UP517 The Mark Oliver Heatmap: Global sport's investment hotspots

0:00Hello, my name is Richard Gillis and you're welcome to Unofficial Partner, the sports business podcast. Today's guest is Mark Oliver, who was the BBC's first head of strategy before co-founding media consultancy firm Oliver and Oldbaum Associates in 1995. Mark is always a joy to talk to. His knowledge on not just the relationship between sport and media, but also its impact on finance and investment is, I think, probably second to none. And this is a very wide ranging conversation. I think you'll enjoy it. This episode of the Unofficial Partner Podcast is brought to you by Sid Lee Sport. Sid Lee Sport is the fame making creative and sponsorship agency for brands in sport.

0:42Through exceptional creativity, deep sponsorship expertise and flawless on-site delivery, they help brands, sponsors and rights holders unlock their full potential in sport. most recently picking up a leaders sports award for their work with Lidl at UEFA Euro 2024. Everything they do is driven by a culture of effectiveness because in sport performance matters, not just on the pitch, but in the work too. So whether you want to build buzz, connect with audiences or do something that actually cuts through, Sidley Sport knows how. Visit sidleysport.com where brands become champions.

1:30the bit that we talk about i talk about with you is sports sports rise market and all the stuff we'll get into but you talk about bbc or geo blocking or all of these things i think yeah it's quite a big broad remit that you have how much of it is sport in terms of just the general

1:46Mark Oliver:day-to-day sure sport less than half bit of a crossover between sports and media but at least half of what we do is nothing to do with sport it's um media company strategy and commercial decisions and policy and that's kind of where we differ from other sports advisors we understand the strategies of media companies and the attitudes of regulators in media and sport is just one part of it so we can see sport in perspective which is not always easy to do but um so what's going on in the TV world, such as today's news that Sky might be talking to ITV, that kind of stuff. That's our core work as well, nothing to do with sport.

2:26And have the clients changed over the years in terms of what people want from you?

2:30Mark Oliver:No, I think we give them four things, strategy advice, commercial advice, investment advice, and policy and regulation advice. That hasn't really changed. The clients, of course, have changed. We didn't used to have tech clients back when I started. They now have tech clients. And obviously, lots of the companies have merged and changed. So the companies are different. If I'm on the finance side, so one of the questions I've got for you in terms of what the money wants now, and you've got this narrative running through everything about a pool of money that is being gathered in various funds, in various shapes and sizes, and some of it is looking at sport, and by sport, everything under that banner responds to that incentive, if you see what i mean and i and it's trying to work out okay it obviously wants different things but we're starting to see some patterns emerge we did a thing with ey last week about what happens after disruption yes and the sort of longer game because i think live golf is a really interesting case study because it's actually getting to the point of running into some of the problems it was created to try and solve if you see what i mean so do people then come to you and are you reassuring them that the money is still going to flow in in large sums so their business their sort of investment rationale still holds up well i'll say is it depends i think you have to understand what's driving the investment rationale and then you kind of conclude that some of it will remain and some of it may not remain i think there's there's a difference between investing in the commercial end of a sport so the commercial activities yeah and investing in a sport investing in a sport is is more complicated and is often more political both with a small p but sometimes with a big p and that that means it's a more complex multifaceted kind of and that's that's the case if you're trying to establish a new event or sports event in an established sport and it's probably also relevant if you're investing in an existing sports asset the sport itself because the governance of that sport and its ability or inability to change is pretty important um and so it's it's it's a different kind of investment if you can cut if cut out the commercial activities are separate and just invest in the commercial bit you're slightly protected from the politics but you're not totally sealed from it because clearly you're investing in the commercial exploitation of the given asset and if the sport decides to change the asset by changing the calendar then that have a significant effect on the commercial revenue so really the safest thing is to try and get a commercial activity from a sport that is either not going to change much in terms of its asset or it's got a clear path to how it's going to change as soon as there's no clear path to how it's going to change you've got a slight problem about you're not really in control of the product and if you're not in control of the product then no matter how good your commercial rights are if the product changes you don't really control it yeah yeah just pursuing that for a moment so you get to the sort of the offensive defensive positions and you get to things like you know the moat of the incumbent which i think is underrested because quite often the superficial play out of the disruption story is a sort of you know clay christiansen thing where you're positioning the you know pga tour almost as sort of kodak blockbuster and then the money will come in and replace that and what we've seen is that that is really hard to do i'm trying of think of you know down the years where actually that clean disruption story has actually worked it's always been complicated yeah let's go back to the packer cricket circus yeah uh it kind of worked it changed cricket forever but established cricket responded and therefore it kind of disappeared so it certainly fulfilled a function and and given the investor and that's why i always think about it in terms of the pete the money that goes into the pack you know whether it's packer or whatever it was a simpler choice then i mean yeah kerry packer didn't get the rights so he worked out we could just buying the players would be no more expensive than the rights and it wasn't the same thing as live where they're trying to create a new asset with a kind of roi and he just said they're not going to give me the rights so i'm going to buy the players and start my own competition and it and it delivered for that um for a while of course it split cricket and then cricket adapted and he wanted a different kind of product was more appealing that pajama cricket was born etc so so but he wasn't really trying to make money out of cricket in the sense of as an investment he was trying to get the rights to cricket they wouldn't give it to him so he started to buy the players instead it was a kind of an alternative rights play I think rather than investment play but it's interesting how we go to packer and we we might go to I mean the IPL is probably the one of the cleanest examples but that's that and the 100 for example are sort of from within aren't they they're they're yes they're reforming themselves in order to meet new audiences and get more revenue streams in and that's what each every sport has to do i think um some sports need the stimulus from external threat to do so some move before that i've always started off articles about cricket where there's all a sentence that says for a sport that has a reputation as being conservative it's remarkably innovative over the last week and it all started with packet really they had to be innovative Yeah, yeah.

