UP570 Spin Class: Here We Go! Premier League Transfer Window Special

0:00Hi there, Richard Gillis here. Welcome. It's Spinclass and we're talking sports. sports comms, PR, reputation. I've got a revolving door of spin doctors and this week's collection is Kate Miller, Dan Johnson and Neil Doherty. Kate Miller, Chief Communications Officer of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Miller joined Spurs in November 2025 reporting to Chief Executive Vinay Venkatesham and sitting on the club's executive team where she leads supporter engagement, media relations, reputation management and CSR across the men's and women's side. She was previously at the England and Wales Cricket Board where she had been Director of Communications since 2019 running comms through a Cricket World Cup and Ashes Summer and The 100.

0:46Earlier in her career she was a partner at the agency Engine and worked in-house at William Hill. Dan Johnson spent 17 years as Director of Communications at the Premier League. After that he was Executive director for digital marketing and communications at Sport England and then held similar roles at the sports streaming company DAZN and production company Whisper, also a lifelong AFC Wimbledon supporter and active in the club's Supporter Trust. Neil Doherty is senior managing director and UK sports sector lead at Teneo and he runs the sports practice at the advisory firm where he has spent over a decade counselling leagues, governing bodies, clubs and private equity investors on crisis reputation and existential strategic issues across football cricket rugby tennis and horse racing he is a cambridge history and social politics science graduate pembroke college who came up through hill and knowlton and blue rubicon with a spell running teneo's qatar operation he also sits as senior independent director and trustee of the london youth games committed man united fan you don't hold that against him and a millwall regular this episode of unofficial partner is sponsored by our friends at leaders in sport there's a new home a new setup and plenty more to get excited about at leaders week london 2026 coming up in october the move brings the summit into central london with a new campus style experience designed to make it easier to move between the people you want to meet the conversations you want to hear and the business you're there to do they'll be all new agenda formats three stages of insight three stages of insight and more ways to connect throughout the day when day one finishes leaders after dark which sounds a bit sinister now i've read it out takes the networking into the evening across stanford bridge home of chelsea football club it's a proper evolution of leaders week and one we're looking forward to we'll see you there in october visit leaders in sport.com stroke up for more information and use up 15 for a whole 15 off your summit pass I want to just say hello so people know voices on the thing.

2:57So, Kate, we'll start with you. Kate, hi. Hi. How are you doing? I'm very well, thank you very much. Dan Johnson, hello. Hello. And also Neil Doherty, we've got him. We've got two returners and a new appointee. Morning, Richard. I was trying to work out if this is the Carabao Cup squad or the Champions League squad with your squad rotation. Well, definitely Champions League. Yes. Well, I mean, you talk about Chappell and Tibbs, They've got Europa League written all over them, stamped on their foreheads. Although it is a Thursday. Presumably, we have to be really careful about what we say here, because it's all being transcribed live by Nigel Rushman's supercomputer before you've even thought it.

3:36Well, interesting that, because he then, I said afterwards to him, having apparently this sort of ransacked the unofficial party, he said, oh, actually, I got that wrong. You can't do that. I'm going to start us off because we're just off the back of Transfer Window, and I'm really, really interested in Transfer Window. And this is a sort of safe space to talk about comms issues and stories and narratives and how they land and where they go and what we do. And I think Transfer Window has got so many interesting bits to it. And I think it's sort of part of a broader thing that I quite like to get into, which is about what happens to sort of quasi business stories when they get filtered through football and the football media.

4:20But we'll tumble into all that as we go past. Kate, we need to start with you because you've been right in the middle of this. and just there's a question about what's it like because I sort of it's I'm a Spurs fan you're running comms at Spurs and they've had a particularly interesting window what just take us inside that a little bit what's it like when you're seeing this and then looking at the stories that you need to put out yeah I mean I but it's my first summer transfer window I joined Spurs at the back end of last year and I think I was probably more surprised than I expected to be about the kind of the dance of it all really and the the conversations the speed of it I've I found I find astonishing like we're talking about huge sums of money and the speed of the transactions is really did take me by surprise bearing in mind that one of the last things I did before coming over to football was work on the hundred sale and that was very quite long and drawn out in part so the sort of speed of it and the agility of it really shocked me and really surprised me and I actually found it really impressive.

