SportsPro Magazine - April 2016

April 2016 | Issue 86

www.sportspromedia.com

APRIL 2016 | Issue 86 @SportsPro

The outlook for federations in 2016 March Madness and the college boom Auckland welcomes the world

CONTENTS | APRIL 2016 ďšť ISSUE 86

46 COVER STORY 46

Back on the front foot In a rapidly changing era and a sport caught between its own traditions, expansionist ambitions and a single dominant market, International Cricket Council chief executive David Richardson must help plot a path to true modernity.

INSIGHTS 32 38

The Bulletin Taking a gamble on fantasy sports Amid uncertainty at home, American fantasy sports company DraftKings is making its push into English soccer.

42

60

Shifting gear: Kitbag and the Fanatics global strategy US sports merchandise giant Fanatics is hoping to corner soccer's e-commerce market by buying the UK's Kitbag.

60

International Fencing Federation president Alisher Usmanov explains how the sport is meeting the challenges of a new Olympic era.

FEATURES 54

38

Thrust forward

Fighting back Ahead of the SportAccord Convention in Lausanne, the leaders of major international federations reveal how they will respond to a year of turmoil.

66

The Profile: Million dollar idea JB Bernstein is the US sports agent whose search for baseball talent in India was the inspiration for a hit Disney ďŹ lm.

SportsPro Magazine | 3

CONTENTS | APRIL 2016 ďšť ISSUE 86

74

Kotahitanga SportsPro heads to New Zealand to find out how Auckland is marrying shrewd planning to national sporting tradition to create a genuinely worldleading destination.

88

The big dance Even the president has his tip for US college basketball's national championship, and the NCAA is capitalising on March Madness.

94

Merch madness With former graduates creating a devoted fanbase, college sport has become the latest target for bigspending apparel brands.

98

74

Culture clash The Irish capital of Dublin is the unlikely destination for what is becoming college football's biggest international event.

108 Company Profile: Pixel Universal Australia's Pixel Universal is bringing its turnkey LED screen solutions to stadiums and arenas in Europe.

102 A new charter Nascar has unveiled fundamental changes to its ownership rules ahead of a pivotal season.

18 20 22 24 30

Premature Facts Movers and Shakers SportsPro World Gallery The Shot: Soccer's Chinese boom

AT THE FRONT 6 8 10 12 16

Editor’s Letter Notes and Observations The PA column Digest

AT THE BACK 110 112 116 118

Deals Review Sponsorship Deals Index Jottings

Thought Leader:

Soccer: A commercial aphrodisiac Jim Dowling

17

Moving to their own Beats Misha Sher

88

102

SportsPro (ISSN 1756 5340), (April 2016 edition) is published monthly by SportsPro Media Ltd and distributed in the USA by Mail Right Int., 1637 Stelton Road B4, Piscataway, NJ 08854.

3HULRGLFDOV 3RVWDJH 3DLG DW 3LVFDWDZD\ 1- DQG DGGLWLRQDO PDLOLQJ RIĂ€FHV POSTMASTER: Send address changes to SportsPro, SportsPro Media, C/o 1637 Stelton Road B4, Piscataway NJ 08854

4 | www.sportspromedia.com

EDITOR’S LETTER

Seeking an accord t’s the fundamental question in this game. Are you in sport to make money, or do you make money for the good of sport?

For plenty of businesses around the industry, whether they’re in ticketing or television or tasty snacks, the answer is pretty plainly the former. However exciting the surroundings might be, companies offering services, spotting opportunities and looking for sales in sport face the same challenges and can only be driven by the same motivations as they are anywhere else.

7here are plenty of people running leagues and teams who’d offer the Àrst answer as well they wouldn’t necessarily be people ,’d agree with. But for those at the head of national and international federations, surely only the latter response will do.

And that, of course, is where things get complicated. Best practice in the proÀt driven corporate world applies some of the time, not all of the time. The top end is what catches the eye but nothing grows if the roots aren’t tended. That rule change that might attract a new audience and unlock record commercial deals could equally be the one that ends up killing the sport. Even the noblest initiatives need proper funding. ,t’s a hell of a bind even before you consider the vicissitudes of human nature, or the ugly compromises that can come from serving such a broad constituency.

Federations are the guardians of something bigger than themselves. That, as much as anything, is why the reaction to the transgressions of recent times has been so forceful. Administrators can be afforded little leeway if seen to be running things to their own ends. And trust is a currency that is difÀcult to measure ² until, that is, there is none left. ,n this context, corruption is not the only vice. The ,nternational &ricket &ouncil ² whose chief executive, 'avid 5ichardson, has spoken to us for this issue ² found a chasm had opened between it and fans of its sport after updates to its governance gave greater power to the richest three national boards those of ,ndia, England and Australia. ,n recent weeks it has begun rowing back on those changes under a new chairman, ,ndia’s 6hashank 0anohar, hopefully fostering a more open and inclusive culture. ,t was perhaps at the 6portAccord &onvention last year that the tone was set for a year of bloodletting in sports governance when 0arius 9i]er, then president of 6portAccord, eschewed the usual platitudes in favour of a sustained assault on the way of doing things. This year’s event begins with a new president of Fifa, as *ianni ,nfantino completes his Mourney from stand in candidate to one of sport’s most powerful people. :orld soccer’s governing body may even, Ànally, have begun the process of saving itself from itself after passing a package of sorely needed reforms. ,t will take more than *ianni ,nfantino to drag Fifa back from the abyss, and it will take more than good intentions to bring renewal.

What is clear, though, is that a new era is already on its way. How that pans out is another question.

I

Federations are the guardians of something bigger than themselves.

Eoin Connolly Editor

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR James Emmett

MANAGING DIRECTOR Nick Meacham

EDITOR Eoin Connolly

COMMERCIAL CONSULTANT Richard Partridge

SUB EDITOR Adam Nelson

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGERS Jon Abraham, Bobby Hare, Mark Baring, Charlie Barker, James Russell

DIGITAL EDITOR Michael Long DEPUTY DIGITAL EDITORS George Dudley, Tom Lloyd ART DIRECTOR Daniel Brown PHOTOGRAPHIC AGENCY Action Images MEDIA PARTNER Press Association

6 | www.sportspromedia.com

SUBSCRIPTIONS Bhav Sahota MARKETING MANAGER Stephanie McMillan BUSINESS OPERATIONS MANAGER Yéwandé Aruléba EVENTS MANAGER Yin Khoo

SportsPro magazine is published by: SportsPro Media Ltd 3rd Floor, Two America Square, London EC3N 2LU, UK Tel: +44 (0) 207 549 3250 Fax: +44 (0) 207 549 3255 Email: info@sportspromedia.com Web: www.sportspromedia.com (SportsPro Media Ltd is part of the Henley Media Group Ltd www.henleymediagroup.com) NOTICES: April 2016 Issue No 86 SportsPro Magazine (ISSN 1756-5340) is published monthly on the first Thursday of the prior month to the cover date. Printed in the EU.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: Available at a cost of UK£199 (Print subscription), and UK£149 (Digital Subscription). Back issues are available for UK£25 and delivered anywhere in the world at no extra charge. Subscriptions are available by logging on to - www.sportspromedia.com EDITORIAL COPYRIGHT: The contents of this magazine, both words and statistics, are strictly copyright and the intellectual property of SportsPro Media. Copying or reproduction may only be carried out with written permission of the publishers, which will normally not be withheld on payment of a fee. Article reprints: Most articles published in SportsPro Magazine are available as reprints by prior arrangement from the publishers. Normal minimum print run for reprints is 400 copies, although larger and smaller runs are possible. Please contact us at: info@sportspromedia.com

YOUR NEW TOOLS TO BRING BROADCASTS TO LIFE

Deliver sports like never before.

From a rich set of graphics solutions to replay and video servers for sports, you can captivate fans while making your workflow more efficient.

All integrated with the Avid tools you trust.

Learn more at avid.com/sports

© 2016 Avid Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Product features, specifications, system requirements, and availability are subject to change without notice. Avid and the Avid logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS

No strings attached Michael Long nother year, another new tournament, another cause for doubt: this time it’s the Laver Cup that has everybody in tennis talking and, as with all the other new-fangled ideas to emerge in the sport in recent years, there is no telling how it will play out.

To be launched in the autumn of next year, the tournament will honour the great Rod Laver by pitting Europe’s best against a ‘rest of the world’ team over three days of competition in singles and doubles. Dubbed tennis’ answer to golf ’s Ryder Cup, it is being created by Team8, the agency founded in 2012 by Roger Federer and his long-time agent Tony Godsick, with the backing of Tennis Australia and Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann, himself a former player. That mix of business nous, governing body inÁuence and star power could well prove potent as the tournament looks to get off to the best start possible in 2017. But as anybody in tennis will testify, there can be no guarantees.

Tennis’ crowded calendar and frustratingly fragmented power structure – both common grievances in the sport – are hardly conducive to new events of this kind. Ever conservative, the boardrooms of the leading tours are highly politicised places, fettered by a complex web of competing interests. As for the traditionally risk-averse International Tennis Federation (ITF), only now, under new president David Haggerty, is the governing body beginning to express a desire to modernise. After many years of inaction, the federation is Ànally starting to entertain the possibility of much-needed reforms to its competitions like the Davis Cup yet within the corridors of the tennis establishment real change is often slow in coming, leaving the shoots of innovation to sprout elsewhere.

