UP566 Chat UP: I never want to hear the phrase 'Palantir for Sport' again

0:00There's essentially two post-war views emerging, which is either we're in charge of technology and we can choose and we have agency over it, or we are somewhat enthralled to technology. And the best thing we can do is to manage our economic model to a bunch of technological changes which are undisputable and which are on a trajectory that we can't control. That's that's the sort of general thinking with AI at the moment.

0:24Richard:Hello there, welcome. It's Richard Gillis here and you're listening to Unofficial Partner, the Sports Business Conversation. That was Mike Bracken, CBE, and this is Chat Up, our series on AI in the sports business. Mike Bracken is one of the most qualified people to talk about this subject that it's possible to find. He built the UK government's digital service and became the country's first ever chief data officer and now runs public digital and has worked with presidents Macron and Obama and plenty of other governments and large organisations around the world about the topic that we're discussing today.

1:02Richard:ChatUp is made in collaboration with TFG Labs, the technology arm of 21st Group. the series was conceived as a place to host the AI conversation and to get beyond just talking about the foundational models and the financial race that is going on at the top of that market and to drill down to questions that really face everyone who works in and around the sports business today so we talk about Palantir we talk about airlines retail the NHS all of the questions and the problems that are facing large organisations and ask what the questions are that are facing sports C-suite today. And that's what this podcast is about.

1:47Richard:And I'm really pleased with it. I'm really happy to bring it to you. My regular chat up co-host Andy Shorer of TFG Labs is away this week. So it's just Mike and me and he will be back for the next one. If you are interested in this topic and all the others that we talk about on Unofficial Partner, you will really like the Unofficial Partners Substack newsletter. And there are, I don't know how many thousands, tens of thousands of people waiting for it on a Thursday morning to be delivered to their inbox. You could be one of them if you're not already. If you're listening to this, you probably are.

2:19Richard:But I need to remind you every now and then. Anyway, I'm Richard Gillis. This is Unofficial Partner. And you're about to listen to a really great conversation. Here's Mike Bracken, CBE.

2:34are you enjoying the whatsapp group i am it's really interesting i'm not lurking i've said a couple of things but there's some interesting people there you know yeah check them out really interesting people so and you've got you've got a great list i've been listening to i bet i've listened to like 30 or 40 of the podcast now bloody hell they're really good i mean they're really really good you've done a great thing here the guy talking about i forget all the names in front of me but i've got them on a list but the guy talking about the sort of false search for advertising data the one that was that was fabulous that like the complete nonsense of cpns and the whole marketing thing i thought that was excellent yeah we've had him on augustine

3:14Richard:foo dr foo and he's yeah he's just someone i sort of saw on linkedin saying interesting things about five years ago and we have we've had him on a few times but this will be a theme of this conversation is that there's a bubble and the conversation most of the time takes place within it between the sort of buyers and sellers the vendors and of selling either research or data or whatever it is and then you've got these just these numbers now which you keep seeing and go if they go unquestioned i mean they just they then work their way into proper serious decks you know so i'm always interested in when you then get into the finance realm of the banks or the private equity groups you can see the same numbers in there because they've just sort of lifted them off it's just it's fantastic it really is it's like that bit in the big short where they find you know they go to moody's and find out what the triple a means it's like my favorite ones having been on the receiving end is when they get things like you know we've 85 million users in the uk i'm like really that's more than the population yeah that's great yeah well it has got to the stage where it's beyond parody now yeah well you say that but i don't know it was sort of at that point about 15 years ago I think I think so but the larger point which is it's a bandwagon that no one wants to jump off is correct and I think the UK actually has suffered more the UK industry has suffered more than most because we are and have been traditionally good at advertising and marketing you know that part of our makeup and yeah I think those businesses have really suffered I want to start with we better introduce you and your sort of back catalogue your CV because you were introduced to me by Alex Balfour and he said well if you're going to be talking about this subject which we're going to talk about today you better get Mike on because you know few people have been there and have bear more scars in this uh in this story than uh Mike bracken so just give us a little bit of background because on the when i ran it through chat up my my sort of idiot uh ai i.e claude he said led uk government digital service gds and became the country's first government chief data officer taking the uk to number one in the un's digital government rankings in 2016 he's a founding partner of public digital so that's the public facing bit but just give me the bit of the reality of it well that's that's correct uh i didn't mean reality as in it's not true i meant as in you know some color behind it so behind that in 2010 i've been advising ministers politicians senior institutional leaders for 30 plus years i was an internet researcher in the 1980s and there weren't many of us wow and the web came along and i was well into that career.

