In short
State of the sports economy in 2025, focusing on how sports IP grows revenue by converting fan attention into monetizable relationships, and on “value leakage” (revenue generated from sports attention that rights holders don’t capture).
Guest backgrounds
Gareth Balch is founder and CEO of Two Circles, a sports IP/audience data and consulting firm. The episode was recorded at the Two Circles European Summit (about 600 attendees) at the Institute of Engineering overlooking the Thames. Emma (a Two Circles leak consultant) presents on leakage.
Key claims
Sports is “winning disproportionately” and will keep winning if focused on delivering what fans want and measuring attention → affection → IP monetization. Industry revenue growth benchmark is ~7% CAGR. Leakage metric: for every $1 made by official rights holders, $0.95 leaks (95 cents leakage). Brand spend shifted toward performance marketing: ~19% of sports audience access dollars go to IP purchases (down from ~29% a decade ago). Sports must better articulate socio-economic value to governments.
Notable examples
Premier League’s Microsoft/Adobe tech partnerships; Wimbledon’s long-term IBM partnership; UEFA Women’s Champions League on Disney+; fantasy micro-economies (Dream11); women’s sports growth and the “compounding” revenue challenge for clubs.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOGareth's Insights on Sports Markets
0:46 to 1:26
Gareth discusses the importance of understanding market leakage and monetization in sports.
“And it's really important to think about it.”
Purpose of the Two Circles Summit
1:27 to 3:19
Gareth shares the ambition of the summit and the value of client partnerships.
“And how many people we got in this building now?”
Understanding Audience Growth and Revenue
3:20 to 6:18
Discussion on the relationship between audience growth and sports revenue.
The Problem of Revenue Leakage
6:19 to 9:50
Gareth explains how sports IP owners often miss out on revenue due to leakage.
“reinforced here people won't be surprised but there's a there's a lot of numbers on screen there's a lot of stuff that I want, you know, that are really catching attention.”
Performance Marketing and Sports Sponsorship
9:51 to 11:30
Insights into how performance marketing affects sponsorship and IP purchasing.
“It's not one individual right, so I was going to solve it, it needs coordination.”
The Future of Sports Marketing
11:31 to 14:00
Discussion on the current state and future trends in sports marketing.
“That was a, we were in I'm not sure we were supposed to be in it We've got something to tell me Listeners should be there is a sort of range of different rooms around the building.”
The Evolving Landscape of Sports Sponsorship
14:00 to 17:41
Explore how sports sponsorship has evolved and its impact on revenue generation.
“but that's bad, I just felt bad it felt like sponsorship is really good it's an amazing channel, it's brilliantly complimentary to other stuff.”
Data Integration and Fan Engagement
17:41 to 21:44
Learn about the importance of data integration in enhancing fan experiences.
“Some of them are happening really subtly.”
Challenges in Tech Partnerships
21:44 to 25:06
Discuss the challenges sports leagues face in creating enduring tech partnerships.
“One, you're backing a horse, you know, and that's difficult.”
The Future of Fantasy Sports and Women's Football
25:06 to 28:03
Examine the growth of fantasy sports and the impact of women's football on the industry.
“with Microsoft or someone like Microsoft.”
Show all 14 chapters
The Rise of Women's Sports
28:03 to 29:58
Explore how women's sports are gaining attention and market presence.
“So beyond all the noise about women's football and the day-to-day stuff, actually when the industry steps back and looks at this, it's incredibly exciting.”
Challenges in Women's Sports Monetization
29:59 to 33:19
Discuss the difficulties of converting audience growth into revenue for women's sports.
“It's 15 % for a really low number, which is really insignificant.”
Wimbledon and the Scarcity vs. Abundance Dilemma
33:20 to 36:24
Analyze the conflicting ideas of scarcity and abundance in sports content.
“Wimbledon, you know, there's a few things I remember.”
Future of Media Rights in Sports
36:25 to 37:16
Understand the evolving marketplace for media rights and its impact on sports.
“of that transformation and how fans are consuming it, which is going bonkers, by the way, filling algorithms, eating entertainment in its share of content.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:04The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:Hello there, Richard Gillis here. Welcome to Unofficial Partner, the Sports Business Conversation. Today is a podcast that we recorded at Two Circles European Summit, which took place a few weeks ago at the Institute of Engineering overlooking the Thames next to the Savoy. Very nice it is too. Gareth Balch, founder and CEO of Two Circles, is our guest. And as ever with Gareth, nothing is off limits. It's useful. to periodically check in to see what he's seeing across the European and North American sports markets.
