Revealed: what it was that the Rock was cooking

31:18If we promote it properly, the fans will show up. We think the results have proven that. So people need to go to the event live and it also needs to be in a good time slot to have a big audience. Correct. And look, we also, we understand we can't just pipe out American product at let's say 2 or 3 a.m. in the United Kingdom and expect people will show up. We have to give them product that resonates with them if we want to grow the property at a time that works for them. You mentioned it earlier, but this coming weekend you are switching from NBC to your new broadcaster ESPN. I presume that's just a case of changing the address to which you send the tapes, right?

32:02That's how it's done these days, isn't it? Correct. Yes. Okay. So make sure someone gets the right address there. You are almost a year into the Netflix deal as well. Again, two huge changes in the kind of WWE universe. What are your... And I guess the context for this is the pay-per-view discussion, you know, is pay-per-view dead? What are your reflections sort of nine months or so into the Netflix deal and about to start ESPN? So a couple of things, 20 plus years ago, WWE's primary programming was on traditional pay-per-view as you just referenced and on UPN in the United States, which you may or may not have heard of very, very small enterprise and the Nashville network, which became the national network, which became TNN, which became Spike, which is now Paramount.

32:49So the trajectory of WWE now being on ESPN and USA and Netflix shows the tremendous amount of work that the WWE team, our wrestlers, our producers, our creatives, our executives have put into growing this property. So we're now with premium partners. That being said, this is the starting line. It's not the finish line for us. So the first nine months into our Netflix deal, we believe Netflix will tell you we've exceeded expectations. We want to be great partners. Our hope is that they would tell you the same thing. No, we don't have office numbers at WWE. Everyone calls us on our cell phones. So if Gabe Spitzer, Bella Bajaria at Netflix needs something on WWE, they call my cell phone, either pick up or I text back.

33:37I'll call you in 10 minutes or whatever it is. Our default is yes. Send an emoji. Send an emoji. I'm not a big emoji guy. You're not a big emoji guy. May I tell you why? Yes, please. I feel you age out of emojis. Oh, really? You also age out of this thing, KK, that people write. KK? Like in the USP, instead of OK, people will write KK. Like, I think that's silly for a 50-year-old person. Nice, thank you. Yes. Full sentences only? No, sometimes short sentences when we're on the run. Do we put grammar in there? Full stops, et cetera? No, I don't think grammar needs to be necessary. but I don't like like the face with like the tongue sticking out or the, I don't know.

34:12I don't understand. We're grownups here. Yeah, no, that's fair. Um, yeah, completely fair. Do you agree with that or are you a big emoji person? You can admit it. The fire, you like the fire one. Do you know what? Honestly, I sometimes use the eggplant emoji. For what? If I'm being suggestive. Um, but, and the thumbs up is easy as well. Thumbs up is easy. Yeah. That's fine. Uh, and I think it's just those two, to be honest. Sometimes here or there, I've looked through the emojis. I'm like, I wonder who actually uses this one. You know, there's sort of butterflies. Do you know what? There was a thing.

34:46I'm surprised Martin at Sport Business didn't go into you with it. But there's been this case recently in a media rights deal. I think it's UEFA with a soccer deal. Maybe it's UEFA. South Korea. uh there's this case of a deal being done over whatsapp and the sort of legality of that is that legally binding if you have done the deal over whatsapp with emojis and things like that and it turns out that legally yes it is so maybe you need to start incorporating emojis into how you contract you know i used to be a lawyer in my prior life a long time ago it doesn't it doesn't You know, people are always like, well, the contract, the contract.

35:28Contract can take shape in many different forms. So, for example, in California, it's all based on what law you're using. A verbal agreement is as good as a written agreement. A written agreement is just proof that the verbal agreement existed. So, yes, I would assume a reasonable interpretation of an emoji could be like a reasonable interpretation. It depends what emoji is. Yeah, correct. Correct. You want to stay clear with him. Let's talk about your personal journey for a little bit, if we may. and then I will wrap up and let you get on with your day. Is it true what Wikipedia says about your sort of first involvement with WW?

36:04Do you know what Wikipedia says about you? I know it may sound hard to believe. I've never searched myself on X. I've never searched myself on the internet. I have no clue. Okay, so what Wikipedia, I mean, Joel, you probably know this, but Wikipedia says that you became involved with WW initially when you were representing Tim Tebow. Accurate. And either WWE wanted to get Tim Tebow involved or the other way around. WWE wanted to get Tim Tebow involved in a match at WrestleMania against a wrestler named The Big Show. Yeah. And offered Tim and Tim's foundation a sizable amount of money. Yeah. That was an incoming call from Paul Levesque, Triple H to me.