At a time when experimental, short-format tournaments – think Australia’s Fast4 or Tie Break Tens in the UK – are springing up across the globe, albeit with varying success, it is clear tennis is in a state of Áux. 1ew properties are being established with the sole aim of challenging the prevailing wisdom and though the purists would say such events are but exhibitions, created purely for commercial gain and lacking in sporting merit, they are beginning to gain traction.

Mahesh Bhupathi’s IPTL project is a prime example. Whatever one thinks of its garish presentation and the convoluted, organised-fun nature of its format, the IPTL has undoubtedly managed to capture the imagination of Asian tennis fans, bringing top names and a novel form of the sport to new audiences. The Laver Cup will hope to do something similar – provided, of course, the players buy into it.

Without the presence of the leading names any comparisons to golf ’s Ryder Cup will be purely incidental, and at present there is no telling who will commit to what is not a mandatory event – save, perhaps, for Federer himself. As noted by the New York Times’ Christopher Clarey, powerful agencies in tennis like IMG, Federer’s former and 1ovak Djokovic’s current representatives, could view the Laver Cup as a threat and discourage their clients from participating. The tournament’s planned late September slot and lack of ranking points and appearance fees may also prove to be sticking points, putting off those players who like a break between August’s US Open and the all-important run of Asian events in the lead-up to the ATP World Tour Finals in London in 1ovember.

Still, there is a sense the tennis world is rooting for this new tournament named after one of its greatest practitioners. Crucially, the Laver Cup is understood to have the support of the ATP, which is more than can be said for some of the other recent upstarts, and the fact it is being created in the Àrst place would suggest Godsick and co have at least received backing from others behind the scenes. 1ot only that, but tennis has been crying out for an event of this type. ‘Europe versus the world’ is the men’s game in a nutshell and if ever there were a time to capitalise on the sport’s global appeal, it has to be now.

A

@_MichaelLong

8 | www.sportspromedia.com

Within the corridors of the tennis establishment real change is often slow in coming, leaving the shoots of innovation to sprout elsewhere.

ONLINE VIDEO: THE ULTIMATE TEAM PLAYER

LUKE GAYDON, VICE PRESIDENT, OTT SOLUTIONS, BRIGHTCOVE

A

rguably one of the biggest dates in the sporting calendar, the 2016 Super Bowl set impressive new records for live streaming as fans around the world went online in greater numbers than ever before to watch their teams compete.

According to CBS, the evening event generated 3.96 million unique viewers across digital platforms including desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones and connected televisions. In addition, viewers consumed more than 402 million total minutes of coverage online, with each watching for more than 101 minutes on average.

With figures like these, it’s clear that the experience of sport is no longer limited to those sitting in the stadium. With the rising popularly of online streaming, viewing audiences are growing and as they increase in number, they also increase in diversity.

In recent years, the challenge for sports broadcasters has become how to deliver high-quality live or on-demand content to their audiences, in a way that conveys the ‘in the moment’ excitement of game day, across multiple devices and platforms. So, how close are they coming to matching the everevolving consumer demand?

UNITING A FRAGMENTED INDUSTRY Over the past few years, we have seen a diverse and dispersed range of viewing audiences emerge following the breakdown

of traditional foundations of technology into an ever-increasing range of devices, screens and platforms – and broadcasters must be able to address them all. As a result, traditional business models have also fragmented into multiple platforms, monetisation models and approaches to address the varied range of viewer wants.

There’s no doubt that this kind of fragmentation will continue.

Consequently, sports broadcasters must find ways to remove the friction and develop a video strategy that brings the team spirit of sport to its audience — whether they’re in the stands or watching from a tablet thousands of miles away.

BROADCASTING BEYOND THE PITCH As publishers think about their strategy for sports video content, they should realise that the nature of sports — ever evolving, the same plot but always a different ending — provides the ideal ground for additional digital ‘shoulder programming.’

Live events should be the centre of gravity for the larger programming strategy, combining both real-time content and video on demand (VOD) clips. When streamed on demand, the beauty of live sports content is that it isn’t just limited to game time. Live content programming can span entire arcs from training and practices to exclusives from teams, players and coaches. And around the game there’s the opportunity to

create a unique experience for the viewer by offering them exclusive access to perspectives that even the fans in their seats don’t have: footage from the sidelines, press conferences, views from the pitch.

For the most part, watching television is no substitute for watching in person — nothing can really replace the atmosphere that comes with sitting in the stands at your team’s home game. But, by creating a digital experience that combines real-time footage, scores and statistics with social dialogue, video replays and highlights, both the in-person and ‘living room’ experiences can encourage similar levels of participation and passion — qualities central to any sporting experience.

EVERYONE’S A TEAM PLAYER — EVEN VOD When you break it down, sports enable people to engage in their passion — as participants or as fans — and video has a vital role to play in heightening the experience of every win, loss or draw.

We often view the final score as the boundary for the game, but when certain moments are able to be shared, video quickly becomes the medium that extends the story way beyond that boundary.

Its ability to inspire passion, encourage participation and deliver personal experiences to each individual audience member — the defining qualities of any sporting event — makes video on demand the perfect team player.

SECTION HERE THETEXT PA COLUMN

On the grid with Philip Duncan As the world’s premier motorsport series gears up for another season, Press Association’s Formula One correspondent casts his eye over the stories that will shape the year to come.

short trip to the bookies will tell you all you need to know about the upcoming Formula One season.

Place a Àver on Lewis Hamilton to win motor racing’s biggest prize, and your return – should the British driver win a third championship in succession – will be a little more than eight pounds.

You see, Formula One, the multibillion dollar industry which this season will visit a record-breaking 21 countries, is braced for another season of tedium, another year in which Hamilton and his all-conquering Mercedes team, and their enormous Ànancial muscle, run riot.

Bernie Ecclestone, the sport’s 85-yearold chief executive, has already branded their success, in which Hamilton has romped to the last two titles, as rather tedious.

And even Sebastian 9ettel, once the poster boy for the boo brigade during his own winning streak, has claimed Hamilton’s magniÀcent run is driving punters away.

Pot. Kettle. Black. Perhaps. After all, this is the man who won a record nine consecutive races, not to mention four championships in succession.

But skim beneath what seem like the trademarks of a sore loser and you will Ànd method in 9ettel’s madness.

Of course, Formula One works in cycles. Think Lotus in the 1 0s, McLaren in the late 1 80s, Williams in the mid- 0s, Ferrari at the turn of the century and, more recently, Red Bull. All of these great teams have, at one time or another, possessed the best car, enjoyed race victories and subsequent titles.

Yet Mercedes’ success over the past two seasons is unprecedented – 2 victories from 8 races – and at only one of the six Grands Prix at which either Hamilton or his team-mate 1ico Rosberg have failed to win, can their rivals boast of having the greater package.

Take last year’s Singapore Grand Prix – in which Mercedes were mysteriously

A

10 | www.sportspromedia.com

So, has Formula One become predictable? Yes. But is that really Hamilton and Mercedes’ fault? off the pace – out of the equation, and you could easily make a case to claim they should have won all bar one of the last 8 Grands Prix. As I said, the sport really has not seen dominance like it.

So, has Formula One become predictable? Yes. But is that really Hamilton and Mercedes’ fault? I’ll let Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo answer. ´They are the team that have done the best job and they get scrutinised now because they are the ones making it boring out front,” the Australian said.

“It’s really our job as other teams to catch them up.”

But while Ricciardo may talk a good Àght, the challenge will not come from Red Bull.

Indeed, the only team likely to get anywhere near the Silver Arrows will be Ferrari.

The famous Italian team, with an estimated budget of US 400 million, and in 9ettel, the most expensive driver on the grid at a cool US 50 million a year, have not won a title in almost a decade.

Rather unthinkable for the grandest constructor of them all.

Yet 9ettel won three times last season and at the launch of this year’s Ferrari challenger – the SF1 -H – the German, his team-mate Kimi Raikkonen and team principal Maurizio Arrivabene all looked rather smug. Indeed, 9ettel claimed his team will be “even stronger” this year.

Elsewhere McLaren, another of the sport’s grandeur teams, will be desperate to recover from a disastrous season which contributed to a US 25 million loss.

Fernando Alonso has put talk of a sabbatical on hold – perhaps the US 40 million a year-wages acted as an incentive – while team-mate Jenson Button shied away from retirement and a presenting

gig on the BBC’s Top Gear for one more crack on the sport’s biggest stage. He, too, will earn a pay rise, adding another US million to the US 10 million he pocketed last year.

And what of the rookies? America’s Haas, who enjoy a working relationship with Ferrari but insist they are not merely a ‘B’ team for the Italian constructor, will make their debut in Australia. Britain’s Jolyon Palmer, Pascal Wehrlein of Germany and Indonesia’s Rio Haryanto will be the new kids on the grid – the latter brings with him to Manor a rather tasty US 14 million cheque from stateowned oil company Pertamina.

Kevin Magnussen, the former McLaren driver, has been granted a second chance with Renault after the 9enezuelan oil company PD9SA failed to provide the US 50 million they had promised to reserve Pastor Maldonado’s seat. And organisers of the inaugural Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku say their June race will go ahead despite a slump in global oil prices.

Meanwhile, the future of who may own the sport remains unclear.

Ecclestone claimed last year that Formula One would have new owners for 201 , but despite RSE 9entures, the company co-founded by Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, and 4atar Sports Investment being ready to place an US 8 billion buy-out deal, C9C Capital Partners has not sold its controlling stake.

Expect that story, much like Mercedes’ dominance, to roll on and on and on in 201 ...