0:36Gareth Balch:I think everyone should know what their leakage is. How can you not? Isn't it dereliction of duty not to? In my head, it seems like it is. And years before, it was hard to know the answer to that. You'd have to guess or whatever. It was expensive or hard. It's neither of those things anymore. And it's really important to think about it. We spend all of our time as industry generating attention to monetize it. And this is attention that's being generated. There's been monetized and we ip owners aren't taking a cut oh that's not okay yeah if you like unofficial
1:07The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:partner if you enjoy listening to the podcasts there's a whole world which you need to investigate via the substack newsletter which goes to a very significant audience of your colleagues so you'll be missing out if you don't uh read that every thursday it comes out and very good it is too okay here is gareth bulge
1:37The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:this feels like i've got a real vibe a university vibe i've gone in and as you'll see i've got like a full notebook of stuff i'm writing stuff down as people talk is always a good sign mission accomplished and it's really interesting the location helps doesn't it so talk talk to me about how many years have you been doing this? 11th of our European version yeah. And how many people we got in this building now?
2:02Gareth Balch:600 people here today I think minus plus or minus some tube strikes I think we've got 600 here today so it's been a been a good day.
2:08The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:What's the ambition for it what what do you hope because we're now sitting here and we should explain we're at the end of the the day we've had a series of talks a load of sort of uh small room things but there's also some keynotes you did a keynote earlier just come out of a really good one we'll talk about that What do you hope from this? What's the thing behind it? It's really simple.
2:30Gareth Balch:I hope that our clients feel that they've learned something and they feel better equipped to be able to grow their businesses. And it's the idea that any client commits to be a partner or to partner with Two Circles is an amazing thought. I still remember our first client and the second and each one every day since. And we value those relationships greatly. and the genesis of this when we first started 11 years ago was to say thank you to our clients and try to replay some of the learnings you get we have a very privileged position to be able to see common problems and unique problems and being able to try and join some docs using some data and tell some stories using some case studies to help people recognize both where the opportunities and the challenges are to come out here with a page full of notes a bag full of enthusiasm and hopefully some um some both gratitude to be in the industry and some and some gratitude for hey do you know i just need my brain stretched today because life's full of you know um tough days and difficult days and so on but there can't be enough days where we are genuinely inspired and learn in our opinion so our aspiration is to achieve that if we can achieve that just for one client today it was worth this mission if it's several then we're even happier and maybe it grows to be something else over time but but for today it's um it's a thank you to our clients there is
3:45The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:a sort of through line of will you tell me what the through line is and I'll tell you because we speak on a sort of reasonably regular basis and we talked the last time we spoke we talked about IP the value of IP and some of the things that you talked about there I was picking up from some of the stuff that has run through today there's obviously this relationship between the audience and just the popularity of sports and its relative popularity to other content but also that audience link the you know how that then turns into revenue take us through what's the if you had a line through it what what was yours that's a great question and it runs right to the heart what we stand for because
4:32Gareth Balch:the genesis of every project we do and every partnership we enter into our clients is that it's working towards growth growth of audiences or growth of revenues and that comes from the same body of work we are essentially a big compounding data set where we're basically learning about what works with both the deliverer of a project but more importantly the creation of audiences and revenue right and so so the through line actually is a is a through line through all of what two circles do and then we're just trying to catch that in a universal way today because obviously we're not in a class specific setting that through line is really quite simple which is um we we it's a very noisy media ecosystem we we stand in it's gone through transformational change accelerated by the internet but it's really simple sports is winning disproportionately than we ever thought before and it will keep winning if we are utterly focused on delivering what fans want measuring the attention that generates turning that into affection that they have for our IP and converting that into relationships that we can identify and or prove to others or monetize for ourselves.
5:38Gareth Balch:And that ability to grow revenues through knowing fans best is essentially the through line. You will grow the revenues of your IP and those IP revenues are growing faster than they've ever done before. So ignore the doomsayers, they just haven't read the data and know that they're doing it by growing audiences fastest, by knowing their fans best and yeah i'm kind of riffing around the same point there but you get the gist there is an intrinsic relationship since the history of time and the monetization of sports between sports and its fans that is now more um sophisticated but also clearer than it's ever been through the abundance of data that's created every day and we're just trying to demystify that and tell some stories about it there's a couple of things that you talked about previously and has been
6:22The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:reinforced here people won't be surprised but there's a there's a lot of numbers on screen there's a lot of stuff that I want, you know, that are really catching attention. You want to press pause. You want to press pause? Stop that. You want to write them down. Yeah, just wait, you know, I'll get that and come here.
