UP515 Other People's Money @ EY: Why is Big Sport so hard to disrupt?

0:00Richard:Hello, welcome to Unofficial Partners, Richard Gillis here. And this is a special episode of Other People's Money, which is our regular series on sports investment and finance. And we recorded it in front of a small invited audience at the London headquarters of EY, the Big Four Accounting and Professional Services Group. And we thank them for their hospitality up there on the top floor at their London Bridge office. It's very, very convivial. Joining myself and regular Other People's Money co-host Matt Rogan were John Fallon and Vikram Banerjee. John Fallon was chief executive of publishing giant Pearson during a period of intense digital transformation and he wrote a book about it called Resurgent which counters some of the cliches that gather around that topic of disruption and it's very relevant to sport as you'll hear.

0:48Richard:Vikram Banerjee is Managing Director of The Hundred and previously led strategy, insights and business operations functions at the England and Wales Cricket Board. A former professional cricketer has played a key role in setting the strategic direction for the sport, including the creation of the ECB's Strategy for Cricket, Inspiring Generations, and the South Asian Action Plan, which was launched in 2018. The other voices you'll hear at the end are some questions from our audience, including Alan Noble and Sarah Hanks, our hosts at EY, plus Jessica Howarth of Sphera Partners. This is a conversation which brings together quite a lot of the threads that are alive in this sports business currently.

1:32Richard:And it's about disruption, but it's also about why major sports rights holders are so difficult to unseat or to disrupt. what are the defences that they have and John Fallon's book goes into that in some detail using other examples so it's a really good framing for what's happening in sport we're obviously seeing it in different sports golf rugby cricket and we get to the question of what does the money want where is the money going to go what's the risk and reward of the investment question in sport in 2025 where is the money going and what does that tell us about sport

2:17Richard:Welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming. There's a question that I've been wanting to get to for a while, and it's to do with disruption, which is a word that has become sort of overused. Let's use that. It's a cliche. And one of the questions is, what does it really mean? And is it happening to sport? And in what sense and where is it happening? and then there's a bigger question which is about what the money wants which again I think we'll get to at some point unofficial partner is an umbrella we cover lots of different bits of the sports industry other people's money is where we sort of drill down on finance and money and sport and investment I do that with co-host Matt Rogan so I'm gonna bring you in Matt just I saw and this is a little bit of scene setting not irrelevant but mtv closed down i mention this because matt he will tell you anyway used to work for mtv yeah i spent um a formative part of my career which really ages me to say it was the turn of the century working at mtv in the days when it was in the days before the ball patch and in the days where they showed music videos i still remember sat in the office as christine aguilera's dirty played and everyone went bloody hell i'm meant to do some work now i was a bit surprised that it was still going yeah it's um the day i left was the day mckinsey came in to re-engineer the organization which was the point that the production and creative wing of mtv was fused with the creation of the uk version of nickelodeon spongebob squarepants so the people producing the music awards were also the people creating brand extensions spongebob squarepants and selling ringtone videos and that's when it all began to go a little bit wrong.

4:02Richard:Well you know no shade on McKinsey they've been there for 20 years they've been grinding away. First of all let's just go around the table and get people's voices on the recording. Vic can you just sort of introduce yourself tell us who you are and what you do all day. Of course well thanks first of all for having me. My job is the MD of the 100 so running the 100 tournament which if you don't know is a cricket tournament that runs for about a month through the school holidays and we've been going for about five years and of note over the last 12-18 months we went through a big franchising process to sell stakes in the eight teams which has just recently completed.

4:41Richard:Very much so right we're going to talk about that in some detail. John same question for you. Well I live what I would somewhat grandly call a portfolio life these days which means I have absolutely no executive authority for anything which I thoroughly enjoy. I did spend most of my full-time executive life, last 23 years of it at Pearson where I was CEO and led it through what was a pretty traumatic digital disruption transformation and now I do a range of things including I think the reason why I'm here today I've just written a book which is called Resurgent which is all about how large established organizations and companies are surviving and fighting back through disruption far more successfully than is generally supposed.