5:24You'll be talking to a player and the transactions team or Vinay and Johan and Rafi Mawson, who joined us recently, will be talking maybe a little bit about terms and where we're getting to. And then all of a sudden they're there having their medical. So I think that was probably the most astonishing thing I have found about it always, just the pace of it. And then just the general sort of interest and the general, the number of players that we were either linked to was gargantuan in comparison to what reality was. and everyone knew that we were obviously going to be active in the market and I think that fueled things even more but I guess pace noise and fan interest have the the things that surprised me the most.

6:01Yeah Dan I think this is something that's sort of evolved the transfer media thing there's a whole social media thing but it's also part and parcel now of Football Journal. Was it always like that or is it has it just been sharpened? There's some obviously some very prominent transfer specialists out there and social but has it always been like this or is it am I imagining this well I mean I think the volume like everything around Premier League and football has just been turned up that bit louder so I mean I can remember the kind of peak Sky Sports news with kind of yellow ties and the lives from outside the grounds which were pretty hairy kind of broadcasting and it used to frustrate us at the premier league that there was so much kind of tabloid ease and uh and so much kind of hype around it because it would really kind of give this sense of like a careening out of control on strategic approach to uh to how clubs were purchasing players and that would then feed into some big macro issues around kind of the nature of the Premier League.

7:11And so what's happened is more and more people have kind of been attracted to that. As you say, you've got the likes of your transfer window specialists like Ben Jacobs and David Ornstein, who are kind of probably on the more kind of sensible end of things. I mean, you've got, you bleed between what some people would describe as kind of journalist-coming influencers, like Fabrizio Romano and others in that kind of space, who are quite often kind of nakedly being used to kind of drive a particular kind of perspective. And I can imagine from a club or a player or an agent, if you're on the other end of that and you're not utilising that, then that could be very frustrating.

7:53I think the other flip side of that is I think more of a mainstream media has turned the volume down a bit. So I think Sky Sports News is much more considered. It will kind of wait. It's lost the maximum of, I mean, probably an unfair maxim at the time, but never wrong for long. And men will report in a much more kind of considered way. And I think that is interesting because like newspapers, traditional newspapers, traditional journalists, traditional mainstream media will take, put greater store on their authority of getting it right and building relationships around that. Neil, what do you think?

8:31interesting you mentioned Fabrizio Romano because I was looking at his social media following and I think he's got 140 million followers across all platforms which is greater than Arsenal or Spurs sorry to say Kate because Spurs has a lot of social media followers but that must be really difficult to deal with because I need to be quite careful here because I think Nick Harris has done some very interesting investigative work on Fabrizio Romano for sporting intelligence and also for the Daily Mail. Unfortunately, we don't have quite as expensive lawyers as the Daily Mail at Taneo, so I would probably refer you to his coverage of that.

9:05But the fundamental accusations are that he is double dipping sometimes. So he's effectively making a market by taking unsubstantiated, unverified commentary from agents that would then say a player is in the market to create false competition to bid up a price. And also then he's maybe passing off other people's exclusives and these are nick's allegations rather than mine his work but passing off other people's exclusives as his own but then because he's got a much bigger microphone with those 140 million followers and actually yeah we're almost in a post-truth environment with football transfers as well because to some extent it doesn't really matter whether that becomes a deal or not because it drives interest in where is bradley barkler going to go is he going to go to liverpool is he going to spurs etc and there probably is a market of interest among a younger generation of fans just in the market itself before actually seeing the players play okay the influencer question does it play in a material way into the way in which you sort of communicate transfers out yeah i mean we've we obviously got aims of our own around transactions and windows but trying to manage noise is always something that you want to prioritize either if it's not accurate we'd always want to try and be as accurate as possible but yeah it does create a huge amount of noise and it does pique fans interest and speculation and I guess particularly where we're concerned with this window when we were incredibly active and we were busy it can be both helpful and unhelpful really but in my mind it's a little bit uncontrollable when we're talking about that big an audience size really and when it's being viewed as being legitimate and having accuracy but that i think that would always be i'm surrounded by like like quite calm smart thinkers really who thankfully aren't aren't wildly reacted to these things and do understand how it all works but yeah it can create quite a huge amount of tension and noise and not just for the players that we're transacting but also the players that we've got on our squad already so yeah it can it can be make things really noisy that the noise there's a couple of things the noise thing so dan you mentioned there about the bigger picture thing and i think that the money so transfers are the transfer window is like a proxy into a finance conversation around football and then you get to things like that i never understand either sort of the the acronyms around squad rotation numbers or whatever pcr all of that sort of what you might call kieran maguire territory you get that sort of price of football area when you look at that there's the noise and you've got someone like so Gary Neville talks about the noise and the market for noise the overlap is basically tapping into the non-live stuff around football and that's real and valuable what was the Premier League worried about back then is it that the money has taken over the story of the football is that what you're getting at well i think i mean i jotted down a couple of words that were kind of thrown around in articles because i mean we've just had a record another record-breaking transfer window 3.5 billion outstripping our european counterparts etc etc and our kind of media are checking around words like absurd and obscene yeah and things like that And all it is, is the money that's being spent is a factor of the income that the clubs receive and generate themselves.

