, I presume one of the first things, if they're not already aware that you make clear to them is, look, here's our policy or here's our guidelines on branding does that actually have the effect of prompting partners to get a bit more creative to think a bit more creatively about how they would construct a partnership with Wimbledon and the club yeah I think most definitely you want to be able to to stand out from the crowd and that's I believe actually easier to do if there are less partners you know within our official partnership group we've got 16 partners across 16 different categories and many of the other grandsons may have 30 or 40 and we believe that we can actually make that give them greater media value and make them stand out further and we will create storytelling with them and we'll work on content with them.

13:06But whilst we also focus on what's within our grounds, and that's half a million people, there's over 670 million people engaging outside of our grounds. And what we've really been focusing on the last few years is how do we amplify that with those partners? And those partners, you know, I think you're mainly talking about official partners, but also with our broadcast partners. And that's incredibly important. And that enables us to be able to get to more people in more places more often than ever before, more directly with more meaningful messages. And that basically creates relevance and receptivity, which drives loyalty and ultimately should drive lifetime value as well.

13:48So yes, being creative on site is important, but actually the work that we do with our partners throughout the year, offsite through digital channels and beyond is also very important. And is your sense that in, I suppose, slightly more general terms, the conversations that you're having at the moment with brands, whether they're existing partners or potential partners, are brands asking for more? Are brands becoming more demanding? Because we obviously know the world that we're living in and there's some economic headwinds around and brands like lots of organizations are under a little bit of maybe a different type of pressure than they might have been a couple of years ago, for example.

14:33So do you sense there is a bit of a shift there? There may be a little bit of a shift. The shift, though, I think is about data-driven decision making. It's about measurement. It's about understanding ROI. It's about segmentation. I think the shift there is all very positive. If you don't measure it, you can't fix it. I think it's really important that you do measure with your partners. And hopefully you've got common KPIs and the key performing indicators that you've got for success. You share with one another. And I talked about also creating storytelling or initiatives with one another. and championing nature for example something launched just last month with wildlife foundations across the uk from newcastle to birmingham from london to manchester has enabled us to be able to link with emirates and being able to help partner with them and have a force for good element to be able to help those wildlife foundations and all that they do to engage their local community and to have a greater impact.

15:45We had this time last year, actually, Sally Bolton on Leaders in Focus series, which was a fascinating conversation. And she was making the point which has become, I think, a bit of a theme. Wimbledon has all this history, all this tradition, and yet I would suggest has been one of the most successful events in terms of marrying that up with new technologies and innovation and bringing that through a lot of that, you know, as activations with partners, as you touched on. In your role and working day to day with broadcast partners, with commercial partners, with all sorts of different stakeholders, how do you sort of work to find that balance and sort of make sure that it's the best of both worlds because I imagine it would be very easy to actually skew one way or the other to almost sort of you know disregard any notion of innovation or at the same time you know really press forward there's so much going on in the world in terms of new technologies and lose a bit of a sense of the history and what makes so much of the championship special yeah I mean it sort of reminds me of something that the Billie Jean King said which is that we're but we're always different always the same and in fact in the last two years up until this year we indeed had a campaign called always like never before because what we tried to do is we try to marry the the heritage that everyone loves and expects from Wimbledon very high levels of service elite tennis immaculate courts with eight millimeter grass officiating that's at the highest levels, but also with innovation.

17:34And that innovation can come in different ways. It can be done with delivered through the food and drink offering. It could be innovation through what we do with the Q and the Q Village, which launched last year. It can be innovation for those that have a companion app with them, which is serving them up, you know, real-time match predictions using AI, using IBM and Watson. So there's many different things that we can do. And for those that maybe aren't in the ground, we innovate. So last year was our first e-sports championships. We had our first e-sport Melbourne champion. And so all the time we're changing, we're being innovating and innovative.