5:28Richard:Right. And I am going to read, spare your blushes, I'm going to read just a paragraph because I think it captures a bit of what we're going to be talking about. So this is from John's book, John's book, Resurgent. The narrative in the business press was all about tech. Companies in the traditional parts of the economy, from energy to industrial to consumer goods to travel to health rarely get a mention everyone was talking about the disruptors the startups and the entrepreneurs and not about the incumbents and we thought it was time for a reality check so one of the questions I've got is the defense and the moat of the incumbents in sport but we're going to talk talk about stuff that's broader than that obviously but that's one of the themes and it's one of the questions I've got I see it you know we're in this era and one of the questions that I'm going to come to Matt with is just to describe the area that we're in.

6:19Richard:Because at the moment, when you've got a sports business podcast, you get a lot of press releases and a lot of information, people coming on saying that we have the future of rugby, we have the future of golf, we have the future of swimming, track and field, athletics. There is a lot going on around the product. And to that paragraph sort of captured more articulately than I can, what's happening? Are these edge cases or is this actually something real? So Matt, I want you just to put some colour on that because and just fill in some of the gaps what is happening out there so as you say there's there's an awful lot going on in terms of the general investment landscape in sport and i think a large percentage of the column inches if not perhaps the investment numbers is going into some of the insurgent organizations some of the different types of organizations we're seeing i happen to live out in the sticks which means i spend far too long on trains that are late or don't turn up at all which i did this morning so in preparation for this morning tried to build an a to z of insurgent sports leagues blimey how long was this journey yeah how long should it have been or how long was it and i i did get the whole way but i'm not going to bore you with all that but i'll give you a little feel like a poet doing a little pricey but if you start with a so i came up with arena football league which is american football this is the last five years broadly arena football league baller league soccer cage warriors mma drone racing league drone race european super league soccer fishing bass pro league slightly spurious but i think i've got away with it uh grand grand slam track athletics i thought i'd finish on h with the hundreds i'm glad to do that i was getting nervous um so yeah it's an awful lot going on and i guess the job we've got today is to make sense of all that and try and understand are they all trying to do the same thing and how do they relate to the status quo so are they trying to do the same thing my view would be no you've got all sorts of different bits of the jigsaw there you've got some completely new ideas really that wouldn't have been a thing 10 years ago wouldn't be possible 10 years ago you know you think about putting small cameras on drones with kids around the world flying them that's getting broadcast live on youtube in the moment you think about having the technology i could get boring having technology to see sense where the carp are fishing go find them mates you can actually film the catch and not just the fishing on the side of the bank very interested in car fishing isn't it there's all sorts going on in the space so that you've got sort of effectively new commercial properties starting from zero and then you've got you know if you take that to the extreme of the European Super League you've got incumbents trying to re-engineer and challenge the status quo you know we didn't get it too well and live golf but you've got something at the completely other end of the spectrum there that encompasses international politics and all sorts of things so I think the underlying start point for today might be to say look we need to go a little bit deeper and understand specifically what the money wants in different types of environments and just before we do that the different types of money again it comes no shock to anyone that a podcaster and my you know understanding of money is reasonably limited so I need you to sort of go deeper but there appears to me again a regular theme is there seems to be a great deal of money out there and a lot of it is pointing at sport and we'll talk in a minute about the hundred and the money that's that's flown in there but you're looking at funds walls of money that are being gathered together by some big city organizations you've got cbc arctos you've got you know apollo almost on a regular basis a sort of fortnightly basis a new fund appears to to come out of the ether yeah but at different stages i mean if i think about kind of things i'm getting involved in at the moment you know one minute you're helping a startup business that might be raising a couple million quid looking to build a really niche proposition an area of sports tech where it's kind of venture capital type level then you know trying to help a team that really it's in the sort of series a stage of 20 30 million quid and part of that's about refinancing the stadium part of it's about some more development to support the women's team then the next stage up you're looking at a brand new league brand new sport probably quite punctually going out and trying to find 70 80 million quid in a very risky punt and then as you say at the other end you've got you know cvcs of this world trying to consolidate rights from a few sports that are getting squeezed in the middle a bit you might argue in the rugby's and the and the golfs and so on and and then at the very top ends billion dollar enterprises in the states that the likes of artos are putting money down to buy 10 percent of for a stake in a much bigger game i'm sure the hundred fits somewhere in one of those where does the hundred fit in that sort of landscape does it fit in uh we're probably somewhere between the those last two we're you know we're not in the nfl size or scale by a long way but nor are we at this stage something that's brand new this name cricket is a very well established sport franchise leagues in cricket are established obviously driven by the ipl who has done you know you didn't mention them but have done incredible things yeah in terms of growth so we're probably somewhere in between so the IPL is probably the most I don't know in terms of just the the cleanest example of disruption and that we've had in sport not just about cricket but just across the board do you think sometimes you look across and think it's sometimes hard to work out get a real clean case study but IPL feels like as close as we'll get to it yeah I mean it is a fantastic case study in the way they went about and if you look what is also incredible is the time frame i mean it wasn't that long ago that the ipl came about and was there and what they've managed to do in terms of changing a sport within was 18 years maybe 19 years that they've done that what do you is talk about sort of offensive defensive positions again i'm going to bring john in on the incumbency question but to what extent is the was the 100 a an offensive this is okay here's a market that we're going to go after it's going to just talk me through that bit of it the strategy bit because i think that's interesting so the 100 the thinking about it came about probably 2017 18 that kind of period the concept was that cricket in this country anyway your ticket buyers had an average age that was mid to late 50s they were 85 % plus were male.