7:40And that's oddly, I remember, I used to know Chris from Martin Jenkins, you know, not well, but quite well. And he used to talk about this a lot. And I remember he wrote a piece about just the level of the number, he almost listed the innovations and the changes of the game over the period, both on the pitch, but also off it and, you know, through the whole thing. It's quite interesting how those things don't get celebrated as innovation and the image of the rights holder or the incumbent is always as the sort of local council, isn't it? You know, sort of un-innovative, very dull, sort of plodding.

8:14Mark Oliver:Yep. There's probably one more left, which is the indoor arena. So I don't depend on the weather so much, but that will be debated a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So where is the excitement, do you think, in that market? So just pursuing this in terms of looking at sport from that side, from that fund side. And again, there are hundreds of new things from basketball to volleyball to carp fishing to whatever. So there's an enormous number of new things, but you're quite sort of marginal, but feel more like a venture capital investment. And then you've got these funds that are looking at minority partnerships in the NBA or an NFL franchise.

8:55and you've got the sort of chaos and excitement of European football clubs, et cetera, and leagues. Where do you sense the real heat in the marketplace is? Because there is something happening. Money is gathering and being deployed.

9:08Mark Oliver:Yeah. I mean, it's hard to give you one answer. There's kind of heat spots, I guess, rather than... Yeah, give me the Oliver heat map. Well, I mean, before you're looking, I wouldn't say a safe register, return, but reasonably low risk and reasonably high return, then you do look at the established large sports and you do look at possible new ways of investing in them. So obviously it starts with the commercial rights subsidiary, which is obviously the CBC method, but actually it can also be if they're trying to set up new competition and new leagues with franchises and it's franchises in those big sports, especially if the economics of franchises are more certain in a sense there's no promotion relegation there's just a fixed number of teams with some kind of cost control the u.s model so if the u.s model is rolling out beyond the u.s uh to sports which don't have political problems with it because some sports do have political problems with that approach and it's a large sport then that's interest so you know the the issue about basketball which is a large sport probably underdeveloped in europe more potential of it becoming an nba kind of franchise European League.

10:17Mark Oliver:That's interesting. It's a big sport. It's got good demographics. The NBA is a great brand. It's previously been quite fractured in Europe, as we know, and they're probably going to go down a franchise model for big cities. So that's something that looks quite attractive. A lot to do in terms of building the sport and promoting it, but the structure of that looks quite attractive. That would be a tick. I think there's still attractions to kind of what we call more passive investors long-term funds to the the other model which is commercial jvs across sports as long as you've got a diversified portfolio of sports that's an interesting kind of bet on the future growth and popularity of sport in general and what what be an example of that is that cvc that's cvc thing yeah and it's better one that the the dynamics of sport and interest in it isn't going to change its protection from ai because it's still based on a live event, which is always going to be more interesting.