6:36Gareth Balch:Wait for the press pause there.
6:37The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:So let's just pick out a number. Okay, you asked the people in the room, this is a question really about the average numbers for the industry and then everyone's relationship to it. And there's a couple of those. And you mentioned before the CAGR, C-A-G-E-R, and what the industry average is, about 7 % growth. In revenue, yeah. In revenue. So if I am below or above that, that's a nice benchmark. And, you know, benchmarks are useful. And again, that was something. I've just come out, we just, a minute ago, so I'm going to flick through to the end of my notes. So the leakage ratio, which is a really interesting one.
7:19The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:And again, we talked a little bit about this when we talked about IP and where the revenue goes, how much is captured by the rights holder, how much leaks. And Emma, can you explain who Emma is?
7:33Gareth Balch:Emma is a leak consultant at Two Circles who's been with us for a couple of years and she's fantastic. She was on stage today doing her thing. She was brilliant to listen to.
7:42The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:Really, really interesting presentation. and she put a number against that leakage, which is 95 cents to a dollar. So every dollar that is made by the official rights holder, 95 cents leaks. And she talked about what type of leakage and the different forms of leakage. Some of that is inevitable, some of that is pluggable, all of those things. Those averages, what do you want people to go away from?
8:08Gareth Balch:I think everyone should know what their leakage is. How can you not? Isn't it dereliction and duty not to? In my head, it seems like it is. And years before, it was hard to know the answers to that.
8:16The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:You'd have to guess or whatever.
8:19Gareth Balch:It was expensive or hard. It's neither of those things anymore. And that's just, you did a wonderful job of the definition there, so bang on, and it's really important to think about it. We spend all of our time as an industry generating attention to monetize it. And this is attention that's being generated, that's being monetized, and we, IP owners, aren't taking a cut. Oh, that's not okay.
8:42The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:Yeah.
8:43Gareth Balch:that will happen a bit, right? The world's not perfect. But where it's happening, we should know, and we should actively choose that it's either okay or, you know, too hard to solve for. But as you say, over$150 billion worth of revenue was generated where we, the IP owners, made the attention. It was monetized successfully, and 0 % of it was taken a cut by IP owners. I think that's greater than it should be, and I think if everybody knew their version of the 95 cents metric, which is the division of that 150 billion dollars, then you would, it might be the first place you'd start. I think you'd call that low-hanging fruit.
9:22Gareth Balch:If you're an incoming commercial person in a sports IP, would you not say,
9:26The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:you would start there, wouldn't you?
9:28Gareth Balch:You would. The idea of having to generate from scratch, unproven, with audiences who don't yet know they love you, that you want, you'd start with what I've already done that I just haven't done my last job of, of getting my cut. And so, as I say, You won't solve the riddle and get it all, but at least know what you're not getting and then actively choose to continue to not get it, at least.
9:46The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:And what the obvious ones, I mean, my head always goes to piracy is one that... Piracy is the biggest one. ...media, you know, is just difficult. It's not one individual right, so I was going to solve it, it needs coordination. Yeah. Betting is another one where you can sort of see, okay, well, that's going to go and that's going to be difficult to... Yeah. And when we last spoke, I remember going away thinking of your list of, you know, top 100 ip in the top 10 war or the top 15 was the hong kong racing club and that felt like okay well that's interesting a lot of people would land on that yeah there was the polo yeah ralph loren which again is in oddly high on the list yeah yeah yeah lots there all of the above there's
10:27Gareth Balch:a long list keep going another one i really like putting on some data points we just heard 10 years ago of all brand dollars spent accessing sports audiences 29 percent of that went to IP purchases 71 percent of that went to buy an advertising space we went into the gold rush that was performance marketing and now billions and billions of dollars get spent on performance marketing to access sports audiences only 19 percent of that now goes to IP owners i.e. the ability to get official or exclusive IP that enables me access those audiences with unique assets. And so what we've seen is a leakage of value where people, brands want to access sports audiences more than ever.