Press Association is an official SportsPro media partner.

DIGEST APRIL 2016

Next month in

The Live edition

The Agenda

Wembley Stadium will be the venue when SportsPro Live returns for its third and biggest edition on 22nd and 23rd March. For those not fortunate enough to be attending – or those who just want to relive the event – the next issue of SportsPro will have full coverage of two days of essential interviews and discussions with some of

the most engaging people in the industry.

Elsewhere in the May issue, there will be a look beyond the world’s most famous soccer ground in a special report on the stadium technology sector. And with new European Tour chief executive Keith Pelley among those on stage in north-west London, the business of golf in 2016 will also come into focus.

Dates for your diary in the weeks ahead

17TH TO 20TH MARCH IAAF World Indoor Championships Portland, USA

26TH MARCH Dubai World Cup Dubai, UAE

19TH MARCH TO 5TH APRIL NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament USA ‘March Madness’ unites the sports-loving US public

3RD APRIL Major League Baseball Opening Day USA

20TH MARCH Australian Grand Prix Melbourne, Australia The longest Formula One season in history begins with the first of 21 races

12 | www.sportspromedia.com

9TH APRIL The Grand National Liverpool, UK Icons designed by Freepik

ISSUE 86 By the numbers p42

What they’re saying this month p54

Sports merchandise giant

Fanatics Inc, which has furthered its international retail ambitions with the

Brett Gosper, World Rugby

UK£11.55 million acquisition of Kitbag, has annual revenues of more than

p66

US$1 billion and is valued at over

US$3 billion p46

The 2015 Cricket World Cup match between

India and Pakistan was watched by

288 million people on Indian TV alone. The two countries meet in the ICC

World Twenty20 on 19th March.

“Obviously there is a cloud over two very large federations in the Olympic movement in recent times, which affects everyone in the business. It’s something that is not good for sport in general.”

“Everybody plays that game: who would play you in a movie? And to actually be able to answer that question with a DVD is very, very weird.”

JB Bernstein, Access Group of Miami

p98

“I THINK ANY TIME THAT YOU’RE SHARING CULTURAL PASSIONS AND SPORTING EVENTS AND ACTIVITIES IT JUST BRINGS THE WORLD CLOSER TOGETHER.” Brad Bates, Boston College From the SportsPro Podcast

“Fifa, IOC, these things are like Spectre from a Bond movie.

They’re that absurd, hyperbolic, evil. You can’t be around it or touch it without being tainted by it.”

NBA star turned psychologist John Amaechi gives a blunt take on sport’s governance issues.

Find every SportsPro Podcast at www.sportspromedia.com/podcast or subscribe via iTunes

SportsPro Magazine | 13

CANADA’S HOME STADIUM

BC PLACE WHERE THE WORLD COMES TO PLAY

A true sporting city, Vancouver, British Columbia, has long been the destination where you can ski in the morning and golf in the afternoon. This is a place with a history of excellence in sport hosting, and a city of passionate people that are no strangers to hosting international visitors.

With North America’s second-largest west coast airport, Vancouver is easily accessible from all corners of the globe.

More than 13,000 hotel rooms are located within walking distance of the stadium, and more than 27,000 hotel rooms are in the Vancouver area.

At the heart of downtown Vancouver lies the crown jewel known as BC Place Stadium. A masterpiece of engineering and design, the stadium is nestled among Vancouver’s modern downtown architecture between the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Mountains of British Columbia.

Vancouver sporting crowds are passionate, educated and welcoming to visitors the world over. From the 2010 Olympic Games to international soccer and rugby, the world is coming to BC Place.

CANADA’S HOME STADIUM BC Place Stadium is the home of iconic worldwide events in Canada. The stadium’s honour roll includes the 2010 Olympic Winter Games Opening and Closing Ceremonies, the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2015 and the HSBC Canada Sevens to name a few.

BC Place is also where soccer fans cheer on the Vancouver Whitecaps FC of North America’s Major League Soccer (MLS), and where football families go wild for the BC Lions of the Canadian Football League (CFL).

The recently revitalized BC Place is one of the key reasons the world has been coming to Vancouver for international sporting events on

a grand scale. With its retractable roof - the largest of its kind in the world - and its deserved reputation as Canada’s most technologically advanced stadium, BC Place is quickly becoming Canada’s home stadium.

the world is designed to create the ultimate visitor experience.

No other facility in Canada is more experienced in welcoming corporate sponsors, sports federations and foreign dignitaries for international events.

AT BC PLACE, EVERYONE’S A VIP

A TECHNOLOGICAL MARVEL

Vancouver is a world-renowned city in the beautiful province of British Columbia. With convenient transit systems, a diverse range of worldclass dining options and first class amenities – this dynamic part of

BC Place is one of most technologically advanced stadium venues in North America, providing clients and guests with a range of game-changing technical abilities and solutions not found at any other stadium.

A spectacular retractable roof keeps fans in comfort while revealing blue skies over the entire playing surface.

An awe-inspiring four-sided highdefinition videoboard – the secondlargest in North America – hangs above centre field in full view of 54,500 fans.

More than 1,100 high definition television screens are located throughout the concourse, VIP suites and concession stands. Each screen is individually controlled through an integrated, addressable-on-the-fly system called StadiumVision.

Finally, the spectacular crownshaped roof is bestowed with the “Northern Lights Display” – a feature that transforms the architecture of the flagship facility into a glowing beacon on the city skyline.

EVENT SUCCESS CASE STUDIES

THE FIFA WOMEN’S WORLD CUP CANADA 2015

The FIFA Women’s World Cup Canada 2015 – the largest women’s sporting event in the world - featured 24 teams playing a total of 54 matches in six cities coast to coast. 52 matches were played over 30 days, with a total attendance of more than 1.35 million.

Soccer fans, athletes and dignitaries from around the world were welcomed at a spectacular venue in Vancouver. BC Place was chosen to host nine matches, including the prestigious final between Japan and the United States on July 5th, 2015 – a match that set a new record as the most viewed soccer game in the history of American television.

The matches at BC Place set multiple attendance records for soccer in Canada, with 53,000+ in attendance during the sold-out championship final and 45 million more watching via broadcast television. The Vancouver Fan Zone areas welcomed more than 100,000 fans over the course of the tournament.

An overwhelming success, the FIFA Women’s World Cup generated $118 million in economic impact in the region – more than double the $52million that was projected for the tournament.

THE CANADA SEVENS

CANADA MEN’S NATIONAL TEAM IN 2018 FIFA WORLD CUP RUSSIA QUALIFICATION

This past March, BC Place Stadium hosted the newest stop on the HSBC World Rugby Seven Series tour.

16 competing nations, plus 56,000+ fans dressed in outrageous livery, descended on Vancouver for a weeklong festival that is sure to become a “must-see” event on the world stage.

The action-packed two-day Canada Sevens event was sold-out more than two weeks before kickoff.

With its World Rugby-certified playing surface, world-famous retractable roof, first-class food and beverage service, and an unrivalled destination in the heart of Vancouver, the Canada Sevens at BC Place is set to grow in 2017 and beyond.

Canada Soccer has recognized Vancouver sports fans are some of the most passionate across the country, and has chosen to reward them by playing its FIFA World Cup 2018 qualifying home matches in 2015 and 2016 at BC Place stadium.

In 2015, BC Place hosted Canada vs Honduras in front of 20,108 spectators.

This past March, Canada played Mexico in front of over 40,000 fans in a match that lifted soccer in Canada to new heights.

Contact Details: Graham Ramsay, Director, Business, BC Place Stadium.

T. +001 604 669 2300, E. stadium@bcpavco.com

www.bcplace.com

|

@BCPlace |

@BCPlaceStadium

THOUGHT LEADER SPONSORSHIP

Soccer: A commercial aphrodisiac Jim Dowling was one of the Àrst to get a whiff.

As chairman of Spurs he listened to the ITV pitch and encouraged Sky to ‘blow them out of the water’ in the Àrst Premier League TV deal. More income Áowed into White Hart Lane and, even better, Sugar sold a lorry-load more satellite dishes to Sky. Ker-ching! BT and Sky will hand over UK£5 billion to the Premier League, with the right – purely the right – to broadcast a Àxture like Stoke v West Brom coming in at UK£10 million.

ne apparent immutable law of marketing is that ‘sex sells’. Soccer – a carnal pleasure of a different nature – is showing every sign of displacing sex as the marketer’s banker.

Adidas has agreed to pay Real Madrid a whopping UK£1 billion over the course of the next decade to manufacture and sell the Spanish soccer giants’ playing kit, in addition to the UK£750 million deal it had already agreed with Manchester United. Sky and BT will spend a combined UK£5.1 billion with the Premier League to screen matches. Soccer gets bigger, richer and more powerful as each year passes.

“Extraordinary,” as David Coleman might have said.

O

Where next?

We may only just have begun.

For Adidas to outflank its rivals, it needs to command more physical and online retail spaces.

Can soccer really be in its infancy? Growth is coming in the US. Finally, patience is being applied to ambition in the United States with Major League Soccer (MLS) beginning to mature as a credible foundation for the professional game.

The Chinese Super League (CSL) is in its earliest days – yet the Àrst clues are clear.

The super-agents of soccer smell the yuan and the likes of Jorge Mendes and Pini Zahavi are shifting talent out of Europe and into China on mega-bucks deals. And then there’s the women’s game – enjoying a surge in popularity around the world and in established in markets like Japan, Germany and the US. So that’s the US, China and women, then. Yes, room to grow.

