What do you get when you buy Mark Goldbridge?

10:54David Cushnan:Of mine.

10:54James Emmett:Of your. Oh, I see. Of Jury. It was a while ago. So Eredivisie TV was an early incarnation of a D2C operation being built by a football league. In this instance, Eredivisie is the Dutch top division. And I think it was around about 2010, I spoke with a chap called Frank Rutten, who's still in the sort of sports media industry. But at the time, he was the CEO of Eredivisie TV. And it was this new service being built out to go direct to consumer in Holland, not just the Eredivisie rights, also being complemented by select other soccer rights from around Europe, essentially building this package that would be the ultimate soccer offering for Dutch soccer fans.

11:40James Emmett:Ultimately, it became Fox Sports. It was bought by Fox in Holland. But yeah, it's an idea that's been going around. It's obviously an idea that the folks running the league are D2C offering are also on to trying to complement their core rights as well.

11:57David Cushnan:Yeah, a slightly different situation there in that they, for reasons that most people listening will know, the French media rights market have been put in a position where they are broadcasting Ligue 1 games on that channel and on that service that they've had to create and they had to create at pace. And they actually went through this process of attempting to acquire and indeed, at one stage thinking they had acquired rights in France to this summer's World Cup for the service before they were gazumped by FIFA and another broadcaster, I think, being sports. Elsewhere, La Liga TV, La Liga Plus is doing something similar to the Eredivisie model that you talked about and for a number of years has been a platform.

12:42David Cushnan:I think Microsoft are involved in that as well, that broadcasts lots of sports other than football, basketball, handball, a volleyball, even a bit of petonk. So yeah, not unheard of, but I think from a Canadian point of view, I think it's a really fascinating organisation and story to watch as this builds out, because James Johnson is there and he's, as you say, he's only been there for a short amount of time, but he has made some quite significant decisive moves.

13:12James Emmett:Yeah. It does get you sort of thinking about what else might work on a soccer-specific D2C offering. And I'm specifically thinking of the Premier League's upcoming experimentation in that field. They're obviously launching a single market offering in Singapore upcoming. They're building these spanking new studio facilities in central London to build out, one would presume, their ability to create shoulder programming for D2C offerings. And it did make me think, if you're a consumer, sports consumer, and you're a fan of a Premier League team, Premier League football in general, and you subscribe to the Premier League service, you might be compelled to watch the channel via all sorts of weird and wacky other offerings that wouldn't necessarily fly elsewhere.

13:56James Emmett:For example, I would watch, as a Premier League fan, I would watch Premier League players playing paddle against each other. A sort of intra-Premier League paddle tournament featuring, you know, the players who like to play paddle. I'd watch that on Premier League Plus, but I wouldn't buy to zone to watch that, for example.

14:14David Cushnan:Yeah, that's actually an alternative path, isn't it?

14:18James Emmett:Get your athletes to do other things.

14:19David Cushnan:Well, get your athletes to do other things, but also build out your programming around the Premier League brand. And I'm thinking of, and I know this has been sold and acquired by a broadcaster, but the drama series that F1 is producing, for example, you could see down the line, perhaps, you know, is there some sort of Premier League drama. Late at the Premier League. Yeah, which could ultimately form part of a sports and entertainment package served up by the Premier League sort of branded content, if you like.

14:51James Emmett:Well, Pimp My Ride needs to come back, probably. Yeah, there's all sorts of ideas, isn't there? There's all sorts. Obviously, food for thought, your interview with James Johnson. And do check out the episode on the feed. There have been some bits and pieces happening, David. As you've been weeding through all your content from Atlanta, the world of sport continues. Should we have a look?

15:10David Cushnan:Yeah, give us some signings.

15:11James Emmett:So Hugo Boss, the fashion brand, has signed a deal with Tennis Australia to become the official lifestyle outfitter of the Australian Open from 2027. It replaces Ralph Lauren in the role. Ralph Lauren has something of a stranglehold on tennis or had something of a stranglehold on tennis. It's also the official outfitter at Wimbledon. This is a big old deal. And congratulations to the protagonists involved. James Foster, Patricia Stefani, and our good friend Amanda Calder-McLaren are on the boss side and on the Australian Open side, obviously anticipating the departure of Craig Tiley. But Belinda Stevenson, who's on the New Biz Global Partnerships team, are hauling in a big fish here.