11:10Gareth Balch:There's more of them than ever. They're more valuable than ever. But yet the route to market has been hoodwinked into being a disproportionately dominant performance marketing market. Now, it will also, it will always be predominantly in advertising first mechanism that but the 19 % should be nearer 30 % and that misread is something that the industry needs to correct and we'll correct that by better articulation to brands about where the value is, that requires a sophistication in knowing your audiences because if you go into brands and claim that your fans are actually your audiences, they're two different things you deserve to not get the deal and I could keep riffing down that lens.
11:46The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:That was a, we were in I'm not sure we were supposed to be in it We've got something to tell me Listeners should be
11:53Gareth Balch:there is a sort of range of different rooms
11:57The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:around the building. I'll speak to accreditation later. And we have just sort of dipped in and out as many as we could. But we were in a really fascinating thing about the UEFA, sorry, about, it was about a women's sport question. And that stat came up, the 19%. And I was going to think, I need to ask Gareth about this. And it was about the proportion of marketing spend that goes to sponsorship.
12:20Gareth Balch:Yeah, it goes to purchase of IP as opposed to purchases of ad units. So we're saying of all brand dollars spent access in sports fans, 19 % goes on the purchase of IP, and the difference goes on the purchase of ad placements as a broad brush definition of where it goes.
12:40The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:And again, 100 billion, and I'm looking at the year, we're saying, I think it was 10 years ago, So 30 % of 100 billion was going towards IP. And the most recent number, I think it's 2024.
12:55Gareth Balch:It's the bigger top number, 250 billion of marketing spent,
12:59The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:but a much smaller proportion. 19 % is the one that you're saying. And one of the points being, so it's never a straightforward answer, but the rise of performance marketing and digital, and that has taken up a lot of disproportionate amount of marketing budget. So if I'm a CMO, I'm now looking at those levers and saying, OK, I'm going to forego the traditional marketing levers into something else.
13:26Gareth Balch:Well, it's never a straightforward answer. But yes, that is the straight answer.
13:30The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:And that's the guts of it, right? It's pretty obvious that's what's happened.
13:33Gareth Balch:It's fueled and created some unbelievably valuable companies that are worth several trillion dollars. And it's revolutionized marketing. but there's definitely an over index or an over bias towards that form of media that we're seeing a correction of in the market and through this decade. I was going to ask you about the correction
13:49The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:so what do we know now? If we were speaking 10 years ago or 5 years ago people have said oh the money has gone to Facebook and Amazon
13:56Gareth Balch:I remember being really scared about that I was just scared for sponsorship but that's bad, I just felt bad it felt like sponsorship is really good it's an amazing channel, it's brilliantly complimentary to other stuff. Anyway that's not totally played itself out although it's definitely suffered a bit in that albeit grown in absolute terms in that world so let's not lose our perspective. It's 2x greater now in total income. Sports IP sponsorships generates 2x more income for sports IP owners than it did on your benchmark 10 or so years ago. So we've had a good run but other mediums have done much better.
14:30Gareth Balch:Performance marketing will be the biggest one at that. The sophistication of how marketeers talk about marketing is like to the kind of you know go away your acronyms kind of thing it is it's gone through the roof and sports needs to stay in that place and that's definitely you know to go back to your question about the through line if when we're you know made our mark on the world we've helped the sports industry have a little bit more sophistication with how i think how it thinks about audiences and fans and buyers and arrive in the right meeting with the right person to be able to articulate the value of a sports which is undeniably greater, better, more wonderful than it's ever been on its societal impact, on its ability to drive brand dollars or media subscription dollars, you name it, I can tell you it's going well.
Read the full transcript
15:14Gareth Balch:Sports needs to get really good at articulating that, needs to get really good at articulating that to governments as well, so governments continue to understand the socio-economic impact of the world. And our ability to articulate that as an industry is a real opportunity in one of the through lines we're trying to do today to get there and to kind of bring it back to your question as a tangent off. sit with brands and they bring half the sophistication, even a quarter of the sophistication that some of the trillion dollar media platforms do, then it's
15:44The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:going to do really, really well. And that's within reach.
15:49Gareth Balch:Yeah.
15:50The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:It's within reach. The history of two circles runs in parallel to the rise of the platforms, doesn't it, in some ways? True, true. They were generating enormous amounts of data and sport didn't know what to do with it. And you were one of the early interpreters of that data, I would say, in terms of, well, this is what this means, this is what you can do with it. And I wonder where we are now with that, because the level of sophistication on the sports side, because people always sort of lapse into, oh, it's old fashioned, it's still selling media buyers, it's still selling equivalences, which I'm sure is true to a large extent.