6:12So I'm not particularly wise or smart. I had just had the great bit of luck to be first in the queue and knew a bit more about it and decided relatively early on that what I wanted to do was not necessarily work in Silicon Valley, but change big institutions that I think are important and valuable. So I've worked in seven different industries, media, telco, retail, insurance, finance, government and now consulting and had exposure to projects and things all over the world. Worked in, lived in 12 countries working, currently advise about 40 governments plus parts of the UN, World Bank, IMF. So basically I've spent my career at the intersection of capital, technology and digital and institutions.

7:01And in 2010, in the build-up to what became a quite important election in the UK, because we had a coalition government, both major parties were in touch and wanted to, having had 10 years worth of terrible technology failures under the Blair-Brown years, wanted to try something different. That different was the government digital service, A whole bunch of people who I don't have time to mention were important in the setting up of that, getting the political space for it to do. And I was its founder and leader. And we really had a good five years of change of government, as in changing government, how it works.

7:39The physical or the digital view of that looks like gov.uk and all the various services. What we actually did was take a fundamental change to the foundations of government, including data, institution management, people, skills, contracts, everything else. We saved, I was part of a group that took 52 billion out of the public spending over four years. I took about four and a half billion just out of digital alone.

8:07Richard:What do you mean by that, taking it out and you saved that money? Yeah, when I went into government, we were spending£16 billion a year on technology and associated delivery costs. About£4 million of that, a quarter, you can't touch. It's like nuclear submarines and whatnot. So about£12 billion, and we took£4.1 billion out of that. We moved digitisation from less than 30 % to 85%, so that's all the services you want to use, passports, driving letters, all that stuff. and we cut out an enormous amount of terrible legacy technology and data contracts and instead replaced them with more modern standards-based, web-based stuff which is open and has persisted to this day.

8:51We did that out of sheer necessity. We didn't have a manual, we made it up as we went along and because all governments are roughly the same, do roughly the same stuff and all institutions do, big institutions, they saw that model and said we need to follow that and now there's about 350 of those big government institutions around the world. We helped Obama with, I went over to help him set up his presidential fellows and deal with healthcare.gov, if you remember that, in 2013. They had messed up again with the big IT system, so we helped them reset that. And then I've been helping presidents and prime ministers around the world.

9:26Recently, Malcolm Turnbull in Australia, President Macron on his advisory board. and as well as that a bunch of industry leaders so I'm less open to talk about the names but very large banks that you will have heard of very large retailers and really helping their executives

