The $1BN CEO who has beat Nike and Adidas in 9 years

0:00Starting with just£25 ,000, Tom Behan went from standing outside luxury gyms pitching to personal trainers to building a$1 billion sportswear empire. It very much felt like someone in Oregon and Germany said, who are these little f***ers that have managed to start taking things that we quite like? Let's go after them. And you're like, wow, these guys have got a lot of money and they don't outbid me by 10 or 15 or 18 percent. They can afford to pay 4 or 5x. In this interview, Tom reveals the high stakes meetings, the controversial moments and the strategic partnerships that helped a challenger brand take on a sportswear establishment.

0:33There's a lot of sports teams in the world. There's no way that Nike and Adidas can do a good job for all of them. Maybe there's a way that someone can do it better. We looked at the same facts that everyone else was looking at. We just interpreted that information differently from others. It must be incredibly nerve-wracking actually doing a deal that carries that much weight. If I walk into a pitch with a Premier League football team and Adidas have been in, they'll put a picture of Jude Bellingham and David Beckham on the wall and I don't have that ability, so I've got to think more deeply about it.

1:02Adidas or Castor, pay your club for the licence, and then they get to, you know, hope that the profits come, etc, etc. Yeah, so it's a bit more than hope. So welcome to the show. Castor has achieved so much. You have built a billion pound business. You've broken into a market that most think is unachievable. At the beginning, that would have seemed so ballsy and so crazy. What was it that was going through your brother in your heads at the time that thought that was possible? well it's great to be here thanks for having me guys first and foremost um i think there's two parts to it one we were at a stage in our lives i was 26 my brother was 22 i can't speak for him i can only speak for myself but ignorance was definitely bliss we didn't have a whole load of and this will not be kind of this is not a playbook that other entrepreneurs need to follow but it did work for us where we didn't know any better we didn't know what failure was so this idea that well if you're really passionate about something you think you're going to enjoy it just go for it dream big shoot for the stars if you fall you'll land on a cloud type mindset it sounds almost cliched but that is a very powerful thing so just that deep inner self-belief and drive and passion the mindset that you take that says i'm just going to make something happen i'm just going to go for it i'm not going to stop until i get to where i don't even we didn't know where we wanted to get to i don't know what success looks like i can't define it but i'm not going to stop where i am now is not acceptable to me i'm going to get there that that is a very powerful thing in life and that can build momentum there's a real manifestation of that, of just knocking on enough doors, you keep getting told no, and eventually you get told yes, and then that leads to the next yes, and that mindset was very powerful for us at the start.

3:04The other part, though, is probably a slightly more logical, because I would say that first one is just an innate, almost subconsciously driven with it. I'm not sure you can learn that. you either have it or you don't. People may disagree, but that would be my view. The second part though was more logical and this is maybe more of the conventional entrepreneurial mindset, which was to look at an industry that most sane, clever people would look at and say, wow, that's really difficult. There's no way you can take on Nike and Adidas. Whereas we looked at it and said, there's a lot of sports teams in the world.

3:46not all of them will want to partner with Nike and Adidas there's no way that Nike and Adidas can do a good job for all of them maybe there's a way that someone can do it better so we looked at the same facts that everyone else was looking at or we looked at the same landscape that everyone else could see there was no special insight there was no inside information that other people didn't have access to we just interpreted that information differently from others saw an opportunity whereas other people saw a closed market that was quasi-monopolistic and said well let's go for this and see what happens it's funny because i feel like at the beginning of something like you've built being ignorant about how hard it is to achieve it is often the thing that allows you to pursue it you know like if you knew how brutal probably the last eight years has been would that put you off at the start it's a great question maybe to slightly reframe it someone asked me recently would you do it again now and that is harder because your life evolves and but like i say for us it was a very specific moment in life we didn't have anything to lose it was kind of reach for the stars as i said because where we are now doesn't work for us so we're just going to go for it but there is definitely an element of truth of not knowing how hard it will be not knowing the setbacks but i do think that is what defines entrepreneurs i've walked to the meeting today you walk through london and there's loads of people that will be far, I'm no doubt about it, far more intelligent than me.

