UP522 Signed by Messi: What's the most valuable shirt in world football?

0:00And basically, it's the most Diego thing you could ever imagine.

0:03Dan Jamieson:That was the voice of Dan Jamieson, who is chief executive and co-owner of Icons, which is the world's biggest signed football memorabilia company. It tells a great story about Diego Maradona, as you'll hear later in the podcast. So we're into the area of sports memorabilia. And it's a really interesting, fun conversation about where the heat is in that marketplace. the exclusive worldwide deal with leonard messi so we ask what does that mean in a world cup year next year and the american market we talk about golf we talk about tennis carlos alcaraz and what happened and what was that what's the legacy of the nft blockchain moment how can i trust that it is leonard messi's signature on that shirt that i've just paid quite a lot of money for so interesting conversation hope you enjoy it my name is richard gillis and you're listening to unofficial partner

0:58Dan Jamieson:so whenever the merchandise market is that how you define it merchandise market uh we're a subset so merchandise for us is everything from baseball caps to t-shirts to all that that's like a that's the really big market we are is signed memorabilia which is a sort of niche okay so memorabilia is the word i was searching for so whenever i think about this i've got like a sketchy idea and probably a very romanticized idea about what happens and what people are buying i find it i personally find it really interesting but i'm not a buyer of stuff happy to collect her i'm not i'm not i don't know why actually okay are you a collector i collect things generally but i don't collect sign memorabilia for example so it's like yeah i i will one of my things i was going to talk about is that i collected panini stickers as a kid and now i collect footballers so it's kind of yeah yeah and uh i've got a i've got a story about panini as well i can tell you i used to love panini but it was so exciting it's brilliant i love that stuff so just frame for me icons because again i remember icons and i think but it's a memory from it it's been it's a long while ago and by a long time ago i think probably 20 odd years ago is the first time i came across it sounds about right so just give me a bit of background to the company and then there's a bit of what do you do all day okay well we actually started in 1999 so we have been going for 20 whatever that is 26 years nearly and we always say we started about four months after google in a dot-com booth oh well we are still around we started as the sort of editorial website of footballers who could talk directly to their fans that was a good idea but it was about a couple of decades too early.

2:44Who was the person

2:46Dan Jamieson:founded the business? So I've got Ed Friedman. Edward Friedman is, yeah, he founded it and he's still here. So he's the chairman still. He is, yeah, he's a passionate creator of these things. So he was the merchandise director of Man United and all the expansion of sort of mega stalls and dog bowls and bedspreads and all that kind of merchandising stuff he was the kind of guru of it on away trips he had been to america and he came back and he's like eric cantona do you just want to sign these shots for cash on the bus on the way to away games because i think people will buy it in the shop and that's how he created memorabilia for man united to start with and then afterwards he thought that would be a really good idea to combine it with the websites of footballers and uh that was the kind of genesis of the company in 1999 but um i came along in 2009 as a strategist for the parent company he was like the websites of footballers talking to their fans is a nice idea but it doesn't work yet the footballers don't pick up their phones and they don't really say anything controversial and the interesting thing is the website on the side which is an e-commerce shop which sells signed memorabilia from the world's best players so i was like this is the thing to focus on do that direct to consumers and then build a brand out of it and then 16 years later this is where i am it's not interesting because that sort of trend we talk about it a lot now in the creator economy and but the basic nugget the insight was that fandom is moving towards the player and the star and as much as it is about teams and i remember that being the sort of thread and that is still the thread isn't it that's still we're seeing it sort of if you if you think of the initial idea of web you know direct relationships with footballers that's still the bit that we're dancing around isn't it a lot of bets are still being made on that model well yeah it's totally fascinating because it's i football fan liverpool fan it's like i know that that's when i've grown up and then you we ask people who have bought icons products who are you a fan of and they'll say cristiano ronaldo and they will move wherever cristiano goes so interestingly i was in hong kong in the summer and people are like oh so you're here for the game and i'm like no no i'm on holiday and they're like oh but cristiano is playing tomorrow night in the saudi pro league semi-final and i'm like that's interesting so i took my wife and my kids to this game and it was entirely full of ronaldo fans in thousands of difference i know everything from portugal shirts to man united to real madrid to juventus and they were still hit there for him yeah yeah it was it was amazing as a kind of phenomenon but yeah people love i know people love heroes the reason i do what i do is i love i love the greatest players and that's what excites me okay so transpose that then to the memorabilia market because yeah there feels like there's a sort of easy bridge into that you've just explained the messy relationship because you've got something exclusive with him just unpick that because i think again that encapsulates a bit of what we're talking about yeah so we are his worldwide exclusive signed memorabilia partner so he only signs for us we create a range of signed shirts boots photos armbands all kinds of good things that Leo will sign.