9:42Richard:understand the art of the possible right okay and my starting point obviously this is a sports business podcast but sport is quite often a microcosm of other things and you know there seems to be a sort of nice analogy we get a lot of people on who are on both sides struggling with the you know it's an ai question now but it was a data question previously and that friction between i want i need to buy a new thing some tech someone is selling me something that promises to solve all my problems and then five years later we find that actually no that wasn't the right solution at the time and you get into that cycle and quite often in the sports realm people land on in-house or contracted in you know what's possible inside an organization the size of the premier league the IOC FIFA or down to an individual team Man United or Spurs so you get that challenge and when i sort of looked at what you've been doing that feels like the same problem but at a much much bigger scale so if we take like the nhs for example my wife works in the nhs it's it feels like a sort of 15 year old computer system that is whirring away that might be wrong but the challenge of getting that into some sort of order feels like a massive version of what a sports team might have that's right that's right well you know were i talking to a large sports organization industry body i would ask the same questions i asked to a country or the head of the nhs and the first two questions i would ask are what is your philosophy around technology and digital service and the second is what is your tolerance for organizational organizational change in terms of how your organization works because until you've got a view of those two things you really can't answer the questions what do what do people normally answer to that those questions because they're big questions well look because you're dealing with big institutions and say our philosophy is that we want to be in charge of technology we are unhappy with this being done to us yeah and then i go good as a result you are in no fit position to take charge of technology largely because the organization shape and size you have makes it impossible for you to display nationwide or institution-wide technology standards because you've been chopped up into lots of competing bits so are you willing to do that and then they go well I would love that to happen and then you go great I'll ask you again are you willing to do that well we might be able to do a little project on the side and that's where we are with the NHS and it's where we are with many institutions I suspect and having talked to some of your colleagues on the WhatsApp group that's sort of where we are with sports as well and so the first question is the most challenging and that means that most institutions that do embrace that change of of how they're set up that usually comes from a crisis or an existential threat which is why if you remember gov.uk came from a cross parliamentary crisis of failure of repeat technology programs in government, failures in tax, pensions, justice elsewhere, and parliamentarians basically said, we have to try something different.

13:20And many institutions at the point of crisis or challenge then get to a point of saying, are we set up right to be the sort of technology-based organization that we need to be because it's so central to how we want to run oneself? If not, and most institutions are not ready to change their shape and size, then I think there's a sort of second request which is well what should we limit your ambition a bit but what can we do with your existing shape and structure and it's up to sports bodies to do that my small take on that would be many of them haven't really grasped that question yet the art of the possible for sports particularly some of the regulated bodies sorry some of the cross-government bodies it is huge but they've really not grasped that because they're still wedded to a sort of buy one system and it'll work go to an agency for some innovation model and you'll get some of that and it's okay but you won't get you won't shift the dial really well if you're running something

14:21Richard:large you know whether either in sport or outside of sport and quite often you look at the end of there's a personal level to these big decisions in terms of wanting to be at the front of a big decision looking sort of thrillingly decisive buying a new tech system is one way of doing it I'm an ex-teacher when we ever got money in the public sectors you know we would you know that they would announce a new computer room and there were 101 different ways of spending that money but it was a nice signal for lots of reasons and I think one of the things that's running through the AI conversation that we quite often talk about is that the CEO the c-suite has seen something they want this is what they want and AI is sort of crystallized data is a really boring important important bit of this question but ai has taken that and made it into something that is really beguiling to people who want change and they it almost represents something and i don't you know how you then get there you quite often land on silos and and you know sales is not talking to marketing he's not talking to performance he's not you know all of these things are smaller versions of what you're talking about isn't it absolutely absolutely and this is my tolerance for change so the first question i think the first issue is to grasp is like why are you asking the question about ai if ai is the answer to the to the problem what is it you can do to solve a problem without requiring a sort of advanced technology because most of the problems that your sports organizations are facing are pretty prosaic they're really quite dull frankly but they're organizational and so it's things like why have you got multiple databases of users and addresses and of payment details like why on earth would you do that why do you need a bunch of advanced technology to unpick that rather than make an organizational decision about how you're going to work i'll give you some ludicrous examples from government i remember i think we had six different parts of business and education departments which essentially gave money to students student loans student grants there's There's a sort of 16 to 18 year old body up in Coventry, they do some.

16:32And I went around to each of them and said, this is great work, great work. How do you give the money to them? They said, oh, you can write them a check, send them to them. I said, oh, great. So you share like the details? Oh, no, no, we have our own. I said, well, as far as I know, there's only one University of Manchester where it is. Can't be sure of the address. No, no, special and unique and different. And it's this sort of nonsense that gets in the way of most organisations. NHS, good example. now in sports organizations that generally is a micro conversation like the performance director is not speaking to the commercial director that's not a technology problem that's a management problem we've got to sort that out one more macro sense that's where it gets interesting because you and I are football fans and I am you know primarily a fan of a football club but I'm also a football fan and I have certain characteristics that means I attend stuff and buy stuff and want to work and enjoy that with other people family friends elsewhere and so on and a bunch of ancillary services but there's no common identifier that everyone's using to identify me as a certain category of football fan there are thousands of bespoke crm systems and other such data analysis tools which are putting me in categories of i heard you the day i think were just Generation X, I think.

