8 Reality Checks For The Sports Industry

0:06Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the next episode of Streamtime Sports. My name is Chris Stone, the community lead joined as always by our CEO, Nick Meacham. Nick, fortunately here in the UK, it was a bank holiday weekend. It was much needed for us at SportsPro, the SportsPro New York, then there's the Blackwick Motorsport Forum, which probably doesn't get enough attention as it should for what it means to the motorsport industry. And then this last week, just had SportsPro London. So three major events in a six-week window. And the content never sleeps. Sports Pro Investment will be here before we know it, and Sports Pro AI shortly after that.

0:37But Nick, this weekend, maybe we can just relax a little bit because it has been a very long six weeks of delivering events across the globe, across the whole ecosystem and everything involved in sports. Yeah, it is a really crazy time of year. I wish it didn't play out the way it did where we've got so many events concentrated in like a six-week window. So, but at least it gives us May to a few weeks to sort ourselves out and breathe a little bit, or at least at the beginning parts of May, before we start getting to think of things from a planning perspective. But, yeah, I mean, our business is probably a little bit cyclical in that sense, because we have these event windows where it's quite concentrated.

1:17Like, I don't know, it is kind of the conference seasons that exist. And that kind of is reflective of how we operate a little bit, even though we're a media business first. just our, what would you call it, the effort or the energy in the business is definitely sort of up and down with the flows of the event cycles, even if there is such a portion of the business that is focused on media. So it's good to get through that window. That is for sure. And now we can focus more attention on some of the other areas and getting ourselves all planned out for, you know, the investment event we've got coming in July.

1:47I am really intrigued by that now, just because we've been talking about investment a lot over the last 12 months. And it feels like the conversation's moving along. There's still more on, it feels like there's a lot of interest yet. I'm sort of been banging a bit at a few different drums on the investment front and other people are doing the same. So I'm intrigued to see what comes off the back of that and what sort of shapes up for that event. Well, we're going to come back to the investment piece because what we're going to talk about later on today will be a bit of a scene center you did for the event about dreams versus realities and investment and private equity is one of those spaces.

2:19But with Sports Pro London, Nick, we always kind of look back at the events and just kind of maybe some key takeaways overall from the event. I think for me, one of the things I found really interesting is I did two different workshops, both closed door, but slightly different audiences. On the one side, you had your larger organizations, your tier ones, high level tier twos. And then I did another one, which was an NGB forum. So we're talking, you know, I don't even know if you call them tier threes. That's not to be insulting, but like, you know, they don't even have media rights. They're really more about participation and some small scale stuff.

2:51I think one of the interesting things there was both sides. I think sometimes there's perhaps a bit of an us versus them mentality where it's like, hey, we'll never be the Premier League. We'll never be the NFL. We won't be able to do these things. And it is true that they don't operate on those levels. But at the same time, they were actually all talking about the same problems. How do we go about identifying, you know, first party data and who our actual fans are? How do we measure things like intent? How do we go? And it's just a it's a it was more a matter of scale. So I found that really interesting that across this event, there were still people, regardless of the size of that, they're still doing the same things.

3:23We're still trying to solve the same challenges. It's just depending on the scale of which you're doing it. But they were all speaking about the same challenges and the same headaches, which I found really interesting. It's not maybe necessarily all of our events have that wide array of everybody that's in multiple different spaces. But that was an interesting sort of the us versus them mentality doesn't really exist or doesn't exist as much as they think. yeah well i do think it's a good reminder that no matter the size of the business or in this case the size of the sports property they still face the same challenges and it's just as complex as ever because the bigger you are the more resources you have available to you to use as well whether it's financial whether it's personnel whether it's agencies or technology those smaller entities and companies or sports properties also have less at their fingertips but still have to solve these problems somehow.