And what if the world’s richest companies decide they want a piece?

Soccer, exclusive to the platforms of Google, or Amazon, or Apple? What happens if two of those three, at some point within the next ten years, competed for TV or digital content rights?

If you subscribe to that long-term view, you look at Adidas’ Real deal as the most conservative of punts. For the soccer industry, it really could be ‘early doors’.

Soccer’s aphrodisiac effect isn’t restricted to the sports industry.

Soccer sells TV, phone and broadband subscriptions in abundance. Alan Sugar

Jim Dowling is managing director at HSE Cake, a London-based agency formed last year from a merger of Havas Sports & Entertainment and brand entertainment company Cake.

So how much is too much?

Work your way back through and you can start to build a case for the Adidas-Real deal. First: sales of the kit itself. Real Madrid, it is claimed, have an estimated fanbase of over half a billion. Let’s say two million of those 500 million fans bought a replica kit at €100 each this year – that’s €200million back into the coffers. Then there’s the kids that aren’t that fussed about Real, but certainly fancy being the next Ronaldo or Bale. As someone patronising might say: “You do the math.”

While that’s good hygiene for any deal, the real value comes from how Adidas can leverage its asset. Soccer’s true worth reveals itself. For Adidas to outÁank its rivals, it needs to command more physical and online retail spaces.

Now imagine an Adidas salesman with the Real Madrid, Manchester United (and let’s not forget Bayern Munich, AC Milan and Chelsea) kits tucked in his suitcase alongside his vast array of socks, shorts, trainers, boots, squash rackets and whatever else he’s got. That salesman has leverage. Soccer is his Trojan horse.

Its knock-on effect can be felt across other audiences. A brand attached to a

16 | www.sportspromedia.com

Real Madrid’s Adidas deal is worth UK£1 billion

soccer club attracts preference either overtly or subconsciously. Sales of JVC consumer electronics and Holsten lager were no doubt hugely erratic around north London in the 1980s, when the two brands were shirt sponsors of rivals Arsenal and Tottenham. However, across the world, how many brains will subconsciously move hands towards the three stripes on a T-shirt or training top and walk to the till? Soccer creates knock-on effects for brand recognition and preference.

THOUGHT LEADER SPONSORSHIP

Moving to their own Beats

Jon Buckle/EMPICS Sport

Misha Sher

Beats is a representation of a lifestyle that many of its customers aspire to and the brand supports that message through everything it does.

By associating closely with high-profile athletes, Beats has become a lifestyle choice as much as a brand

016 has only just kicked off, but there is no shortage of opinions being shared on what it will take to win the battle of the brands in what is a major year for sport. From the Uefa European Championship to the Copa América Centenario to the Rio Olympics, brands are gearing up to capture the imaginations of the millions of consumers who will be tuning in to follow their favourite teams and athletes.

The question is: will the ofÀcial partners make their involvement count? Or will they be upstaged by an outsider?

Time and time again we see brands that, through deep understanding of consumer behaviour and clever marketing, are able to elevate themselves beyond any ofÀcial partners and disrupt the status quo. It may have started with Nike, but the mantle surely now belongs to Beats by Dre. It’s been a fascinating rise for a brand that few people knew about before the 2012 London Olympics. Then came the Games and Beats’ clever idea of giving athletes a free pair of headphones in their countries’ colours. They became the talk of the Games. Such was the power of the marketing that Olympic athletes waited in long lines outside of Beats’ Shoreditch House headquarters during the Games to get a pair of their own. This was a brand strategy executed to perfection. It was a movement and everyone wanted to be a part of it. The International Olympic Committee (IOC)

2

may not have been happy, but Beats knew it was on to something.

Anyone who knows music would tell you that Beats are far from the best headphones on the market, but that hasn’t stopped the brand from becoming the biggest in the world. Like Nike, Beats is a representation of a lifestyle that many of its customers aspire to and the brand supports that message through everything it does.

In 2014, Fifa weren’t going to allow a repeat of London 2012 but it made little difference. By signing some of the world’s biggest stars featuring in the tournament, Beats created some of the most shared content highlighting pre-game routines. It put the product at the heart of emotional stories, further solidifying Beats presence within popular culture and connecting with millions around the world in the process.

It was a similar story around last year’s Rugby World Cup, where Beats took emotive storytelling to another level, demonstrating once again that the brand knows exactly how to connect with its consumers.

Such has been the impact that many have begun talking about the value of ‘ofÀcial’. If Beats could have such an impact as a renegade, is ‘ofÀcial’ dead?

Judging by the brand’s recent partnerships with soccer clubs Bayern Munich and Chelsea, the answer would appear to be a no, but it’s more nuanced than that.

While major sporting events attract huge global audiences, the ability to leverage association as an ofÀcial sponsor is largely limited to a very short time window. That’s why the IOC is developing a digital proposition that will allow its partners to drive value from the partnership 365 days a year.

OfÀcial sponsorships like those that Beats has recently signed provide brands with year-round marketing vehicles that not only deliver consistency in brand presence, but the ability to leverage unique attributes that these properties provide.

In joining forces with Chelsea and Bayern Munich, Beats has the opportunity to build on the story it’s created in recent years, by bringing its products closer to the game and leveraging the pull these clubs have in the brand’s key growth markets.

Rights holders are well placed to address the ‘ofÀcial’ v ‘non-ofÀcial’ question by offering value that far exceeds anything that a brand can achieve through ambush.

With the Euro and Olympics only a few months away, we’ll know shortly whether Beats has embarked on a new strategy or will once again dominate the brand battle around these two major events. Whatever happens, we can be assured that they will hear, and do what they want!

Misha Sher is the head of sport EMEA at MediaCom.

SportsPro Magazine | 17

PREMATURE FACTS

Regional drought Former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer (left) had every right to believe he could secure a local TV rights windfall when he forked out a record US$2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team back in May 2014. At the time, the regional sports network (RSN) business was booming, particularly in the ultra-competitive LA market, and the Clippers’ inflated franchise valuation appeared justified in light of the

Transport for London (TfL) announced in February that it would be drastically scaling back the resource it devotes to Twitter updates on account of the social media service’s new algorithm, which will mix in some ‘while you were away’ tweets within the normal reverse chronological offering. TfL’s logic was that there was too much room for confusion if its real-time transport alerts appeared hours after the event.

As Daniel Ayers of digital consultancy Seven League pointed out – on Twitter no less – it’s ‘a bit early to call the death of min-by-min sports commentary on Twitter, but it’s definitely going to be ‘a thing’’.

Lauren Hurley/PA Wire/Press Association Images

Calling time on real time

For the first, second or even third-time visitor to Japan, there is nothing more mystifying, or indeed symbolic of both the country’s exoticism and technological sophistication, than an everyday encounter with a lavatory. With their control pads, mysterious and surely euphemistic symbols, thousands of buttons and blinking lights and general air of threat, Japanese toilets have captivated western visitors for decades. Good news, then, for Toto, the inventor of the ‘washlet’ and the 27th local sponsor of the Tokyo Games. The official bathroom of the 2020 Olympics should have no problem attracting attention with whatever it decides to do with its activation strategy.

Koji Sasahara/AP/Press Association Images

Olympic ring washers

At first glance, February’s news that several National Basketball Association (NBA) team owners were throwing their weight behind North America’s newly established Professional Futsal League (PFL) certainly perfect sense. Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov and the Buss family of the Los Angeles Lakers will reportedly join Dallas Mavericks boss Mark Cuban, a majority owner of the league,

in getting the PFL off the ground. Though futsal, an offshoot of soccer, is not well known on US shores, the league’s elevator pitch to prospective investors more accustomed to basketball must have been straightforward. For the uninitiated, futsal is a high-speed, high-scoring sport typically played indoors by two teams of five. It’s end-to-end stuff.

Sound familiar?

Crossover court

18 | www.sportspromedia.com

broadcast riches that would surely follow. But things haven’t exactly gone to plan. The US cable landscape is no longer the abundant goldmine it once was, with escalating carrier and subscription charges having led to cordcutting across the country. As Ballmer is finding out in his negotiations with Fox – and as other teams have also discovered – the once-reliable RSN gravy train has all but derailed.

The scrum to come Sports politics observers still recovering from Fifa’s two-take search for a new head of world soccer may want to look away now. The struggle for the presidency of World Rugby is about ready for kickoff, with Bernard Lapasset stepping down to help the Paris 2024 Olympic drive as bid co-chairman.

The vote will be held in May and could open a new flank in the battle between the big-hitting campaign agencies. The Daily Mail reports that Bill Beaumont (above), chairman of England’s Rugby Football Union (RFU) and an unsuccessful candidate in the 2011 election, has enlisted Jon Tibbs Associates in his effort to succeed the Vero Communications-backed Lapasset.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS

Movers and shakers This is an edited selection of appointments made in the weeks before publication. For daily updates on the movers and shakers in the sports industry, visit www.sportspromedia.com Please email appointments to: info@sportspromedia.com

Peter Diamond Peter Diamond has been promoted to the role of executive vice president of programming at NBC Olympics. Previously, Diamond had been serving as senior vice president in the same role. He will continue in his responsibilities for programming NBC Sports Group’s Olympic coverage across its various platforms, reporting to NBC Olympics executive producer Jim Bell. Diamond’s 17 Olympic Games are more than any other executive in the history of US television.