5:15They'll work in finance, they'll be architects, they'll be doctors, they'll be lawyers. The difference between an entrepreneur and another very intelligent person is that ability, not just to see the opportunity, but to act upon it. And really to say, no, I'm going to go for this, whether that's because you don't know how hard it will be or not, but just that ability to act. We've all met many people who have got a great idea don't do anything about it got a mortgage to pay there's a reason why entrepreneurs are in the minority it would be if it was easy everyone would do it of course but it is that mindset of i don't care how hard it's going to be i i'm just gonna i'm just gonna keep going yeah on that i watched an interview recently with jensen huang the ceo of nvidia and they're like would you do it all again he was like no absolutely no way i was trying to be more diplomatic apparently he is like an absolute machine yeah he looks like he like worked all hours the day but still no way um okay so just take me back to the first year i'm so interested in how it's all where's the name castor come from what was the idea did you have to go for like you know uh division 10 clubs first like how's it all start is there a division 10 who knows yeah no no there will be i don't know what it'll be called but yeah there will get done eventually um so yeah right at the start the i mean to answer the question directly the name castor comes from a story of greek mythology so in greek mythology there is two brothers castor and pollux who challenged the greek god's use which uh we thought was quite a good analogy for us as two brothers challenging the big guys they go nike which is of course the greek goddess of victory so challenging the Nikes of the sportswear world and because we're highly intelligent and insightful individuals before I know Castor is a better name than Pollux let's go for that we've made a lot of mistakes in the last eight years I think we probably got that one right I love you're like we're a British brand named after Greek brothers there you go but I mean to the point earlier about ignorance we didn't know what the fuck we were doing at the start so we had this idea we had all of this passion and this drive and it is funny because i am i was a cliche but i am a 5am guy i get up at 5am i always have i suspect i probably always will there was nothing to do at the start no one responded to our emails no one wanted to meet with you we try and get factories to make us samples and completely understandably as we were two brothers from merseyside with no money or industry experience or knowledge or name themselves off the greek gods yeah exactly no one replied yeah i was shocked with hindsight why no one wanted to invest in us maybe it was because it was five in the morning yeah that's right wait until 9am then the emails all rolled in if only it were that easy but again we had all this drive and passion and just let's go knock on doors let's go like we did these partnerships with equinox the gym down here and said oh can we put our product on your on your traders just hustle like that we don't really have it in the uk i don't think but hustle culture not if it needs to be strategic not if it needs to be five year a 10-year plan just make shit happen go and do something today that takes you a step forward versus where you were yesterday so that that was really how we got going was just that hustle one one day at a time one order at a time every customer i would send them a personal email i'm the co-founder thank you so much and it amazed me it still amazes me to this day some pretty because we're a premium brand some pretty high caliber customers and people would respond and they'd say like what you're doing people respect hustle people respect ambition people respect passion and they will want to help you and say oh that's brilliant you work at that company i might be looking to raise capital at some point which we are and just again the first one is a no and then the next one's a no but the first one's a yes and then you go forward so that that was how we got started there was no real certainly not in-depth vision or thought at the outset to identify this opportunity in team sports that came later what we did have at the start was a belief that there should be a british sportswear brand that competes on the global stage can you be bigger or better than nike who knows it's quite a good thing to try and find out in your lifetime whether you get there or not but you should be able to compete why is there not a british brand we invent we invented football and rugby and cricket why do we not have a british brand that competes with those global guys so that was the vision and we knew as part of that that in order to achieve that vision we would have to have globally recognized athletes wearing our products but we hadn't really fought any further than that certainly to the level that oh I know we can unlock this opportunity to partner with Premier League football teams or Formula One teams that came a few years later.

