UP538 Ted Knutson on Brentford, Betting and Benham. And how AI will change football data

19:25Ted Knutson:I think these days I have to be considered a proper football man. I've been around too long. But Matthew's sort of that way too. Matthew's been around for ages, very successful. Always going to be an outsider, partly because he likes it that way. And the person we're talking about is Matthew Benham, who's the owner of Brentford. And he's very quotable. He doesn't generally get up and do many quotes. But when he does, he's fascinating and funny. And obviously, he was very early to this stuff and has been quite successful in what he's done.

19:55James Yorke:There is also, both him and Tony, I live in Brighton. And I've said many times that my mates are all Brighton fans. Their pub chat has gone downhill since the Tony Bloom era. They just talk about data. but um both of them you've got and yourself you've got that betting hinterland which people don't know much about beyond a top line and so they they think that and suspect that you have deeper knowledge and there is something in your betting background that has revealed truths that are now being played out i don't know whether that's true but i think that's the story that associates with yourself, Venom, Bloom, I think.

20:38James Yorke:And you can tell me whether there's any truth in it or not.

20:43Ted Knutson:So I think when I came back out of StatsBomb, I started writing the transfer flow. And attached to the transfer flow is a thing called variance betting. And people are like, why would you cover betting? That's horrible. And I was like, first of all, because I've been doing it for a long time. But second of all, because I find it an interesting experiment that you can test your hypotheses against, test your ideas about and then get very quick turnarounds around it because there's 38 matches in a season. And then they're like, okay, isn't that a bad thing? And I was like, first of all, I wanted to help teach people how to bet smarter, which I think actually is a good thing.

21:18Ted Knutson:And as like in Stats Bomb, we wanted to make people smarter about their understanding about football. So like, it's not actually very far apart from each other. And I like the education part of it. I like the testing of ideas. So that's the exact same thing. It was what these gentlemen have. And it's the same thing you have in the financial markets as well. I have a theory. I want to test that theory. How do I test that theory? What are the different ways that we can test that theory? Like which bets might we make? So there's a war going on in the Middle East right now. Which ways might we profit on this, given that the United States closed off the Strait of Hormuz?

21:49Ted Knutson:And it's the exact same concept. So you're like, okay, I don't believe that this coach is very good, or I believe this coach is much better than everybody else seems to think. And I think that he's going to get them playing in a style that is very useful for helping to win football matches. And I could bet on that as long as the odds are better than I'm anticipating them to be. So we did that. And transfers are the same thing. They're just with humans and they have a longer cycle. So transfers are bets on whether or not this player is better or worse than the market expects them to be. Whether we can improve them in ways that you might not expect.

22:26Ted Knutson:or have available to you at other clubs. And then if we sell them on, great. If they do great at our club, great. But sometimes they're not going to work out. But if they're working out at a 60 % or 70 % rate as opposed to a 50 % or 45 % rate, you have a big advantage in the market. And that's what happened pretty consistently in the football space.

22:45James Yorke:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you mentioned you did, but Billy Bean obviously was the subject of Moneyball. I interviewed him around, I can't remember when it was, in the 2000s. And we've talked about betting, but there's the sort of financialization he talked about arbitrage a lot and it was a sort of that as a concept being applied to sport and to human beings and all of that and again he was that was the pushback initially on on money ball but one of the one of the questions around the sort of polymarket calci we're in this prediction markets moment is that collision isn't it between the financialization of everything with whatever bit of life we choose to put into the market, whether it's football, whether it's, again, transfers, you can see it's analogous with all of this stuff in terms of your thinking in bets and your thinking in percentages, which again, is a sort of, it's a really interesting way of thinking.