David Yang Wanda Sports has hired David Yang as chief executive of its Chinese division. According to Chinese media reports, the former senior vice president and managing director at NBA China will replace Shen Jiaying as the executive head of Wanda Sports China. He will report to Philippe Blatter, the Infront Sports & Media chief executive who is heading up the new Wanda Sports conglomerate as global chief executive. Yang held roles at Enron, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia Securities before joining the National Baskeball Association (NBA) in 2006.

20 | www.sportspromedia.com

Cesar Olmedo/AP/Press Association Images

February 2016 Steve Mitchell

Clare Salmon

Alejandro Dominguez

The Melbourne Rebels Australian rugby union club have appointed Steve Mitchell as their new general manager, commercial. The appointment sees Mitchell switch rugby codes, with the former Channel Seven executive joining the Super Rugby side from rugby league club North Queensland Cowboys. In his new role, reporting to Rebels managing director Andrew Cox, Mitchell will work to achieve commercial growth at the club, just as he did in the sponsorship and corporate sales team at the Cowboys.

The British Equestrian Federation has announced Clare Salmon as its new chief executive. Salmon, who left pensions company Royal London last year, will begin in earnest at the beginning of June. She has held board-level positions at numerous international companies, such as ITV, Royal & Sun Alliance, Prudential and the AA. Salmon will follow the 17-year tenure of the retiring chief executive Andrew Finding.

Alejandro Dominguez has been elected as the new president of South American soccer confederation Conmebol. The Paraguayan, who was the lone candidate after the withdrawal of Uruguay’s interim president Wilmar Vasquez, was unanimously backed by the continent’s ten member associations at an extraordinary session in Luque, Paraguay. He will take a seat on the executive committee of world soccer’s governing body, Fifa, as a vice president.

Ma Guoli Jake Reid Scott Smith The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has appointed Scott Smith as its new chief financial officer. Smith will join the ECB from his current role as chief financial officer of The America’s Cup Event Authority in May this year. He will report to ECB chief executive Tom Harrison and will become company secretary and a member of the ECB leadership team. Scott will be responsible for reporting and budgeting within the ECB, supporting revenue objectives across the game and giving financial guidance at all levels. Before joining the America’s Cup in 2011, Scott worked as group financial controller for Lend Lease Corporation in London and as group finance director at the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport.

Major League Soccer (MLS) club Sporting Kansas City have appointed Jake Reid as their new president.

Reid, 33, joined the American side in 2010 as vice president of ticket sales and became chief revenue officer in 2012. He will oversee all of Sporting KC’s business operations.

Ma Guoli is set to leave his role as the head of Infront Sports & Media’s Chinese division for a new position at LeEco. Ma will be installed as vice president of LeEco’s sports and entertainment arm, Le Sports, responsible for developing the business at home, across Asia, and further afield.

Will Symon

Lord Mervyn King Lord Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, has been appointed to the board of directors at struggling Premier League soccer club Aston Villa. 67-year-old King, who headed the UK’s central bank from 2003 to 2013, is a lifelong Villa fan. He is also president of Worcestershire County Cricket Club.

Formula E has added to its partnership sales team by appointing Will Symon from executive search firm Odgers Berndtson. Symon, 26, leaves his current role as associate in Odgers Berndtson’s global sports practice. He will commence his new position with the all-electric racing series in March and will report to Sam Piccione, Formula E’s chief revenue officer.

Maurício Jacob

Mark Emmert Mark Emmert is to remain president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the regulatory body for US college sport, until October 2020. Emmert, the former University of Washington president who has led the NCAA since 2010, had a three-year extension of his contract unanimously approved by the organisation’s board at January’s convention. The deal includes an option for a further one-year renewal.

Matt Braid V8 Supercars has installed Matt Braid as its new managing director. Braid, a former Volvo Cars Australia managing director, takes on the role having served as commercial director of the motorsport series since January 2015. His appointment comes as part of an executive reshuffle at V8 Supercars, with marketing director John Casey switching to a business development role. In his new post, Braid will work alongside James Warburton and Shane Howard, V8 Supercars’ chief executive and chief operating officer respectively.

Brazilian soccer champions Corinthians have named Maurício Jacob as their new marketing director. The former chief of Disney in Brazil replaces Marcelo Passos, who vacated the post in January.

Jacob arrives at Corinthians with a background in advertising and brand promotion in Brazil, and his appointment by the club marks a return to sport – prior to Disney, he worked for ESPN. One of his first responsibilities will be to help get a new shirt sponsorship deal over the line, with Corinthians reportedly in advanced negotiations over a record-breaking agreement with an unnamed financial company.

Terrence Burns Terrence Burns, the managing director of Teneo Sports and veteran of the winning Beijing 2008, Vancouver 2010 and Sochi 2014 bids, has been appointed as the chief marketing officer for the Los Angeles 2024 Olympic bidding committee. Burns will be responsible for shaping the brand image of LA 2024 throughout the Olympic movement, working closely with committee chairman Casey Wasserman, chief executive Gene Sykes, and the United States Olympic Committee.

Diana M Murphy Diana M Murphy has been elected to serve a one-year term as the 64th president of the United States Golf Association (USGA) by the body’s members. The USGA, which serves as the global governing body for golf along with the Royal and Ancient (R&A), has previously elected just one female president in its 121-year history. Murphy is a longstanding member of the USGA, having joined its members’ committee in 1996.

She went on to join the executive committee in 2011, and was elected vice president in both 2014 and 2015.

Murphy, 59, is the managing director of Rocksolid Holdings, a private equity firm focused on small business and real estate in the south-east United States.

Tim McDermott MLS side Philadelphia Union have appointed Tim McDermott as their new chief business officer.

The Philadelphia native will be responsible for overseeing the team’s business operations, including working closely with their United Soccer League outfit, Bethlehem Steel FC, and the Philadelphia Union Academy.

McDermott joins the Union from the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, where he had served as chief marketing and innovation officer since December 2013. He has also previously held roles in football, with the Philadelphia Eagles, and in ice hockey, with the Washington Capitals.

MOVER OF THE MONTH Will Symon, partnership sales manager at FIA Formula E What is your single biggest responsibility in the new role at Formula E? The success of our inaugural season has continued into season two and this has given us a huge opportunity to make Formula E even more appealing to existing and potential sponsors. So for me, in the short term, we’ll be working towards our Paris, Berlin and London ePrix and hopefully shaping opportunities for new partners in these regions. In particular, we are looking for a title sponsor for our Berlin ePrix.

In the long term, we are working on some exciting naming rights opportunities for our Championship Cup, as well as continuing to build on Formula E’s reputation as an innovative and exciting platform for global brands.

What do you anticipate being the biggest challenge?

I think with any new sports property the single biggest challenge is awareness. Formula E has already done a fantastic job in building that awareness from a standing start but as we continue to add new races this becomes more important. I think that if we can communicate the true nature of Formula E and what it stands for we can continue to expand globally.

How will you measure success?

Formula E was originally founded as a platform for the development of electric technology in cars. So, ultimately, our success will be measured by the uptake of these into everyday life and I hope that we are driving a change in the perception of electric vehicles and moving them into the mainstream.

We want the younger fans, who come to our races, to not even have to think about whether an electric vehicle is a viable option – hopefully that distinction has been made long before they are old enough to drive. Ultimately we are an entertainment property, with motorsport at its heart, and we have an opportunity to be the most innovative and creative partner for global brands anywhere in the world and provide unprecedented access to races, content, and to our stars.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

I was probably worryingly old before I realised that I would never win Wimbledon! Tennis was, and probably still is, my sporting passion but there was always a bit of a gulf between my ambition, skills, and reality!

In all seriousness, I always knew that I wanted to work in a dynamic and stimulating sector and within an innovative business that will not settle for the status quo. The mechanics of the sports industry have always been of interest to me. I’m fortunate that Formula E ticks every box, both personally and professionally.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I would like to think that I will still be working at Formula E. Hopefully, driving revenue across multiple area of the business and continuing to maintain our ethos of taking an inventive and original approach to entertainment, content, fan engagement, and partnerships.

SportsPro Magazine | 21

SPORTSPRO WORLD HOSTINGS AND HAPPENINGS

C

3

4 5

2 1

B

A

D E

F

Conferences 1

Los Angeles, USA

The 15th annual edition of the CAA World Congress of Sports will be taking place at the JW Marriott Los Angeles LA Live on 13th and 14th April. In line with the conference’s tradition of transcending the world of sports, Disney chairman and chief executive Bob Iger (pictured) and US secretary of education Arne Duncan head up the list of speakers.

3

Chelsea FC’s Stamford Bridge stadium will welcome delegates from across the industry for the Sports Entertainment Alliance in Technology (SEAT) Europe 2016 on 20th and 21st April. Attendees will tackle the latest technological evolutions, developments and innovations affecting the sporting world.

4

2

Washington DC, USA

The Sports Events Marketing Experience (SEME), a two-day conference for young professionals and students seeking to launch or further their careers in the sports and events industry, will take place at Washington DC’s Verizon Center on 8th and 9th April. Key speakers include Geoff Bough, head of business development at FanDuel, and Kurt Kehl, chief communications officer at Monumental Sports & Entertainment.

22 | www.sportspromedia.com

London, UK

London, UK

The Innovation Enterprise’s Sports Analytics Innovation Summit will take place at etc.venues St Paul’s conference centre in central London on 13th and 14th April, this year addressing the subject of how sporting bodies, rights holders and sponsors can push the boundaries of their business using data. Richard Allen, the head of talent at English soccer’s Football Association, and Clare Connor, director of women’s cricket at the England and Wales Cricket Board, are set to speak.