17:47You're clinging. I'm clinging to Gen X. I'm hanging on by my finger. I don't know what the previous one was. But, you know, why do you need all those tools if there wasn't a common standard or platform that says, yeah, I'm in that box. And by the way, you can all use that definition because we all share it. And it's this idea of having shared platforms and shared protocols, which sounds quite benign. But when you think about it, most of the world works on that basis so get on an airplane you work out you're going to land somewhere it's got a three-letter suffix for where you're going to go it's that lhr for london heath row that system called sabre it sort of saves an enormous amount of time for airlines and everyone in the industry so you know where you're going to go right it's not difficult as a very simple example why are there not similar examples of that in sport why don't we just share what is obvious and common and often not changing so we can all work and innovate on those basis i think the answer that is twofold organizations don't want they're not built to share and understand wider value and most importantly they're having terribly micro arguments about which bit of their machine is in charge of which bit of data most people don't care quite often in sport there is so if you wanted to pull the fan base of the Premier League you run immediately into Man United versus

19:13Richard:you know West Ham or what you know actually not yet no longer but you know I can't whoever's at the bottom of the small versus the big question so Man United say you know you can sod off because we're not going to share our fan base with your with you because it's more it's valuable to us and we it's our competitive advantage so you get this the big and small framing or you know the club versus the league versus you know whatever so there are real commercial incentives at play and people it's not they don't understand the necessary sort of the sharing question is that they actively are incentivized not to so that's what you find in you know if you work for a marketing agency broader marketing agency you've got the the sort of sponsorship versus media because they're just competing over the same budget and so that's stopping all the good stuff from happening and i don't i've come to wonder whether that's a solvable problem yeah it's solvable you've got to start by doing the maths the reason it's it's not being done is that in sports bodies generally and industries i take broadcasters out of that generally don't have an economic model say what's the size of the prize if we did this because they're all thinking all those things you mentioned are essentially different parts of an organization competing for who holds the pen or who holds the lever about extractive value creation but in essence yeah they're all extracting value of me and you from an individual layer because the entire philosophy of how they work is extractive.

20:55It is not collective. And this, I think, could be a central point to sport, is that CRM, let's take CRM as the most simple and commonly understood tool system. Talk about AI, whatever. CRM is a 50-year-old database. It's relational marketplace, how it started. And the idea of CRM is essentially an extractive basis. Like, I'm going to get, Football Club X is going to get all my data, and from that it's going to extract a bunch of value it's going to sell it it's going to market to it etc right it's essentially extractive and the choice i have over what they do is limited very limited and at the point of that i'll be like whereas actually there's another way of thinking about this which is vrm which is a vendor relationship management which is i'm in charge of my data and i'm going to give it to you football club x but not football or because i'm going to favor a trust relationship and I'm going to invest in that relationship if I get more of what I want back.

21:53So at the moment, some of the high profile scores, we're seeing, and I'm seeing this with some of the agency stuff I've looked at, people saying, we've got higher levels of engagement. You know, it's the Virgin Media problem. It's like, yeah, you can engage with anyone all the time. You can send them emails, you can pester them to death. All they end up is hating you because you won't leave them alone and yet they're not getting a good enough service. And I think if sport persists on this, because sport is incredibly sponge-like. People have got a huge amount of interest in it. I have, you have, and everyone listens to this podcast has.

22:24But there is a limit to how many times you can be asked to look at replica shirts or whatever it may be while you're still not getting a good service for ticketing or five different bits of the same organisation have got my address. And there's a tolerance for that extractive stuff. I think we're getting way beyond it now.