13:08They were pretty much all white. They were ABC1. It was a very narrow market and the sport had to grow. It had to find ways of appealing to a broader audience. And that's where it started. And that was, you know, I don't quite know if that's offense or defense or whatever that is, but that was the kind of germination of this. Okay, well, if you agree with the concept that we have to grow and we have to find a new audience. We then went about and went, what's stopping them? Why aren't they engaging with Test Cricket or the Blast as it was then and the other products and what are those key barriers?

13:44And understanding really that audience and what they're about and what their likes and dislikes are and what their views of cricket were, some of which for cricket fans was fairly brutal listening, but it was good to do because that then translated and morphed into the 100. It wasn't as if we started with, right, here's the 100, now let's find out where we can take it it was started with with the fans and what they want

14:06Richard:and what does that result in and that's the problem okay there's a few things there john you said that you know the IPL is probably the most graphic case of disruption and even there the IPL now exists alongside other formats of cricket it has not displaced them and if you go back to the original Clayton Christensen theory of disruption the idea is that the technology basically drives the existing format out of business. So the idea was we're all going to go the way of Kodak or BlackBerry or Blockbuster. And, you know, so one data point from outside the world of sport, if you look at the Fortune 500 today, largest companies by revenues, how many of them didn't exist in 1995 on the cusp of the Internet?

14:50Only 24. The likelihood of any large incumbent being completely put out of business, it's not impossible but it doesn't happen very often and a slightly cheap jibe but i would argue that you know far more unicorns have turned into unicorns than large incumbents have ended up proving to be the dinosaur that everybody said they were going to be that's not to say there hasn't been huge disrupt you know like you talk about ipl you we were talking earlier about music yeah classified advertising uh you know whole swathes you know the industry that i was in so it's mainly been in industries that are sort of virtual in nature that are sort of you know where they are driven by the bit and the bite and there's no reason for that product to exist in a physical format they've been the ones that have been most disrupted and that in turn means the other side so i said oh like you know those guys have survived much better but we haven't broken out in valuation so you look at like the you know the magnificent seven you know and we're all familiar with who they are you know only two of them existed 50 years ago that was uh microsoft and apple that were born out of the personal computer those none of those other five existed on the cusp of the internet and they're now worth collectively 20 trillion dollars the equivalent of you know the whole of the european union and i would argue having quite a significant disruptive impact on sport.