5

Lausanne, Switzerland

The SportAccord Convention returns to the Olympic capital of Lausanne, Switzerland for the first time since 2004 from 17th to 22nd April, gathering members from over 100 international sporting federations to discuss the issues facing the sporting world in this Olympic year. A new digital summit, featuring speakers from leading social networks, is one of the key innovations for the 2016 edition.

Hosting A

Houston, USA

The city of Houston, Texas, which will host next year’s Super Bowl LI at the NRG Stadium, home of the Houston Texans, is hoping to create a footballing double-header, having entered a bid to host the 2017 Pro Bowl, the All-Star game of the National Football League (NFL).

The Pro Bowl has been held in Hawaii in all but two of the past 30 years, but on those two occasions it was held in the same city – Miami in 2010 and Phoenix in 2015 – that hosted the Super Bowl.

B

C

Sweden

The organisers of Rally Sweden have agreed a new three-year hosting contract with WRC Promoter, operator of the World Rally Championship (WRC). The rally’s contract had been due to expire after this year’s event, which went ahead in February despite nearly being cancelled due to lack of snow and unsuitable racing conditions. The new deal, however, means Sweden will continue to host a WRC stage until at least 2019. Talks over the extension had been ongoing for six months, according to a Rally Sweden statement.

D

Hua Hin, Thailand

Thai communications firm True and alcoholic drinks company ThaiBev have partnered to contribute 180 million Baht (US$5 million) to the creation of a new Asian Tour golf event, the True Thailand Classic Presented by Chang. The tournament, which has been sanctioned by the European Tour, Asian Tour and the Thailand PGA, will see players compete for a US$1.75 million prize fund. It replaces the previous True Thailand Classic and will take place annually in March.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The Professional Squash Association (PSA) is to stage its Women’s World Championship in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in April, after signing a new hosting contract. Sportspin Event & Athlete Management will organise and promote the event, which the PSA says will be the ‘most lucrative’ in the history of the women’s squash tour, in conjunction with the Squash Racquets Association of Malaysia (SRAM). The sport’s top players will battle it out for the world crown at the Bukit Jalil Stadium between 23rd and 30th April.

F

Cádiz, Spain

Ryder Cup star and world number 116 Sergio Garcia is the latest high-profile golfer to host a European Tour event. The Sergio Garcia Foundation will be the official host of the Spanish Open, staged in Valderrama for the first time from 14th to 17th April. The stroke-play tournament has been part of the European Tour’s schedule since the inception of the tour in 1972. Previous winners have included hometown hero Seve Ballesteros and six-time major winner Nick Faldo.

E

Auckland, New Zealand

The Vodafone Warriors of the National Rugby League (NRL) are to remain at the Mount Smart Stadium in Auckland until at least 2028 after renewing their lease agreement with local authorities. The announcement brings to an end a long period of uncertainty over the club’s future in New Zealand’s largest city, with Regional Facilities Auckland (RFA), the owner and operator of Mount Smart Stadium, having been looking at the possibility of relocating the team to Eden Park or North Harbour Stadium.

The organisers of Rally Sweden have agreed a new contract with WRC Promoter, ensuring a World Rally Championship stage in the country until 2019

SportsPro Magazine | 23

GALLERY

The spectacle of the half-time show takes place in front of a packed 71,088 crowd in the Levi’s Stadium

American pop star Usher before kick-off

Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning holds the Vince Lombardi Trophy

Denver Broncos tight end Virgil Green celebrates victory

Super Bowl 50 The biggest single game in American sport, the Super Bowl, was back for its landmark 50th edition at the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California on 7th February.

The Denver Broncos beat the Carolina Panthers 24-10 to take the third National Football League title in their history.

24 | www.sportspromedia.com

Lady Gaga sings the national anthem

NBA star Steph Curry, of the Golden State Warriors, beats the Carolina Panthers’ drum

Chris Martin of Coldplay performs in the half-time show

Carolina Panthers’ Jonathan Stewart leaps over the goal line to score a touchdown

Bruno Mars also appeared with Coldplay and Beyonce

Singer Beyonce was a surprise addition to the half-time entertainment after being invited to join Coldplay

MVPs from some of the previous 49 Super Bowls were honoured before the game

SportsPro Magazine | 25

GALLERY

Orlando Magic’s Aaron Gordon leaps over Stuff, the team’s mascot

LeBron James dunks

Eugenie Bouchard (second left), SportsPro’s most marketable athlete for 2015, discusses tactics in the celebrity All-Star game with guest coach and former NBA star Steve Nash (centre)

Retiring LA Lakers forward Kobe Bryant helped the Western Conference side to the win

NBA legend and Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan presents Larry Tanenbaum, chairman of MLSE, with a jersey to commemorate the game

Nash watches on with TV presenter and film director Jon Stewart

Former players Yao Ming, Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell are honoured during a time-out

British pop star Sting provides the half-time entertainment

NBA commissioner Adam Silver presents Russell Westbrook with the MVP award

Movie star couple Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis in attendence

NBA All-Star Game 2016 The 2016 edition of the National Basketball Association’s exhibition game, pitting the best of the Eastern and Western Conferences against each other, took to Toronto’s Air Canada Centre on 14th February. Oklahoma City Thunder’s Russell Westbrook Jr was named All-Star MVP for the second year running.

26 | www.sportspromedia.com

Australia’s Lleyton Hewitt takes a well-earned drink after his final game before retirement

A disappointed Andy Murray fan watches on

Andy Murray admires his reflection in the runner-up plate

Angelique Kerber celebrates taking match point in her victory over number one seed Serena Williams

Noura El Shwekh, girlfriend of France’s Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, offers her encouragement

Brazil’s Bruno Soares and Britain’s Jamie Murray savour their men’s doubles win

Kerber kisses her trophy as the defeated Williams offers her congratulations

Novak Djokovic celebrates another with trophy after the 11th Grand Slam win of his illustrious career

Amelie Mauresmo, Andy Murray’s coach, watches the final

Djokovic’s coach Boris Becker

Australian Open The 2016 Australian Open, the first of the year’s four Grand Slam tennis events, saw Novak Djokovic triumph once again over world number two Andy Murray in the men’s final, while Germany’s Angelique Kerber won her first ever major title with a surprise victory over Serena Williams in the women’s.

SportsPro Magazine | 27

SECTION TEXT HERE GALLERY

Denny Hamlin comes in a nose ahead of Martin Truex Jr in a photo finish

Tyler Hubbard of the band Florida Georgia Line

Hamlin celebrates his victory

Danica Patrick greets fans as she is introduced before the race

The US Air Force Thunderbirds perform a flyover

Professional wrestler John Cena answers questions at the press conference

Team owner Richard Childress assesses the track

Driver Dale Earnhardt Jr (left) pauses during the National Anthem

Baseball Hall of Fame centerfielder Ken Griffey Jr poses with the Daytona 500 winner’s trophy

Actor Gerard Butler joins in the fun

Joe Gibbs, owner of the winning team, walks through the garage area during practice

Daytona 500

paimages.co.uk PAImages

The 2016 Daytona 500, the first edition of Nascar’s most prestigious Sprint Cup Series race since the US$400 million Daytona Rising redevelopment, saw Denny Hamlin race to a 27th career victory for Joe Gibbs Racing.

28 ||www.sportspromedia.com www.sportspromedia.com

THE SHOT SECTION TEXT HERECHINESE BOOM SOCCER’S

THE SH T Ramires, formerly of English Premier League team Chelsea, greets Chinese soccer fans on his arrival at Nanjing Lukou International Airport after signing a four-year contract with Chinese Super League (CSL) side Jiangsu Suning. Ramires was joined in the league by other high-profile players such as fellow Brazilian Alex Teixeira and former Paris Saint-Germain midfielder Ezequiel Lavezzi, as CSL clubs reaped the benefits of heavy state investment in soccer and a US$1.25 billion domestic TV deal.

AP/Press Association Images

paimages.co.uk PAImages

30 | www.sportspromedia.com

HOSTING WINNERS Everyone’s a winner when hosting events in Denmark.

Volunteers, spectators, businesses and politicians all come together to empower your world class event.

Everyone plays on your team to take it to a higher level.

When you place your event in Denmark, you’re bringing it to a vibrant atmosphere served by a wealth of trustworthy and experienced partners. Together we’ll make your event a winner.

THE BULLETIN SOCCER

Gianni Infantino, the former Uefa general secretary, is the new head of soccer’s governing body, replacing long-standing president Sepp Blatter

Gianni Infantino wins Fifa presidential race

G

ianni Infantino has been elected president of Fifa, world soccer’s governing body.

The Uefa general secretary beat Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, Jordan Football Association president Prince Ali bin al Hussein, and former Fifa ofÀcial Jér{me Champagne of France after two rounds of a ballot at an extraordinary general congress at Fifa’s headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland on 26th February.

He will serve a four-year term.

South African candidate Tokyo Sexwale withdrew his candidacy at the end of an entertaining address to members before voting began.

All Àve candidates had been given 15 minutes to make their case to the Fifa electorate.

Infantino replaces Sepp Blatter, who had been

32 | www.sportspromedia.com

president since 1998. Blatter called an election last June, just weeks after winning a Àfth four-year term, after deciding he would lay down his mandate in the wake of a series of arrests and corruption allegations involving soccer ofÀcials and executives.