10:13Because you did build a billion dollar a billion pound business brand like off partnerships ultimately so how Or what was the one that really made the difference for you? Rangers Football Club was the transformational partnership, I would say. Is that because of an iconic fan base? Globally recognised club and brand. Genuinely global fan base. So a lot of clubs think they have a global fan base. There's not that many that do. Every Formula One team has a global fan base because they race all over the world. So by definition, they have fans all over the world. That isn't true in football. People might watch the Premier League in Taiwan and Vietnam and Cambodia and Mexico, but they tend to support quite a small handful of teams.

11:01Rangers is one that people know all over the world. So that was a big part of it. But actually, the way that that happened, it kind of started two years earlier, where in 2020, COVID happened. we were a e-commerce led digital first sportswear brand selling a product via the internet when everyone could only shop online and selling a product when the only time people were allowed to leave their homes was to do exercise so if you couldn't be successful in that period you probably didn't deserve to be in business so we kind of revenue went like that during that period and it's probably something that every entrepreneur in the journey you come up against this question of oh wow what I'm doing works I've had this idea I've willed it into existence people are now exchanging their hard-earned cash for my product what do I do do I want to have a nice life and start to leave the office early on a Friday to go and play golf or do I want to double down and really take this thing to the next level.

12:05It was a pretty short conversation for us when we had that debate. And then when we said, well, how do we take this to the next level? It was at that point during COVID. We'd started to think about it before, but that was when the opportunity to partner with teams really came up because Nike and Adidas had other things to worry about and focus on and therefore weren't prioritising teams as a category. and any team that they were prioritising was what we call tier zero, the very, very best in the market, the Real Madrid's, Barcelona's, Paris Saint-Germain's of this world, which meant there was a huge segment of the market that was overlooked.

12:45And whenever you get a segment of any market that's overlooked, there's usually an opportunity for value creation. But how did you know? I know it's obvious, but how do you... As in, how did you know? yeah how yeah how do you know to do that how do you know to move into this partnership model to reach out to teams because that's like yes insightful but it's a big hunch too it didn't feel like a hunch on it to be honest like we'd spent i i am a failed footballer so i've spent my life in that world and i was never very good at football so i didn't play for the top team so you know as a player you got treated like a second class citizen right and again although I wasn't thinking about it in that kind of way, it would have been more subconscious at the time.

13:31But again, any market where a big segment of the audience feels like a second class citizen, it means something isn't working particularly efficiently. So almost kind of circling back to the question at the very start, what most people saw as an incredibly competitive market with these dominant brands that you had no chance of competing with, we saw as the opposite where I know they're not doing a good job for them. I live and breathe. I had lived and breathed this market all of my life. It wasn't difficult to verify or validate that idea because you go and speak to any commercial director or CEO at a football club and you would get that feedback that, oh yeah, we've been with Nike for X years, but we know that they care more about that team than us and they do bespoke products for that team, which they don't do for us.

14:22And they've got stores in America, but they don't put us in there. So there was these kind of consistent pain points. Again, you didn't need to be a Harvard MBA to work out that, okay, consistent pain points, try and work out a way of fixing those pain points. Maybe I'm going to have something that people are interested in. And again, because it was COVID, the world was an abnormal place and it was kind of a perfect place for entrepreneurs that wanted to make bold decisions at a time when most people were playing it safe. so Andy Murray is one of our best athletes ever he's one of my favorite athletes ever why would he choose at the time to go with a relatively unknown startup brand than presumably he would have the pick of the bunch presumably he could do the best deals ever with anyone so what what made that happen I'm a big believer in the the maximum of the harder you work the luckier you get and we we definitely have worked hard like there's like say people talk about working hard and it's almost like a throwaway quasi glib remark but i talk about it in the context of being a consistently hard worker when stuff goes wrong when you have setbacks when things aren't going your way when you make a big investment that doesn't pay off when you do a big marketing campaign that doesn't result in the revenue that you'd hoped for when you get some bad customer fee do you still get up the next day and work as hard as when things are going well and when you do that consistently over a period of years it's funny how the world seems to reward you for it most people don't get three years down the line of doing that hard work consistently enough to get the rewards they'll give up earlier in the journey and say oh this isn't working or it's not worth working hard you don't get rewarded for it what's the point particularly in this social media generation that we live in where it's easy to see kind of false or shallow success it's really hard for people to buy into the concept of delayed gratification but that's exactly what it was with Andy so we'd said and this was before we started doing teams because for teams it's operationally very complex people think it's just the players on the pitch that you have to kit out there's a whole squad there's an academy there's a charity organization that you'll support there's a wider a grassroots network that you have to provide kit for.