16:16The Champions League looking at completely re-changing the format so it can offer Netflix or Amazon a package that works. So how are incumbents surviving? Well, I think they're doing a number of things. One, they can sort of migrate away, which is probably not easy to do in sport. But to give a simple example, Kodak went extinct. Fujitsu, its major competitor, has now continued to grow because it basically took its core technologies and you found different ways to apply them. For sports in sectors, I would say you can fight back, which I would argue is probably what the 100 is. We are going to take our product and come up with a new format and in Clayton Christensen's word, we're going to disrupt ourselves.

17:02You can double down, which I would argue is what the Premier League or the Champions League are largely doing. You add extra capacity, you improve the spectator experience, you buy up all the best talent, you iterate and innovate in lots of different ways so you make more and more of the product, or you basically do a degree of retrenchment, which is basically you look for the regulator to help you. and arguably you could say people are doing all those things then finally just to bring it back just sense check-in so does my does my thesis apply to sport I would argue that if you look at you know going right back to Bradford Park Avenue if you just look in football all the clubs that have gone extinct it's not because they were disrupted it was because of maladministration and mismanagement by the people who were running them so I don't know if that helps but that's how would think about it.

18:05It's probably easier for me to say than Vic but you know walking around an enormous number of cricket pitches and cricket clubs over the last five years because my kids play it's one of the best examples I've seen of a sports organisation sort of changing before it absolutely had to. The number of conversations you have where the old guard cricketers saying I don't know why they're doing it why didn't they just do it to 2020 just a gradual change you know it would have worked it would have worked and the reality is it wouldn't so it's having the bravery to change before you have to. I'd argue the same at the FA when they put a lot of time, effort and energy in building the Women's Super League when a lot of people were telling them just to not license clubs and just let the current women's clubs continue organically without any kind of support and challenge.

18:51I think what characterises those large organisations, I'm not sure what other of you guys think, in sport that have gone with it and been ahead of the curve for the ones that have just been a bit braver and grasped the net a little bit. Is it bravery or is it money?

19:06Richard:Where did the money come from for the 100? Well, at the very start, it was effectively a partnership with Sky. Sky had been great partners for cricket for 30 years now. But at the time, it was, let's work together. There's a win-win. So the money comes, but it follows. The objective was always pure in the sense of the sport. The sport needs to grow. And if the sport grows, that stuff almost kind of takes care of itself. But the fact that we had a partnership, we had a relation that allowed us to have a bit of a runway, and that's where a lot of people don't have. There was a broadcast deal that was put in place in 2017 that put some money to it, so there was a bit of confidence that we have a thing that can go.

19:49But yeah, I agree with Matt. I can say it's not me. It's other people that deserve a lot of credit for that bravery. A lot of people took a lot of stick and a lot of, you know, all sorts from all sorts of people.

20:00Richard:What was it like? Because you sort of saw it from the outside. I ran a magazine in 2000. It was called Sport Business. Q in the name. And the ECB came and did a presentation to us about 2020 cricket. And I couldn't have been more patronising. you know if i'd have tapped them on the head and said well you know good good shout well done you know good effort but i thought no it's never going to work you know and i've my career is a series of these conversations where people have gone off and made you know billions and billions and i've poo-pooed them it's becoming the received wisdom that it's been disrupted from within the ecb has it's almost like done its own kodak moment and that will be the case study that history will look back on this moment and say look this is not live golf it was them doing it to themselves and And that was, but just talk to me because that sounds easier, but actually you've got a constituency of people, cricket fans, who didn't like it.