36:46Yeah. Who said, hey, you know, this is Paul Levesque calling. And I said, hey, Paul, how you doing? He said, you know, I'm the wrestler, Triple H. I said, I know exactly who you are. used to be called Terra Rising. Then you were called Hunter Hearst Helmsley. Oh, you showed you were a fan straight off the back. Correct. I said, what's going on? And it resulted in a meeting about, again, Tim Tebow with the big show, which never materialized. But Paul and I stayed in touch after that. And ultimately, it ended up where we are. So forget about Tim Tebow. This is actually about you. I try not to make anything about me.

37:17To me, I like to stay behind the scenes. Hence me doing a big podcast with a famous podcast. Very famous, yeah. Contrary to what I normally do. Well, I appreciate your time. This podcast is called Leaders Worth Knowing. I know your podcast. Yes. Yes. If someone wants to get to know you, what's the best way to do that? If I'm looking to do a deal with you at some stage, how do I get to know you? I think sitting together in person as we're doing right now is always the most effective way. I also would tell young executives, so people far junior to us in their career, do it the way that the recipient of what you're pitching of how they want it done.

37:56So if someone likes to sit together in person, sit together in person. You see the younger generation likes to text and WhatsApp and all of that stuff. The older generation, my generation likes to talk on the phone. So if somebody calls me, it's very tough for me to ignore that. Even if it's someone I don't necessarily want to interact with. I'll eventually, I call everybody back. And by the way, certain times, you know, I'm, I'm blind copied on any complaint that goes to our fan services email. And oftentimes it's obstructed view or, you know, I didn't get this. So that that's all handled, you know, by our team who does a great job, but sometimes it's a serious issue.

38:33And when it is, I'll call the customer of ours directly from my cell phone and say, Hey, I was not aware of this happened. Let me look into it right away. We'll look into it. We'll try to get it rectified. I prefer the phone. So that's a way to connect. So you're the ultimate customer services executive there. It has to be. To me, I've always said, if there's no job beneath you, there's no job out of your reach. So we have to make sure that our customers who are our clients stay happy. Not everyone's going to be happy all the time. They may not like the result of the product. That's fine. Right.

39:06As long as they keep showing up and we keep delivering as I think Triple H and the creative team have. But if something goes awry at a venue, it's not the venue's fault. It's our fault. If something's our fault, I want to take ownership of it and correct it as soon as we can. Final question then, Nick. I wonder what your advice would be to executives trying to work out how to deal with big characters. It strikes me that in your position and in your kind of entity, TKO, WWE, you're constantly with big characters. You might be a big character yourself, you know. But, you know, the sport of wrestling, WWE is all about characters, whether they're, you know, made up or not.

39:50All the executives seem to be big characters. You're in this big group now, TKO, Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro, they're big characters. UFC, big characters. You know, President Trump coming to pretty much every event. Big characters everywhere. How do you deal with ego and character like that? Look, in terms of the ego with Ari, Mark, Dana, Triple H, they're easy for me. Because we're all rowing in the same direction. So if they're calling, it's either about an idea or, hey, something's askew or, hey, there's an opportunity somewhere. Easy. The most important thing to me when you're dealing with big personalities, stay calm.

40:32Stay cool. We're not, I often say in conversations, we're not talking about each other's children. So there's nothing you can say to me in business that would offend me, that would embarrass me, that would upset me. It's just business. Again, as long as it's not personal towards children, family, this or that, which of course it never is, stay cool, stay calm and deal with whatever the issue is. And remember, as you continue to grow your career, people are usually only calling you because there's a problem. problem so they're calling you because they want you to fix it so if you answer your phone that's a good thing even if you text back i'll call you in an hour i'm in a movie unless you need me now then i'll step out if they say i need you to step out i know there's a problem i know they're calling me for help on it and i want to help fix it so always answer the phone great words to live by nick karm thank you very much thanks for having me on been a pleasure danny garcia thank you very much for joining us on Leaders Worth, knowing we're here at the IMG Redbird Summit.