6:22You sign a strict amount and then we package them up and sell them around the world, either under Leo's brand or under licenses that we have. So we have the World Cup, Champions League, Barcelona. We did have PSG. We work with the rights holders of Inter Miami. We've added the Ballon d 'Or recently. So you can sell Leo's stuff all signed under all of those different ranges. And the rights holders give us the rights to sell it under their brand. And then we push that out on the internet and sell it all over the world.

6:53Dan Jamieson:So are those secondary licenses that you have to then go and collect? So you've got Messi as the central bit of IP. And then you've then got to make other relationships wherever he goes that covers the base of not treading on toes, I suppose, of getting into other people's IP in terms of what they've sold. Exactly. So we are IP rights people. So we do everything the right way. we will always work with the rights holders and we we sort of have a because we have such a long relationship with leo literally as he moves it's part of the negotiation how are we going to do the memorabilia and it's great because you've got such a long working relationship with his team that it's literally part of the negotiation as he moves clubs talk to me then about how you create do you just go to him with with ideas for things and and what what is in that sort of category of stuff that he's happy with and what's part i mean what's what do people want from messi in your market yeah it's been it's been relatively tightly controlled so for us it's jerseys shirts that's the thing people most want we do adidas boots and well-cut balls and club stuff and photos but we're always thinking of new ideas to to add to the collection so one of my favorite things is the 10 year old son who loves lego as do i and i don't know if you ever seen licensed barcelona lego sets where you can build the new cam brilliant so me and jack built the new cam took it down to our photographic studio and in the middle is actually uh one flat piece of lego which is the pitch so basically we took the pitch to leo leo signs it and then you embed it back into the stadium and you sell it as a collection which is like a leo messi signed new camp stadium wow so ticks all my boxes it's sort of it's fun 10 year olds like it i like it it's good to do and then you add you add sort of chavi and everyone else who's played onto other bricks how do i know it's him signing it that's always the again i'm a i just treat me as a an idiot in this conversation because i i don't trade in it and i if we went back three three years we'd be having an nft sort of conversation but always the question was what i don't quite know there's an element of trust here that that he is at the other end of this relationship i'm not being done over the classic sort of you know memorabilia question uh i mean it's literally every minute of every day we're thinking about authenticity and we we have to sort of there's two ways of a kind of almost a left brain and a right way brain way of thinking about it we can shout facts at people it's like we are his contracted partner we have the fifa license we work with barcelona and there's sort of a fact side of the ledger which we continue to push and press but there's also a sort of emotional narrative story level it's like look here on my instagram i know icons or ceo you see me with leo over 20 years we're not making it up we are in the room with him we we videotape it we have uh photographers and videographers and contracts and we are transparent with what we get signed and how we sign it and we've just introduced a next level of authenticity which is called we're calling triple lock which is sort of three different levels of authenticity now So for the first time ever, we time code, geolocate, and video every single moment of a signing.