18:13And we're in particularly looking at acquisition of younger tennis fans. There's a lot of research that says within sport, if you haven't grabbed a fan by 14, the chances to be able to lock them in are quite tough. And so we do a huge amount of work with under 14s, whether it be with preschoolers, with cartoons such as Blade and Bounce, whether it's initiatives that we have with community and school programs, or whether it be through gaming and esports, all of these things are very important. And yeah, we've been doing that for some time. Our Rayblox initiative has been running for many years.

18:51And in 14 days, we get more kids engaged than FIFA managed to get on Roblox for an entire month. And that's pretty impressive when football is the global AP of the masses. Give us a sense of what's new for 2025. Line judges out. New start time for the men's final, which I would suggest probably works for both the BBC and ESPN. what else have you got that either people will maybe see that is visible or actually is happening a little bit more behind the scenes but has occupied a lot of time and attention? Well I think you've named two of the big ones the first is the new start time for the finals that allows us to be able to finish on a crescendo with the singles we have the doubles earlier in the day so people still get their fix of doubles and singles it does enable us to have a later allocated start time and appointment of you for that singles match.

19:57And that would be at four o 'clock UK time. And yes, you're correct. It does allow the largest amount of our global audience to be engaged and to be able to watch the tennis at a time which suits them. And that's only good if we're looking to be a guardian of tennis and we're looking to be able to promote grass court tennis in particular. So that does work. Electronic line calling you called out. We're very keen on being at the pinnacle of officiating. And we do believe that we need to move the times and the majority of tournaments or ATP, WTA. Now it will be three of the four of the Grand Slams will be moving to electronic line calling.

20:37So we are moving probably after others. But once again, we're innovating. But we wanted to test that it worked on grass and surfaces are different. and so we've done extensive testing to make sure that all the ELC as it's called is going to work as we expect. There are a number of other initiatives so whether that be new restaurants on the ground, whether it be new AI initiatives that we've developed, we are going to maintain and improve match prediction but we've also got a way in which you can ask any question into our app and it's going to give you the answer based on the game. So if you're watching a game and you're coming in halfway through and you want to find out some information, or even you're just wanting to understand what might not happen in the next set, then the AI will help sort of try and predict that and give you some insight.

21:29So there's lots of different things that we're doing through digital screens, small and large, but also within the grounds. I want to come back to AI in a second, but I wonder, again, with your marketing hat on in particular, and you've got a lot of hats, your marketing hat on, how important is it for Wimbledon to be telling a new story every year? We talked about the history and the tradition and actually it being probably more than any other sports event. The event that if you close your eyes, you can imagine it year after year. And it doesn't change fundamentally year on year. Is having something new to say critical, important, nice to have in this particular instance?

22:20I think news is always interesting. And actually within the attention economy and with the media changing constantly, you always want to innovate. If you don't innovate, then you won't be relevant. And so that's essential. It's the pace of that. We're fortunate we don't need to take sort of knee-jerk sort of swings because we're in the doldrums. We're in a very strong position as far as our brand equity is concerned. We're incredibly oversubscribed through our palette. We do huge amounts of guest research to understand what the guests want and what they'd like to see. And that enables us to be very choiceful in what we do and what we don't as far as innovation is concerned.

23:05And for us, we'd prefer to do bigger, better, fewer things and to be able to deliver them with excellence than throw a load of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And yes, we get courted an awful lot by a number of marketing agencies and advertising agencies and innovation streams to be able to come to us and try something out. But it's really got to fit with one of our strategies. Firstly, is it going to help us maintain a position at the pinnacle of the sport? Is it going to help drive a position within tennis as a guardian of tennis and bringing people in and acquiring them to watch tennis and love tennis for the first time?

23:43Or is it going to be something to do with the force for good so whether it be some initiatives that we've done in in in recent years such as action audio or with give vision action audio is a way in which we've been piloting if you're if you're blind you'll be able to track using sound exactly what's happening on the court and give vision is for people who's part who are partially sighted who generally can't see in front of them for more than a short distance. And by using a special pair of goggles that resemble VR-type goggles, you can actually watch the entire match and you can see from a distance in real time.