41:34First of all, why are you here? I was here. So interesting. So the real true story, I called Mark Shapiro because the NFL had wanted an RFP for me for the flag football. And, you know, IMG was doing it. There were a few other entities. I said, Mark, I think I'd like to let's talk about doing this together. And he said, you know what? I think we are not going to be doing that, but please come to the Redbird IMG conference. I want you to come. And Mark is an incredible friend and ally. And I was like, I would, I would love to, and I wasn't able to attend last year. And so it was, it started with flag football and ended with me here at the conference.

42:15Never saw that turn coming. Danny, be honest, when was the last time you Googled yourself? I didn't Google myself, but I did do on Instagram my name search because there is now that AI feature and it writes this bio about you. And I was like, oh, what is it going to say about me? It's nonsense. Yeah, it had a lot of nonsense on it. But it did include some of my recent things that I thought was very appropriate. I was like, oh, that's funny. So Google, I think, has suddenly got so much worse since they've introduced the AI bit up the top. And I obviously did Google you quite recently. Oh, I wonder how.

42:51I didn't do it on Google. I did it, like I said, I did it for Meta. But how was that? So they seem to scrape all sorts of stuff from everywhere. Oh, right. And there's stuff that's clearly out of date in terms of companies that you're running and what you're involved in now. But it was interesting how they sort of define you. It's like Danny Garcia is a businesswoman, film producer, and professional bodybuilder. Ah, I feel seen. Yeah. Okay. Well, the question was, do you feel like, do you identify as those things? Yeah. If you're introducing yourself to someone who doesn't know you, doesn't know the fields that you work in, how do you...

43:31Yes, which, by the way, very interestingly enough, I don't do too much, which thanks heaven, because it's always clunky. And it is like, what is the first thing first? What is the one that'll, you know, if you start with, you know, actually I would say the UFL helps me because when I can say, well, I own a, you know, American Spring Football League. That is broad enough where people are like, oh, well, that's very different. And then underneath it I could say, and by the way, I also am a producer, you know. So, and then if I want to really lean in, oh, really? Yes, I have the most first, the highest watched film on Netflix, the most watched film on Amazon, you know.

44:13And then the, depending upon how, what I'm wearing, the bodybuilding conversation will either come in first or it'll come in last or it won't come in at all. But usually, many people will be like, in your arms. And so, it all weaves in. But it is interesting because so much of my life was not built on doing one archetype. It really was built on doing the Danny archetype. And as myself, these expressions are very natural to do all these different things. Have you been to the gym here once you've been here? I did. I used the gym here when I landed because I flew in and had that weird, you know, four-hour sleep.

44:57So I need to adjust my body here. So I did use the gym. It was, it's a nice gym. It's nice. It's nice. The swimming pool looks really nice. Yeah, it's not fully gym, gym, Jimmy. No, sure. It's not a professional gym. No, but it is lovely and you can get work done. Good. I remember a few years ago being quite excited by the prospect of you and Dwayne Johnson launching, was it called Athleticon? Athleticon, yes, it's our gym. Which didn't happen. Like COVID, that was a victim of COVID, was it? It was a victim of COVID, but it's in our hopper. I mean, we have not given that IP. It's coming up. Oh, we love that IP.

45:35It really is about timing and opportunity. It's actually one of the best things about – it's so funny. We've been so fortunate. We're the best thing that never happened. Because what's happening in sports now and in the athletic landscape and what's happening with training, the amount of strength training, people getting into the gym. Gym lifestyle. culture. Exactly. People don't drink in bars anymore. They hang out in gyms. Right. It is so, so different. So this is the environment where you can really blend all those things together. So yes, we've kept the property. Okay. So that's in the, uh, somewhere.

46:14Like, what is that? Where are the right? And you know, does it happen in Europe first? Does it happen in the Middle East first? There's lots of conversation, but we love it. We love the name. We love the idea. It is so in our wheelhouse. We're just putting all the pieces. It's quite sort of futuristic. Right. Transformers. It's a bit American. It is quite American. I'm not sure what else you would go. Gym con. Gym con. But it really, I mean, it's to the point. Yeah, yeah. Athletic con. Athletic con. Right. Oh, good accent. Yeah. You did a panel session once you've been here at the IMG Redbird Summit.