12:31So our kind of, the Premier League's kind of concern, and you used to kind of reach these kind of milestones, whether it was like the first£50 million player or the first, you know, we just had a kind of preponderance of£100 million player. The first time it was in excess of a billion. The first time that agent's fees were in excess of£100 million. and all that kind of stuff. And people try and draw conclusions from that. From a communications perspective, I suppose it becomes a bit of a kind of arm wrestle for control of the narrative, where you want to say, right, well, actually clubs are behaving in a sustainable way.

13:06They're investing in their squad. That's kind of what football fans want to see. No football fan wants to see a club not investing and developing, for want of a better word, the product. the 25-man squad or the 11 players that are going to be on the pitch. So you get those kind of like, well, what does it really mean kind of stuff? And how does it then kind of feed into your kind of acronym? So SCR, squad cost, squad control ratio. Another one, SSR, sustainability and systemic resilience, which is further health checks on how clubs are run and live reporting and things like that. So, I mean, that was interesting because Miguel Delaney, I've got a lot of time for, and he's a very good journalist, went really hard on this private capital, private kind of funding, going into supporting clubs transfer investment.

14:04And actually, it's like, well, that's fine because it's all been done sustainably and it's all been checks and balances in place to ensure that is done on an ongoing and sustainable basis. but taken in isolation you go look should we be worried about this is this kind of the the big short for that's but that's uh neil i'll bring you in a sec but that that is a story that you're right you've got the transfer window number you've got the media rights number and salaries is also a number and that story of sort of unsustainability and the financial crash type sort of aspect there's five to midnight and all of that is it's odd but it has been going on for 20 25 years people have been calling the top of the premier league market for a very long time longer as well i mean it's like we used to put this uh quote in our annual report from the daily telegraph in 1901 talking about the investment in it was i think it was like from deloitte had it originally but talking about these kind of like too many foreign players and like the club being run that's just unsustainably and the foreign players were Stots and Welsh players and the unsustainability was like in 1901.

15:21We also used to kind of pull kind of similar articles. I think Richard Scudamore for his 50th birthday got a football annual. And again, he used to kind of leaf through that in front of journalists and go, look, all the stories are the same. So just kind of keep moving on. But that's not to say that the regulations, the checks and balances, the interest, the scrutiny, has all kind of moved on. And as I said earlier, the volume has been turned up because that's a natural consequence of the enduring and growing popularity of Premier League football. I think the wider backdrop of like shock and awe around finances, like, and you look at the wider sort of societal landscape, like we've had the age of austerity, like costs are going up, costs of living's increasing all the time.

16:03The issues that are happening in the Middle East, like people, like, it feels like fairy tale language a lot of the time. like the numbers that you talk about like they feel unreal right and so i think that drives the conversation as well is that people are on the one hand are debating that milk's gone up or bread's gone up or the energy cap's going to go up again and that's going to impact people and then we're talking about trading humans for hundreds of millions of pounds like i think that i think that fuels a lot of the noise as well lurpak spreadable is the one i worry about neil i was going to say i think there's a sort of law of unintended consequences with some of the regulation here because money is like water it typically finds the weakest point in the system and it escapes through that and you've moved to this squad cost ratio model whereby it's now clubs can spend 80 85 of football related revenues on player wages transfers fees and agent fees which before that you had psr which was related to all revenue so beyonce plays at the spurs stadium that revenue goes towards what's better that and what that has actually done is now in some respects it's trying to make it more sustainable now also define sustainable because in any other walk of life a business is spending 90 of its revenues or 80 85 of its revenues on employees wages it probably is not a sustainable business but this is this is football world which is sort of through through the looking glass but it has driven therefore quite different behaviors whereby uh you're again getting into the sort of kieran maguire territory and i know you're talking to your mates down the pub apparently richard about amortization of playways but whereby you could buy a play of 125 million and then spread the cost of that over five years and then you're incentivized to sell academy players but i think the really interesting thing about that is the long-term impact on fans relationship with players and clubs and i want to use the example of elliot anderson because he was the third biggest transfer in this transfer window moving from forest to man city for 116 million now that i think forest put 80 million book profit they booked on that but the only reason he's playing at forest is because under the previous financial regime of psr newcastle had to sell him in order to comply with their psr calculations now here's a lad who's played for Walls End Boys, that sort of storied path through to Newcastle United, has been playing for Newcastle United since the age of eight, wants to play for Newcastle United.