16:42There's a whole non-playing staff. These things are operationally very complex, which is why there's very high barriers to entry, which I like. Hopefully it makes my business more valuable, but you don't have that with athletes. So you'll get people like Lacoste and Uniglow and other brands. There's more participants. There's more competition. So you're right. Someone like Andy would have his pick of the brands. We'd worked out that we wanted to put our brand on a top athlete and we didn't have the money that most other people had. We didn't have the balance sheet. So we would gift Castor product to all of the people around the athlete.

17:18So the coach, the master, the physio, the nutritionist, these guys have got, these top athletes have got teams around them. The agent, we'd gift Castor product to all of the people around them, take the time to find out their sizes, send them products, send them a personal note. We're a British brand, we're ambitious, all this stuff, just try and get the brand in front of them. and when Castor was being worn by all of these people around Andy consistently, it was almost like, oh, what's that brand? I keep seeing it. I've never heard of them, but I keep seeing this brand. I was like, oh yeah, I've got some of this stuff.

17:51It's this British brand. It's quite a nice fabric. And through that, we got invited to meet him. I'll never forget it. It's one of those things, sliding door moments in your life. I don't know if they set it up as like a negotiation tactic, but if they did, it worked. They invited me down to Wimbledon, and there's this room that only the champions, you have to be a champion of Wimbledon to be allowed in it. And they've got the Wimbledon trophy there and these portraits of all the past winners. And I'm sat there like literally shaking, never met Andy Murray before, Sir Andy Murray. And then he comes out and we just had a chat.

18:23Like there was no talk about sponsorship. So tell me how you started the business. And we just connected. I don't want to speak for Andy. Maybe it was one way entirely, but we just connected on a human level. we'll get him on the show yeah that guy talked at me for so long no choice he just kept speaking and eventually we had to do a deal with him but we just we just got on on a human level we connected and again sport is business we all know that but human beings are human beings like when someone likes you on a human level I can't speak for Andy but I do think there was a genuine sense of him and his brother Jamie have come from a kind of a very working class background and gone on to achieve great things and become globally recognized.

19:08My brother and I came from a not indifferent background, not dissimilar background, sorry, and equally had these big ambitions. So that worked. That got us through the door. The next part was being creative to work out a deal structure that worked for him and us. So there was a big gap between Andy's market value and the amount of money that I had in the bank. So there's often this misconception about entrepreneurs that we're kind of crazy risk takers. And the reality, in my experience at least, is that obviously entrepreneurs take risk, but we work very, very, very hard to understand, grapple with and minimize that risk.

19:53Because if you just keep taking risks relentlessly, at some point you're going to lose the hand and you're going to lose everything that you've worked for. so to try and manage that risk with Andy we said look we can't pay you what his market rate was this is what we can't afford to pay you why don't we bridge that gap by allowing Andy to invest in the business at a discount to what the market rate was at that time we'd done a couple of small fundraisers by that point so we'll give him a discount and the equivalent value will be what he would be worth that required a huge amount of trust and faith on Andy's behalf for which I'm very grateful but thankfully five years later hopefully it's worked out pretty well for him.