23:42James Yorke:Most people don't want to think that way. They want to not have to go and do, they think it's about maths. So they don't want to start to think of their lives in that way. We're constantly making those calculations,

23:57Ted Knutson:constantly making the, can I make this train? Is it safe to cross the road right now? If I were to cross the road, even though there's no green man there, is it going to be dangerous for me or am I going to be fine? You're doing this all the time, whether you realize it or not. Like this is just a systematized way of doing it and some people hate it and i get that but it's a really

24:16James Yorke:useful way to think about things it is do you think that the ability to think in that way or talking that way is useful in conversations with in a business context so you've got this you know this is a sports business conversation and quite often those two words conflict and people you get you go into tribes so i think there's a sort of there's a layer and a group of people who probably are able to articulate what we're talking about to the business side in a language they want to hear they want to listen to someone who has analyzed sport in that way it's quite and that's the sports side don't want that in mixed up in that is tradition and romance and what sports for and the soul of sport and i've seen people write books about this but there's a whole bit in the middle i think there's a sort of cohort of people who are able to articulate both ways

25:08Ted Knutson:In the early days of sports analytics, the translator role was constantly something that was mentioned. And some people are very incapable of doing this. Like you get academics who come over and they don't understand sport well enough, but they're like, this is what the data says. And you're like, Ooh, you're going to get us in trouble. Like this, this is not credible. And also this is a bad way to go about it. And it actually is super valuable. And it's not just in sport, but like, that's, that's the most common thing we're talking about right now. But being able to translate complex ideas like mathematics and why we think this into ways that are easily digestible is incredibly valuable no matter what arena that you happen to be in.

25:44Ted Knutson:And in sport in particular, like people who've been in a sport for 30 years and it's their life and you can't tell me that you understand this better than I do. Like they have a real chip about them. And you would understand that because if it weren't sport, if you were in marketing or in journalism or in politics, you'd be like, look, you're just some random outsider. And I understand that this might be useful, but like I have a lot of knowledge, too. And you're not trying to discredit their knowledge. And although sometimes you will, sometimes you'd be like, actually, what you think is wrong.

26:14Ted Knutson:And we need to have an honest conversation about this for why that's true. But what you're trying to do is give them better information to make better decisions. And that's really what it's about. And once your decisions get to a certain level, you're making pretty dramatic mistakes if you don't incorporate all available information that is useful to you. Like the filtering of that information is really important as well. And sometimes people are bad at filtering. Oh, this coach says that he really likes him. So we're going to take a look at him and maybe we'll hire him. What credibility is that whatsoever?

26:46Ted Knutson:Like they might have just played on the same team. They might have gone through their license together. Who knows? Coach hiring was one of the worst things that I ever saw. And that was actually a thing that we did regularly at Stats Bomb. It was one of the few consulting things that we would do. We'd be like, hey, tell us what type of coach you want, and then we'll go out into the market and research this. We understand tactics, and we can find those styles. But that was pretty disastrous. And that's an area that definitely intersects business with sport and takes the coach element out of it, is what type of coach are you looking for?

27:14Ted Knutson:Because if you get this wrong, and you have to change your whole squad over, that's a huge bill that you have to pay. Or you have to pay off the coach and find a new coach, which also has a pretty big build.

27:24James Yorke:And labels get attached to coaches. Coaches carry the story now, don't they? Managers carry the story of, you're seeing this in rugby, actually. Steve Borthwick is a data, he makes data-led decisions, and that's an accusation. It's not a compliment. People are saying he's inflexible. So the binary is, again, you get to an engineer-artist type binary, and the manager in football carries that story a lot of the time, I think. You've got the club. So Brentford is a great example where I'm a Spurs fan. Thomas Frank comes to Spurs and we are saying, OK, unpick this and it's not worked. And one of the conclusions was that Brentford is a machine and Frank was just part of that machine, which was built over time.

28:09James Yorke:And now it's still Brentford is still doing well, despite Frank leaving. So there's a question there, which I don't know the answer to, but I can see myself being sucked into a narrative.

28:22Ted Knutson:I think Thomas is a pretty good coach, to be honest with you. But Spurs are a pretty weird vortex of anti-football right now and injuries, like just incessant injuries. That's a tough thing for coaches to overcome, but you have to build a coherent squad. And that's not what's happened at Spurs over the last kind of three, four years. So inheriting, that's a tough one. But presumably he got paid for his mistake in going to Spurs. Because it's not just been Thomas Frank that didn't succeed. It's been a lot of people that are not succeeding. And so you're like, is it a one-person problem? Or is it a system that they're part of?