11:14Mark Oliver:Obviously, there are AI offshoots and gamification, etc. But that's additional, more leisure time, that kind of stuff. It's all positive in that sense, not that cyclical. It responded well to a global financial crisis. Its only real downturn was COVID, which obviously had very special features and even got through that. So you could say that that's quite attractive, as long as you've got a diversified portfolio and also there's probably scope for better commercialization because they've been run as sort of smaller activities not benefited from some sort of scale efficiencies and commercial activities that the other industries have so so it's still interesting that as a kind of long-term play from the people who look at long-term investments and then the other end i suppose is there is some interest in smaller sports that have a reasonable amount of interest.

12:04Mark Oliver:They're not totally niche. But where you can see a way of effectively having enough influence over the whole ecosystem to actually affect change rather than getting involved in a war between different bits of the ecosystem. They're much harder to find. And, of course, you think there might not be a war in the ecosystem, but as soon as you try and do something, there is a war. So what's happening in volleyball, which is both a commercial investment from CVC, but also the US volleyball leagues, etc., where you can see there's a latent demand. You tap into the increased interest of women, and volleyball has always been a sport where the women's volleyball is actually more popular than the men's.

12:42Mark Oliver:And so you get a sport of that, and even something like lacrosse in America, which is not a sport in the UK. So there are some sports, I think, where because the incumbents, there isn't much of an incumbent in terms of the money it makes, etc. And because the ecosystem is quite easy to influence and control, there are interesting opportunities. So you've got this. OK, so let's just sort of pursue that stage then. Let's pick on one of those. Volleyball, I find really interesting because it's so not on my radar, but everyone mentions it as a sort of hidden sleeping giant of sports. So if we sort of pursue that for a second.

13:20So the CVC thesis would be we're gathering a load of expertise centrally that we can run. And it doesn't matter what the sport is. We can do a job on it. And volleyball is there is a sort of marketing deck somewhere that has said to them, yeah, this is for all the reasons, you know, the gender split, the latent demand in TV rights, perhaps or the popularity. It's always very high on social media sort of league tables post sort of Olympics and things. So which, again, always a bit I'm always a bit suspicious of. But that's essentially the thesis that's running there.

14:00Mark Oliver:Yeah. So the fundamental is very popular in a number of countries, not ours. Yeah. So that's why we don't see much. But it is very popular in parts of southern Europe and southeast Europe and parts of Asia, etc. It has reasonable popularity in the States, always a good tick, and South America. In the States, it's mostly college, but it's a reasonably popular sport. So overall, it's got good popularity. You can argue the fact it's not that popular in some countries is both a problem or an opportunity. You can roll it out, obviously, to different countries. It has two formats, beach volleyball and indoor.

14:36Mark Oliver:It's also the ecosystem, which may play in CBC's approach, was that the Federation, the World Federation, actually is quite powerful. and controls quite strong assets, the world championships. It's not always the case with Olympic sports. Often you find a federation doesn't really control much and doesn't have much income, but volleyball does. So it's got a core business which is already doing quite well. Then you've got to work your way through how does that then relate to if volleyball grows around the world, what happens in each country? Do they establish their own club leagues? Who owns the rights to those and so on?

15:07Mark Oliver:So there's a kind of second wave of opportunity, which may not be CVCs, maybe someone else's, which is your thing at the moment. So it's got good fundamentals in terms of growth and appeal, possible upside in terms of breaking to new countries. And the structure of it, there is a way to invest in it where we have a partner that has quite a substantial proportion of the money and also quite a lot of influence about the way the sport runs. So it's a kind of good way in. But there's another story yet to unfold, which is what happens to sort of club volleyball below that as it professionalises and what happens to the regional international tournaments like the European Championship, etc.

15:40Mark Oliver:because that's kind of, if a sport grows, they will grow as well. And that's not part of the deal directly. But they're sort of creating a market. They won't own all of it, but they are... They own enough of it to be beneficial to them. And given they're developing a kind of front shop for volleyball, which is the OTT volleyball service, then they could always start to buy the rights to these other competitions, especially in areas where they don't have a broadcast deal. So it's kind of a rights aggregation play, even if you're not actually investing in the individual national leagues, et cetera, you do have a possibility you can actually.

16:22So would that be a sort of FIFA plus for volleyball type of?