20:31Yeah, and it's interesting because he is actually well known as being a good investor. And not many, he was early to that really, in terms of like British sports people. I think he pioneered it. He was one of the first people on Cedars and crowdfunding and stuff and he was just very early as a, you know, it's more common in America, you know, we've got LeBron to invest or whatever, like they all do that. But not in the UK. And he's one of the first ones. Total legend. My opinion, best British athlete ever I'm definitely biased I'm with you it's hard to disagree with that but watching him play talk about moments that stick in your head like we went to Australia to watch him first and he didn't win the match it was a classic Andy Murray game five sets he looked like I think he was two sets down he's never going to win this that's his favourite spot yeah he fought back and it was the first time that he'd worn Castor he was just gritty as fuck yeah he's just gritty and those big points he'd pull out a second serve ace he's just like wow how the hell does he do that but it was Watching Andy play wearing castor for the first time was, you can't put a price on that feeling.

21:33It's pretty special. Was that the most memorable moment in your journey? That would be up there for sure. So it was in Australia. We got invited over. We were sat in the box, which is, it sounds really cool, but it's actually a really scary place to be because Andy always turns around and shouts at the box. You see him when you watch him and it feels like he's shouting at you. and like Judy's mum was sat next to us who's also a she's more terrifying yeah she's more terrifying than him amazing lady but I was thinking I was probably more scared and nervous meeting Judy than I was Andy but she did have some very nice Scottish fudge which she shared with people in the box which was very nice of her but we went to Australia watched that because of the time difference people were watching it early morning in the UK and he was wearing Castor for the first time he had a Castor cap on Castor logo and we could see in real time digital business the website traffic, the orders coming in.

22:27So that was the first time that not only did I get that buzz of seeing an athlete wear a brand that you'd created, which is really cool, but you could directly in real time see the financial impact of that. So that was definitely up there as a wow, pinch me moment. Rangers, when we launched that partnership, and again, seeing we'd had this thesis, this hypothesis that if you work harder and think more strategically about sports teams and you think about them as if they were brands rather than just something to be money or make a kit sell a kit move on try and be a bit more intelligent and strategic about it maybe we can generate more revenue when we saw that happen with rangers financially that was on a that was of a level that we hadn't seen until that point and it really validated wow this isn't just a thesis this works because rangers is a 25 million pound deal right so how does that how's that negotiation come about like how does that actually work so how many years into the business is this that rangers happens uh so we started in 16 will have done rangers put me on the spot i think we probably negotiated in 2020 launched in 21 maybe negotiated in 21 did in 22 it's about 12 and flee time albeit there was less on that one for for various reasons covid being one of them but yeah there's a there's always a a build up to it and it's not dissimilar to the andy story where relationships matter so again football teams are businesses but they're led by people like every business is their customers are not customers their fans so the human element i would argue matters more in the business of sport than it does if you were operating in telecommunications or aerospace so building a relationship with the rangers ceo and the chairman at the time, that made a big difference because it was a big risk for them to partner with us.

24:21It was a big risk for Andy to choose us. But if a team gets it wrong, that's a big deal. There's a lot of people affected. Andy Murray's fans don't need to buy that product. Football fans will generally buy the shirt that year. If you don't make it properly, if it doesn't turn up on time, if there's any issues, they're going to impact a lot of people. So it was a big risk on behalf of Rangers to choose us as a challenger brand. but for me, I love that because it forced me to think creatively and not say, well, you've been with Nike before. Let's take what they've done and add a pound to the offer and see if we can win it.

24:59I'm never going to win that way. I don't have the balance sheet that Nike do, and I'm a bigger risk than Nike are, so I've got to work out a way of sharing more of the upside with Rangers, convincing them that I have a playbook and a method here that will grow your revenue in a way that Nike will not. telling them that look the world is digitizing ever more we're a digital brand we want to sell more product digitally off the back of digitizing revenue you then have more fan data if you get more fan data you can learn more when the fans buy what do they buy what price point does the products become too much are we selling more in dubai than in this market should you be trying to sell sponsorships in dubai if we are no one really thought about the market in that way so So for us to have to be innovative because otherwise no one would have partnered with us was a massive blessing.