16:25The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:but it does feel different and i certainly don't get that sense of coming out of here today don't come away thinking that sport is unsophisticated good mission accomplished
16:37Gareth Balch:um i hope not well i hope we are next week in that brian meeting or in that broadcaster thing i hope we carry that because obviously the specificity has to carry into that the sports industry is um is more than keeping up with the sophistication of the marketing ecosystem that it lives in i would say or the media ecosystem that lives in can it do better of course are we um tireless in our in our desire for that to happen of course but it's doing really well and it can get down on itself but it's come a long long way and you can you just to pick up on your point you can relapse to kind of like oh yeah but it's still a media buy and oh yes people just still buy it
17:11The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:because the ceo is with them and all that stuff and that's you know there's there's some um you
17:16Gareth Balch:know everything changes everything stays the same this it's radically changed from the inside out What we do looks the same to the untrained eye. How it does it, I say on behalf of the industry, decades of change have happened within a decade. There is a deep change in the way it does that. And one of the things I love about today is it's a celebration of that transformation through the lens of our clients. Today's all about client stories, right? You've heard dozens and dozens of Two Circles client stories of that transformation. Some of them are happening really subtly. Some of them are happening quite boldly.
17:48Gareth Balch:But there's an amazing transformation. happen in our industry so I'm I'm I'm bored by that one of your clients so
17:55The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:Premier League I was again listening in on that session again this is where we might clip its clips on in but one of so one of the questions Alex Willis was talking about was the the new app the relationship with Microsoft the way in which they're looking at the question the app is obviously an answer to a bigger question which is the sort of fan question so just take me through what your lens of that because we always land on the premier league because it's huge and successful and people want to learn lessons from it and it was really interesting listening to alex sort of really honestly taking you through the sort of the the learning curve yeah you know even someone at the very top end of the shop in terms of from global sports perspective but there are still challenges in big tech, you know, we've got these AI all of that stuff but it's interesting how difficult it is but what's your perspective?
19:00The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:Alex is brilliant, she's a complete visionary and it was
19:03Gareth Balch:great to have her here with us today the Premier League are brilliant, they're a complete visionary they're the first to say they haven't done it before they might have resources or talented people and all those things but as much as they might be really good or really talented or whatever they've received most of the time they're either trying to do something no one's ever done before or trying to solve a problem many people have failed to solve previously and technology category IP partnerships with a high level of sophistication to the activation and I do think about it as
19:34The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:activation as opposed to oh you get a bunch of free software is a wonderful graveyard of failures
19:40Gareth Balch:over the last 10 years there is a graveyard of ip owners who've done a technology category deal thought they were going to get their technology um wishes sold for in a in a moment once the box arrived the box never quite arrived the people didn't know yeah to do with what did arrive and and it all ended in tears not very many years later and and and i don't think the audience your audience is sophisticated enough to know that there's a list longer than my arm and alex is very clear that she's going to do this different and better and there's been some i've done it already not say she's the first one to do it but the but but the relationship that the premier league has struck with microsoft and adobe i believe is is is sophisticated if i may say that it was a i feel um uncomfortable claiming sophistication other others say it of themselves but i believe that relationship is very sophisticated in the level of systems integration data integration clarity of commercial outcomes all centered on delivering a differentiated relationship for the fan yeah and we can then wrap some you know dollars in ip fees and other things around that but the heart of that conversation that alex would have talked the the room through earlier was all born out of um the teams collaborating on a technical on an audience on a data level before it was talked about assets and rights fees well that's that last bit is i
20:55The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:think interesting i i did a thing in the newsletter a few weeks ago which my only caveat or my question was whether or not sponsorship is a good framework through which to work out long-term tech projects. Because sponsorship always comes to an end and then you're, what do you do? And I think where the other bit, I sometimes think I looked at that deal that they've done with Microsoft and with Adobe. And my question was, it felt a bit like three or four years ago, we'd have been talking about blockchain partners and Web3 partners. And people were saying, okay, build me a blockchain.
21:31Gareth Balch:Wasn't that a disaster at that moment?