20:57And I think some of the challenges of the bigger organisations, for us, we have, there was 9, 10 million people that were saying, well, I'm a cricket fan and I like, by nature, like what we've got. And sports fans almost to the tip don't like change. They don't like, you know, this is what they like. They like it and they know what they like. I don't the one difference of the disruption I don't it was never meant to kill any other forms of cricket quite the opposite right test cricket I mean it's thriving we've just had an amazing summer of test cricket with great audiences and engagement and that's the symbiosis that's that this is all about you can have you know in the same way that Cadbury's make have many different bars of chocolate it's not so that one wins of those bars of chocolate they all kind of support each other and I think it's the same here that test cricket is a product that some people love and that's great and the hundred is a product that some people love and that's also great and if they cross brilliant if they don't that's also great the sport on the whole wins out the back of it and that's thing that perhaps sport where other in the corporate world isn't quite as clear cut as that but that's where sport can do things like differently okay so back to your list of things

22:10Richard:we didn't mention live golf I think live golf is a really interesting one because my again I'm a big golf fan and I resent live golf so because of its intrusion and now I've come to think so if I'm a fan if I'm a typical golf cricket football fan am I one of those people that people will say oh he just wants faster horses he's just a he's a conservative he won't he won't change you'll never change his mind how do you deal with that how do you sort of take me along because in sport in some of your you know the the case studies in your book you haven't got those constituencies of fans and superstar players these are two groups which i think make sport there's a difference in but but it has forced the pga to to use the framing earlier to to sort of to double down hasn't it so you know it's increased the prize money it's concise and it's and a bit of retrenchment as well so the consolidation of the european tour and the pga they've increased the money they've made some changes to the format.

23:12And then you could argue, well, the analogy doesn't quite work because it's not the PGA that has launched it, but the Monday night indoor golf thing is the fighting back, isn't it? It's like that's going to sit alongside. So Liv tried to go head-to-head. So Liv's chances, I would argue, Liv's chances of success of directly displacing and putting the PGA out of business was always a very long shot. and arguably is that what the backers ever thought was really going to happen or was it like let's put a huge amount of money on the table and force people and force some consolidation and change

23:46Richard:and we'll be part of it. Do you know what I mean? I think that's how I would think about it. And it's sort of interesting, it's been going four or five years. Sorry, you go. I was just going to say, I think it's a very bold call for any financier to say that they can change, believe that they can change the whole ecosystem of one top five or six sports globally. And you might argue that it's only with the political and financial will and international will that comes from the Middle East that anyone would be brave enough to try that. My personal view, with no vested interest at all, is I think challenging the rugby ecosystem like it's happening at the moment, rugby 360, is just as brave a call.

24:28And it's interesting to see how the status quo are kind of reacting on that to try and sort of... I mean, what I would say is, what I think is interesting, again, the analogy with other sectors is where companies get into trouble when they go through disruption is they sort of lose confidence in themselves and they forget, lose sight of what their identity and purpose is. And I know when we went through a massively disruptive transformation, we survived because we said, what is it that we do that is of enduring value to our customers? What is it that is of real value? Where I think sport has a huge advantage is because of that community identity, doesn't it?

25:11you know back to football sport I love you know every other Saturday or now 4.30 on a Sunday afternoon sadly for those of us who travel to games it's like you're reminded why you're there because there's 50 ,000 fans in the game do you know what I mean but I think it's that and I suppose that would be my one caution for cricket is you've now got so many different formats just make sure in all those different formats you don't lose the I don't think you have do you know what I mean I'm not saying but that would be my one caution just make sure that you don't lose what it is that is of enduring value and people really love yeah I think that's right it's the same as any you've got to balance what the current customers, fans as we have with the new and at the heart of it for cricket that battle between a bat and a ball is what it's at the enduring heart and whether that's that battle lasts five days or a hundred balls that's what fans love And I think whenever you try and fight each other and forget what the purpose is and what the role and what the audience is, that's when you start to get in trouble.

26:19And being very, very clear for us as a cricket as a whole of this is what test cricket is about. And almost celebrating that heritage and celebrating the nature of that sport while celebrating the innovation and maybe pushing some of the boundaries with the 100 with a very different, new to the sport kind of audience to it. being very clear on that is important as is separating those two and making sure they don't blur and then you miss a bit weak on that side and a bit weak on that side because you're kind of halfway But you've got to try and build new team identity haven't you? I'm of a certain generation so I will identify with Lancashire in a way I never will with the Manchester Originals so I would imagine trying to build that identity is one of your challenges.