28:56Ted Knutson:And that's not to say that they haven't done better at trying to hire smarter people to be involved in it. But it takes a long time to turn over a football team. And that's where you have to be really careful about making big mistakes. And if you can avoid those on a regular basis, like you'll be ahead of most of the sport.

29:11James Yorke:So I think we get now to what I call the Ted Knutson story. And it is how portable these systems are. So again, it worked here. Can it work there? Then there's the women's question, which is the crux question, which I talked to Bex about last week, which is, is that approach portable into that world? Is there enough data in the women's game to be able to apply, what do we call it, a Brentford type approach?

29:42Ted Knutson:I think that there is data. My company that I founded and then sold collected a lot of it. And so data in women's sport exists and it's the same quality as the men's sport. Football is football. So that's useful. But I think the bigger question about women's football is simply professionalizing it. so many people in the women's game are there because they were told by the men's side, like, hey, go over there, run the women's side and don't cause any problems. And this is your budget. Don't screw it up. But if you screw it up, we'll fire you. We'll get somebody else. But the level of quality in that versus men's football is like a huge gulf right now, despite the fact that the product on the pitch is not.

30:23Ted Knutson:The product on the pitch is better than it's ever been. It looks really good. And so I find that intriguing, at least at the very top levels, right? So simply by putting better quality management in place from the commercial side, from the marketing side, from the ticketing side, and then from hopefully the coaching and the football side, like you're going to have a very large gap across most of the women's football industry right now. And so you get an early mover benefit from doing that. So the data is an ancillary question and really secondary to simply professionalizing what is running that team or those teams.

31:02Ted Knutson:And that's what Bex has created in Crux. I've been a longtime fan of women's football since 1999, the Women's World Cup in the United States. I watched more women's United States matches than I did men's from the period that I became a football fan because they were better and because they were winning more. So they were in more like long-term quality matches and tournaments. And then at Statsbomb, we started giving away women's data very early. We gave it away to all of the big leagues for free to each of the teams inside of those. Not thinking that it was something that would grow into a profitable business, which it eventually did, but much more so this is the right thing to do.

31:41Ted Knutson:And women's football has been left behind for many, many years. We want to help push that forward. And so that's what we did at Statsbomb.

31:48James Yorke:So my question is completely wrong then in terms of the actual, we talked about arbitrage, there is more in the WSL, European leagues in women's football than there would be in men's football. There is a greater both need for a more, what do you call it, scientific approach. And it all comes back to investment, doesn't it, in the end, and whether people think that there's a return on investment in the women's game. So the skepticism around women's football is it's more about actually, am I going to get a return? Sure.

32:21Ted Knutson:I think that's really important. And when you look at what has happened in the UEFA revenues and the FAWSL revenues and the NWSL revenues, what you can see is a very dramatic sort of curve that's sloping upwards that has not existed in men's football for a long time. If you got early in a Premier League team and you were able to obtain it then and you're able to stick around, you would have gotten those returns, right? You could go from something that you got for$200 million or$500 million into something that was bought into for$2,$5,$6 billion, right? Or Spurs for what they've got. And at women's football, you were at the tiniest start of that curve.

32:58Ted Knutson:But we know that looking at the other parts that have had success so far, it is possible. And there is a lot of interest. And we had a player at Montpellier who just came back from pregnancy. And we didn't get to take over that team until October 1st. So we didn't get involved in any of the transfer window up until this winter window. So we have been inherited and doing our best with it. But she's been a legend of that club. And she's very impressive. We were talking about the kind of commercial opportunities that she could have. And I said, imagine one of the men's players that are legends inside of a club being out there advertising for nappies.

33:34Ted Knutson:It would never happen. It's an impossibility. No one would ever do that. Even if he was very excited to be a dad and wanted to be a frontrunner in football dads. But as someone who is a legend inside the women's game, you can have a baby, you can come back and potentially play again at a high level. And then you can also have all of these campaigns that advertisers would love to be involved in, but have never had the opportunity to do.