21:33The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:Exactly. So tech and sponsorship, tech projects, long-term, these are things that you'll build, you know, and again, you lay AI into it, and you've got Microsoft Copilot. There's two things. One, you're backing a horse, you know, and that's difficult. You like the sort of government picking winners in many senses, and that's really hard to do. So Microsoft Copilot versus Google versus all the others, OpenAI, all of the other choices that you could make purely from a technical perspective, it then is wrapped into a sponsorship thing because that's how sport handles things. I just wonder that's a tension point.
22:12Gareth Balch:Yeah, it is. I think, to my point about less longer than my arm of failures in this space, there's a lot of tripwires for sports IP and technology to create partnerships that endure, that are great, that renew, which is a good way of measuring that. And so you point out some of the issues with that as you go but it's a massive opportunity to to be done better so if we can learn from those trip wires and point some of the things i've done really well some are really enduring right one
22:39The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:you know we have really privileged to have wimbledon here today and wimbledon's partnership
22:43Gareth Balch:with ibm is is as long as you know many years older than us community put together i think and so there's been great examples of that happening already so it's not beyond the wit of of person to figure that out there's been too many failures in this noisy world where i was getting distracted by emerging technologies that felt like the future and then you back that horse to your point and it runs out but the kind of whether to back the right horse or not is is neither here or there because if you start the conversation when you go to market with technology which isn't really a category anymore it's a litany of categories yeah and and is and is one of the fastest if you did bundle up together everything you loosely call technology you would you would find yourself with a near majority of the of the growing part of the digital money coming to the space and one of the data points about today is that 60 % of buyers or sponsorship are what they would consider to now to be digital first companies where their revenues or their...
23:35Gareth Balch:And that's kind of a proxy on commerce, right? But that's really important because this technology category is wide ranging. Anyway, a tangent. The technology category is unbelievably high potential if you start the go-to-market process to find the right partner with a conversation about what you're going to achieve together with the right architects in the room technical architects the right engineers in the room data architects the right marketeers who talk the combined lingo of how we're going to expand collective audiences and achieve dual outcomes and that is harder than rocking up giving them the sales prospectus and asking what the right fee is going to be yeah if that comes after the fact and there is a challenge there to remove or to retain some of the competitive tension that we know drives real value in the market and the fusion of that systems, data and audience led first thinking to then wrap around a right, steal around it.
24:32Gareth Balch:If you can get that right, there are an abundance of technology partners, I believe, that are ready and willing to invest greater dollars into sports.
24:42The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:And just to round up, I mean, Alex and Will Brass, in terms of the commercial side of the Premier League, they would say, well, we need to learn from the best. Why not do it with Microsoft? So there's that argument, and they're not going to, Premier League is not able to do it, so they're going to have to do it in partnership in some way. For sure.
25:00Gareth Balch:But the reality is, if they weren't going to spend lots of... The flip side of that is, Premier League were going to need to spend a lot of dollars with Microsoft or someone like Microsoft. So it is a lot about learning, because we've all got a lot to learn in this space, and the world's moving quickly. But there's also increasing amounts of cost that goes into marketing technology, if I call it that. There's an increasingly big cost line, and there's much more effective ways to be able to access that technology you need. Clearly, Microsoft is...
25:30The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:One of the other things was it was quite an interesting, not counter, but just a sort of the YouTube story at the moment, which is sort of... Non-stop. non-stop relentless and one of the points that alex made in the presentation i was in was you know the app premier league app when it came out on first friday was the number one app in you know on the app store and so the owned environment it's never either or and people always want to sort of create you know youtube versus youtube is a new television and therefore television is all of this is just it's noise but actually within that you've got some very interesting case studies this is a case study of owning you or just being present for your fans
26:14Gareth Balch:the english premier league app is tremendous there's other very strong apps delivering good audiences but the active monthly users on the premier league app and the total consumption hours on the premier league app is a bit a bit eye-watering when i sit and look at the numbers and we've written a long-term plan taking this through to i think 2034 and put the projections around it. It's one of those where you just hand on the desk and think, really?
26:40The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:Is that really going to happen?
26:41Gareth Balch:Is it really going to be that big?
26:43The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:And you're like, yeah. It's going to happen. Fantasy is a cultural phenomenon. And there was a good question from the floor. It was from UC3. But he said about the micro economies around fantasy. And again, back to the original question about leakage. Where do you put your hand? When and where do you step in and want to put your hands around that?