22:41Richard:When sometimes people come on and there is a... Or we should be more like retail airlines is quite often referenced and banks as these are good practice. This is what this is the direction it should be. So a fan and a football club, it should define its relationship a bit closer to that end of the spectrum and not, you know, a traditional fan relationship. relationship and obviously then outside of a sports business bubble hackles start to rise and you start to get into sort of cultural stuff about fans and what that is but if we just stay within the bubble for a minute there's always leaders and laggards in anything but where who is at the front end what industry i mean looking at amazon is it is it what just talk to me about who the best in class are is it easy to do that in terms of categorizing because my assumptions being that sport is somewhere in the middle maybe towards the end and because it's got a very traditional view of itself and then you get to things like so government i wouldn't know where that would i wouldn't you know i listened to you at the beginning i think wow this is all solved this is great but it it feels not but this is why i'm so optimistic about sport here's why so if you You gave me examples like banking and airlines.

24:04So the examples are given because those industries have rock solid standards and platforms which everyone knows about and works to. And you can then work with them to increase value to customer and so on. The problems of both those industries, banking, the best example in banking is open banking. the ability to layer on a bunch of over-the-top services or new innovative services but with the guarantee that there's still a sort of cast iron level of clearing and all the rest of it that banking does well so customers get the satisfaction security of know they get their conventional banking but they're getting some innovation over the top airlines good example of where they adhere to common standards but both banking and especially airlines are hugely restricted in their innovative capacity because of the regulatory overhead it's a metal tube that flies at 30 000 feet there's only so much you can do with that within safety regulations sport is a very light touch regulated industry in comparison to those two but it doesn't have the standards and consequently it's got thousands of people running around doing busy work with poor or incomplete data sets and even when they do have better data they can't deploy at scale because there's no standards to deploy to So I think sports are missing the trick by not having these open standards.

25:25They won't revolutionise everything overnight. What they will do is give third parties and actors within the industry the ability to innovate using those joint shared standards. Sports is an intensely inefficient industry from a technological point of view because it keeps having to repeat everything all the time. and then all a lot of leaders want to give me a dashboard that shows x give me a dashboard that shows y you know you can continue on that for some time but again you're not moving the dial there

25:55Richard:again one of the questions i again as an obviously a non-tech person is the palantir question so i you get to what is it they're selling so again it's an nhs question or it's a government question it's almost comically created for someone like me to not like from peter teal and the cart down their public sort of persona through to ice and wherever it is all of that is just noise i'm trying to get to actually what palantir is offering is it offering something that is different that is part of this solution is that what it's getting at why is it so popular or is it just about lobbying is it just about money to talk to me about this a bit because I'm interested because people again one of the phrases you hear is that you know a palantir for sport you think okay well that's taking us into a different direction that's not a phrase I want to hear again but there we are right let's let's do this properly so there's a lot not to like with the noise and palantir I get that that's not my issue today let's go back and let's look at the Lansley reforms of the NHS in 2011 and what that did was really chop up in the name of autonomy and localization it chopped up the nhs into about 90 odd trusts and gave a lot of power to doctors it was a big reorganization and it gave a lot of autonomy and then said by the way you're all free to do your own things but we wouldn't mind if you converged on a set of outcomes and crossed our fingers and you know some years later i had health ministers with a head in their hands going to me mike you know why are we not getting the network network effects of everyone doing the same thing like because you literally chopped it up into hundreds of pieces without any real common standards or protocols to work to which is why nhs england was quite rightly put in the bin now what then happened is palantir and others came along and said if you use our proprietary technology the problem we will solve for you is not a technological one it's an organizational one back to my first question which is we can make all the bits of data which currently are classified differently in different hospitals talk to each other now there are many technological ways of doing that believe me that's not good for today but palantir said we can do that better than anyone but the way we do that is our own proprietary technology so once it's in the palantir box we do it and you get the outcome and for better or worse the nhs went yeah we'll have a bit of that and that means you then have today the classification of health data and much of the personalization of that data being done in a black box and that's not good because there's no open standard for that so that means today should you today the current position in say secondary care you walk into or you hobble into a hospital in Aberdeen because you've broken your leg and they go who are you and there's no sharing of health data or records because your local hospital in the southeast and that's crazy in a country like ours but that's crazy because we've decided that our organization structure is better being chopped up into hundreds of autonomous bits than having a common standard or protocol that you can work to and here's the news you can still have a hundred bits or a thousand parts of NHS so long as where it matters they have a standard protocol and we don't we decided not to do that it was a foolish move and what we said was in the name of competition we would have a small number of electronic health record companies as four major ones who essentially have an oligopoly on the market and they will use a proprietary service that Palantir gives from its proprietary database and proprietary technology that you can't see into and then we'll get the outcomes that we want and we'll pay them a lot of money and they will be essentially the owners and drivers of that thing.