18:32In another era, he should probably have been the new Kevin Keegan and played all his career at Newcastle United. And I think clubs are now incentivised almost to flip players, to sign them on a five-year contract, realise some book value, flip them after three years of that, and then start again. Or to grow academy players and then flip them because that's pure book profit and i think longer term that is going to create a rupture between fans who quite frankly like to think that the guy who's on the pitch could be stood next to them in the stands if he wasn't on the pitch so i think that's sort of a law of unintended consequences where something that was in a well-intentioned way intended to create a more sustainable financial model might actually break that fan engagement over a longer period of time there's a question there's a sort of specific comms question which is who answers these questions quite often they fall to the manager and increasingly the manager feels ill-equipped i'm not talking any about specifics here kate but i've been interested in your view about where these types of questions land and where they should land and who should be fronting and who should be answering them because obviously if the manager is being asked about the finances of clubs and the sustainability of the broader club it sort of feels a bit above their pay grade or there's a sort of miss connection there so that separation of the conversation about football and money i'm wondering where it lands and whether it's in the right place and how that plays into the board and chief exec role and all these things because they're the people that probably and the oh you get to the owner and i think the owner and the communications around owners i think is a really interesting sort of area because i think owners almost become new managers in the sense that they are the all powerful alex ferguson type personality who you could ask any question of what do you think about that in terms of where this the money story lands from and what do you do with that yeah it's a tricky one because obviously it's all incredibly commercially sensitive as well and so we don't particularly want to talk about the nuances of deals or individual players or what budgets might look like but that that isn't something that you actively want to talk about but you do land on an interesting conundrum which is the coach or the manager is the one that's regularly on the men's side and on the women's side they're regularly going up they're the effectively the most public face for the organization and so they do tend to field if there's a question that's relevant in that moment it does tend to be fielded by the manager I mean I've heard some super interesting stories this year down the things that Roberto's responsible for down to things like what brand of turmeric shop do we have in the restaurant afterwards like the view the view from kind of the wider world on how much responsibility a manager or coach will take on at a club seems to vary quite wildly and they're also all very different within that themselves as well what they are interested in what type of coach they are what areas of the club they want to get involved in and what they want to drive whether it's culture whether it's technical side whether it is nutrition or s and c so that would be one in sort of observation i'd share with you is that the scope of what they are they need to be across feels feels pretty big and roberto is obsessed with football and wants to talk about football i don't think he particularly wants to talk about the nuances of transactions so yeah you do then pose an interesting problem where does that go and who does field that generally it would be Vinay my CEO our CEO my boss who is the person best place to talk about the business of football so ultimately it should really be answered by him but I think our view overall would be it's incredibly commercially sensitive we obviously want to be as transparent as possible with fans but sometimes there are questions that we just aren't going to answer and we aren't going to put that information out in the public domain?

22:25I think it also depends a lot on the kind of stage of like the development of the club uh the kind of particular kind of view of any individual club at any kind of particular point in time and how they want to communicate around that I mean I think Newcastle's an interesting example they've got a new uh CEO in there uh David Hopkins he's a really good communicator I think I think he has done some good work in terms of how he's kind of rolled the pitch and kind of positioned the kind of movement that's kind of come around at Newcastle, the kind of shift in the model. They kind of handled the departure of Eddie Howe, who clearly was that principal kind of spokesperson for the club and would field a lot of those questions around kind of sustainability and financial rules and regulations.