46:51And you said something which I think really struck a chord. And certainly I found it amusing and true. where you said sports is great. Being involved in sports is great because you have the license to piss people off. Yes. Like it is part of the fabric of sport. Conflict. Yes, the conflict. You get the full emotional range all the way to distraught and despair. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, in the sort of most basic sense of the word, sport is about competition and it's red against blue, it's X against Y or whatever. And there's conflict involved there. But in terms of human conflict, pissing people off in a, you know, you riling them up outside of competition.

47:38Right. What's your approach as a leader to, yeah, to addressing conflict? Oh, so interesting. So I am, which is probably why I love sports. Outside of sports, my leadership style is actually focused on frictionless. to be as frictionless as possible. So in resolving conflict, conflict doesn't scare me and emotionality doesn't scare me because I'm very comfortable understanding that that individual, it sounds so basic, but I've never not been in a situation where the other individual doesn't actually have a viewpoint that is completely beneficial to me. Now, where they're coming from, how they're coming from, what is the piece, what's the point of view, what is their narrative to that.

48:25Many times I have to do some unpacking. I may not agree with their overall narrative, but there's always something in there. So that I find helpful. And it's probably, you know, a big portion of my life had actually management involved, like the management of human beings and how they're feeling and how they're operating and how I create environments so they show up in the best possible way. That time and skill set allows me to look at conflict in a different way. And to also, one of the best things or one of the, I guess, things that I do, I guess I'm proud of myself for is that I'm so comfortable being like, I'm sorry, you're right.

49:14That was awful. It's quite powerful. things and tears, man. What was I thinking? And my sorries are not, I'm sorry, therefore, you're good. My sorry is like, I'm sorry. What was I thinking? Did I do that? Oh my goodness, it's because I did this. All right, I did that. Boom, boom. While I'm live with you, I will go and be like, okay, oh, you know what? I did this. I'll never do that again, which will never lead to this fight again. I don't give a sorry. I always give sorry, resolution identified how did i get here make amends sorry resolution promise yes yeah amends that's good that's sort of past present future oh nicely done oh that's great yeah may i borrow that of course you can sorry about something happened in the past you resolve it in the present and promise not to do it again in the future right and the resolving in the present gives the because you've you've broken down the issue into reasons of how you got there You then giving confidence to the other person that your promise to the future actually means something.

50:17Yeah. Good. We're getting somewhere. You have stakes in a lot of businesses. You're involved in a lot of enterprises. Obviously, we've mentioned the UFL. You've got a film production company. You've got, I mean, according to out-of-date information on Google's AI, you've got about 20 other businesses on the go. Um, who's up in the portfolio at the moment? Who, who, which company are you loving right now? And on the flip side of that, which one needs a little bit of work? Oh, all my children. So who's, who's up? Yes, I'm asking who your favorite child is. So who's up dramatically would be, uh, UFL and then Donnie Moss, which is my media fashion company, right?

51:06Which is freshly launched just a few months ago. Right. Like freshly made. It is that rare space of under a thousand followers on Instagram. Okay. Truly infantile. Those two, very much so. And the UFL differently because I have a brilliant new investment partner, Mike Rapoli, who's come in like a force. But Donnie Moss, absolutely. And then the brands underneath it, I'm spending quite a lot of time. Zoa Energy, which is Molson Core's partnership. Terra Mana, which is with our Jägermeister partnerships. Those are very interesting. Also, going through a transition where their marketing and branding, which is very Dwayne Johnson heavy, focused on drink this, sort of that model.

51:58Root one. Yeah, is being completely reworked. And so, you know, it's adjacency off of the brand. And then Project Rock would be that underneath that that's actually quite active because there's a lot that's going on inside of Project Rock. So actually, yeah, I have a lot of children. I would say children who are just, you know, entering high school, those hormones are hitting. Yeah, emotional ups and downs. Yeah, emotional ups and downs. I want to talk about film a little bit, if that's okay. obviously pretty much any movie that Dwayne Johnson makes is a guaranteed smash hit and does he only work within your production company?

52:43For the most part yes we or well you know a lot of times if we have projects come to us that are outside our production company our production company attaches it to stuff we bring so much value and of course the world of The DJ is not just DJs, a performer, an actor, but there's also the entire massive digital aspect. And we activate on that and manage that. Yeah. What do you think makes a great sports film now? I think we're in a time of amazing content. Obviously, we've had the sports documentary explosion. I feel like there's a bit of fatigue around, actually, with sports documentaries. They have to really cut through.