29:51Now that's not a great outcome I don't think but what would have been a better outcome is you said tell you what we'll have a common standard everyone with a license or everyone who would choose can use it they can innovate on it and what they do the the better services they create goes back into that system and so you get the flywheel of competition and innovation you get better services for less money that's how we took loads of money out of government in the first place what we're now getting is paying a lot more money for an adequate service that we can't control or manage. It just happens to be Palantir in the driving seat.

30:25It could be someone else. Until we decide as a health industry that we're going to run and manage our own classification, that's not technology, that's just calling things the same thing, then you're going to have this window for proprietary technology companies to say, look, without us, you can't run yourself. Now, sport's in that position. It's not as it's not as vitally important as the nhs it's not far off to some people but that's the choice and sport about now sport should be making those choices because take football as industry or the it's you know these institutions are big enough to dictate the vendors and suppliers to them and how they work and instead you know i think gentleman said it recently you know be makers not takers and sport is like the nhs is now having to take systems and services provided by third parties that they're contracted to without real really much say in in how they work or the outcomes of them that's that's not a great outcome so when you go in your first question

31:30Richard:one of them was about philosophy what's your philosophy is that about open and closed is that what you mean by philosophy yeah i mean you know there is a philosophy of technology which i won't bother you with but there's a sort of essentially two post-war views emergent which is either we're in charge of technology and we can choose and we have agency over it and we can choose to be open where it suits us or we are somewhat enthralled to technology and the best thing we can do is to manage our organizational and economy economic model to and to a bunch of technological changes which are indisputable and which are on a trajectory that we can't control.

32:11That's the sort of general thinking with AI at the moment. So it's a really central point. Like, are you in charge of this stuff? Are you determining where it's going and how you use it? Or are you going to do the best with it as technological change happens? Now, there's pros and cons to both. But the bigger institution, the more agency they want.

32:31Richard:Right, OK. And it's where the power lies. Again, this is about power, isn't it? It's not about tech. It's all about power. Look, for 30 years, institutions, including sports, big institutions would buy big IT systems from big blue companies that you're familiar with, Oracle Database, IBM, Microsoft. Big companies make very good technology, very enterprise technology. And executives would sit around and go, well, if we hit trouble, I know someone at IBM, I can make a phone call. That's the way out of it. as if that's going to work. And then time and again you have systems crashes and systems failures.

33:10That was a nod to power. It was essentially saying we've given our power away. I mean a couple of years ago Heathrow Airport and British Airways had substantial outages which cost billions largely because of enterprise IT failures. They've decided to give that to someone else. And so you don't have to run all your IT but you do have to be in control of the stuff that is really important like how you manage your own approach to it what you call it what should what should be open what should be closed and i think sport is going almost down the clothesline very quickly largely because it doesn't believe it can do anything else just to build on that slightly