15:58James Emmett:And Roddy Campbell, who's responsible for global partnerships at the Australian. Congrats to all involved. Never easy to sign a deal at a time of executive change. So particularly well done for that. But BOSS are going to outfit up to 4 ,000 staff officials, umpires and ball kits. And it adds to the title sponsorship that Hugo Boss have with the ATP 250 tournament in Stuttgart. And they also have a small roster of players that they endorse, including Taylor Fritz. You'll remember him wearing the Boss logo upside down at some point, and Matteo Berrettini. Elsewhere, low-cost carrier Wiz Air has been named as a partner of World Athletic's new Ultimate Championship.

16:40David Cushnan:Over at Formula E, Will Brown, VP of Motorsports at Legends Global, is switching to Formula E as Chief Commercial Officer. He will join the organisation in London in July. This comes as the Chief Revenue Officer at Formula E. Tiziana Di Giola leaves her role at the Electric Motorsport Series. Deandra Duggins has been named as Chief Business Officer of the new Atlanta NWSL team due to join the league in 2028 and very much Arthur Blank's latest purchase as he's building things up over at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

17:15James Emmett:Streaming service Flow Sports Chief Operating officer J.R. Donlan has been promoted to president there. J.R. spoke at one of our events a few years ago when he was the up and coming content whiz kid at WWE. He's been very highly rated in the sports industry for a long time, now in a leadership position. So congrats to J.R. Daniel Haddad has left Octagon and is FIFA's new director of planning and strategy. And the ECB has hired Catherine Beloff as general counsel. And our old friend, Tim O'Mahony, formerly of Snapchat, Manchester United and X, is now XX. And he has become the new market director in the UK for fanatics.

18:00James Emmett:Good luck to one and all.

18:02David Cushnan:Now, another signing of note, James, this week is that Gary Neville's The Overlap, now majority owned by Global, the radio and outdoor advertising giant, has acquired Mark Goldbridge's online football watch-along platforms, The United Stand and That's Football, which feels like a big moment for fan channels in general. And this is news that broke on Tuesday here in the UK. And it raises a few questions, And I think there's a couple of ways we can discuss this.

18:37James Emmett:What are your immediate thoughts? My immediate thoughts are, I've just remembered another move in the industry, and it involves the overlap, or Buzz16, which is the holding company for the overlap? Or what's Buzz16's relationship to the overlap? They're the same entity, aren't they? One's the holding company or the other, isn't it?

18:53David Cushnan:I'm not sure.

18:54James Emmett:Okay. Well, Duncan East is leaving Buzz16 to become the new CEO of Sunset and Rhine, which is interesting news, but probably unrelated to the overlap buying Mark Goldbridge. Yeah, as you say, there's a lot of angles here. Probably the first one, there's a personal one, which is potential personality clash between the principals at both of these organizations, Gary Neville versus Mark Goldbridge himself. Mark Goldbridge, I believe, is sort of acknowledged as a not necessarily an authentic Manchester United fan, but someone who talks about Manchester United a lot and is quite critical and has made a living from being dramatically critical about Manchester United, as I suppose has Gary Neville in slightly different ways.

19:41David Cushnan:They might get on.

19:42James Emmett:They might get on. The other thing is this means for influencer broadcasting. What's the collective term for what Mark Goldbridge does? Watchalong.

19:52David Cushnan:Yeah. Is it watchalongs? Yeah.

19:53James Emmett:So the era of watch-alongs, this basically puts a monetary value on. These watch-along entities now have clear value. They are being bought by more traditional media entities. And the next sort of angle is the global angle and global the company. This seems to be another feather in the cap, another page in the inventory for Global to go to a market of advertisers, sponsors, and give them other outlets, other touch points to a consumer audience that can't get enough of this stuff.