However, the 79-year-old Swiss was subsequently suspended from soccer for eight years – reduced to six years in February – for making a payment of CHF2 million (US$2 million) to Michel Platini, president of European confederation Uefa. Platini is also serving a six-year suspension, which ended his long-held hopes of succeeding Blatter.

Representatives of 207 member associations voted, with the Kuwaiti and Indonesian federations ineligible due to suspension.

Speaking to the assembled members on his election, a visibly stunned Infantino switched – as he had done in his Ànal pitch – between several languages.

“Fifa has gone through sad times, moments of crisis, but those times are over,” he said.

“We need to implement the reform and implement good

governance and transparency.

We also need to have respect.

We’re going to win back this respect through hard work, commitment and we’re going to make sure we can Ànally focus on this wonderful game that is football.”

Infantino, 45, entered the race after the suspension of Platini, who had long been the

Defeated candidate Sheikh Salman congratulates Infantino on his victory

Jérôme Champagne, Tokyo Sexwale and Prince Ali bin al Hussein were among the other candidates, though Sexwale suspended his campaign before voting began

favourite to succeed Blatter.

A polyglot and trained lawyer, he joined Uefa in 2000 from the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) at the University of Neuchâtel, becoming general secretary in October 2009.

In his time at Uefa, Infantino worked closely with Platini on the expansion of the European Championship and the introduction of Financial Fair Play regulations for clubs.

He was also the regular host of Uefa competition draws.

Among Infantino’s pledges as Fifa president is the release of more of Fifa’s income, which has gone in recent years into a growing cash reserve, to member associations. He is also in favour of exploring an expansion of the World Cup to 40 teams, with regions hosting rather than nations.

Sheikh Salman had become the favourite in the weeks ahead of the election, securing the support of the AFC executive committee and that of the Confederation of African Football (CAF). However, it appeared in the aftermath of the vote that several members of those confederations had split from their leadership and backed Infantino instead.

Supporters view the tenure

of former Bahrain Football Association president Sheikh Salman, 50, at the AFC as a period of modernisation, particularly in the women’s game. His candidacy for the Fifa presidency was nonetheless controversial internationally, due mainly to claims that he helped to identify soccer players and athletes who had protested against Bahrain’s government – and were subsequently tortured – after the Arab Spring uprising of 2011. He denies the allegations.

Earlier in the day, 189 members voted in favour of a package of reforms that will lead to the abolition of the Fifa executive committee.

22 opposed the reforms, with six abstaining.

The ExCo will be replaced by the Fifa Council, whose membership will grow to 37 seats including that of the president. In a victory for current executive committee member Moya Dodd of Australia, each of Fifa’s six continental confederations must put forward at least one woman to join the council.

Other reforms approved in the vote include eligibility checks to join the Fifa Council, limits of three four-year terms for all elected

Fifa presidential election: the results FIRST ROUND – Two-thirds majority of 207 voters required for victory

SECOND ROUND – Simple majority required for victory

Gianni Infantino: 88 votes Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa: 85 votes Prince Ali bin al Hussein: 27 votes Jérôme Champagne: seven votes

Gianni Infantino: 115 votes Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa: 88 votes Prince Ali bin al Hussein: four votes Jérôme Champagne: no votes

Fifa positions, and public disclosure of individual earnings from Fifa activities.

Fifa will also implement measures aimed at separating powers between those responsible for its sporting and business operations, with an independent Audit and Compliance Committee overseeing the activities of the new council and the general secretariat.

Human rights requirements will be written into Fifa statutes, while there will also be a new Football Stakeholders Committee to represent players, coaches, clubs, leagues and match ofÀcials.

The new rules were drafted after consultation by

a reform committee led by former International Olympic Committee (IOC) secretary general François Carrard and Fifa audit and compliance committee chairman Domenico Scala.

Alongside reform, the challenges facing Infantino include restoring the conÀdence of potential sponsors. Fifa is currently US$550 million short of its targets for the 2015-18 cycle.

Infantino marked his Àrst day in ofÀce by playing a game of soccer with Fifa staff and former players. He also ofÀcially opened the CHF110 million (US$110 million) Fifa World Football Museum in Zurich.

SportsPro Magazine | 33

THE BULLETIN GOVERNANCE/MOTORSPORT

AIBA courts pro boxers for Rio

P

rofessional boxers are set to be allowed to compete at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, provided amendments to the constitution of the sport’s world amateur governing body, AIBA, go through at an extraordinary congress in June.

The controversial plans were conÀrmed by AIBA president Ching-Kuo Wu after it emerged in February that the federation had begun procedures to change its eligibility criteria.

“We want the best boxers to come to the Olympic Games,” Wu said. “It is AIBA’s 70th birthday, and we want something to change – not after four years, but now. It is an IOC policy to have the best athletes in the Games and, of the international federations, AIBA is probably the only one without professional athletes

in the Olympics.”

The proposed changes, which would allow each individual national federation to select professional athletes for Olympic representation, have attracted criticism from those who argue they would be unfair to amateur athletes currently taking part in the qualifying process for Rio, which is already well under way.

In reality, however, the practice of selecting professionals is likely to be a gradual process for the majority of countries whose national associations have nurtured promising amateurs through funded programmes over the past four years.

Male boxers will also compete without headguards in Rio for the Àrst time at an Olympics since Moscow 1980.

AIBA is set to relax its restrictions on professional boxers at the Olympics

Alexander in after London 2017 tumult

C

Cherry Alexander, the new MD of the 2017 World Athletics Championships

34 | www.sportspromedia.com

herry Alexander was appointed managing director for the London 2017 World Athletics Championships in February after a spate of resignations from the event’s troubled organising committee.

Alexander, who is the head of international and televised events at UK Athletics, replaces Sally Bolton, the former general manager of Rugby League World Cup 2013, who resigned earlier in the month amid a reported power struggle within the senior management.

A report by The Guardian said Bolton, whose departure followed that of deputy chair Heather Hancock and independent director Martin Stewart, had fallen out with UK Athletics chairman Ed Warner and chief executive Niels de

Vos over ‘a range of Ànancial, sponsorship and governance issues’. Questions had been raised over Warner and de Vos’ involvement in the governing body and the event, with Hancock and Stewart having complained of an ‘inherent conÁict of interest’ in a leaked resignation letter to acting sports minister David Evennett.

London 2017, the biggest athletics event to be held in the UK since the 2012 Olympics, has struggled commercially in the midst of the ongoing athletics doping scandal and Warner is believed to have approached new IAAF president Sebastian Coe for Ànancial help.

The governing body, however, has refused until board reforms are implemented following the “unsettling” resignations.

Alexander replaces Sally Bolton, who resigned from the role in February

Inside the story: an end to Nascar’s ‘moving billboard’ era?

By James Emmett

F

or years Nascar, stock car racing’s preeminent series, has been something of an anomaly in the commercial landscape of US sport.

Most entities in US sport, from the major leagues through to college sport, have traditionally shied away from logo-heavy sponsorship strategies. Keen to build team or league brand equity, and creative in their use of activation techniques in and around sports venues, the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Hockey League (NHL), and the National Basketball Association (NBA) have all erred on the side

of caution with their sporting product, opting for a ‘clean jersey’ policy, ofÀcial uniform provider excepted.

The opposite is true of Nascar, in which cars have long been plastered with multiple logos. But that might be about to change.

Nascar’s new charter system will offer greater long-term stability to teams

Why might that be about to change?

If the NBA is on the verge of introducing more commercial logos on its playing jerseys, Nascar may well be about to think about doing the opposite after a major and longanticipated overhaul of its business model ahead of the 2016 season.

Essentially, the series has moved from an independent contractor model to a franchisebased system in which, initially at least, 19 teams have been granted nine-year Sprint Cup ‘charters’. Bigger teams have

been granted multiple entries, and smaller teams often just one, but the charters effectively act as a long-term licence to compete in Nascar’s top-tier series, giving the teams stability and a long-term proposition to offer to their partners.

Why will it help?

The system will immediately provide a new potential revenue stream to imperilled teams. The charters are already believed to be worth signiÀcant seven-Àgure sums and there is nothing to stop the teams trading entries

amongst themselves.

But the system should also create a new virtuous circle for owners: secure in their positions, they should be able to invest in building the brand equity of the team – and that might mean an end to the days of cars switching colours on a race-by-race basis to please their sponsors, while simultaneously increasing the value of a sponsorship association.

For more on the new-look Nascar, and a team-by-team 2016 sponsorship guide, turn to page 102.

Formula One unveils 2017 rule changes

F

The safety of drivers in the cockpit has become a primary issue for F1

ormula One is to introduce new bodywork regulations and enhanced cockpit protection in 2017, after a suite of rule changes were approved by world motorsport’s governing body, the FIA. The new bodywork regulations will see cars become longer, lower and wider. An FIA statement said the design changes have been adopted to ‘create more exciting cars, delivering additional downforce to increase speeds and lower lap times’.

All stakeholders in Formula One are also said to be working together to improve cockpit protection, with the ‘Halo’ concept currently

the preferred option. Other options, such as transparent cockpit protection, are also being evaluated.

Further proposed changes to the series include the introduction of a new elimination-style qualifying format, possibly in time for the start of the 2016 season, and a ‘Driver of the Day’ award, to be announced as part of the race broadcast immediately following the conclusion of each Grand Prix.

The changes are due to be formalised and ratiÀed by the World Motor Sport Council on 30th April, the Ànal deadline for all 2017 sporting and technical regulations.