33:59James Yorke:Yeah, yeah. We had a guy who's the head of Unilever's Rexona Shore. And we're talking about the World Cup. This was last week. You've got the World Cup there and they have spent 100 million maybe. But the Women's World Cup is a central part of it. But it was quite interesting listening to one of the biggest spenders in marketing in the world and how bullish they are about women's football. And I think you look at the sort of the roster of brands that are gathering around the WSL, even you're talking top of the shop, Nike, Mercedes Benz. So it's a really big opportunity. And again, it talks to that, what is it?

34:34James Yorke:And it's a mark. Is it a marketing return? Is it a marketing investment return initially, at least compared to the men's game, which is always driven by media rights. And that's what the story has been. So it's interesting.

34:45Ted Knutson:That's a big portion of it. But think about the disparity in who shows up, right? Like a women's England team versus a men's England team, entirely different crowd. Like totally, totally different. Their family's there. It looks much more like the U.S. demographics, which is what everybody wants to have, right? You want lush sort of family-oriented sport. You want the young people there. English men's football is desperately worried about their fans aging out, and there's so much competition. But if you're able to bring a family to the stadium, that's really exciting. And that's where women's football is right now.

35:17Ted Knutson:And it's at the nascent stage, but that's like the best time to invest in something as long as you can wait for the returns and the success to come. And you see the smoke, which is what we have seen in other spaces. So that's why I was really excited to be part of it. It is the right thing to do, but it's also the right place to invest right now.

35:35James Yorke:And just finally on it, that trading model, the player trading model, buy low, find valuable young players, trade them out, sell them. Does that model work? I was talking to Bex about the sort of potential fragility of squads and how Rosengard are up and down in the league. And it might be about the sale of one or two players in their team compared to a sort of bigger squads, deeper benches in men's football. Can you see that as a challenge or trying to manage that as a challenge?

36:07Ted Knutson:I think that we're still learning and I'm still very ignorant and dumb in that space. So it's hard for me to put a stake down and say this is definitely how it's going to work. I think looking at the Swedish teams, Rosengard didn't finish well last year after having been, I think they set the points record the year before, which is dramatic. But every single time that the Swedish teams do really well, they get rated from outside because the richer teams look at it. All the Swedes speak English. They also tend to be very fit. They have a long, successful, proud history of women's football. In that league, you can expect that that cycle is probably going to continue because there are really good reasons why teams outside of Sweden are happy to buy the best players and then you have to restock.

36:51Ted Knutson:But what that does is that also promotes investment in young players in Sweden because you know that those will eventually be sold on. And so it is a pretty virtuous cycle as long as women's football continues to grow and the money continues to improve. Okay, let's talk about you've built and sold a successful data business.

37:08James Yorke:You know, Statsbom sold it to Huddle. There's a few questions there. What did you learn in that process what did there's a question that runs through this podcast is what does the money want and it's a lot of it is gathering and looking at sport some of it wants to buy teams got private equity groups wanting to buy teams or invest in product new ip but then there's a lot of money going into your world or agencies consultancies but also they like certain stories what did you learn from the whole process of building a business and then selling it timing is always hard

37:40Ted Knutson:and we've seen this many different times. I would say StatDNA is the company that was bought by Arsenal. They were broadly bought for quite a small amount. They existed and they were ahead of us by a lot in what they did privately inside of Arsenal. And Jason Rosenfeld tells stories about how they were taking like most of the overnight bandwidth in the early internet in Cambodia to get video to then be able to code up those games and send it back to Arsenal. Not that Arsenal successfully used it because Venger was there at the time and like the revolution hadn't happened there, like it would have with Liverpool when Edwards and Graham were sitting over the top of that.