27:01Richard:I've got a stamp that says I'm not the target audience Well I'm not the target audience I do love it as a format and I love watching it but it is that identity I think isn't it that is the thing that you've got to keep in mind yes and we joke about not being a target audience but I think all lovers of cricket and I'll talk obviously I can talk more about cricket than other sports but the high calibre of the on-field product is so important and messing with that is when it gets you know a bit tricky you know we all watch I certainly watch lots of Olympic sports with I have no idea what the hell's going on but I can appreciate that whatever's happening there, that is athleticism at its very best.

27:41And in cricket, people watching men and women smashing sixes, bowling fast, at its heart, if that product is excellent, whichever kind of nature of fan you are, you get drawn to it and attracted to it. And then, yeah, sure, you package it up slightly differently to bring in others, but I think the product has to be at the core of what you're trying to offer. For me, the clue was in what Vic was saying around, he was effectively the marketing director, being able to say, all my Cadbury's chocolate bars, I've got this product that serves this segment, this product that serves this segment, this product that serves this segment.

28:18Some customers might buy all my chocolate bars, but some might just buy one. So owning the whole supply chain, I think was super important in that journey. I guess coming back to our question around some of these insurgent leagues you know you're the chief exec of a baller league or a king's league or share our pk's property where they bounce balloons up and down not run and sort of try and make that one work what position do you imagine you're going to play in the ecosystem of the future and if i'm putting 50 million quid into one of those i sort of want to know that there's a position that can play around football that's going to be sustainably profitable or I've got an exit route to FIFA.

29:02Presumably those are attracting very different types of investors, aren't they? So if you're, I mean, you were talking about CVC, if you're sort of private equity, you're wanting a 15 % IRR and a five or seven year exit, you're much more going for the sustaining innovation and the consolidation. And I've seen an undervalued asset that I think I can do a better job of digital transformation of or whatever. the guys who are going after the Gerard Piquet type thing I'm assuming that's much earlier stage venture capital type like I'm going to invest in 10 things and I hope two of them are successful isn't it I'm assuming there must be a different profile to some of those I believe that's true but I also I'm not particularly clear what they think success looks like how big really is the success for balloon balancing or for baller league in that relatively static football environment where any real innovation is going to get quashed, and you would argue that FIFA and UEFA's competitions are probably game over.

30:03If I was a mid-market firm putting money into a starter league, I'd be asking myself some real questions around whether there's actually any room. It comes to the why. Why is this there? As a governing body, it was almost easier to do that because of the remit, as you say. We're here to grow the game. This is how we think we should and can grow the game. For some of these things, it's casting no aspersions to any of them, because I don't know enough, but I don't know why they exist. And that's no shame if it's X at the moment, and we want to make 3X, and then we'll exit, and that's fine. I don't really bother where it goes from there.

30:37Or if it is to knock over the existing, which, to your point, is a big shot to say that in football or rugby, we're going to knock over the incumbents. And I think if people are really clear on that, that will then help them attract the right kind of partner for investment or whatever it may be. And you don't get those things down the line where there's a bit of tension because people's views at the very start were 2 % off and that gets bigger and gets bigger as you go through the years. I think probably a couple of other trends I think are probably relevant at this conversation that you think about from what other sectors and industries are going through.

31:09One is the shift in business model and how you earn money and presumably the sort of diversification of revenue streams. We were talking about music just before we started talking about this. And, you know, music went through a hugely traumatic industry transformation, what, 17 years of industry, of revenue declined, stabilized. And now they've had eight years of growth and everybody wants to be back in the music business. And that was the challenge of going from an ownership to an access model. And that's now very attractive to investors because it looks like something much more like a software as a service type business model.