20:29David Cushnan:And this has all happened in the last six, seven months. It was October last year when Global, which is the owner of many of the biggest radio stations in certainly the UK and actually probably Europe. So you're talking about Capital and Heart and LBC and Classic FM and Radio X, but they also have a huge outdoor advertising business. They do the billboards. And in October, they launched Global Studios and in doing so gave themselves, I suppose, a podcast division to add to some of the in-house podcasting that they were already doing, which includes very successful podcasts in all sorts of verticals, notably the news agents, the sports agents, which are both global productions.

21:11David Cushnan:They also bought a studio called the Fellas Studios, which again, sort of creator led. So you can see the direction of travel here. They then followed that up by making a majority investment in the overlap, which Gary Neville and friends have built up. Scott Melvin, a key executive here, also at Buzz 16.

21:30James Emmett:And we're not clear on what the relationship between them is.

21:33David Cushnan:But clearly the stick to football brand has grown rapidly over the last few years, and they indeed have branched out into other sports, stick to cricket. And the plan here with acquiring both the United stand, which is the Manchester United channel that Mark Goldbridge runs, and that's football, which is the general football watch along channel that he runs, is adding in a combined 3.7 million subscribers on YouTube, two of the most watched independent football channels. Mark Goldbridge, and it's worth scrolling back if you want to listen, was on our podcast around about a year ago, I think, where he talked through his business model.

22:09James Emmett:It was just before he did the Bundesliga deal.

22:11David Cushnan:Yeah, that was a moment as well when both the overlap and Mark Goldbridge's channels, the That's Football, took on these Bundesliga rights to be able to show live games. And they did it in very different ways. The Overlap took a standard world feed and put it on their platforms with the traditional commentary. Mark Goldbridge ran and continues to run his traditional watch alongs with a picture in picture.

22:34James Emmett:Do you think the Overlap are just sort of buying a Bundesliga commentator for their Bundesliga?

22:39David Cushnan:Well, potentially, but they have big plans actually, and they've been very detailed actually in the press release that they've sent out about what they are going to do to build out the United stand and that's football. They're going to launch new formats, including a Stick to United, a format featuring former Manchester United players and journalists. The Daily United, a daily Manchester United news service. And that's football, it says, will be relaunched and rebranded later in the year to a football news and podcast channel. This suggests that this has been in the works for a long time and they've done some quite detailed thinking about what they're going to do.

23:12David Cushnan:I think what's quite interesting here is a couple of questions around when you're adding greater production values, as you probably might be inclined to do if you've just invested in a business like this. Does that change the raw, the uncensored, the unfiltered, the sort of imperfect feel of what a Mark Goldbridge does with these live watchalongs? Does that also change the relationship with the audience?

23:37James Emmett:And also it's him. It's him, right? You're buying his channels and his IP, of course, but he is the driving force behind all of it.

23:43David Cushnan:Are you buying him?

23:45James Emmett:Yeah.

23:45David Cushnan:Himself? Yeah. Or are you buying the sort of raw, unfiltered format of the watchalongs? And even just a couple of days ago, it's already appearing as a sort of viral clip sent out. He was complaining about his skybox going down in the early stages of the Manchester United-Leeds match. And then he comes back, it switches back on just at the point that his sky returns and you can see on the screen, Leeds score.

24:09James Emmett:Yeah.

24:10David Cushnan:That is imperfect. Classic Goldbridge. Classic Goldbridge. But it's imperfect. It's not staged in any way, but it is a moment that can be easily clipped up and packaged. as you add greater production values, does that fundamentally change what that is?

24:25James Emmett:Yeah. Yeah. What do you get? Yeah. I mean, and you can think about this with Casa TV, right? The entity sort of built up around Casamiro, the broadcaster, the watch-along broadcaster in Brazil. What do you buy when you buy into that platform? Now here's a reach, David. Do you recall the private workshop that we ran in our Attention Seekers series, which is our series for sports and media entertainment insiders that we do sort of four or five times a year. Do you remember the one that we did in October last year? Bex Martin and a troupe of new global colleagues, Sarah Ray's, came to that. And do you remember what was sort of a dominant theme of the discussion?