38:17Ted Knutson:So we were successful because we had the right timing. I came out of Brentford, started the stats bomb basically at the end of 2016, started 2017. And we had early success. I think we sold our front end to six teams in their first year, which is okay. It's not great. And we bootstrapped all of that. And then we started to go after the data market because we thought that it could be done better. And we were told that we were insane. And maybe we were. But in the football space, the soccer football space, it worked out really well. The exact same thing with a much better product happened in American football for us.

38:53Ted Knutson:And the year that we sold to Huddle, we didn't really get credit for any of our American football revenue. We almost spun it out, sold it off to somebody else. And we had six teams that were taking the American football data. we we had and i will do i will present this at our our transfer flow conference on may 22nd but we had the most awesome product that i think i've ever seen in the space and i say this as somebody who's very experienced in the space not just because i'm proud of it because like we really really did create something special you get frame by frame data references for speed acceleration like you can actually attach all of that to frame precise bits in the tracking data with this player released the ball at this moment so then we can create this other layered set of data that couldn't possibly exist elsewhere.

39:35Ted Knutson:We were going to do that for soccer, but we were one year early or one year wrong because we had six in the first year. Then Huddle took a slightly worse product, but basically the same thing. And they had 67 of 70 of the top teams one year after it was sold. Now, part of that's a distribution product problem, but part of it is if you just wait long enough, you were going to crack that. And we did. We just didn't have the time and the grace to do it. If you're a startup founder and an entrepreneur, timing is incredibly hard and it's never really in your favor unless you get lucky. And so we got lucky with the soccer side of it.

40:11Ted Knutson:And then we did not get lucky with the American football side.

40:14James Yorke:So a company like Huddle has now bought several other companies as well. I'm wondering what happens to the market, what consolidation does in that particular bit of the market? Because normally it's not a boon to innovation. It's actually the opposite. There tends to be a coming together, a move to the middle, because just organizationally, that's easier to do. Do you see that happening? And like all markets, there are going to be people on the sidelines or on the margins who are going to make the next big play. Is that how you're framing?

40:50Ted Knutson:So you've got Huddle, you've got Teamworks, and you have Catapult as like the three main aggregators of businesses. catapult less so i think because they probably have less money behind them teamworks have also scooped up a bunch of very good companies that they are making into like full sport products and then they want to be across the whole of the sport landscape when many of these small companies are sport specific initially so that's what you're seeing and in some cases it feels like the teams are allowing themselves to slowly be boiled and that they're making decisions around video rights that are not conducive to their future cash flows.

41:27Ted Knutson:Yes, we want video rights money right now and we want to protect it and we don't want anybody else to be able to do XYZ, so we're going to do this. But then you need the innovation because otherwise the people that capture the video rights and the SaaS and the data rights, they just continue to raise prices until suddenly you've paid two or three times what you could if there was competition inside of that market. But the teams and the leagues are the ones that control those rights. So it's a pretty interesting problem. And in some cases, I think that they're making decisions that are not good for their future selves, but their current money looks fine and somebody else gets to keep their job because of it.

42:00Ted Knutson:The aggregation, as you say, is always a problem inside of certain markets, but also who knows what it looks like post-AI. Things are changing so fast right now. And AI used to be a snake oil word that was garbage because the people selling it weren't actually AI and it was often bad machine learning, black boxes, but they can sell to people that don't understand what's going on. Now, AI helps you do a lot of your work and probably can create a lot of automation inside of it with clarity as to what's actually going on, which I think is a very different space than it would have been five, seven years ago.

42:32James Yorke:Does it change the product or does it make it more efficient and cost effective and all those things? But is there something, will it do anything fundamental to that?

42:42Ted Knutson:You can collect a lot more data and you can save a lot of the boring stuff to be automated by AI. It makes so every company can also spin up their front end with some level of quickness, but things will break on you that you don't expect. And that's always a little bit harder. It's the gap between I can create something custom pretty quickly and it's okay versus I need this to be nine nines of or five nines of reliability. And it needs to be here exactly the moment that my coach needs it for me. And that's a very different space. If you have to have a thing on his desk at 9 a.m. the next day or two days later, you can't miss that.