16:25Mark Oliver:Sort of, yes. Yeah. Probably more life rights. Right. Because there's less of a market for those generally. It may be a medium term thing. Maybe once the sport does develop, there's a proper market in primary outlets for the rights. And in the meantime, to build the sport, you take on the rights and build the coverage. So using volleyball then as a proxy, because it's the Olympic bit. This is front of my case. I've just read Michael Payne's book. Michael's coming on the podcast. Yes. Well, you know he was involved in that. Yes. And so it's quite interesting reading. it's not about Michael but the Olympics there's a question here about how efficient the sports market is I suppose is a question and the role because Michael's career has been spent building the top program building the sort of Olympic moat for these federations and he's now sort of made a career second career going around and sort of berating these federations for not being more innovative where actually his body of work the top programs have removed the incentive to be innovative you could argue that actually it's quite a nice reverse ferret that he's sort of uh i saw him at the international federation sort of uh thing the other week and or last week and they're sitting there thinking well they're being drip fed olympic money over the course of 30 years thank you very much and now you want us to be you know all singing dancing and and culturally completely different but the strength and particularly the that olympic world so presumably the volleyball case study you know It's an interesting one because it's live.

18:01Could apply to virtually all of those federations, could it? Or are they...

18:05Mark Oliver:It does, but they are all different. Some depend almost entirely on the handout. Some have their own championships or a worth significant amount of money, and that's what he bought as the latter. So it has its own independence. It had its own critical mass even before this. I believe the plan, the whole plan, was developed by FIVB and taken to investors rather than investors knocking on the door saying, I hear you want some money. So it was more proactive, and Michael had a role in that. But if you go down the list of federations, we've done quite a lot of analysis of federations and their mix of revenue.

18:40Mark Oliver:There's definitely a hierarchy of the larger ones that have more substantial commercial activities now and ones that are much smaller that depend almost entirely on the IOC handout and have very little infrastructure. And that's partly, I remember, the federations are only the top of a pyramid. So the relationship between the federation and the rest of the national associations and the various elements of sport, some are quite weak in that system. Some are actually very strong. So, yeah, and obviously a sport that has a big life outside of the Olympics like tennis. The ITF is not really the power broker, right?

19:12Mark Oliver:It is the Federation on Olympics and it's involved in Olympic tennis, but all the power and money is in the various tournaments underneath that. But even in sports that don't have big assets like tennis, you know, a lot of the commercial activities is not through the federation it's it's elsewhere and so getting your hands on the ecosystem and influencing how it operates can be very complicated depending so be careful which federation you choose and not to put too finer points in it and i think michael touched on this book some of those federations work in rather obscure ways let's put it that way some don't some do yeah and and you know that's that's that's quite a nice way of putting it And that's always been the case.

19:57It's really interesting, the book, because again, going back to almost the Horst Dassler days of the manipulation of that world by a very smart operator is sort of, now we see it as a huge, he's seen as this great sort of figure and he is a great figure in the sports marketing history. But a lot of what he was doing was manipulation, placing people in the places that he needed them to be, get their um commercial bit of it it's quite interesting it's so long ago it's fifth what is it 60 years ago now 50 years ago so and it's interesting that these are these games are still being played and this generation of financiers are now essentially doing similar types of work yes gather the power from within a sports i mean it talks back to that sort of power of the incumbent it's quite underrated i think yes but you probably look for a federation which is really

20:53Mark Oliver:kind of sorted out a bit it's clearer how they decide things and i mean there was obviously the play that we get to a federation which is a bit of a mess and we kind of play the system but i think most investors especially large investors actually prefer a federation that's kind of sorted itself out already uh we prefer to and some of them are under quite a lot of scrutiny in terms of getting in getting you in anywhere close to practice which might be deemed to be a bit odd um they have their own rules about what they invest and what they don't and Some of them don't want to invest in something which might come up to embarrass them in the future.