4:10They can't just throw their chief tech officer into, let's work out a data and AI strategy to make sure we've got the full breadth of our first party data at hand. Sometimes they have to work it out themselves. They might be a commercial director. They might be someone who's one of the senior people or even a CEO in some instances of a sports property at the lower tier. So I do think it's a good reminder of how similar those challenges are right from top to bottom but just the person having to manage all that might be one person versus uh you know an army which happens uh at the top end so yeah interesting to see how similar those those challenges really are yeah and my other takeaway nick and you'll you'll phrase this better than me but i'll do my best to kind of explain my takeaway i did a scene setter's uh presentation on the state of the the industry from a media perspective and it was a bit similar to the one that we did in new york kind of looking at some key trends things have taken place over the last 12 months a bit of a comparison between the U.S.

5:07and Europe and why there's some differences there. And I got a lot of really positive feedback off the back of it. Always really nice to get positive feedback to know that you've delivered people something people find valuable. At the same time, what my takeaway was is I think what I'm starting to come away with more events is how much people perhaps are struggling to come and find information. And this is kind of to promote sports pro a little bit. little bit but nick i think sometimes you and i because we're covering this we're doing the podcast every day and if you're a listener of the podcast you probably are getting your news but i think there's a lot of people in the sports industry that because of what we talked about before the scale of the problems how challenging they are people get so bogged down in the delivery of what they're doing on a day-to-day basis they're actually not taking as much time as they probably need to because they probably don't necessarily have the time they're not aware of everything that's going on and i just thought it was really interesting because some of the stuff i didn't feel was necessarily groundbreaking but it may just be because i'm in the weeds of it every single day thinking about it that not everyone always has the opportunity to stick to it and you know the event's really valuable but i think it also talks about how valuable it is to whether to be a stream timeless nerd you know be it sports for plus and that it's not to like you said to shamelessly plug our products but more i just i what i think what i took away is people don't have as much time as they probably need to or spend as much time looking at what's going on around them there's no shame in promoting our products uh chris uh i'm all for it uh but i do think it's a really important point sometimes we have no idea um going into any conversation about the the depth of knowledge that the person we're talking to might have because sometimes i've talked to c-level figures who don't really pay much attention to what's happening in other properties and other other sports and others that follow everything everyone does and the conversation can really take quite a different uh angle we do take for granted how much we are across be sitting at sort of the the center of the action i would say given how much stuff we're across whether it be through our news channels but also the stories and the information we get sent off record and on email pretty much every day there's a lot to digest and we probably do take that for granted to some extent but that's why we've set up some of the tools we have on sports pros main website like the wire where all that information is is aggregated uh at least a of the news stories that are aggregated because quite frankly in this day and age how do you find the information you need if you're using linkedin to get your you know insights or news which i do know a lot of people do you have to wade through a lot of crap basically to work out what's uh what's relevant to you and um obviously the algorithms are built to keep serving you more of the same stuff so you might be missing a lot of things so i do kind of feel like in the future in the near future because of the proliferation of ai and content creation platforms like ours and others who provide um that sort of filtering process that um have that uh internal expertise that sort of puts i guess delivers the stories in the way that needs to be told it's going to provide actually have more value in the market than ever um if you we are doing a good job with it all because i think you will need to get to a point there's too much information out there or you need someone to just sort of summarize it all for us.

8:19Now, AI could play a role in that too, which perhaps on an AI agent perspective, you can do your own and that might be also a thing. But I think for the near future, we've still got a really important role to play because of that. Yeah. And then for you, just any general takeaways from your side? Those are some of the things I took away. I was a lot behind the scenes compared to some other events. Didn't have any moderating sessions per se. I did do my one presentation. You were, I think, a little bit more active. But were there anything that you walked away from the event or anything that stuck out to you?

8:44Anything you maybe heard? yeah i didn't i didn't get an invite to do too many things this week this year which was kind of kind of nice to have a bit of flexibility uh but also uh i always do enjoy getting up on stage and speaking to some interesting people i did do a great session with the chief growth officer of high rocks which was a real eye for opener and i had a lot of people coming up to me afterwards talking about that basically to understanding and hearing the sheer scale of high rocks as a business and as a participation and as a sport, which is what they want to be. Their aspiration is to be an Olympic sport, which who knows if they'll get there, but the numbers that there's a one stat that he shared, which was like, they have something like more participants in high rocks now than all of the world marathons combined, which I don't know where they've drawn the line there, but if that's true, that is just a bonkers thing to consider high rocks wasn't on the radar.