53:25They have to be good. Yeah, I don't. What are the ingredients in a great sports film? Well, you know, I've got to say there is, while they, I do love a good sports doc, and they are, but there is a proliferation of, sorry, I'm sorry. There's a proliferation of social media used in a way that is basically doing the job of a sports doc. Yeah. Because you're right there. If you're not right there, someone's camera is right there. Someone else is commenting on it. There's, you know, 20 different viewpoints that are being shared live at this time. So historically, you know, if you have a doc that is going back, for example, the Jimmy Johnson documentary, right?

54:11That was fantastic. And that went all the way back where we didn't have that access in social media. Now, it's a bit challenging to do that now because everyone knows so much of what's happening. So I think that's a challenge. But what I do, what I'm excited about is, and I just had this conversation with Ashlyn Harris, is I want to do the Sandlot of today. I want to do these four quadrant sports movies that everyone can see that may focus on a little bit of a younger athlete. I'm excited about a – I love that in particular that film where you also have young girls participating in it. And I think that, you know, starting there, moving up – sports now is ripe for fictional storytelling based upon the true realities and the dramas of what happens in sports.

55:10And I have a keen interest in that. Danny, thank you very much for your time. Now, before I let you go, I just need to ask you one really annoying question. How often do you get asked, you know, what was it that The Rock was actually cooking? Oh, you know what? What is so funny? No one has ever asked me that. What was he cooking? Well, he was cooking success, global domination. Clearly, clearly. Can you smell? Yeah, it smells like money. It smells like success, my friend. Do you cook? Do you cook? Not much. No, okay. Yeah, I do eat a lot. Yeah, sure. Don't quite do that. Yeah, yeah. Someone else does the cooking.

55:47Danny Garcia, thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Adam Kelly, the man himself, one of, I'm going to say, four or five presidents in the IMG WTKO stable that are here at the IMG Redbird Summit, but the only one that matters in my head. That's really kind of you, James. How are you doing, Adam? Honestly, I think I might be one of the happiest times of my life. Yeah. everything is really going well enjoying every minute personal professional feeling in a really good place i walked into the office last week and it might sound a bit ridiculous but i genuinely stopped and thought to myself life is good yeah um it's always i mean i came last year and had a great time and this year i think is ever so slightly better only slightly well there's always room for improvement isn't there uh i'm not saying that but i do think we raised the bar yeah i think you did uh i can't find my questions for you adam so i am going to completely um freestyle which is a shame because i had some absolute zingers did you yeah um what we're pretty much halfway through just over halfway through the summit at this point what do you think you've learned so these are some of my favorite days of the year is what i said in my in my opening remarks.

57:07What I've learned is that despite everything that's been going on, the challenges that surround us, there is so much to be not just grateful for, but optimistic about. So many people come to me with concerns, issues, anxieties about the direction of travel for the industry and everything that's been going on. And I think we've had this conversation before. First of all, I genuinely see challenges at work as opportunities to do our best. I think that's when IMG is at its absolute best, particularly in this era as we're in through this kind of transformation process over the past few years. But problem solving challenges, finding solutions for the industry, for our partners, really drives me and really drives the team.

58:00and I think bringing people together in this environment sort of brings all of that to the fore. We've addressed a number of really interesting topics and issues, but also there's quite a solution-oriented mindset, which we talked about the genesis of the summit and us investing in this event was to do just that, was to get people together, to get them in the right frame of mind to build a mindset for raising the game, finding solutions and, you know, really developing and building the industry. And I think we're in just an incredible moment in sport. Yeah. You took part in a session at the beginning of the summit alongside Mark Shapiro and Nick Khan, your fellow presidents.

58:53Shapiro, obviously the president of TKO, and Nick Khan, the president of... WWE. Yes. And UFC? No, that's Dana, isn't it? That's Dana. And there was obviously discussion about what TKO is as a big group now, where your strengths are, how it's going. Shapiro's obviously always great, wind him up and he speaks and gives his genuine opinions, it seems. And he said something which I thought was interesting. And I'm not sure whether he would have said that kind of in front of you before, but he basically sort of said that IMG used to have the reputation, obviously, as the original best, biggest sports marketing agency.

59:37But there was a period in which IMG would do the hard sell, and he called it sort of nickel and diming. And over the course of the last sort of 15, 20 years, and especially since Endeavor came in, WME came in, the approach has changed to one of partnership and finding solutions for partners' challenges. Do you agree in general with that characterization? Yes, I think it's fair. My way of phrasing it is we had become very transactional, which I guess is what he means by the nickeling and dimeling. And a sort of business framed against transactions is really hard to defend. I had been analyzing, commenting, sharing my views, but it wasn't until I took over leading the division at the time, now the company, that I really made a difference and changed the course of our strategic direction.