10:23We have fixed cameras over Leo signing everything. So every time it goes through the kind of conveyor belt, everything is individually annotated and marked and cut up and edited and turned into a unique moment. So I think for the first time in the market, you can see the exact moment your thing is signed. you can then use an NFC so a near field communication chip you ping that with your phone it goes up and you see all the evidence that we have for the signing so the moment it's signed the contract it was under the place it was where we were dates all that kind of stuff and that's linked to our digital record of the product so we tried to kind of create a triangle between the product the digital and the session and make an undeniable link that this thing is entirely real you don't have to worry it's it is and how much fake stuff is there out there is it

11:18Dan Jamieson:you know is it enormous in getting bigger or is it a you know it's a sort of version of the tv piracy conversation i guess it is big there's no denying it we try and we do everything we can from our end to try and make everything as uh authentic and sort of undeniable as as humanly possible there is a vast amount of it because essentially you just need a pen yeah hard to stop so what we would say is just go with brands that you trust and have a reputation so we've been doing it for 26 years we're the world's most followed uh football memorabilia company on instagram it's like there are a million people who follow us there's a reason for that we've been doing it a long long time and uh yes you can buy dodgy things on ebay but that's kind of the same for everything uh yeah global marketplaces are quite tricky okay what's the most valuable shirt out there so just to slightly explain two different markets so we are signed memorabilia you buy a shirt on sports direct and get the player to sign it it's it's like it's a repeatable commodity yeah so has a price i mean we're always trying to innovate and do new new exciting things but fundamentally it's a replica shirt signed by a superstar uh match worn items which are the things they played with in in the game are the sort of things dealt with by sotheby's and sort of high-end auctions like buds and so on so we're not in that game we're in the kind of regularized repeatable section i mean we wouldn't mind some match on stuff that's great we we've sold some but there is also a wild west of match on stuff as well so i don't want to that's pretty tricky to uh even identify everything yeah yeah uh the most valuable shirt for us is therefore the most popular player and then the best version of what you what he wore yeah so uh as it is we can repeat leo products because we see him every three months and that we have a contract but uh if you can see behind me you see my diego maradona yeah so that's that's more special and more unique because it's uh my first ever signing was uh my first ever international signing was with Diego in Buenos Aires uh we flew out there and we were told that we weren't supposed to see him and it was like we could have a night off and it'd be all right so we went out and got a bit drunk and then at about one in the morning you get phone calls saying Diego will see you now but you've got to go to his mom's house so you're zooming around Buenos Aires with kit and photos and things and you turn up in this sort of small house and uh yeah Diego's just finished his telly novella with his mom and you start signing things on a table and i've got so i've got a dedication which is i don't know in spanish but thanks to dan and uh good luck with everything so for me that's the that's the most special because it's kind of unrepeatable now so that i remember i had a i've mentioned this before on the podcast but i had a book idea where i would go and find there's a sort of hunt for the england shirts the 66 isn't there and yeah you know the worn ones and they had two i think they were given two each and bobby moore's is lost so somewhere so tina moore is sort of it no one quite knows where it is and occasionally the story pops back into the news agenda where people have sort of making claims that they found it but that bit so the messi shirt the world cup final winning signed messi shirt is presumably one of the most valuable artifacts in sports memorabilia i assume it's the holy grail of things though interestingly he wouldn't sign it because that would ruin it it's a kind of cachet it needs it needs to be clean and be the actual thing you wore uh yeah i mean i i believe there's there's uh if you could get all of them from every round of the world cup that's that's the ultimate collection and you'd build a museum around it if you had that okay where is the the sort of the heat in the market do you think so with there's messy and then there's also there's other you know areas and i and so has every sports major sports rights holder got a sort of official memorabilia partner is that how it works this is a license that they sell so we've got a world cup coming next year how is that going to play out just talk to me about the sort of economics of that well it's interesting is basically you just you follow how the americans do it i mean it's this kind of market is sort of an americanized thing and actually the places we sell best are the sort of american viewing areas so japan loves baseball so they also love memorabilia and the middle east really respect it and that's what they want so a world cup in america where memorabilia is also a kind of bedrock of what they do it's uh it's like it's kind of perfect uh perfect moment to really really expose the game over there but also then us and what we do so we're fifa's partners so we're the world cup partner and have been since uh the south africa world cup so this is world cup number five i think so for us the heats are the world's biggest sport in the world's biggest market at the world's biggest time with leo so we've got a lot of stuff going on over there and And actually what we've just done is opened a US operation.