9:36At least it wasn't on my radar a few years ago. So it is exploding and they don't even need a media strategy in terms of like media rights or broadcasting live other than just live on YouTube. All of it's organic. They're not spending money on marketing and paid acquisition. They're just getting millions of people. I think it's like two and a half million people are going to do it this year. That was a pretty interesting story. So hopefully we get to share that in some capacity, whether it be through sports pros channels or through stream time, we should get that because the business model is fascinating.

10:03The whole growth trajectory of that business is fascinating. um other than that um what did i what was my key takeaways i had a good chat off stage with sean harvey on the wrexham journey i also talked with pete bellamy on delta trade which we're going to be launching uh rolling those out soon a bit of insight what's going on in their respective worlds wrexham just uh missed the playoff promotion uh um by a smidge there we'll talk a bit about the business model there um i had an interesting chat a couple of interesting chats with sanjal gupta who's the ICC chief exec and I am really intrigued about what is in store for cricket based on some of the stuff he was telling me I mean some of it was told a bit of confidence but there is a lot going on in markets you would not believe including like China and the US that he was across that I was kind of a real eye-opener so I still can't fathom the idea that cricket become a sport in those countries but there's a lot of signals that they're seeing that there's a real interest around that at like a an investment level at a governmental level and there's like venues being built that i think it's that's going to be something to watch in a couple of those key markets that did intrigue me to see where that sport could go in particular uh and obviously michael payne we had on stage and i spoke to him at the vip dinner hearing some great stories from his book which are wrapped between kgb stories and bernie eccleston's libido and a few other things in between which quite entertaining i have to say you know i had a i didn't have nearly as long of a chat with sandra but he is a fan favorite here um at sports pro whenever we get to speak with him and you know we spoke to him back when he was a disney star um different business but he's always been around involved in cricket in some way or another uh so yeah i got to catch up with as well i haven't seen him in person in a couple years i know he's been to a couple sports pro events but just i've not necessarily been around but yeah he mentioned something similar about some venues being built out in LA for the Olympics in 2020.

11:59I didn't even catch on that T20 cricket was going to be a part of the Olympics. So I'm sure the way that has been a big thing for American football here in the UK, you know, having flag football, I'm sure it'll be a similar thing for cricket to be recognized as an Olympic sport. Yeah, yeah, 100%. I'm intrigued to see if they can really ride the coattails that. You've heard that talked about so much with things like the World Cup coming to the US and that's what kicked off the MLS and that's what they're expecting to create this next wave of soccer fans. Well, they've had the T20 World Cup in the US.

12:33They're going to have it for the Olympics. Can that really spur cricket to be a serious sport in the US? I can't see it, particularly with the baseball and there seems to be a bit of synergies there with its audience. But randomly, I went to the sports store on the weekend because I needed to buy some trainers, my nerds, toast. And I saw a cricket bat and cricket bat and set, basically with like a proper cricket ball at the local shop in Sweden. I couldn't believe that. So maybe there's some Swedes playing somewhere that I need to get in touch with. Maybe, just maybe, Nick. So for today, Nick, the thing that we want to do, and this is not me, and I said this to you off stage after you finish, this isn't me just saying this because you're my boss.

13:14I thought you did a really excellent presentation to kick off the event. and basically it was this concept of you know dreams versus realities you know does sports need a reality check based on you know things big trends hopes and ambitions that the industry has and i thought you went about it in a very good way in terms of sort of these are the things that people are talking about here's what my view is on the realities of those situations or perhaps the a different perspective on how we should look at these things now we're going to play that so you need to go into great detail at this point but is there anything else you just maybe the the aim the the inspiration to come up with this and you know present this at the start of the event sure one of the things we've been talking about for this event is we wanted to there's a lot of noise in the industry again like linkedin and other places where people consume a lot of content and those that are shouting loud as often get the most uh headlines and airway and time in people's ears and eyes, basically.