23:20and evolved that kind of position of the club. And I think it's worked well in terms of the fans and the broader kind of football stakeholder group understanding what Newcastle are trying to do. And I think that has given the club confidence to put someone like Ross Wilson up. So Ross has come out and he's done some stuff and he's given some real insight into actually how the transfer window kind of evolved the sort of plans that they had in place. And I think that kind of level of transparency has worked for Newcastle at this particular point in time. Now, that's not to say it's going to work all the time for Newcastle, and there might be other transfer windows where they go, right, well, actually, we're just going to keep it very tight, and we'll do announcements, and we'll do very kind of controlled things, and we'll concentrate the messaging through the Isla.

24:12But I think it just kind of shifts and changes. I mean, Man United is a really interesting example where the Glazers have essentially outsourced kind of front of house to Jim Ratcliffe. Now, whether Jim thinks that's a good thing or a bad thing, I think he probably thought it was a good thing to start off with. He probably thinks it's less of a good thing now. And they probably need to broaden their bench of spokespeople in order to try and kind of explain what we're trying to do. because I think a lot is falling on the manager at the moment, which is probably unfair. And Jim will do kind of certain set-piece things, but I don't think it kind of answers the gold bridge critique.

24:58Kate? Yeah, I mean, it's quite interesting because storytelling around sport and football is always massive. We could go anywhere. And I look upon a stable of incredible speakers in the women's game, in the men's game, in the technical department, in the medical department. got an amazing new performance director i've already mentioned raffi mawson who's come to us recently as our sort of director of transactions but people don't really want to don't really want to hear from them they want to go straight to the top of the shop and they want to either speak to ownership or to vinay or to roberto or to johan so that's the interesting thing for me is i could pitch some incredibly compelling people but people do just want to go to the top i think it's quite an interesting point that you've posed there with the Man United case.

25:41And that's a challenge for us is to say, OK, well, that person's busy doing big transactions or is engaging in European matters or Premier League matters. But here's another host of people you might want to speak to. And they do just want to go straight to the top of the shop. And I think fans probably want that too. I think that's a really interesting point you made about the storytelling is that it seems to be like the transfer window is this notion of who won the transfer window even a couple of seasons back was it last season that well liverpool have won the transfer window and then proceeded to have a kind of underwhelming season so so the the nature of the kind of communications and how you kind of position yourself during a transfer window is kind of helps kind of set the narrative for the season but then the actuality, the reality of the season is the thing that's really important and then how are you going to build upon that?

26:37So I'm not saying it's unimportant because it is important. We live in a kind of world of vibes at the moment that we're told kind of like under our current Prime Minister. But the vibes around the transfer window are important and they will help set the context. But what's more important is actually what's happening on the pitch. I'd actually just like to build on that as well because we've used obviously it probably goes without saying that the spurs have undergone a period of change probably like unlike many other organizations over the last 12 months like I've never worked anywhere where there's been that much wholesale change and we've really used just creatively and I know we're talking more from a business angle but we've really used creatively to use our transfers in and out as like a real moment of reconnection with our fan base that we've brought back former legends we've used staff members to unveil signings that we've made and we've kind of really tried to use it as both a reset moment for the club but also a massive reconnection moment and getting people to feel like we are kind of one big Spurs family the phrase gets used quite a lot but one big Spurs family again and I don't I kind of I can't a bit of me feels that sometimes the business of the transfer window overshadows the poetry of the transfer window and like the hope and reconnection and kind of creativity that it feels and the conversation online about what's this going to mean like and i think we sometimes lose the beauty of that because the money amounts are so big yeah neil yeah no i just it's fascinating listening to people in inside clubs who are going through this because i do wonder i think dan makes a good point how long does the honeymoon period last for it buys you operating space of hope but if those players don't gel on the pitch then that that pretty soon dissipates so you judge the transfer window not in on the 1st of september you judge the or you judge the transfer window on the 5th of may in terms of who's won trophies there's a there's a who's not relegated absolutely and i think there's it's interesting kate used the h word the hope word which then again is very underrated and i think i remember we talked to mo bobat who's a cricket yeah most great performance guy and he made the point about winning and losing and how you win and lose and how long you have a period of time and one of the things that you know the dream scenario you've got like this sort of mckinsey four box thing and you've got losing winning with style is the sort of top right everyone loves that there is a period where if you are playing the way the fans want to play and losing there is a bit of space that you get but not again the honeymoon isn't very long and then obviously bottom left is losing without style which is uh is a night the nightmare so the other lens on it and links to transfer window is direction a sense of direction a sense of plan and we're moving forward in some way towards some target that is discernible rather than it being a complete scramble so the sense that there is someone overseeing a strategy a roadmap playbook whatever cliche you want to use that quite often is a useful framing device isn't it because you sort of say right okay they're spending money they're going young they're going andy robertson but there is a plan in place and let's just give them some time to let that play out so i've got a very recent example of that i was at the den on tuesday night when milwall lost 1-0 to newcastle united and it was described almost universally by the fans as a very hopeful loss.