24:24And so that actually benefits us from a Force for Good standpoint, but also allows us to test and innovate for the future for different groups who otherwise wouldn't be able to engage with Wimbledon in such a deep and meaningful manner. I wanted to touch on AI again, and I'm really interested in a broad sense. We can come on to talk about, and you've already touched on a couple of the ways in which Wimbledon is utilizing and applying AI. But again, as a marketeer, as somebody who's working with commercial partners, what's your general approach philosophy to AI at the moment ahead of the 2025 championships well I think the first thing about AI is I view it as a tool for productivity about driving efficiency and effectiveness there are obvious ways that if you put your marketing hat on that it can help you with creating content it can help you with being able to be creative in much quicker and more economical manners.

25:30But you do want to own that, right? Want to make sure that you've got a license and you're owning it and you're using the right tools and you're being respectful to anyone else. So we're not up for plagiarism. Sounds like you've been on the same courses as we've been on here at Leaders. Yeah. Yeah. will be but i think ai goes beyond that you know ai allows you if you're running an event and i'm thankfully don't work on the operations side because it's far too complex for for my brain but whether you're looking at people flows traffic flows you're looking at electricity and what should be able to deliver at any particular time there are so many things that ai can do and it could even help with your scheduling.

26:16You can pump in the weather and you can try to understand when matches need to be played and finished by and what the average length of time was and that can do it in seconds whereas in the old days you'd have a load of analysts there sat in a room with Excel spreadsheets and calculators. So it's far more efficient because it's done in seconds. For me, I'm really keen on how you harness AI not just within marketing communications but what it can deliver for something like the championships wimbledon so wimbledon can't exist without three things players grass and officials so how does ai help you with that with officiating and the calls over time how does it help you being able to maintain the grass because that's imperative it's a living surface and to be honest that's what makes the original surface of tennis so exciting and also the players and I think over time people won't just be using AI as coaches to be able to help the players to play at their very best by giving them insights to who they're playing and how they might play but I think when mixed with biometrics it's going to be able to measure the player load and hopefully it will be able to make sure that any injuries don't take place because at the end of the day when you get to the tougher end of the competition you want all the players playing at top performance without any niggles.

27:37And if that can be harnessed by the power of AI, I think it would be a massive force for good. Do you have a favourite bit of the tournament?

27:50There is definitely a tingle when the announcement for the gates to be open to the public on day one. When you hear that announcement, the people who are permanent employees, they've worked for many, many weeks preparing for that very moment. And there's definitely a little rise in your heartbeat, hair stand on end, and you see the people coming through the gates and you know, whether they're running off towards, you know, the hill or they're going towards the outer courts before centre courts on, you know, that it's absolutely amazing. And seeing the smiles on their face is absolutely brilliant, especially if the sun's shining.

28:36Indeed, indeed, which is the one thing you can't control, of course. Final question. Let's end where we started with your diary. What does the Monday after the championships look like in your calendar at the moment? Is there anything in there? Is it immediate debriefs how does it work for you well we actually after we finish on center court and after the gentleman's champion will do their interviews and the drug testing and everything else and visit their loved ones they then need to put on a black tie hopefully after they've had a shower and brushed up and there is a a champion's dinner and that takes a place in in central london and generally goes on into the wee hours.

29:21So my very early Monday will hopefully be with some of my colleagues, some of the key stakeholders, partners and some players, enjoying ourselves and reminiscing on what a great championship it's been. And then, yes, I will have somewhat of a lie-in before I crawl out of my pit and go back to work and start analysing some of the numbers and having a debrief. Good stuff. well in the meantime Sam I really appreciate you joining us and good luck for the next couple of weeks and yeah we'll see you on the other side. Thank you very much David and have a great summer