21:27Mark Oliver:So the big investors prefer a federation that's sorted itself out or has a plan to sort itself out. Or a group of federations or associations, whatever it is, that has a plan to sort itself out. So is there a market then, Mark, of people who are sorting federations out before the money gets there? Is that a sort of cottage industry of advisors and consultants? Sort of. I mean, it's not one. I mean, particularly partly because it involves a lot of travel, a lot of, I'll be with a small company, a lot of patients. And I guess Michael's in that market in a way because he's so well networked. but yeah but the standard thing a federation will do is if it's thinking about its governance and the way it's it operates it will get the standard consultancy like a deloitte or pwc to do a study on organization and governance and some of that is creating a separate commercial subsidiary which might be ready for outside investment what the rules are about the board on that and how ring fenced it is from the sport itself there's a quite a few sports have been starting to do that which is a sensible thing to do yeah yeah and again then there's the the white space argument which you sort of touched on there are bits of the the market and then you land on the women's sport question which again is too broad a category but you've got some really interesting sort of needs in that marketplace do you buy the basic argument that there is a huge latent audience for women's football cricket rugby because i we come i've just come from you know we we did the two circles event and gareth as you know is incredibly bullish on that line that's going up of audience for sport and it's predicated on people that don't look like you and me and i get it and intellectually i can get there but i just wonder if the money gets there and whether or not you actually think okay yeah okay i'm gonna that's a bet that i'm gonna take yeah well the truth is to say a mixture of things yes there is increasing demand increasing interest no doubt about that it's not equal all across sports but there is there was a general trend that was always the missing bit many people talked about young people watching sport there so i said well there's half population that don't watch it very much so maybe that's that's the answer we used to talk about millennials didn't we we used to say yes that's right they're you know got more alphas yeah but but there's always the fact that women didn't engage as much as men in watching sports either male sports or female about sports so that that has changed and obviously it's a kind of participation interest kind of multiplier so yeah once it affects participation you can see the long-term shift not just a short term obesity shift because it's not all good news for all sports because if you're a traditional women's sport like something like hockey or netball you're threatened by that because other people are after that market yeah what sport is played by girls in schools is quite important but there is a general trend and that's true but also you know be patient it's it may be a different kind of interest it may be more general than tribal and tribal interest is what generates real value for tv companies etc to be honest nation or club and if it's more general interest then it has a different economic future because it's it's going to be about wide reach and sponsorship and free to air tv it's not going to be about large subscription prices because that's just not the way it's going to go now you could argue over time there will be tribal elements to to women's sport as they start to support clubs in certain sports or nations and so it becomes that much more passionate and more about driving subscriptions or choice of platform whatever whatever the big high value ticket item is that drives value but um it doesn't have to be that it can be a more a different kind of interest which has a different monetary model it may or may not be as profitable as large but so the two things are true there's going to be substantial regress but it may not be the same thing as men's sport and one of the things i always counsel people in women's sport is why do you always want to copy the structures of men's male sport of course there is a reason for that it's called equality does european football really need to have 54 nations all with their own women's league um because because that's a very big structure to support it's all it is equality but it's also brand isn't it i mean you're starting liverpool women is going to be easier than starting no i understand that no i the thing about using current club brands i can see the sense of that or you might argue that having a few non new brands actually is quite useful to saying it's different yeah so the lionesses in the middle all team yeah yeah and um so i think there's a bit of that but yes no it's more about the league structure okay it's the fact that it does cult women's football move almost automatically to a pan european competition led sport rather than the 30 years of battles in the men's sport of developing a european competition on top we've still disputes about substitution revenue etc why don't you just jump avoid all that history and have fewer clubs but playing a much higher profile tournament and that applies to all all sports you know why not have the best of in a european competition really high profile rather than trying to build from the bottom up now i understand that the link between that and participation is difficult because participate often comes to the bottom up but just think a bit more naturally about how you can get participation but at the top level don't wait for there's 400 clubs to appear across you before you You can match the men.

26:54Mark Oliver:So you have the opportunity to basically tear up that history, which is often held back men's sport. And that sort of an IPL for women's football in Europe versus the best. Yeah, and the seven-asides thing that they're trying, where actually it's being tried outside the system. The different format, which traditional football, men's football doesn't have time in the calendar to do that. Women's football does. And also, you know, do you have to have all these national leagues? could you have more regional leagues? Could you get, because the women have a Dutch-Belgium league before the men. Well, why not?

27:27Mark Oliver:You know, they're not constrained by 70 years of having separate national leagues. God forbid, could the UK have Scottish teams playing against English teams? This is Bolshevism.