30:14They'd gone toe-to-toe with a first-choice Premier League team. Millwall have got 13 first-team players out at the moment and the manager, towards the end of the game, wants to equalise, go through to the next round, but he put two 15-year-olds on, a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old. And that was doing two things. It was saying, look, there's a plan for the future here. It was also making sure that if those players move on to other clubs, the club is well compensated. But it was also sending a message to fans of the broadcast viewers back home that I'm doing this with a bare bones as well. And I thought that was very astute, both game management, but also communications from Alex Neal, the Millwall manager.

30:57I think, I mean, going back to the framing point and trying to get beyond the money is a massive challenge. And I mean, when I was in the Premier League and subsequently at places like the Zone, people would obsess about the money, whether it was like the broadcast rights or the losses of the Zone or whatever. But trying to kind of get beyond that and kind of build a narrative to Kate's point about the direction of travel, what we're trying to do, what we're trying to achieve, is sometimes masked by the sheer size of the figures involved. And we'd try and talk about, towards the end, when we started doing these kind of mega deals with Sky and BT and others, we would talk less about the overall kind of figure, but more about what it meant the clubs would be able to do, be able to invest in youth, invest in facilities.

31:55and I still think that's a kind of challenge in the game and particularly in the transfer window because the figures become like counterpoints. So with another VAR kind of issue at the weekend, a lot of people said, oh, three and a half billion spent on transfers. How much more investment would it take to get VAR right? And it's just like, well, I mean, to me, they're slightly non-sequiturs because, I mean, you will never ever get VAR are absolutely spot on. There will always be mistakes. And that's another kind of issue for how the AR has been positioned. But it's an unhelpful counterpoint which gets picked up by the media, gets picked up by fans.

32:37The clubs are spending, the Premier League, spending all this money on transfers and they're still making mistakes. Kate, there's the money question when it gets pointed at women's football and the women's team. You've had Michelle Kang out this week doing a sort of press thing. and that's a story about money that's a story about a rich person coming in and build it and they'll come there's all sorts of messages that they were putting out this week around london lionesses i always get this wrong and tracy crouch always has a go at me for getting the club name wrong the london city lionesses i always get those the words in the wrong order money in the men's game is used as a proxy success power although all of that so the money is flowing in and people moan about how it's spent but in the women's game that the messages are slightly different how does it play what's what role does this bit of the conversation play in the on the women's side in terms of because we talk about noise but actually not other sports would love football's noise and they would love the just the amount of stuff that we talk about all day every day that between matches and i think sometimes the women's game hasn't got the architecture the media architecture that the men's game has it hasn't got that noise going on in the same way what do you think oh there's so many things to comment on there i mean part of that i think is to do with media algorithms now and coverage and visibility follows clicks and clicks follow the men's game more than the women's game at the moment so it's a hard one to it's a hard one to see how that can be reconciled because media is a tough space at the moment i'm not quite sure how that does get navigated likewise with kind of broadcast numbers but I think we always have to be mindful about sustainability and there is I think it's fair to say there are some concerns that if the women's game follows the men's game like it's not going it's not going to be viable in the long term we do have to build audiences we talk a lot about a kind of one club two teams philosophy and how do we Spurs women have only been professionalized for a very short period of time and to a certain degree I think women's football has kind of happened to Tottenham rather than us happening to women's football but it's fair to say we're trying to become a much bigger player in the game now made some great signings really pushed for quite a young vibrant exciting squad but we haven't done what Michelle's done and some of an Arsenal have done some of the others tried to own that kind of big international player space probably for a bit of sustainability reasons but also because we're trying to build right we've got a brilliant manager in Martin Ho a brilliant young squad who punched way above their weight last season and I think will do even better this season fingers crossed but I think ultimately yeah it does come down to sustainability you do have to be mindful of that and I think fearful probably the right word would be that it doesn't outgrow itself and eat itself ultimately in in the sort of short to medium term Yeah, yeah.