31:47you can see again as a consumer you can see that that's what football clubs are trying to do now aren't they they're trying to build much more diversified revenue streams and see you not as a purchaser of a one off match ticket I mean we always had an element of it with season tickets but something much more it's an ongoing relationship it's a subscription like and therefore your social media strategies and all that become very important so I'm sure that's probably what's driving people is what's the sort of revenue model and the other point is very quickly is around you know I mentioned the Magnificent Seven the power of the platform so every company in the world is trying to think how do I survive in a world that is dominated by the big platform players and can I build my own platform maybe quite rare for a content company to have a platform that is going to be big enough to attract lots of users so how do I play as part of that and presumably given that television rights drive so much of the revenue in sport how do I make sure that I'm not over dependent on sky I want to lure Netflix in but I don't want Netflix to get too dominant because then they'll start dictating terms to me so do you know I think there's a whole platform debate presumably as well that people are having to think about absolutely and

33:07Richard:there's a question of you know the fans in terms of what that that quite the answer to that question and what that does to our experience as fans because of the you know we're just seeing at the moment where it's a live conversation is in terms of UEFA's rights for the next round of Champions League now they're relevant are have repackaged and it looks like there's going to be something for the streamers a netflix it's an obvious sort of place to go but also lots of other places and lots of other packages and and the life of us you know a football fan a rugby fan a cricket fan is a spreadsheet and a packet of saltpidine trying to work out where your team is sort of playing next and where where i've got what subscriptions i need to to have and at some point when sport becomes just another entertainment product there i see real risk because you've got the core audience but then you've got these others who are flakier more promiscuous but everyone wants them and everyone is trying to chase them and wants them over the line for subscriptions so it's a difficult sort of to see the way out i can see immediately if we looked at rugby and And I saw, like, this week the NRL have come out, and last week the unions have said the players can't play for the country.

34:28Richard:That was an entirely predictable response, I would have thought, having read your book and having sort of looked at this sector. I can't think that that wasn't modelled in the initial disruption. It wasn't a problem for you guys, presumably, was it, in terms of that lever? No, well, when you do it on the inside, and we worked very closely with players from the outset to make sure it's, if you're a sport, they're the asset. They're the thing that people come to see. And so you need to get them on side. And so I was surprised, as I'm sure you were, when I read that that, again, not everything in the press is as it is, but it felt like that had been kind of, it was a surprise to everybody, which perhaps shouldn't have been.

35:08Isn't it, I mean, yes, that works as a short-term holding pattern. You could probably buy yourself a bit of time. buy yourself a bit of time but ultimately the consumer will decide well I mean if if rugby fans or you can grow with the rugby market and they want that or they want something different I mean it is the you know back to music the lesson from music people thought the Napster moment was that everybody wanted to you know and he was happy to have music for free rather than pay for it that wasn't actually the lesson from Napster it was that people wanted to to be able to access music as they wanted it, when they wanted it.

35:44They wanted to disaggregate the album and just be able to have music as a service. And so consumers drove that change. So ultimately, presumably, what do rugby fans want and how are they going to think about it? And what are they going to want and pay for?

36:01Richard:So what's the play beyond that then? If we're now in this situation and rugby is a live conversation, we've moved through to that. we're in the period of the defence, what happens after that? You're saying the fans, there is a route through to a direct... I suspect there needs to be some form of consolidation, so probably the north and south need to get themselves organised so that the fixtures work better from a spectator point of view. And I would argue learning the lessons from football is iterative development. So, you know, the big bang, the massive disruption is unlikely to be successful, but it's less likely to be successful if you continue to iterate and improve and over time make a hundred different changes.

36:46I mean, I think that's probably the way that's what the lessons of other sectors would tell you. I guess the natural extension of that, they're probably telling me I'm wrong in a minute, but if you think about the world of cricket, where you ultimately have some of the most influential owners of sports franchises in the world, and the IPL owners have now bought into the English system, one would hope that therefore there's more of a guarantee of the best talent coming to play over here through the 100 as well as the other competitions. And you therefore, I assume, get into a space where the players who might leave to do something where there's a bigger paycheck actually end up in an ecosystem which thrives and works where the calendar gets itself a bit sorted out and you end up in a, maybe I'm being a bit utopian here, but a T20 environment that works or 100 environment that works globally, that dovetails with a sort of a global test setup that works, that works for women, works for men.