14:16But we felt that one of the things we wanted to do with this event is to give more context, give more specificity, and maybe dial down the noise and give a little bit of a reality check to some things that we've seen. And we've been basically talking about, Chris, for a while, even on this pod, this stuff that we've talked about around how content and media rights are tracking, around AI's role, around trends around content consumption and big social that doesn't seem to be getting a lot of coverage outside of these four walls and also in the wider mainstream audience. So I wanted to talk about some of those things, but also talk about some of the challenges that come with those because most people are just talking about you've got to do more content because you're going to get more engagement.

15:05But yeah, but there's some challenges that comes with that. And I think it's important for us to give some context about what people are facing in this industry because I do think it's never been more complex, more difficult to work in the sports industry it is today. Lots of opportunity, but just as many challenges, and I'd argue a whole lot more challenges than opportunities. So I wanted to try and give that sort of synopsis, I suppose, of what I think were and are the current challenges and opportunities in the industry. I have to confess, when I first wrote the first draft of it, I had 18.

15:41And then I got told I wouldn't be able to fit all those in, so I had to cut it down a bit. So maybe next year I'll do the second half of that, which can leave only a couple spare. Maybe it's a stream time episode, you know? Maybe it's another stream time episode. But I got some interesting feedback. I got a lot of positive feedback about the honesty of it. And I also got some negative feedback, basically, how doom and gloom it was. But that wasn't the intent. It wasn't supposed to be all doom and gloom. Although I do think there needs to be some pragmatism in the industry every now and again. Otherwise, these events can all be back padding.

16:18And yeah, this is the next big thing, next opportunity. But it ain't that easy. Well, Nick, we will play that presentation now. and then what we can do on the back of that week and talk about maybe some of the feedback that you got and i can perhaps raise some of the points that i thought was really interesting so from here we'll play that presentation and then we'll catch you on the other side with a little bit of feedback and some thoughts off the back of that presentation from people on side

16:47thanks very much everyone great to be here with you again for another sports pro London. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Nick Meacham, CEO of SportsPro and also host the weekly sports media podcast stream Time Sports. And I've been in the industry for over 20 years now and actually been with SportsPro for almost 16. And I remember when I first joined SportsPro and we were talking about things like sponsorship, licensing, media rights deals, live events. And I'll be honest, I found some of that subject matter a little bit samey, a little bit boring at times. And now I think fast forward to where we are today, we're talking about direct-to-consumer, AI, data technology, private equity, and to put it simply, the breadth and depth of this industry has exploded.

17:30Now with that has come a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of challenges, and a lot of hype and a lot of noise. So we thought today, I'm looking to kick things off with a bit of perspective on how things really look in 2026. Now as an industry, we often spend too much time looking at the exceptions for inspiration. So here's a fairly general assumptions I want to highlight that too many people will shout about on platforms like LinkedIn and rather than what's actually happening across the industry. So dream number one, media rights will continue to drive the growth of sports. The reality is that media rights revenues are hyper concentrated at the very top of our industry and yet new competitions launch all expecting to break the mold.

18:17If you're not top tier, you need to basically stop dreaming about that pot of gold at the end of the media rights rainbow. Even the top football leagues are struggling all across Europe. And even in the UK, we've seen the Premier League have a per game value of their rights drop. And even in markets where the revenue has gone up, in real terms, it's actually flat or dipping. And let's not open up Pandora's box talking about what's happening in France and in Belgium with DAZN pulling out of their broadcasting deal and no one wanting to pick up the media rights check left behind. Naturally, this leaves a huge financial role and impact and burden that may never actually get filled again if trends keep happening as they are.