35:31Neil? Yeah, I mean, it'd be fascinating to hear your view, Kate, on what maybe women's football could learn from the 100 and what was built there. But I think there is a structural thing as well, which could be a fix around, and it was in the Carney report into women's football anyway, but to give women's football a dedicated broadcast slot that's not on a Sunday night, which is going to be, if you're going for younger family audiences with kids, putting it at 8 o 'clock on a Sunday night is not great, right? And if we had a regulatory change to Article 48 to allow live broadcast of women's football at three o 'clock on a Saturday afternoon, I don't think that would cannibalize men's football.

36:13But it would give a predictable broadcast slot and a window that you could build a brand and marketing around in a more sustainable way. But it's interesting you talk about Michelle Kang and London City Lionesses because she's done that with a sort of a breakaway women's only team. But I'd be interested in Dan's views on this, given his involvement with the AFC Wimbledon Supporters Trust. But actually, they are in some respect to the MK Dons of women's football as well, because they split away from Millwall Lionesses and walked away prior to Michelle becoming involved. then she's become involved and they have actually picked players out of FC Barcelona Femeni as the you know, basically Women's Champions League champions because, and we're back to this point about sustainability, because Barcelona are not paying those players enough money because they're suffering for the financial sins of the men's team.

37:04So it is all sort of wrapped up together but I do think having a dedicated broadcast slot would really help to build the profile of women's football okay we're all desperate to chip in i was just going to add broadcast tax credits being critical to that as well around women's football i think that's a really important point as we do it for other sectors the government recognized that women's sport is a is a huge growth area for the uk i think broadcast tax credits could be quite instrumental for women's football just explain what they are so it's a bit like you see like around pinewood studios and the making if you think about it in the film sector like you want to encourage british filmmaking and producers and directors to come here.

37:42And I think the Harry Potter franchise is probably a good example because a lot of it was built here. But effectively, you get to claim part of your tax back for broadcasting. So it would be big for Sky and the major broadcasters and encourage them to show more women's football. And this is completely separate, but it's always where, doesn't Gary Barlow and Jimmy Carr, their tax gets sort of filtered through some of those schemes? I'm not wealthy enough. I ever hear about those schemes is when some celebrities caught up in them. That's an entirely different thing. Those were like deliberate loss-making films, vehicles, which have been subsequently banned.

38:22I apologise. But I think what Kate's saying, I think he's 100 % endorsed that. I think Sky is doing brilliant work leading that kind of campaign. When I was at Whisper, I made sure we aligned to that campaign. And the point that I made when I was at Whisper into government was this isn't about production companies or broadcasters trying to make more money. It's trying to create the opportunity to invest more money into a women's game. Because I think there's a kind of inflection point where there's lots of kind of opportunity for the women's football and women's sport more broadly. But there's also kind of lots of challenges.

39:02I think Neil's point about the space is very well made. In a world where you've got, how many are we up to? Like 270 Premier League games. There's huge pressure to end the Article 48, 3pm closed window for the Premier League. And there's a whole kind of variety of really strong reasons why that's on the agenda. They want to drive further value. That's kind of opportunity to do that. They also want to prevent that kind of gateway into piracy. So it's an opportunity to kind of seal that off. but at the same time I think if that is then allowed then two things one a provision needs to be made for a kind of a slot and a space where the women's game can grow and breathe and also some provision for for greater solidarity payments down through the football pyramid including beyond beyond the football league and into the national leagues also needs to be made to preserve the financial sustainability of the game at that level as well.

40:00One of the stories of the last sort of week or so has been the BBC's sort of decision to drop its women's football. Ski Sunday was a headline, but also they sort of dropped the women's football show. And then Alex Scott is then, they're going to go on to YouTube with what people are describing as a sort of overlap-ish type product that sits on YouTube with Alex Scott fronting it. And I was trying to work out whether that was sort of a good or a bad thing. what do we think about that in terms of just that because the role of the bbc and its relationship to the women's game is important and they screen games and the rest of it but what is it that bit it felt like okay that could be quite a smart move because i think if there is something to be built there but again it's just trying to work out how that iterates neil generally free to air gives you exposure and pay tv gives you revenue and i just wonder if the women's game has yet got escape velocity to achieve that without free-to-air exposure and again that's back to kate's experience of the hundred which would be really interesting to hear about i think i yeah i would totally agree with that for me it's the virtuous circle of like reach relevance and resonance really it's got to be everything they certainly will get youth and younger audiences with a YouTube model, but BBC gives, BBC and Linear TV gives breadth, scope, and probably a bit more into sort of intergenerational audiences as well, which is really critically important still.