25:06James Emmett:No. It was this Mark Goldbridge. It was the Bundesliga. It was the Bundesliga's creative approach to rights distribution to Neville's lot and to the BBC and to Goldbridge. And so I wonder if the Global team who were there that day and got stuck into those conversations had some real food for thought.

25:26David Cushnan:Yeah, absolutely. And we will continue to watch Global as this builds out and develops. The one type of radio station that Global does not have is a sports network, a sports radio station.

25:40James Emmett:Ian McIntosh has just launched one.

25:42David Cushnan:Well, exactly. But they are building quite an armoury of sports programming via podcast slash visualised podcasts that will be, again, we'll be watching carefully in terms of how it gets packaged up and what it might look to do with those channels. Yeah. Anything else going on in the industry at the moment, David? Well, I just wanted to make a brief point about a press release that went out the other day from Sale GP. Now, I'm always constantly impressed by the number of PR firms that Sale GP appears to have on retainer to spread the message about what it's doing. And it's obviously been through this process over the last couple of years, I would say.

26:21James Emmett:By the way, damning with faint praise there, you're always constantly impressed by the number of PR firms that Sale GP has on retainer.

26:29David Cushnan:Yes, I am. Yes, I am.

26:31James Emmett:I'm always impressed by the number of deals that they seem to be doing.

26:34David Cushnan:Yeah, I'm as impressed by that. And boy, am I told about it. But they have been going through this process of selling the teams over the past couple of years. The latest to be sold is Los Galos, the champions, I think, from Spain. Is that the chickens? No, they're a sailing team in SailGP and they have been acquired by Quantum Pacific, who are quite interesting in themselves, becoming a bit of a player in the Spanish market. Idan Ofer.

27:00James Emmett:It is the bloody chickens, mate.

27:01David Cushnan:It's the roosters. Idan Ofere, the son of shipping magnate Sammy, is the billionaire behind Quantum Pacific. Antoine Bonnier is the CEO of the organization. And they now have stakes in Atletico Madrid. I think they have about 30%. They are, I believe, a majority owner of the Movistar cycling team based, originated in Spain. And now they've bought Spain's SailGP team. Where I think this is interesting is that in the press release, it was noted that with this acquisition, Los Gallos, has become the 12th of 13 teams sold by SailGP competing in the championship this season, which I think is quite a testament to the abilities of everybody working at SailGP, Andrew Thompson, the CEO down, as they develop this series, which I will say, every time I happen across it or a clip of it, the broadcast coverage, I mean, goodness knows what they're spending on it.

27:53David Cushnan:But the innovation, the technology, the way they map out, and we've seen this in other sailing events before the America's Cup, but the way they are able to map out the course and make a very visually challenging sport to broadcast very watchable, I think is highly commendable.

28:11James Emmett:And it's not just the broadcast product, the live product as well is immensely successful and entertaining onshore racing. It really does come right up to the edge. It's visceral watching a SailGP race. And this success, this quiet success they've been having in selling the teams, this is selling them as central franchises to independent ownership groups. This doesn't just happen just like that. There's clearly a process that they go through, which probably starts with entertainment and hospitality, come and experience the show. And then, you know, conversations progress to the point that you're getting a seriously heavy hitting group of owners across industry and Hollywood, I suppose, and sports.

28:59David Cushnan:You've got Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds who have acquired the Australian team, the Flying Roos. You have Anne Hathaway, Hollywood star, who bought into the Italian team, Red Bull Italy, and Coalition Capital, which is Kylian Mbappe's investment vehicle, has invested, as you might expect, in the French team.

29:17James Emmett:A really impressive organisation there as well. So kudos to the team led by Andrew Thompson, the CEO, Ben Johnson, the CRO, Charlie Dewhurst, a regular in this podcast and the accompanying newsletter for how busy he is, but also Leah Davis and the marketing team as well. Really impressive outfit. And all the PR companies. Well, they get paid. So, I mean, do they need praise as well?

29:41David Cushnan:Everyone's happy.

29:42James Emmett:Yeah.

29:42David Cushnan:Is that it for today?

29:43James Emmett:I think that's it. Yeah. See you next week. Goodbye.