25:47So it was one of those examples, I guess, where scarcity forces creativity. We had to be resourceful because we didn't have another choice. Were they your first big team partnership? Yeah. So we've done, I mean, I think we've done a partnership with West Indies Cricket before, which is a great partnership, but financially nowhere near the level of Rangers. So you obviously have built this incredible business And one of the things that, you know, we've read is that you've managed to poach incredible staff from the big players in the industry. What's the vision you're setting out for your team now?

26:21Because even meeting you for like 20 minutes now, I feel like you feel like there's no ceiling. I don't. Yeah. Honestly, when we, I said before, when we started, there wasn't like, oh, imagine we can get to 1 million revenue or 10 or 100. do it like it wasn't a financial thing it was why can't you build a brand and i don't want to get too philosophical or grandiose but imagine building a brand that outlives you that's that'd be pretty fucking cool like whatever happens financially i kind of don't give a shit about that like the two are connected of course you've got to be financially successful for the brand to last but that isn't what gets my heart racing faster.

27:04What does get me excited is building this brand. So if I start with the end point, which is could there one day be a British brand Castor that is worn all over the world, that is talked about in the same sentences as Nike and Adidas, that would be really cool in my head. And then I reverse engineer back from that. What is it that I need to achieve? Okay, Australia is quite an interesting market. They speak English. They like sport. We've got a similar culture. maybe I can do some interesting things over there or Mexico is growing quite quickly and GDP per capita and again they love sport and they have a culture of buying sportswear, what do I need to do over there, so you start with that, this is what I love, this is what gets me excited this is what makes that 5am alarm less painful than it would be than if I worked in a bank I think if people see that that's authentic you've gone a long way to getting them on board without being disrespectful to any other brand.

28:03But it's neat. As companies get bigger, as the founders step away, that passion, that drive, that intensity, that enthusiasm is naturally going to wane. So that is, as far as I'm concerned, that's a superpower. Like a founder, as I said, you're not necessarily more intelligent than anyone else, but you should be more passionate. You should care more. You should be more enthusiastic I want making the business better every day. And not everyone wants to work in that kind of environment. Often people want a comfortable life and they can get in at this time, which is absolutely fine. But there's certain people that love that challenge that know if I walk into a pitch with a Premier League football team to become the kit partner and Adidas have been in an hour before me, they'll put a picture of Jude Bellingham and David Beckham on the wall and expect that that's what will win them the pitch.

28:56I don't have that ability. So again, I've got to think more deeply about it. If you look now at what's happening with financial fair play in football, how does that impact teams and how they think about financial things? And what can I do from a kit perspective or merchandise perspective that helps them with financial fair play? Adidas generally, I'm picking on Adidas and Nike, the big guys generally do not think like that. so I want to attract people to work with us that are creative that do want to go a level deeper that like a challenge that like being the underdog but they'll only be excited about it if I'm excited about it the day that I'm not excited is the day I need to stop doing it I think it's fair as well like if you're if you're setting out your stool at your company and you say like I we are going to work incredibly hard here we're on a very tough mission like don't necessarily work here if your biggest priority in life is work-life balance you know i think actually it's fine if you say that up front whereas i think the worst thing you get these days is companies that bleat the whole time about like work-life balance and then just expect you to work like dogs anyway it's been tough i guess for everyone probably post covid where people have worked more flexibly and then there's that there's an expectation from people that they'll get a day a week at home or two or whatever it is and companies have had to work out in real time well do we allow that do we support people to do that or actually do we say be really honest and say no look it's a tough economy it's a tough environment we need people who are going to work hard and that means being in the office five days a week it's kind of been a real life experiment for everyone hasn't it so i don't judge companies and we haven't got it perfect either where we've I mean we've gone from I can't remember how many staff we were pre-COVID but we went to 500 pretty quickly after COVID you do not get 500 decisions on anything right you definitely don't get 500 decisions on humans right so but was it like 100 to 500 in that period?