43:20Ted Knutson:And you continually have reasons why that gets screwed up. Maybe you don't want that level of stress in your life. So there's still a need for these types of companies. And AI will simply power both new data, but then also allow them to have potentially cost savings or just human savings.

43:34James Yorke:And again, the question you've, I'm sure, been asked lots of times, but from the outside, it's trying to work out where the when everyone's got the same data, when everyone is doing the same thing. The story, the Moneyball story is all about difference, wasn't it? And differentiation in the market. As that smooths, I'm trying to work out what actually the, where the edge is and where the points of competition are. I'd be much richer if I could answer this question. But is that still a valid question?

44:02Ted Knutson:There are always market inefficiencies. Basically, the initial market inefficiency that's been found in the Premier League is they used to pay old players a bunch. Now they pay a bunch to young players, but those young players have uncertain futures. And so now they're paying big amounts of money and risk for hopefully they get a couple of spikes for world class players. So that's shifted. If you had older players, you could get on cheaper contracts and more flexible contracts, then that becomes the new money ball arbitrage. But the big thing that happens, so there's three layers in sports data, sort of application and changing of a sport.

44:34Ted Knutson:The first layer is always, can we find better players for less? That one, because player salaries and transfer fees make up so much of any budget in any sport, that's the first area of arbitrage, as you say, or just searching for efficiency. The second one is, can we find better ways to play the sport? And that is baseball. Can we create pitchers that throw harder? Can we hit more home runs in basketball, three points, dunks? Can we find styles that are more efficient? Can we find coaches that are able to coach these more efficient styles? right now in football, despite the fact that it's taken 10 years of my work and some other people's work as well to crack the set pieces that this is really useful and important.

45:16Ted Knutson:It finally happened. And people are complaining about that, but they used to complain about tiki-taka being boring too. So they'll just complain about whatever the new thing is. The last layer is the thing you're talking about, I think, which is, can we create better players with science and technology? And can we take the players we currently have once the market becomes efficient and then improve them. And that's really just back to coaching. It's just coaching using better tools and better logic and better data.

45:42James Yorke:We had an AI event just before Christmas. Again, one of the issues there was what are people buying and selling now? And they probably don't quite know what they're giving away. Some of it in sport is always bundled into a sponsorship relationship. So Google and Microsoft will do Premier League type deals. And within that, you start to see, okay, they're going to use Copilot. And they're essentially devolving the function of the tech bit to the third parties for a generation. And we can then argue the toss about whether that's a good or bad thing. Now, one of the issues is what AI, what a deal includes now, and what is the value proposition of a business?

46:25James Yorke:So you think, for example, a football club, it could be just one use case could be a sort of it's a lovely robotics baseline for AI to learn about how fit human beings run around. And then you start to. So there's no way of pricing that potentially. But you can start to see I'm wondering if that just the AI moment creates a real inability to work out or to value what a business is now, because so much of it is future value. about where it's relationship to whatever AI evolves into becoming.

47:00Ted Knutson:Correct. And I think that's where distribution becomes the most important factor. If you have distribution or you can build good distribution, that's something that has returns forever. Like in the thing that sport has, it has great distribution. So I think that when you're looking at valuations and things around the businesses, it's confusing because you don't know what's going to be automated. I'm the type of person that's optimistic about this stuff. I think that humans with tools do better than any other time. And there are leaps of logic and insight that humans generally have when using the tools that they wouldn't have otherwise.

47:36Ted Knutson:And I have a long history of doing this in the gambling space and then now in the football space. So I'm optimistic and not pessimistic about the influence that this will have. I could turn out to be wrong, but what's the point in being pessimistic anyway? Because if it's all going to go to shit, you've just had another three, four, five years of thinking it's going to go to shit before it actually did. why would you do that to yourself? I'm quite optimistic about it. But distribution remains the most important thing that you can get if you want to sell things. And sport has great distribution and has loyal fans and has passionate people.