16:35So it's interesting that how open to business our American cousins are. Literally, we flew in, met a lawyer, did the paperwork, sorted everything out in 48 hours. So now we have customer service, website, tax advice, framing. And then we can do everything inside America. Because kind of interestingly, we're sort of doing what Donald Trump wants you to do. So we can create memorabilia with Leo shirts. So you'd buy the shirts from Fanatics in Florida. You take them to Leo in Fort Lauderdale. You send them to our operation in Illinois, and it gets framed and sent out overnight. So it's made in the USA.

17:18So we are bringing manufacturing jobs to the heartland of America. It's good for us because it's not just a World Cup. There's so much more beyond that.

17:27Dan Jamieson:I mean, we're in America, and it's going to be a great show. so you mentioned fanatics and again my mind went to fanatics and i thought i don't quite know what your relationship with them is whether they are friend foe frenemy there is are they a service supplier or you are explain that relationship because again they get mentioned a lot on the podcast because of they appear to you know in various different parts of the market yeah but just give me a sense of your relationship with fanatics i mean we worked with them for many years were uh they're one of our biggest customers uh for example because we have the contract with leo and they have into miami they would drop into miami shirts to us we would get them signed authenticated and then drop them back at their office and then that they can sell them on the on all their channels so they're a great partner to work with they memorabilia i think is maybe 10 to 15 percent of their kind of sport vertical so it's sort of vaulted on the bottom they do it in europe and they do it in soccer and football for example but it's kind of uh it's under exploited they haven't they haven't really gone for it they have a kind of exclusive deal with harry k which is a good idea and then they sort of buy and work with us on the wider range of players so just take me through the sort of market then what's the size of the market that you're operating in give it give us a sense of the sort of universe well it's kind of how all the sort of subsets interlink so sort of merchandise which is baseball caps and shirts and everything to do is massive i mean that's billions and billions and billions then memorabilia itself if you include trading cards i think is usually quantified at about two to four billion annually because because the american market's so big and there's so much going on sort of football signed memorabilia is a couple of rungs down on that so it's not hundreds it's hundreds of millions i'd say but there's so much headroom to go with i mean for football is the world's biggest sport and you've got the most amazing players and there's lots of markets to conquer so um growth is there to be attained i think and what is the where what is the customer the end customer what do we know about them because this feels like i mean you mentioned american market that's it that's a baseball card type thing and i can imagine a sort of you know got a photo of the odd couple film behind me and that was you know that's all about trading and and baseball fanaticism but these are old men now so just give me a sense of what the market looks like now well it's kind of let's think of different different elements so if we say 60 of our stuff is retail through our websites yeah so that's the kind of first audience and i would say 50 of those people are present buyers so often women buying something special for someone in their life so we have to be mindful that they're not experts not going to know everything can be men and can be women of course uh so you have to be able to talk them through their kind of purchase and reassure them and do all the things that we do you've then got about 40 who are buying for themselves let's say uh uh the most sort of let that's right the the person who sells the most so if you're talking manchester united person who sells the most is eric canton okay it's like that is the sweet spot of a sort of 50 year old man's yeah lover of their club and canton outsells all the current stars five to one at least because he's the icon of of that generation then we got about five percent a small amount who are collectors who just love the latest thing or want to add to their ranges or are looking for something special or somebody's won another trophy so they want to add another one to their list so that's the kind of retail angle on the other side is a kind of b2b audience so we work with the clubs so we sell to the clubs to then sell on we sell to fifa partners and ucl partners so the champions league licensee so that allows us to work with mastercard and heineken and various