1:00:37And that was very deliberate with a clear approach on becoming strategic, adding more capabilities, investing in the team, changing the structure, adjusting personnel, not few in number, making some pretty big changes and adjustments. And from the very first moment, it was about becoming a different company and very deliberately changing our approach. And that was a transformation project. It was framed in various ways, but to be ready. And a number of my colleagues looked to me like I was nuts, but to be ready to lead the change in our industry. And when all you're doing is deals and sales and transactions, you go back to that era we were talking about was we've done a deal.

1:01:29Then people were quite surprised that we were setting this pretty ambitious goal to make a real difference. And because of the mindset back then, people didn't even really see the need nor felt that we had the footing and the justification to be able to actually legitimately stake that claim. So it took a while, but I've noticed strategically how you can reposition a business even of the size and scale of IMG, because we were not small at that time. We had some bumps in the road, but we were still a very large organization. And there was a sort of mindset that you're changing direction on an oil tanker.

1:02:12But actually, we made significant steps and really repositioned the whole business to the point now where I do this repeatedly because I've learned that getting a cultural shift is about clarity of objectives, communicating a clear strategy, understanding and outlining your tactics on how to get there, but repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly communicating about what you're doing, give case studies that demonstrate that you are actually walking that path and reinforcing it both with internal stakeholders in particular, but also externally. And I'm proud of the work that I've done over that period.

1:02:59Interestingly, you mentioned cultural shift there. And I'm always very impressed when I see you present at this event and others, Adam, but especially given usually you're in and amongst and alongside your group colleagues, who invariably are quite larger than life American characters. You know, just yesterday, obviously Shapiro and Nick Khan, who we mentioned, but last year, Ari Emanuel. You know, these are big characters and they sort of shoot from the hip. And I'm not saying you're not a big character, but you're definitely a different sort of person. You're a British person. And it struck me coming to the summit this time, just how American the group is, how American the group feels.

1:03:49And IMG feels like the sort of last bastion of sort of UK stronghold almost. And I wonder how you would sort of characterize the culture now in IMG. And do you feel like it's a different separate culture from the wider TKO culture? First of all, you said a lot of very nice things there. So thank you. And I do appreciate your point of view on these things. So it does mean something to me. The overall positioning, I think culture comes from the top and I've shaped the culture of IMG as I believe is right. And it's me as my authentic self, as I've always believed leadership should be. And I've studied and I've read, but interestingly, it confirmed my instincts.

1:04:45And I can't tell you exactly where those instincts have come from, but I've learned a lot through, honestly, the failure of others that I've noticed around and historically said to myself, I will not be a certain type of leader if that's the only way to become successful. I think we've spoken about this before, maybe on the record, maybe off the record. But the person in my life who had always said that I would eventually be the chief exec of this company is my wife. And for a long time, I would say, I'm not even sure I would want that job. And I'm certainly not aiming to become the boss. But this has been the job that's given me the most satisfaction of my entire career.

1:05:26And I'm in my 25th year at IMG, so I've had a few different roles here. But back to the culture, it's, you know, people who spend time with me don't differentiate me at work in my personal life. I'm level-headed, calm. I don't get stressed. I've got a good perspective on how to deal with the pressures of running a very large organization amongst some very high-pressure, high-energy individuals. And I've just stayed true to myself. So I think when people see me present, it's pretty similar to how I talk at a dinner table or how I talk because I'm speaking with my friends and family. So it's consistency, it's honesty, and I think it's authenticity.

1:06:14And that seems to resonate with a lot of people. And frankly, I'm the only person in the ELT at TKO that's from outside the US. I sit physically outside the US, and I think I get a lot of benefits as a result of that. And the benefit of the English accent when you do with the Americans is quite useful. But also, it's a style that is international and resonates with our clients who are based in all countries around the world. Yeah. A few quickfire ones, if we may, because I know I'm probably keeping you from some mysterious entertainment tonight. It's been an amazing year, nine months, six months even for IMG in terms of rights deals, well, TKO especially.