33:51Richard:so when you i'm just coming out the back of a financial conference you know sports investment summit sports pro investment summit yeah and it's the money on stage talking you know about sport what it what it thinks about when it looks at sport and the open close question i think is really interesting because when you see the sort of nascent leagues or growth leagues or people that are launching things you've got a whole wall of money waiting to be deployed they like sport for all the obvious reasons they think it's you know an ai hedge they think it's the fan relationship is is a super customer relationship and that's all all of which is i'm sure true you then get to okay well what do we want to build if you're going to build something from the beginning so something like a sail gp or a there's someone there from horse racing league set up last week we've got paddle we've got all sorts of things rugby live golf they're all looking at formula one and seeing a closed world where they control everything and they control everything that is within that walled garden that's what they want and you can start to see that that's how the money wants sport it's the american model franchises you know investable units all of that stuff and then you lay in your questions and i can see that working so within formula one i can see that okay it's just liberty or whoever's running for owns formula one can then make a decision about systems and it's got a constituency which is sort of there's always ferrari versus the rest but But it's a much easier environment than football, which is the Wild West.

35:46Richard:That's right. So the easy bit would be to take the Formula One fan, it would be almost a low-hanging fruit or whatever the cliche is, but it's trying to work out what actually you would do to try and answer your questions. Because your questions are simple but really difficult to answer. And I just don't know whether or not you ever get there. yeah and whether or not it's just the mark you know the the stuff that we dismiss as people and problems are actually the point it's really difficult and you'll never get to a the utopia so it's the single customer view is one that when presented i hear it and say okay that sounds really interesting i get that but i don't know whether you'll ever get to that point in a in an open open world yeah well there's two issues there let me take one at a time the idea of a single customer view the 360 view everything else is a sort of marketeer's wet dream in different circumstances they are more or less effective they can be but by and large in dynamic markets they don't work they don't work for two reasons firstly the time and cost of getting the data and crucially maintaining it doesn't get you anywhere close to the value that people think you will get out of it so most people who opt for a single customer view do so at industry level because their current data practices are shoddy and they've probably had some sort of hack or something like that they think we've got i know we'll go from being really terribly organized to have like absolute novanum single customer view they very rarely stop saying well we've got this data what are we going to do with it practically what are we going to how much will it be worth what will it cost to maintain when i move house how will we manage that who will wash it who will verify it who'll authenticate it and the cost for those things are huge and ongoing and complex and unless your model for how you're going to monetize that data is rock hard then you're probably onto a loser now if you can have but to your second point different different sports have got different models i'm not familiar with formula one much i was once part of a group that sponsored a car but that's for another day yeah i work for a work for a very large company that once sponsored i think we got a wing mirror or something but there is more of a clear model in Formula 1 because it has got more of a closed market, a set number of races, a set number of drivers.

38:26You can atomise the individual who follows that more readily than you can a football fan. And here's why. Because there's no national Formula 1. We don't watch England play. Also, it's essentially a personalised sport. By that I mean, if I follow Formula 1, I follow it. If you and I follow football, we're likely to go with friends, family, to different groupings, different competitions, different regulatory bodies, it's messy. And therefore, the more messiness you have in your sport, the more unlikely it is that you'll ever derive value from a single customer view.