other people who are sponsors or licensees who take our stuff to create sort of promotions and incentives and giveaways and products and that's brilliant for us because they it's a combination of we're a champions league licensee they're a sponsor let's let's put it all together for something special and then and then we're in then we have other partners and collaborators around the world i think from classic football shirts to shops in the far east to chinese resellers in that market too so we sell to about 140 countries now i think so we are super worldwide and one of britain's greatest exporters so if you just let's keep the flow of eric canton our shirt then he signs a shirt what's the price differential between a signed and unsigned shirt about you know a plain man united shirt with a or a canton are signed shirt depends what the price of a plain man united shirt is these days they've taken their retros in-house i'd say it's probably five times what a standard shell right is okay so you're taking a model turning it from it's actually an interesting rights issue if you buy a shirt off the high street then you're buying a piece of sports uh equipment as it were what we're doing is we're changing its category and adding value okay so it moves from being sports equipment to being akin to art it's it's a different category it's now signed memorabilia it's not for wearing and playing with it and you can see the value chain as you add a signature on top and add branding and packaging and authenticity and that's a different legal categorization than just a football shirt yeah that that's the way we argue it yeah and the so you follow that chain you say right okay i've got now something of value it could be a canton ar signed shirt or it could be someone from you know the england team this summer and okay i want i've got coca-cola they want well what do they want what do coca-cola want they want to or you know using them as a proxy for a fifa partner what did they want well one of the best things we've ever done actually is to so heineken sponsor the champions league and they obviously have i think maybe one of eight of the advertising that get rotated so what we wanted to do is to create wait for a moment when ronaldo or messi so we have both of them uh signing for us scored a memorable goal in front of a heineken billboard basically and then as soon as they did it we could then get it signed you then put it into a branded champions league product with a heineken logo and then they bought them all and used them to put on the walls of bars and other places that they uh they distributed to because to a punter it just looks like an icon has scored a great goal but to the heineken marketing department they are that's what we're spending our money on it's that billboard that moment the excitement the champions league it's like that's everything encapsulated in a frame photo so you we are would like to we're pitching to if you're a sponsor of a major sporting event we can we have a license with getty so anything that happens we can use put that all together into the most memorable moment of the games or the finals or whatever sport it is and get the get the person who created that moment to sign it it's it's the ultimate gift present for a product incentive prize whatever you want to do so we mentioned nfts and and the blockchain question because at that point we were all dancing around the is it art question the valuation of it what is it i'm buying here and i've got a feeling that we probably you know as these things go in and out of sort of fashion fashion is the wrong word just as in the the sort of hype around it subsided but actually what you're saying it feels like there's an easy jump there back into digital collectibles so has that market gone away completely was it just a a bubble that's just dissipated completely or is there something that you think is going to revisit or are there elements of that moment that you'll be revisiting so i'm a physical product like i want to tangibly see that shit on my wall it means something it has a memory and that there's a reason behind it so i've always nfts are not something we've got into or thought about because it's sort of that's a digital version of it which for me is so you didn't go anywhere near that no but i had conversations with people about nfts which was something where the digital is locked to the physical makes sense to me yeah so for example we we had a worldwide contract for exclusive memorabilia with diego maradona but it was during covid so he still had to supply him his products we sent them all to his house and he sent him all the money and he sort of had um everything got sent back but they had as we were unpacking everything there was one of the shirts with a massive burn hole in it and you're like the mind oh no it's ruined