19:04And all of this is happening while content costs and expectations are going up. There's more competition than ever for attention. Players want more, investors want more, and clubs and even some leagues are going bankrupt. Media rights have driven much of the growth of this industry for a generation, but now we need to look elsewhere to drive commercial growth. Dream number two, investors and their cash and knowledge will save sports. The reality is that across most legacy sports that have received investment, it's been nothing more than a short-term release valve, paying off debts, giving easy exits, and buying time.

19:43And on the flip side, launching new sports has proven incredibly hard. There are more failures to point to than successes. And so what is really the core issue here? In my view, it's simply that sports isn't built for venture capital in that way. You can't have 8 out of 10 fail and call it a success. sports needs a generation to settle and not a year to prove itself fandom takes time to build athletes livelihood is at stake and most stakeholders are simply pulling in different directions and the assumption i often hear from the investment world is that media rights will just pick up later or sports will just work it out because sports has such incredible power and clearly it does but if we're taking an investment sports needs patient capital not venture style expectations.

20:32Dream number three, more money in means more job opportunities for the industry. I have to be frank, I've never had more people reaching out to me looking for support around work. I've never seen more one-person advisors and consultancies popping up in the last four months than I have in my career. And at the same time, costs are being cut. Operations are asked to get, demanding to be more leaner. Expectations are growing with the investment coming in, and expertise is being pulled in from outside of the industry. And look, some of that is needed, but sports isn't sass in consumer tech. Fans don't behave like someone buying a consumer good.

21:09People outside of sports clearly bring something new to the table, but also may never come to grips with the nuances of how the industry works. It feels like we're undervaluing industry experience at a time we may need it most. Dream number four, sports is thriving on social and big tech platforms. The reality is engagement on those platforms is massive. There's no question. But it's a very leaky bucket for us right now. Without the right commercial and media setups internally, engagement does not magically turn into real revenue. And right now, there's a battle going on between those big platforms.

21:47They want sports doing way more. Why? Because sports performs so incredibly well on those platforms. In fact, better than most genres and industries. And the longer people stay, the more money those platforms make. And actually, many of the big platforms are raising a really important question. Are our priorities completely backwards? Or is the model actually broken? All the economics right now sit around a live event. But they will argue that real fandom is determined by those engaging with sports content between those moments instead. And there in many ways lies one of the most foundational sports monetization conundrums.

22:28Dream number five. Creators and athletes are the future of sports content. The reality is this is already happening. I don't think there's a lot of debate about this. But the challenge is that the official channels just don't get the engagement a person ever does. And content with no sporting relevance often performs better than official content. The Cybermen charity match is also a great example of the power of creators. They sold out Wembley in a couple of hours, had millions and millions watching it concurrently. Most sports would kill for that sort of reach and engagement, and it's just an exhibition match with creators.

23:04And now sports and broadcasters are really leaning into the reach and engagement that creators and athletes bring. But what happens when you don't own the audience driving the best results and visibility? dream number six fan engagement will unlock major new revenues the reality is that the problem the problem is the fans just don't like paying for much and i'm sorry but you do not own a fan which sometimes the language i hear people use their attention alone particularly in this day and age is a privilege for us all and piracy of course is still a huge issue and in many ways fans are proud of not paying.

23:45So when people talk about new revenue streams, I still struggle to see where scaled growth is going to come from. And if you look at some of those numbers up on the screen, it shows the industry has a major ROI problem. In many cases, the old model still applies best. Reach, sponsorship, indirect monetization. To put it simply, engagement and interest doesn't automatically, again, equal major revenue. Dream number seven. AI will be another revenue driver. The reality is that now AI is already delivering immense value for the industry. And I feel a little uncomfortable comparing to perhaps some of the more recent hype trains we've had of Web3 and crypto, as AI is different in that sports is already driving a lot of value from it through efficiencies, cost savings, and productivity.

24:38but there's not immediate top-line growth impact happening right now. And the exception might be that AI is leaning into sports as a sponsorship and marketing tool and, quite frankly, what better place and time to do it, I would say. And the final one I'm going to point to is that tech will solve sports' biggest problems. The reality is, I believe it can and in many instances it does too. but too often decisions are driven by who pays not just what fits and not just what problems need to be solved. Sponship-led tech deals are everywhere and they are only ramping up and they can and do work really well in many instances.