27:42The bit that I find, one wrinkle, is that team level. Because I can see a sort of framing, again if i'm looking at the from the money side i can see a framing in the appeal of creating the ipl for women's football and we did a lot we did a brainstorm at the zone a couple years ago with this is the premise there wasn't a lot of love for it in the room i'm going to sort of warn you so i stood up and said let's have an ipl for women's football and you know um and then had an hour of people shouting at me but it was really interesting sort of sort of experiment but one of the challenges is the is the team brands and because you've got again this run of the running themes is the the audience and it's going towards the star player rather than the team and you know and i'm never completely sure how much to let you know credence to give that i know it's obvious and we're in a youtube world and there's a creator world and all of those things but it does mean that you've got like for example the world cup in 2020 cricket world cup women's event next year in over here it's going to be obviously a big moment it could be national tribes and it's going to get attention and you're going to get superstar players lauren bell will be on every ad campaign around town the problem is what next and that's i mean it's talking to your point about it needs something that doesn't necessarily have to be the county championship

29:10Mark Oliver:which presumably is the hundred yes and the hundred franchises and again one of the the happy things that happened is that the women's game it created a a sort of market for that yes but what do you think about teams as if you're looking at it as a 15 year pumped rather than a you know a turnaround what do you think about teams what do you just in terms of the the way in which they're viewed now as an investment vehicle teams will endure beyond the player career the player career is a spike yeah i think we're very influenced by football yeah let's face the team you follow your football is as they say you will change all kinds of things but not your team uh even your religion but never their team as somebody tried to change the team as a young man and was pressed going back into What were the teams?

29:58Mark Oliver:I tried to go from Arsenal to Chelsea, but I wasn't spoken to by family for six months and my posters were torn down. So I had to get back into the fold. So it was taken quite seriously, this move. I think that, you know, the elephant in the room is why you avoided Tottenham on that journey from North London to West London. If I tried Tottenham, I may not be alive. That's another story. So I think the role of football in European culture in particular and South American culture is enormous. And I think that's where a lot of the value is, right, teams. I think in other sports, it's less clear. Yes, there are people loyal to a county.

30:33Mark Oliver:I'm kind of loyal to Middlesex because I saw them as a young man, but I wouldn't go to the wire for them. And when you get to other sports, it's just there are some sports that do traditionally have big city teams, et cetera, that have loyalty, but it's less presence. And that's one of rugby's problems, I think, is that, yes, the teams in the premiership, the Prem, have very loyal tribal followers, which is not big enough. They're in the wrong place. We've got two London teams. Yes, Harlequins is quite big in West London, but a lot of people grew up supporting other West London teams before Harlequins came along, and Saracens in North London.

31:11But Saracens was a very small team in London before professionalisation.

31:16Mark Oliver:So a lot of people who used to follow clubs in London in the amateur day who have no particular loyalty, really, to Saracens. because it's a new, it was one of the clubs that emerged as a professional. So I think the putting power of team brands is different in different sports. So the obvious question is the R360 moment that we're in. Do you think that that's got a chance because of the, you talk about the nature of the club brands, is that what's missing? Is that where it could make an impact? Yeah, I mean, it's not easy. You have the gap between the following of national teams, which is sizable, especially the World Cup.

31:52Mark Oliver:and the regular following of clubs. It's a huge gap. Probably the biggest gap is actually in England. It's more in other countries. And so there's an opportunity to try and close that gap. That's not to say that having sort of big city franchises, etc., isn't necessarily the answer, but probably also the case is just adding on two or three more local clubs and the Premier's also not the answer. So someone needs to find an answer. There is an opportunity there. Building a following from scratch to city teams will be difficult too. But the idea that you can just go back to having 12 or 13 teams in the prim and that will solve everything.

32:25Mark Oliver:Well, we had that. It didn't solve very much. So something else has got to change. The NBA Europe plan. When I look at that, I think I get it. I think, you know, London, Paris, Rome is where American money wants to go. But the heat and the real value is in Southeast Europe and Turkey. And, you know, that's where they're properly tribal. Yes. Yes. This is why football club brands may play a role. Yeah. Okay. As well. You know, an accident of who the NBA went to see when they went around Europe. If you want to establish a Paris team, in some cases it's simple. If you want to establish a Paris team, go to PSG and talk about having a...

33:05Okay.

33:06Mark Oliver:If you want to go to Madrid, go to Real Madrid. London's more complicated because as soon as you go to one of the clubs, the other three won't want to know. So London probably has to have a new franchise. But you can see the tapping into the football brands might be a useful way. I mean, one of the most complicated things about the NBA, they did establish a European league, is who gets to keep the best talent? Because at the moment, MVPs and the NBA in the U.S. have come from outside of the U.S. If there's a great player in the European NBA, are the NBA teams in the U.S. going to say, oh, you can keep him?