27:04Gareth Balch:You say it very well. Fantasy is a phenomenon. and i can't say the word as well as you can but it is whatever it's one of those things fantasy is astonishing and really within that this gamification and you know literally the biggest story or what one of the big stories around that is obviously dream 11.
27:19The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:i think you wrote about that
27:20Gareth Balch:in your news last year the week which i always enjoy and and you know just amazing about how far and why dream 11 reached and what that means and just you just cut that out in a microcosm obviously it ultimately is an indian story on one lens but it's also a completely universal story when you run that across tennis or any number of other sports that that are both um playing on some on a human craving that exists that we've only significantly under monetized historically and have continued to underestimate going forward in terms of our ability to build those micro economies around our friends from uc3 would say so yes there's a gift that's going to keep on giving around that it's obviously got some dark sides to it as well because it's a gateway to other things that that need greater consideration but it's um it's a phenomenal it's a phenomenal
28:08The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:growth engine of the sports industry the other um session i wanted to mention was the uh uefa women's champions league session because one of the most eye-catching deals of the last six months has been the disney plus entrance one of your again just spitballing tying back to your uh sort of bull market, this is the line going up to the right of fandom, money, a lot of that feels predicated on new fans, new audiences as you define them, and obviously women being a significant factor in that. So beyond all the noise about women's football and the day-to-day stuff, actually when the industry steps back and looks at this, it's incredibly exciting.
28:58The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:yeah however that that i think sometimes i think gets conflated into a whole conversation about the decline of the linear rights bundle and i think people get pessimistic about that and then forget that actually you've got this whole new cohort or cohorts of people that weren't interested remotely in sport they were anti-sport in some way and are now being brought into the to the thing so just let's talk about the that just the way into that you know point is that session on uefa and disney plus but yeah give me your yeah i mean it's not even that those people those
29:33Gareth Balch:segments were over generalizing a bit but those segments didn't weren't anti-sport they were stood hiding in plain sight saying hi hi is there something for me um and we didn't hear them and and we are beginning to hear them i think the biggest challenge to your point you articulated
29:50The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:well the biggest challenge to your point all right i can get on the train just to you know
29:54Gareth Balch:maybe get on or really on whatever into the kind of it's, you know, there's a real growth story here and they say, okay, budget next year. Yeah. How much is it going to be? And you're like, Oh wow. 15 % off. It's 15 % for a really low number, which is really insignificant. This is, this is, I think that you'd like to say that you can conflate this with a bunch of other macro things going on in the industry, but the rate of growth is something that I think also our clients challenge with the, you know, we're experiencing the most amazing women's rugby world cup at the moment, which we're delighted to be part of.
30:25Gareth Balch:And it is amazing. Like the Women's Champions League continues to be on an amazing journey and posts record after record after record. But it is still proportionately underwhelming, I'd say, if you're just economic about it when you return to the budget page. And I think that's, you know, time is a great friend. I'm a big fan of Warren Buffett. And the biggest thing I learned from Warren Buffett is the power of compounding. this business will compound and compounding it once you get your head around it is a beautiful thing in terms of where i'll get to albeit you know just doing 10 a year or 15 a year and only therefore getting to treble over three years is treble enough on the baseline this is a challenge but but the women's women's sports generally which i think is the the point and women's champions league is a hero project product within that and one of the best um women's only um sports sports in the market is gonna do brilliantly and and it's been amazing to have disney's support for that is a great example of of um of where the breadth of sport continues to eat into other genres and start to exist in different entertainment platforms and just you know seeing um women's football in in the disney plus platform over the coming weeks i think it's going to be like oh wow look at this and it gives so many adjacency adjacency opportunities that have never existed before as we then do conflate it into the change of the streaming age that we now yeah and that that sort of question of what happens in between here and there i completely
31:52The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:buy into the big picture you know the line going up and new audiences but you do have people with jobs you must get this day in day out of you know i'm running a football club and i'm subsidizing the women's side how long do i have to do this before these new audiences actually turn into money gareth is telling me these are you know the numbers getting bigger and bigger every year but on my own micro lens i'm running a rugby club i'm subsidizing how long do i have to subsidize that it's it's those are the really difficult questions yeah and it's getting from the audience number through down to revenue but quick enough so people believe it and ultimately yeah we spend
32:33Gareth Balch:a lot of time on well how big is it going to be yeah and when's it roughly going to get there yeah and what's it going to be along the way and what do i need to do to either get that to be true or to make it happen quicker and the answers to that essentially you know particularly because there's lots of private money kicking around this part of um the women's sports industry is essentially the game of the speculators at that point the people who accurately get that right are going to win really big because what's unassailable at this point is that women's sports on a one-way trajectory they're becoming mainstream and mega economically socially fanatically in every which way and how and it's just a question of how big and when and how and the best operators will will accurately get there and become a super accelerator and win in the day
33:19The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:okay right i'm gonna the last bit that we're going to talk about i'm conscious of your time you need to go there's a whole room up there waiting to be networked by gareth forge that's something i'm not good at networking well you know you're better off down here talking to us um is your audience
33:34Gareth Balch:bigger than the audience on there that's the real that's the real question so i want to talk
33:38The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:about wimbledon i need to get wimbledon in because again really interesting case study one again one of the things that when i i come away and this is just in my head because it's you know over the last few hours it's it's a sort of unconsidered there's a question about scarcity there was a media session really really good really strong stuff early on it followed your session about about genres, finding new genres, finding new areas to play. Wimbledon, you know, there's a few things I remember. One was the sort of the way in which tennis fills the algorithm at that point. Why and how does that happen?