and then they sent us the signing videos and basically it's the most diego thing you could ever imagine it's diego in a massive armchair drinking cocktails whilst listening to aggressive reggaeton and smoking enormous cigars doing it very slowly so effectively he'd burnt one of our shirts with his massive cigar so we have the video and we have the shirt diego had his own brand of cigars he could probably get those so someone was saying right you could create a sort of nft physical product unique hybrid yeah which is the shirt with the video with a digital version of it and it comes together and then for me that's the kind of combo of things it i mean it didn't quite work we still have the shirt but um see that's a shirt i think that's more valuable than the run of the mill signed shirts because that's that's a shirt with a story on it at one point we're going to throw it away because it was useless and then someone said that's the most valuable shirt we've ever had yeah yeah so that story the uniqueness the thing behind it the video it's like put all that together blockchain the ownership of it you can't then buy a digital version of it you have to buy the whole because when i mean we had someone on and he had just done you know he'd sold something at sotheby's it was a piece of digital it was a monkey inevitably or some sort of a it made tens of millions you know and uh that was at the absolute peak of of the sort of you know and everyone was talking about okay we need to get into web 3 we need to be on the metaverse we needed all of those you know what it was like and the the bit that made sense to me was exactly what you've just articulated that there is some way that we live we know we live in a digital realm most of our lives and in some way there is value there and of course linking it to that you know a physical product i can see why you'd want to do that because that's the game you're in but i could i could just glimpse that okay yeah i okay i can sort it took a long time to get there but i sort of understood it now the composite the heat has gone out and we're all talking about ai but i do sometimes think actually there was something in that i like like all the gardener cycle we'll get mentioned in a minute like like all innovations there's a sort of there's success and failures and people don't quite get it right and you don't know which way to go and your practice i mean we created a blockchain version of what i've just described about authentication seven years ago we had a minimum viable product that was available and we could we won awards for it but what we couldn't do was transfer ownership that was the thing that that was the next level that would make it sort of commercial and viable and it's sort of the blockchain element is an interesting way of of uh locking it it's called b lock it's a very good idea but um you can still fake things that go into the blockchain yeah so it's not it's still a it's not a foolproof thing it doesn't someone said oh yes the blockchain will prove it's real it's not it's whatever you put in and whatever you get out that still has humans involved so it's not it's not total lock and everything so actually our triple lock we're doing now isn't blockchain it doesn't quite need to be it's about connecting a digital record to a physical product uh unique unique codes that only show one thing for that product sometimes i'm going to run another sort of a part of a conversation that i have elsewhere i'm going to run it because i think it feels relevant to this yeah this conversation which is to do with what or how the football associations football teams and leagues and governing bodies see themselves because that's shifting over time and one of the questions that we bump into a lot in lots of different realms you know maybe media or kit sales is where they start and stop where they they want to get involved so in hospitality they're saying like okay maybe we should encroach more and let they see service providers as a leak to that why are we you know let's own that bit of the business and do it ourselves we're taking in-house where are they do you think in your bit of the world and is it just niche enough for them to say right okay we're better off just signing a license and letting you know dan do his thing and we'll take a license fee from it but that that trend is quite an interesting one because the line differs depending from sector to sector and it's one thing where what the conversation on the sort of fifa the fa the man united to this world are saying well okay well maybe we should be doing more in this sector yeah i mean owning the means of production is kind of always a good idea i would so certain clubs do it in-house arsenal do it in-house very well and they are they get their players to sign things and create Arsenal merchandise.