1:07:07You're looking at WWE and UFC both doing a range of amazing deals. You talked about it in your presentation. It shouldn't have happened, but you made it happen. You've got a Saudi Premier League deal in the mix too, and I'm sure there's a couple of others that you'd want to point to as successes. when you look back honestly at the what you've been able to achieve over the last nine months money-wise uh do you feel like you got everything that was on the table um in terms of the big rights deals uh tko level marks pretty clear um it's it wasn't about maximizing every penny it was about the strategic fit and the structure of the partnerships i think is going to be groundbreaking for fans of both WWE and UFC.

1:07:58When I look at the last nine months in terms of what drives me and what gives me the most satisfaction, it's definitely not the numbers part. It's about confirming that we're working with a real purpose, the purpose being something I talk about a lot, which is that we're able to make an impact with our partners and show on the one hand, we deliver these incredible results for ourselves at TKO, and we translate that to driving incredible outcomes for our partners. The number one highlight of the last nine months has been our extension with CommaBol, because we put a lot of time and energy into that relationship, truly helping them transform incredible numbers, stats across the board, audience growth, which I truly believe is the most important currency in our industry, impact across every metric, and I'm not going to go into them all now, but as a result of that great work, they extended our relationship without going to market.

1:09:01We tested it. We had KPMG, I think it is, run an audit. So they had everything verified. So they did everything by the book. But they felt, and they said, Alejandro Dominguez said to me, Adam we feel IMG is our trusted partner and expert advisor there is honestly nothing better for me to hear and as an agency to hear that you have successfully built a relationship with a major rights holder in the world of sport and despite every agent consultant man and his dog knocking on their door, they made the right decision, given the energy, time and success that we've put in and delivered for them to extend.

1:09:47So that is probably the proudest achievement of my career. And we've got a lot more to come, some in the near future, which I'm really excited about. I think it's an interesting time in the sports media rights market at the moment. There There are some sort of flowering shoots of new entrants coming through, some interesting deals that have been done recently, not necessarily massive deals, but interesting deals and potentially could be more. Obviously, Netflix is in in a big way now. The streamers are coming sort of full force. YouTube haven't jumped in fully yet, but then you've got this wave of podcasters, influencers, talent, et cetera, actively buying rights.

1:10:34if you could point to one sort of trend as one that you're really excited by in that kind of field what would you point to the the trend i talk about is the umbrella one which is this is a golden age for sport because we have moved into a new phase of monetization and conversion we're in the attention economy. The key driver in this environment today are the peak audiences that continue to build, continue to grow for sport and with premium sports content. And in that environment, you now have the biggest organizations in the world that have driven more success than any other company in the history of mankind, focusing and realizing the value of this peak audience delivery mechanism that is sport and driving into their business.

1:11:30So as that continues to build, it's not going to be a one-way traffic. It's not going to be a knockout shift. Everything moves over to these big four, big five, but it's going to be a process where the traditional media companies are also reinventing. We're going to have a group of five, six, seven, eight multi-territory, multi-regional buyers that are going to drive incredible outcomes for our industry, the rights holders, the leagues, clubs, federations. And with the right advice and guidance, and I'd offer that IMG can provide that direction and strategic advice because the challenges are different for these organizations, but with the right approach, sport will really enter a golden period.

1:12:19Finally, Adam, this time last year, I think it's fair to say that one of the things that people were talking about, that we were sort of talking to each other about, was what was going to happen with the UEFA European rights, the Champions League speculation at the time that they were leaving team. They did end up leaving team. What is it that you want to find out? What are you asking people this year? What's the thing that you're trying to find out? I didn't disrupt the process by telling you, but we did not bid in that process. We sent UEFA a letter saying we disagreed with the timing, unusual timing, didn't align with the process.

1:13:02We had a suggestion if they would have invited us. I'm not going to declare what that was, but we suggested something and it was ignored. The question to ask UEFA, the question to ask the relevant guys that have a big job on their hands. Listen, I wish everybody success in our industry. I hope they succeed in their goals. I don't see a clear pathway for them to do so, but I'm sure they have it well planned out.

1:13:36You know me well enough. I focus on our shop and what we're up to. I don't really focus too much on everybody else. No, fair enough. Fair enough. Adam, I'm looking forward to watching from the stands in a couple of weeks as you speak at Leaders alongside Brandon Riege from Netflix. That's going to be a good one. Oh, can't wait for that. That's going to be a big one. Let's knock it on the head, shall we? Adam Kelly, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.