34:15The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:The dip in the summer was a really interesting point. This is on your session. Then I'm wondering about that it was about more, creating more content in different places. Wimbledon is all about scarcity. the masters is always about scarcity is there am I conflating content sort of everywhere all day everywhere more and more and more content wins which was one of the messages with product scarcity and I'm just trying to work through what that means.
34:47Gareth Balch:You're on a contradiction right? There is a contradiction there and both are true as they often are contradictions scarcity is beautiful, scarcity of rights scarcity of experience scarcity of memory is is is a valuable commodity in the sports industry trades in it greatly but we also live in a world of abundance and we talked about that in terms of volume of media that's getting generated the volume of media generated is going to grow by seven and a half times so the available media to humans of all types not just sports every type of media be that text be the audio um be that video it's going to grow up seven and a half times in the next 10 years it's like oh my word so you're like okay how do i where do i sit in that we are living in an age of abundance what that's going to do is place a greater and greater and greater and greater value on scarcity and how do i find the place where i'm both scarce and abundant because if i'm totally scarce in this attention economy living you're actually irrelevant
35:44The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:yeah but if i'm entirely abundant and available yeah i'm not as valuable right so therein lies
35:51Gareth Balch:the puzzle and ultimately what sports has beautifully is this um it has so much agility to slice itself up yeah and and in its physical context it can it can be much more naturally scarce yeah but people like watching people people like watching sport and so you stick that together and it makes a big video product but that's been the case for a long time but actually the nature of what those video products can now be or video um formats can now be is is where so much uh transformation is happening in our industry right now. And we're just, I can't wait for the connection of that transformation and how fans are consuming it, which is going bonkers, by the way, filling algorithms, eating entertainment in its share of content.
36:35Gareth Balch:Once we connect that attention to a new monetization model, and it's just about to happen. It's literally happening as, it's literally happening. The marketplace for it is forming as we speak. And right there is the future of media rights. And what I can tell you is that this amount of money spent on media rights is going to continue to go up it's already at record high who's buying it and what they're buying and how they're buying it is changing what we've got to do is make sure we're creating it proving its value demonstrating why there's audiences for it and then go into that new and more sophisticated marketplace than the old media world and we're going to find um we're going to find a new um some new best friends and some new money and um and creation of new value for great partners which because sport's more valuable than ever
37:15The Unofficial Partner Podcast Hosts:I like the for you economy that was a word that was a phrase that came up I'm going to use that steal that take that as my own pass it off value leakage there is value two circles value leakage listen Gareth as ever thanks a lot really enjoyed the chat and go go network go
37:34Gareth Balch:be amongst your people I'm off thank you Richard
37:46Thank you.
38:16Thank you.
From the publisher
Today's conversation was recorded at the Two Circles European Summit which took place a few weeks ago at the Institute of Engineering and Technology overlooking the Thames, next to the Savoy.
Gareth Balch, founder and CEO of Two Circles is our guest, and as ever with Gareth, nothing was off limits, and its useful to periodically check in on what he's seeing right across the European and North American sports markets, where they encourage their clients to think about their relationship with the key trends, sharing nuggets of useful information that lurk just below the day to day headlines.
We explore the state of sports business, what fan engagement means in 2025 and the evolving relationship between sports IP, audiences, and revenue.
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