31:34And it's great. It's fair enough. We have worked with a number of clubs, lots of them. So Liverpool and Man City and AC Milan and PSG. But we had a license didn't quite work. So now we're with Man United and Barcelona and through a partner, Chelsea and Spurs,

31:49Dan Jamieson:who are more open to what we do. You can always get more value if you produce it. But I think having a third party expert do it, manage it and use to bring their expertise to it is the is the way you grow up. You grow the pie. So you're sort of saying so, again, this is not to put words in your mouth, but there is I think it's an interesting dynamic at play where some people would define what you're doing as a leak to their income, whereas others would say, actually, you are a marketing arm of them. you're creating a different market or a new market that they wouldn't have reached with their brand yes there's always going to be a tension between the two i think uh there's a reason the world's biggest clubs and federations work with us as experts because we know what we we've been doing it for many years yes you can kind of try and do it but a club trying to create their own credit card or their own i don't know whatever the thousand products they have on their website like yes you can produce your own balls that's not that hard they're not gonna do high-end products that have an expert who can do them better so specialism specialization i think so yeah i mean that's what i would argue okay let's go sort of take me into the near future then where is this market going to evolve because again there's a bit of me that wants to be a collector of something and i don't know whether that's you get to a certain day and but it is it how how relevant is the collector in this or is it is there actually a third party marketplace that's happening here that they're buying from you and then they're trading in the way that you know the baseball card market is again my my romanticized idea of the baseball card market yeah uh the base i mean they're trading cards so yes they're literally trading so that that's not something we do we kind of collaborate with people but it's not our thing so we say buy one of our things because you love it we're not saying buy it wait five years and then trade it because at the moment if you then trade it you're going off into a marketplace and then the chain of provenance has been broken so that's untrustworthy i wouldn't want to do that so buy it from us enjoy it give it as a present that's the critical thing what the market i think is mainly growable by reassurance both technical and buy brands that this is a safe place to be if the internet is entirely full of dodgy stuff and it's a plague on all your houses then it's just a category you'll shy away from if you're in we used to be in harrods if you're in the fifa store you're in saxwith avenue you're on football club websites and the champions league and you're being given away on sky sports yeah that's okay right i can trust this category we can expand it uh that for us is where it goes there's also a kind of value chain of you can have something in the middle which is a signed shirt but what can you add that's really exciting so unique signed shirts or personal dedications or videos video signings of your exact uh dedication versus a lower level which is collectibles and boxes and uh sort of unsigned memorabilia that still is made up of that came from the champions league or manchester united so asset memorabilia is another category we're interested in so all the stuff that's in the locker from all clubs and tournaments and stadiums and players that is all memorable stuff and uh people would love to i do like an auction don't you like an auction it's there's a i'm going to one of is it buds yeah no we're a partner but yeah so i remember doing a thing just sitting in the room at sotheby's and it's it's really interesting and i love because They're so full of stories that, you know, just the pamphlet you get, and it's just full of stuff.