48:07Ted Knutson:Now finding the connection between those two is probably the really interesting space. I always thought Power BI or Tableau should have gotten really in touch with like full football leagues and done great visualizations that, hey, you can make your business visualizations look like these awesome sport visualizations, and we'll teach you how to do it. And it's going to, and your owners or your boss is going to be impressed because you're providing beautiful things for them to then analyze stuff, XYZ. But I couldn't quite get Microsoft to listen to that. So it didn't happen.

48:38James Yorke:Just, I mean, you mentioned a conference there, because I'm now, I find it really interesting. You've gone full circle to back to content. Is that, am I, I'm just reading what, you know, So the transfer flow is, so you've got a newsletter, you've got a podcast, and you mentioned an upcoming conference. Talk to me about that. Where are you now? And is this just something you've wanted to do for a while and you've got the opportunity to do it?

49:02Ted Knutson:So I founded the StatsBomb conference at the disagreement amongst my managing team. I was like, no, we should do this. It's a big deal. And then it ended up being the best day of the calendar year where we got a bunch of people in the room that were our customers. but also like really smart people doing talks on stage. And it was a great networking event. And it was something that was like really important and required, but we would leave it open to tickets so that people who were interested in the space from the outside could also just come and be part of it. And then my company was acquired.

49:33Ted Knutson:And so I wasn't really that comfortable in that space or welcome in that space anymore. And the transfer flow is a different thing. So we built something for fans, knowing that transfers are the most valuable kind of interesting content that you can do. But no one has the credibility that we do. Like my main co-writer, Kim, and I have both worked inside of football. And so we've been talking about the football space for a couple of years and haven't done this actual job. Then it became, all right, so how can I combine these two interesting things? And so we have this weird platypus of a conference, I would say, but it could be great, which is that the first half of the day, like we're doing it starting at 1230.

50:15Ted Knutson:So everybody gets their own lunch. because we're doing it on the cheap. But 12.30 to 5.30, we're doing an industry conference. So it's a half day of industry conference. We're going to have really talks about business of football, but also talks about the future of football. I'm going to give one of my own conversations. Hendrik Almstadt, who is one of the architects of AC Milan's sort of comeback title, will be there. He's got a long history inside of football as well. So we've got five hours of that and a little bit of networking time, and people can show up. And then we've got an evening session.

50:44Ted Knutson:And the evening session is cheaper and it's for fans. And it's basically show up. Patrick and I are going to do two of our most successful pieces of content, which is we're going to rebuild two of the big teams in the evening, live podcasts on stage effectively. And then we're going to do goofy stuff that we enjoy doing. I might read my favorite children's book in a funny voice because that came up some point as an idea that we could do on stage. And I think that we're actually going to do it. You have the freedom to goof around and have fun. And that's like selling your business, as painful as it might be, buys you a bit of freedom and a bit of ability to do fun stuff like that.

51:22Ted Knutson:So that's why the conference exists. Partly to network and fill this need for something that I wanted to have happen. And partly to fill this space for somebody that I love being on stage or on microphone with that we do it on a weekly basis. And now we're just going to do it in person. And where is it going to be? Central London, May 22nd. Okay.

51:41James Yorke:It's weird that the transfer, we had David Ornstein on, and I talked to him about this, but also you've got the Fabio thing. You've got, it's a, transfers are really, the way in which that's become such a media platform is, I suppose it makes sense. But I'm just trying to think what it's about. What are we, what's the need there? It's about hope, is it?

52:03Ted Knutson:It's about hope and optimism. Absolutely. Hope and optimism and that things might be better in the future. yeah yeah i think that's that's a key underlying thing for for the world no matter what time period you're in but particularly now and so football fans need something to be optimistic about and when their team is terrible that's especially true we're talking to a spurs fan i'm i'm lapping

52:25James Yorke:this up okay listen ted thanks so much for your time really enjoyed talking to you and as i say i it was something i've been long wanting to do for a long time so i'm really pleased we got to do it but good luck with the event. And I'll point people in your direction.

52:40Ted Knutson:Thank you for the interview and the time. And I've been reading your newsletter off and on for quite a long time. So nice to show up. Thank you.