39:05Richard:And so is the promise of AI that you don't need, it's gone beyond that. So that was a sort of 10 years ago question. He says stroking his chin one of the benefits of ai is of course is a another it'll be this year's version of a i must say ai is a different thing i've seen selling generally is a collective term for a bunch of technologies which have a lot of value the ai that's been sold at executive level to solve this problem is it's just like it's just this year's bitcoin blockchain crm whatever it's the next version like if you have ai you can solve this problem essentially if you have relational database management going back 30 years you can solve the problem the problem is organizational as we've talked about the problem is about the nature of change yes you can use some ai tools to make it better i mean some of the tools some of people working with claude and some of them on your podcast are doing amazingly quick and insightful work and it's drastically improved and increased the time to market of analysis so it has a load of value but in and itself they are specific sort of dashboards they're creating they're not taking a systemic view to the data of an industry so when you look at again back to my finance question when the money looks at man united and or barcelona and it hears 800 million fans and we can chat about how a fan is defined and all the rest of it and then it it says right okay why is man united valued at between whatever five billions eight billion quid compared to pinterest which has got a massive valuation and has got you know claims roughly similar types of users or you know the big platforms and the money says right okay i want a fan to be closer to a platform user than he than than our definition of a fan in our imaginations and the clubs want to tell that story because obviously it impacts their valuation as organization so the money is waiting to be deployed but it doesn't believe the fan number and or it's saying yeah but you don't know who the fans are and therefore we're not going to you know your valuation is going to be pegged at the story of the fan rather than the reality of it and the classic sport you know the case study of the industry that gets wheeled out a lot is Barcelona Spotify yeah you know and they they see the difference between how many fans they know or you know and the claimed media story so just walk me through this what do you see when you hear that type of scenario because again if you're looking from the financial perspective that's where they see untapped value in the sports industry it's like even a club as storied as man united isn't doing it right or it's a it's there is a mismatch yeah i mean because on the models i've seen i've seen for some clubs not manchester united is that the models that extrapolate future value, apart from the sort of fixed issues like broadcasting, which is a collective deal, and maybe ticketing, but there's limits to that, those projections are based on a series of extractive valuations about how more money can come from individual fans and through which mechanisms.

42:43And those projections are based usually on projections that come from different industries like footfall in retail like if we have more people through the door they will generate so much money so if we have a bigger club shop they'll spend more now in the micro sense that is correct if you have more seats in your stand in the fall you'll get more money in but but the the sort of inflation level in those numbers are predicated on such bogus basis of what a fan is and how they will spend that they're essentially unprovable and my contention would be that they are mostly there to x to attract future capital investment by telling people look if you're going now the numbers are still going up you two can get on the bandwagon the numbers go up so we have essentially an industry in football where the majority of clubs lose money and have continuous done for ages and yet the industry is generating ever more revenues that cannot persist forever but people want to get on the bandwagon for a verse with us now they need these sorts of metrics to show it so you know in a bit way that like advertising and marketing digital advertising marketing have been completely you know distorted by the sort of cpms as your show has shown before football particularly and many

44:06Richard:sports particularly are going off these not bogus metrics but these massive inter over interpretations of of what are relatively micro improve improvements to sort of in-game value or or to the consumer spend it's almost as if sports consumers are given no limit to their capacity for spending and that's that's just not right yeah i increasingly don't believe them well you know you're not the only one if we bring it back to ai i guess is a is a point do you see anything there do you think that's a marketing game that is being played largely or is there something you know you're someone who worked on the internet in the 80s before i even knew there was an internet you'd have heard you know i've we've had professors of ai on who you know got their degrees in 1995 or whatever so these things have been allowed a long time i I always wonder what it looks like from someone as experienced as you to look at these things, say, OK, yeah, that's a marketing game.

45:06Richard:But actually, there's the value and there's the reality of it. And it must be very frustrating that those things, these questions keep coming back in the same guise. Not really. Human nature, I think. But AI and various parts of AI technologies will continue to add value for sport and embrace them quickly. You know, that's great. but they're not going to change the two questions I asked at the start. That's a sport to do that, which is, are you in charge of this thing, or are you just a fast follower, and how quickly will you change your organisational model to adopt technologies? And I don't think AI could be a very useful tool for any sport that decided to take a decision to unlock the value of, if you like, the collective of sport.

45:59Because if you keep doing the extractive, you get more and more skilled at extracting a finite amount of money from me and you. And there's only so much to go. So yes, it'll cost you less over time. You'll be better at it. It won't cost you so much to get the same amount of money out of my pocket. But it's still extractive. And over time, I'm getting a bit misty-eyed and romantic. but over time many of the sporting moments you talk about and you talk about in 25 you'll look back at the year it's interesting that the moments talked about are collective i gotta say the world cup for this year will be one of them the olympics last year that you know it sport has something that other industries banking finance airlines the nhs don't which is it has a latent value of the collective and its current model of technology and digital and data is essentially based in a 30-year model of the extractive of the individual it's not an either or but sports missing a huge trick and i wonder which sport will go for it first just don't just take me