25:20They can drive innovation, they can transform ways of working right across the business and ecosystem if they're done right. Otherwise it can simply lead to a classic case of square peg round hole or just the need to rip it all up a few years later if that sponsorship deal goes sour. If you do need new tech, make sure you bring in the right solution and not just base your decision on the check alone. So that's the eight areas I wanted to cover today. The reality is there is still huge opportunity in this industry and many of you in this room are helping bring that to life. But there's no easy path to unlocking it.

25:59There's no silver bullet. And if anything, it's harder than it's ever been before. But quite frankly, that's why I love doing what we do and being in this industry. And you should too. In my view, it's a privilege to be part of it. And over the next couple of days, I'm sure you're going to make many new connections and learn new things that will help you be more successful. And of course, by subscribing to SportsPro after the event. Thank you, everyone, and enjoy the rest of your event.

26:27So Nick, those were your eight dreams versus reality scenarios. And I remember watching it. Lots of people taking lots of photos. I think one of the interesting things, Nick, was during Sports World London, a lot of news was breaking around Live Golf. And if you didn't watch the podcast, you didn't watch the YouTube video. There's a couple slides referencing what was taking place at Live Golf. And I saw a couple of people that I knew worked at PGA Tour taking photos and smiling. So I'm sure that was getting sent in the Teams chat or Slack, whatever they were using. But Nick, like I said, I found the presentation really good.

27:00There were some things that we've obviously spoken about, you know, talking about being overly keen on media rights, how investment's not a good thing for sports because it's too short term. But what was some of the feedback you heard from people in terms of, you know, you already mentioned some people are positive. Maybe let's talk about the people that were a bit negative, you too do mingle them. Well, I think the thing with the investment, I wasn't saying that investment isn't good, but most investments that I followed have not turned out well. I'm struggling to see many examples that I would point to that are real positive outcomes.

27:34And the burden of receiving that investment relative to what outcomes are possible with accelerating growth is really, really challenging to achieve. so my point was simply that investors i think there was a perception years ago when investment and finance and capital was coming into the market that they were going to be experts how to generate more income generate finances and i think what i've seen is that most the expertise on how to do that particularly in sports still lies within sports it doesn't lie with those people outside of it they've got money to spend and put it in different places they take lots of bets but you can't take lots of bets and fail in sports.

28:15I'm sorry, I don't see how you can, you know, back let's say 10 new challenger sports properties and have eight of them fail because of the impact it can have on the athletes, the coaches, the families. I don't think you can treat it like a B2B or SaaS platform. I just don't think you can think like that. And I did have actually a couple of investment related people come up to me. They were basically asking me for advice because I think I might have scuppered some of their plans or thrown a bit of a spanner in the works on how they were seeing things. But I think it just gives people a bit of a thought process as to where the opportunity really lies there.

28:55Well, one of the ones that I liked, because it felt like something we've not necessarily talked about, we've maybe talked about it via similar things, was one of your dreams was more money equals more opportunities. And you kind of came in there with some really good points. And, you know, from the, you know, costs are being cut. Efficiency is such a big term these days. We've seen layoffs. Expectations are getting higher. So even though you're making more, you're expected to, you know, produce more. And then you even made the point, and this is very true, we've seen this trend happen multiple times where people are getting hired that are from Google or, you know, from these tech businesses into sports.

29:32It's not necessarily sports people getting those opportunities. And that's not something I think we've directly spoken about, but I thought that was one in particular, I really enjoyed because I think there probably is that correlation, more money equals more opportunities, but that's actually probably not what we're seeing play out all the time. But definitely not at the top end. I think there is almost like more of a, what would you call it? Like more of a verticalized org structure happening in sports now where there are some senior figures in sports that have serious roles and will continue to be living at a senior level in the sports space for some time.