30:57give or take that's a hell of a lot of heart yeah and particularly when at the start of COVID people were working remotely and that's well you haven't met the staff and how the hell do you encourage cross-departmental interaction to sound very corporate but you can't do that when everyone's sat on a team's call You do wear trousers in the office, right? Yeah, yeah Because I could see the top half So it's been hard for everyone but it's one of the things it's a nice feeling creating jobs like when you're born and raised in Merseyside creating jobs in the north of England that's pretty cool like that's a nice feeling to be able to do it what's even cooler is when you see people come into the business and you're like wow they're adding a lot of value they have a skill set that i don't have that they think about things in a way that i hadn't thought about them they're making me better they're challenging like that's a really cool feeling when you get a group of people that think like that it's very cool we just interviewed uh the founder of omaze do you know them yeah yeah so uh incredible storyteller yeah and he's like that's the number one thing of storytelling.

32:05He was taking us through the StoryBrand framework of storytelling. And of course, one of the things in StoryBrand is, you know, your customer is the hero, you're not the hero, etc, etc. And everything goes well, you've got to build up the sense of everything going brilliantly, etc. And then you need a big crisis, a moment of jeopardy that you overcome. And obviously, you've had your amazing moments with your Andy Murray, you've had your amazing moments for Rangers, everything's going well, but presumably something has gone wrong so what is your experience of something that hasn't gone the way you want it to and what do you learn from it christ where to start so i mean we've had loads we're in a super competitive market what i said earlier about covid was uh as i perceived at the time a once in a generation opportunity where nike and adidas took their eye off the ball and allowed us to get in and go and partner with teams.

32:59When we came out of that once in a generation moment, and I can't speak for Nike and Adidas, but it very much felt like someone in Oregon and Germany said, who are these little fuckers that have managed to start taking things that we quite like, let's go after them. And you're like, wow, these guys have got a lot of money and they can do things. So we'd done a partnership with Newcastle, amazingly successful partnership. we did it just before the takeover by the Saudis so there was all this huge fat excitement and the club started investing in players performing very well on the pitch and it was amazing privileged to be a part of it phenomenal and then when the contract comes up for renewal Adidas want to pitch or bid on that contract and they don't outbid me by 10 or 15 or 18 percent then they can afford to pay four or five X what I can.

33:51So you kind of have two choices. Either you overpay to retain a partner or you accept, okay, maybe I'm not going to fight that particular battle. I'm going to reallocate that budget elsewhere. And we have something that we call it internally, that there's a cast or club and it is the underdog, the challenger, the teams that need to think creatively or differently in order to compete. So again, I don't like naming teams because you kind of always offend someone, but there's a segment of clubs that see themselves as the underdog and that works really well for us. We did a partnership with Bayer Leverkusen in Germany way before anyone thought they had any chance of being successful.

34:34I'm not saying that we're kind of visionaries that can see into the future, but when you understand sport, that one's worked out relatively well. But other brands, bigger brands, again saw the same facts that we did we just interpreted them differently so it's almost although it's sport and by its nature it's very fluid and you can never predict results perfectly of course but it is kind of like being a hedge fund manager and you say okay that stock's undervalued look at the infrastructure like Everton at the moment are a partner of ours amazing stadium Tramia Rovers so I'm over the water really Fair play Flying high in League 2 How's your partnership With Tramir Robles going?

35:19Working for progress Never say never They're working on the Global fan base Through this podcast And that's pretty much it This is where you'll find them Not quite there just yet But someone like Everton They've got a new stadium Coming Merseyside is And I'm biased But it is a hotbed Of talent Because there's a Deeply ingrained culture Of playing football on the street from a very young age in Merseyside. So Stephen Gerrard, Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman, Wayne Rooney, some of the best players in every generation will come from Merseyside and Everton will create a good portion of those. And then I think it's been announced today.