41:34There's a little bit of me that still thinks that people really overlook the conversion of men's football fans into sort of male men's football fans into being fans of women's football. And I don't know why it isn't so readily embraced in football. It certainly was in cricket. I went and watched England women play at Somerset once and the ground was either full of older grey-haired men or young girls because Somerset had managed to build this really passionate and engaged women's cricket fan base from their existing membership. And I do think there's a good conversion there that's often overlooked.

42:07The other thing I would say as well is around football is, what is it they say, comparisons, the thief of all joy. and I think comparing men's football to women's football is in itself a mistake as well like it's too easily done like we know men's and women's tennis is different and they can be appreciated for completely different beautiful reasons likewise men's and women's cricket has is getting to a point of evolution where it's being appreciated for its different styles and ways of being played and women's football is definitely the case there so I think a lot of it is just this imprinting of the men's game the business structures are of the men's game this is how football is played through the lens of a men's game is partly erroneous as well yeah absolutely and what i think one of the interesting things i think one of the kind of growing kind of realization over probably the past couple of years in reluctance especially in relation to women's football is i think off the back of the kind of euro success there was this kind of idea that it was going to be like a an avalanche of change and it was just all yeah everybody was going to kind of flood in it was going to become massively popular the brands would kind of sweep in and it would happen really quickly and i think and dwelling on the not making a comparison but then going to make a comparison is that men's football has had decades and decades of like building up and building up a kind of fan base and the kind of evolution you know the Premier League was not an overnight success, etc, etc.

43:35And so I think there needs to be some kind of expectation management about the kind of pace that it's going to develop and going to commercially develop. And I think that's a strength rather than a weakness because I think it can avoid the mistakes that the men's game has made and build its own kind of personality, its own fan base, its own space. which I think will be to the long-term benefit. Just on that then, so I agree, and that's sort of the same or different thing. Dan, you'll remember we did the thing at DAZN when you were at DAZN. We had an evening and I remember pitching an IPL for women's football, which went down like a British heavyweight in the end.

44:20You were the most popular man in the room. But there is, again, you keep bumping into that as an idea. It's interesting, Man City's badge thing this week. I mean, it was quite, there's a design, there's a small micro bit of the argument, but actually it felt like, to your point about one club, two teams, Kate, it felt like, okay, there is a personality, a difference that is being projected there, even on a very simple level of a shirt design. what do you do so Kate when you're looking at that are the teams this is a difficult question but are the teams is the brand the same on both sides of men's and women's at Spurs or at a football club are they is it a sort of house of brands where you've got the women's team and they're both playing is it to dare to do is that I can't remember what the uh yeah or Darius Yes, for series.

45:14Yeah, to dare is to do. It's a good question. And it's, I talked earlier on about the change that's happening at Spurs. And it's actually one of the kind of things that we're really looking at is how do we have, and Dan made the point, a men's side that's had nearly 150 years of marketing and investment and quite a new sort of startup almost in the women's space. How do you bring those two things together when you've also got two teams that play different styles of football, which is a big part of their brand? I think there's ways of doing that. And I think it is an overarching master brand that probably just manifests itself slightly differently in the way that you present the teams but I think it's it would the unintended consequences of doing them separately is that the women will just remain outliers and they would never really feel as connected to the sort of central club narrative as they need to so for me I wouldn't I don't think it's right for them to be too separate for me the beautiful sweet spot is finding something that sits over I'm getting all hand flappy because I'm this is my one of my favorite topics but Like creating narratives, like how we create something that's brilliantly overarching and can just be executed through a sort of men's football and a women's football lens is the real sweet spot on how you make that work.

46:23I mean, and that's donning my AFC Wimbledon hat now. I mean, that's a challenge that is felt at all levels of the game. We've got a really strong and successful women's team got promoted two seasons ago. We're in the third tier. it's a real kind of financial struggle to stay in the third tier for a club the size of AFC Wimbledon. But at the same time, we are very driven by one Wimbledon kind of attitude. And I think at this particular kind of juncture in the development of the women's team and the development of the men's team, we want to hold the women's team closer, actually bring it closer into the club and allow others to see the kind of value of that and actually how we can expand our kind of commercial horizons by having a strong and successful women's team.