35:44Dan Jamieson:What, other than football, where is, again, what's interesting from your perspective? What other sports? So we love icons of the game, of all games, and we love global games. So we took a punt on a tennis player called Carlos Alcaraz, who turned out to be quite good. So worldwide license with Carlos, amazing guy, lovely uh people who work with him and we've tried to sort of do a messy for carlos with high-end products that we create and with our kind of sensibility and it's an international sport all year round people are passionate about it and they have some money and it's it's just not football let's say in terms of revenues and making it work but uh it's a fantastic example of trying to pick the right kind of people because he's obviously the right guy is amazing and how many how many sort of car losses did you have to do deals with before one popped we only did carlos well done yeah when we went in at the top and it's brilliant being associated with him but i want to try and do that so it's a absolute debate we're having in the company which is trying to choose one icon yeah and then you've got a massive gamble versus working with rights holders who already have an audience and the ip and i think that's where that's why today's is interesting so we were sort of sitting around thinking what where could you go what could you do and it's like you could uh go and sponsor arberg in golf like he's european he's brilliant he's he's a football fan uh you could grab him and he could be your guy but that's quite a gamble whereas what we were thinking was actually be much better to take our sensibility we've got we're working with the champions league and then working with the rider cup yeah because there's a moment when all the eyeballs are on the what rider cup we could bring our expertise to exploiting the assets signing with the players distributing it creating a 365 day a year moment that then carries on for into the future so that just let's push that through then so you've got so it's messy or fifa or uh rory or the pga tour or the european tour whoever the rights holder would be the rider cup i know is a really odd shaped yeah rights holder in its own way so and that from your point of view i'm just trying to think through so that means that's a sort of risk reward thing and so it'd be a higher input price the initial deal would be more expensive presumably but you would be more you would you would get a longer run with it i don't think well i don't think it'd be more expensive because trying to buy a tennis player at the height of the market is expensive i think if it's at the moment you're not doing anything and everything we bring you will be upside uh then it's a conversation where with sides that sort of have a risk and reward involved so if i if i'm rory or rory's agent and who's got my so if i say right okay yeah i'll do a deal with dan and icons will i also do one with the pga tour and also with the rider cup and also my name i'm getting paid several times or would you want exclusivity is there any value in exclusivity in that sense uh rory has a deal with upper deck so he does his stuff with them therefore you're back to what you started on which is it's the individual versus the areas in which they play and who has the most power so rory commands top dollar for everything he does i would say that for example when you're on i mean i haven't negotiated with the rider club i haven't talked about this isn't the idea it's like when they're on guy kinnings is a keen listener by the way you know so you know the idea is it's it's the european tour hosting it in europe you're on european tour time and they need to grow the european tours brand and awareness so rory puts his hat down and then comes into the changing room as a european player and the rider cup you're playing for the glory of the european tour and therefore you sign flags and pins and golf clubs and it gets sold under a banner of the rider cup and more people love the event it gets wider uh it gets wider traction and everyone's a winner so it's just trying to work out from the players point of view they're seeing the opportunity here because they obviously want to just maximize their their own value and where they sign what i'm just trying to put myself in the shoes of a big tennis player or a rider cup player who isn't rory mcelroy what i would do so my would my rights be bundled into the european tour deal in that sense i think it's like you're playing for you you're in the rider cup team congratulations these are the terms and conditions and your job is to promote the rider cup at press conferences and on tv and help us monetize the event so we can keep doing it every four years so i'm signing my shirt goes out the door and that's it i'm not getting again the rider cup is an odd one because they the money around the rider cup is a is a sort of contentious issue in terms of how that's worked but that's essentially what you're saying so the player would then sign that and the the value would go to the rights holder to the rights holder would get it i mean there are different models but you could that's one way of doing it so we've talked to the people who do the tour de france for example and they're like well we've got no control over the teams whoever wins you'd have to then do a negotiation with them whereas uh we have partners in australia called se products who are brilliant to what they do so they get a league-wide deal so it imagines the afl the aussie rules so they don't care who wins because inside the deal is if you win you immediately go and do a signing session for them and then we sell the winners range so all they care about is whether it's a big market team or a small market team and they win every every which way and it's uh it's a great model is it because people quite often moan about doing this is american companies coming over here service providers who say right i just want to go to the premier league and do all the teams and it in the is it the same dynamic at play so you know and they say oh well we now have to knock on 20 doors rather than going into the premier league office because the premier league can't sell everton man united spurs no the beauty of the premier league is that 20 different owners make it impossible to come in and do deals with the whole league so fair play that's just that's the way we do it so americans would struggle to come in and say i can i want to do a deal with every uh every club whereas in reverse we're not looking to jump into the american market and start taking the best basketball players and the best american football players it's it's that's what they do well uh we we work within football and work with the clubs okay and the best players brilliant okay well listen i'll i'm gonna look out for some memorabilia i might even buy some i might dip my toe in the memorabilia marketplace there's a gap on the left side of your wall so is it i had a i had a arnold palmer signed thing and i thought i never quite know what to do it and i gave it away to someone i quite regret it now but he it was a flag of his you know one of those sort of uh and i thought well i don't know how many and i assumed it was but he signed it in front of me i so i've got authentic you know it was authentified or whatever it was triple lock i didn't have a triple lock no you should have stamped it should have filmed it well listen dan good luck with it and uh really enjoyed the conversation great thank you very much for your time really enjoyed it too thank you