36:00In fact, new owner comes in to take over the club. So you look at these facts and say, okay, maybe they're at this level now, but is there the chance that they're going to compete at a higher level going forward? It will take a view on those things. we think more creatively, just like a hedge fund manager would on when they're choosing a stock that gives us a differential versus the bigger brands that just don't look at the depth, don't look at the depth of data, won't analyze these things in the way that we do. Really interesting. Yeah. I've got a question for you from a completely selfish point of view.

36:33So you work with Red Bull Racing. I'm currently in the process of working with Red Bull Racing. and one of the things we're coming up against curious and your experience of it is the you actually mentioned it but from regards to football the financial regulation stuff so the cost cap as they call it in the FIA what is your advice to me for someone who needs to negotiate around the edges of this and other founders scenario and anyone who wants to do a deal with an F1 team for example because it's as I'm sure you might have gone through it's same which has been all all inbound all the sign off everything else and then this sort of like legal question around cost cap which i sadly have had to learn about it's not even interesting um can you share have you had those challenges yourself guys i'm interested we we we have um and it is interesting if it helps your business right so in of itself it might not be the the the most engaging of subjects.

37:37But if understanding it better than the guy next to you gives you an edge, then it can become very interesting. Well, go on, educate all of us then. So, I mean, I guess there's a couple of things. There's understanding the legal financial specifics of, in that case, the FIA, whether it's the financial fair play in the Premier League. It can be a genuine competitive advantage. it's quite a good, I think I mentioned it earlier but principle to live your life by certainly run a business by which is the harder that something is to do the fewer people there are willing to do it so in this case making sure that you read every page, every word twice understanding where the nuances are that is going to give you something that other people do not have that is the kind of thing that I absolutely love and that is worth giving a weekend up for or whatever it is because it's not something that many people are willing to do.

38:39The second part though, and this is maybe the harder part, is building a relationship with the people at Oracle, Red Bull Racing to use their full term, and understanding what's important to them. So they all will have read it and they all will understand it. So it's all well and good, you or me or anyone going to them saying oh I've read this and I think this they'll understand it better than both of us combined so going to them building a relationship of trust demonstrating to them that look I genuinely want to add value to you here where is value not being added at the moment whether it's a sponsorship or a category or something that they're not able to offer to fans how within the confines of the FIA agreement can I try and structure something that is adding value you'd be surprised at how few people approach things that way most people in life approach things from i want to do this can you help me do that flipping that inversing it and saying what's important to you what matters to you how can i create something that works for you that adds value to your fan base you'll be ahead of 95 of the people i would imagine by doing that how did your deal come about with them then so yeah so they am i reading that right that Red Bull ditched Puma after 20 years, replaced them with you.

40:01How did you make that happen? And then became champions? Is that a coincidence? No. No, not at all. He's a champion. He's stamping me. That's it. Leverkusen, we got a flat at Bilbao, won the Spanish Cup last year, Feyenoord, Rangers, got to the Europa League. Can you fucking hurry up and do Arsenal then? Interesting. Been waiting fucking 20 years, it feels like. Analogy, the hedge fund manager analogy, isn't it, when you say that, like you've had quite a few hits. Yeah, and it's interesting because, like I say, sport is a motive. So you talk about Arsenal. I always think Tottenham, most people, whether they like the team or not, is a very, very well-run club.

40:39Daniel Levy is a very, very smart guy. Any financial metric that you look at for that club will be top quartile, top decile. But unlike almost any other business, Daniel isn't going to get any plaudits probably for having a return on investment that's higher than his weighted average cost of capital or free cash conversion that goes up year on year because fans therefore they care about something that is very niche and that is quite strange when you think about it from a business perspective how do you make long term sustainable business decisions when you've got a huge audience 70 ,000 people that turn up and will tell you very voraciously if they're not happy with that thing that you've done today and you've got a 10-year plan.