SportsPro Magazine | 35

THE BULLETIN SECTION TEXT HERE DESTINATIONS

Brazil struggling ahead of Rio 2016

P

hotographs received by the Brazilian Globo news agency in late February appeared to show a disembodied human arm Áoating in the waters of Guanabara Bay, the proposed site of the sailing events at the Rio Olympics later this year. The scale of the task facing Olympic organisers – already under Àre for the high levels of pollution in the bay – seems to grow larger with every passing day.

Rio’s preparations for the 2016 Olympics and Paralympics have been beset by multiple delays in the construction of venues and city infrastructure: news emerged in February that the new metro line linking the Olympic Park in Barra de Tijuca with the rest of the city may not be Ànished in time ticket sales have been sluggish and there have been concerns about the country’s handling of the Zika virus. Undertaken against a backdrop of a Áagging economy and a fraught political environment in which the president, Dilma Rousseff, is facing impeachment proceedings and the country as a whole is dealing with a vast corruption scandal centred on the state-controlled Petrobras oil and gas giant, it is perhaps no surprise that local organisers have struggled.

The lag between bid success and the awarding of an event and the execution of the event itself – especially in the case of major global sporting events such as the Olympics or the Fifa World Cup – can be perilous to the chances of hosting success. In the latest edition of SportsPro’s Destinations report, an unrivalled guide to bidding, hosting and major event strategies around the world, The Sports Consultancy, a London-based sports agency

36 | www.sportspromedia.com

Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff (right) is threatened with impeachment as this summer’s Olympic Games approach

that works with the world’s leading cities and rights holders to develop event strategies, redesign event concepts and design and manage major event bid processes, offers its best practice counsel to rights holders looking to ensure the successful delivery of their events.

“What’s becoming increasingly apparent is that cross-party agreement at award doesn’t necessarily turn into cross-party agreement for operational delivery,” says Matt Wilson, The Sports Consultancy’s director of consulting. “So what appears to be a locked down operational budget, especially if it’s in dollars or euros or pounds, can change quite considerably over the course of a four or Àveyear delivery. So it’s absolutely essential that the rights holder has the protections so that what is signed up for Àve years previous is what is budgeted for and can be afforded Àve years hence.”

Angus Buchanan, comanaging director of the agency, says, “Our view is that there’s signiÀcant risk there and you can

mitigate that, but it’s probably not being mitigated effectively because of the hiatus that can be created between award and delivery. What are rights holders doing to ensure that between the award and the delivery there isn’t this enormous holiday where no one is doing anything, that the contract doesn’t gather dust in someone’s top drawer in the mayoral ofÀce or the central government ofÀce or the ministry of sport?

“It’s incumbent upon the rights holder to make sure it is putting milestones into that period to make sure that it is constantly communicating with the political administration beyond award through to delivery.”

Ashley Blake, general counsel at The Sports Consultancy, adds, “We ideally look for one or more government institutions to be underwriting the full performance and delivery and the Ànancial contributions for an event.

It is also very important for the rights holders to make sure that those guarantees are fully binding, and doing a degree of due diligence

on the guarantees that are presented from government and making sure, for example, to get a letter of conÀrmation from an international law Àrm in the jurisdiction just to conÀrm that those guarantees are binding and enforceable, and understanding how you might go about enforcing those guarantees. That’s particularly important in Brazil.”

The full roundtable feature with The Sports Consultancy – ‘Why to bid, how to host, and making a success of both’ – is available in the 2016 edition of SportsPro’s Destinations report. Available now at www.sportspromedia.com/shop THE ANNUAL REPORT 2016

WWW.SPORTSPROMEDIA.COM

THE UNRIVALLED GUIDE TO BIDDING, HOSTING AND MAJOR EVENT STRATEGIES Europe - Africa - Central Asia - Middle East Central & South America - Asia-Pacific - North America

THAT EXTRA-PIECE OF CONTENT FANS GO MAD FOR deltatre’s Digital Host Services

by Carlo de Marchis, deltaWUH &KLHI 3URGXFW 0DUNHWLQJ 2É?FHU

W

ith digital sport consumption growing every year, reaching new markets and larger audiences, we recorded a need for exclusive content - something unique, that can’t be seen on TV, available only for digital users.

This is why we designed and built Digital Host Services (DHS). A range of services that let any federation, league or event organiser make the most out of the content produced RQ YHQXH HQKDQFLQJ WKHLU RÎ?HULQJ for rights-holding broadcasters.

To make it easier to understand, let’s take an example: you are a sports federation, the owner of next summer’s top football event. Broadcasters are battling to buy rights and fans are hungry for that extra-piece of content that only you FDQ RÎ?HU WKHP :LWK deltatre’s DHS, rights-owners like you enable broadcasters to entertain fans in new ways, with additional camera angles to watch every key moment of the competition; to stream any game through a video player that let fans see lineups, heatmaps, live statistics, additional video clips - without missing any second of the action. You will

SURYLGH EURDGFDVWHUV ZLWK DQ DWWUDFWLYH RÎ?HU that they can integrate into their existing digital and mobile solution or provide them a full, hassle-free, turn-key service.

These and many more services make up the Digital Host Services package; from rights-owners to broadcasters via deltatre, delivered in digital-ready format, stored on the cloud.

Fans everywhere are looking for ways to enrich their sport experience on digital SODWIRUPV :H SURYLGH WKDW SLHFH RI extra-content they go mad for.

INSIGHT FANTASY SPORTS

DraftKings has a major advertising presence in the US, holding partnerships with over 50 professional teams, and is now hoping to build a similar profile in the UK

Taking a gamble on fantasy sports In late 2015, scandal hit the daily fantasy sports gaming industry, leaving its two biggest players, DraftKings and FanDuel, on choppy waters. The first few weeks of 2016 have so far failed to offer calmer tides, as business continues to be plagued by regulatory and financial woes. As DraftKings’ UK launch sees it move into international territory for the first time, what is the future for the beleaguered sector?

By Adam Nelson

38 | www.sportspromedia.com

I

t was late September last year when the storm Àrst hit the daily fantasy sports industry. Ethan Haskell, a content manager at DraftKings, one of the leading services in the sector, was found to have leaked a batch of secret player data to the internet just hours before going on to claim a bumper US$350,000 prize at rival site FanDuel.

Though an internal review by DraftKings would contest that the leak was ‘inadvertent’ and that the timing of the leak came after the FanDuel deadline for team submission and thus too late for Haskell, or anyone else, to beneÀt from the use of the data, the damage had irreparably been done.

The data was, on the surface, innocuous. The core of DraftKings’ main games is selecting players – in this case, football players – who the client believes will be successful on a given game day.

The leaked data related to how frequently particular players had been selected across the entire game. Though there was no evidence linking Haskell’s winnings to the data leak, nor any evidence that he had access to the data at a time when it would have proved advantageous, a lawyer speaking on behalf of law Àrm Becker Poliakoff in the immediate aftermath of the incident told the New York Times that the leak was ‘absolutely akin to insider trading >«@ It gives that person a distinct edge in a contest.’

That storm has hardly abated since. It is difÀcult to say whether Haskell’s data leak caused the surge in sudden interest from both lawmakers and the media in the industry’s regulation, or simply increased its visibility, but in either case the upshots were clear and damaging. In October Nevada joined Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and Washington on the growing list of states where daily fantasy gaming is prohibited, on the basis that, as a game in which stakes are put up and prizes are won based on noncontrollable outcomes, daily fantasy sports games are a form of gambling – illegal in much of the United States.

The move by Nevada legislators was particularly vexing for the industry, with the state being the home to Las Vegas and one of only two in the country in which casino-style gambling is legalised statewide. Nevertheless, the state government requires such institutions to apply for gambling licences and, while DraftKings and FanDuel would be likely to receive

DraftKings’ soccer games use Opta data to provide players with a detailed, in-depth experience

that licence, doing so would weaken their case for remaining operational in states in which gambling is outlawed.

Then, in the biggest and most highproÀle development so far, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman commenced his campaign against the industry. He initially served both DraftKings and FanDuel with cease-and-desist letters – which were temporarily enacted by a judge, who subsequently revoked the order for both companies to stop accepting bets in the state – and later, in January 2016, requested that a judge order both Àrms pay back all money lost by New York State residents playing on either site.

It is not simply the regulatory environment that is proving challenging, however, and the Àrst week of February 2016 brought a signiÀcant double blow for DraftKings. Fox, which had invested US$160 million in the company last summer, prior to the turbulence of the year’s end, in exchange for an 11 per cent stake, announced that it was marking down its investment by US$95 million, taking a 60 per cent loss on its equity.

Later that same week, American sports network ESPN announced it would be ending its advertising partnership with DraftKings early, just

one month into its period of exclusivity.

The deal was also initially signed last summer, though only became exclusive in January – essentially meaning that until that point ESPN was free to continue selling advertising to FanDuel, as it will presumably continue to do now that the exclusive deal has ended.

According to reports, DraftKings had pledged to spend up to US$200 million per year on advertising with the broadcaster, a commitment it probably felt it could not keep while Àghting legal Àres on several fronts.

It was amid this uncertainty that DraftKings expanded its business into international territory for the Àrst time, launching in the UK in early February.

The timing, the company insists, is coincidental, with its entry into the British market having been planned for over a year and recent events unforeseen.

Nevertheless, given the situation in which the company currently Ànds itself, it seems as though a great deal is riding on the success of the product on the Atlantic’s eastern shores.

“Why now? Well, it’s a phenomenal marketplace,” explains Jeff Haas, DraftKings’ chief international ofÀcer and the man in charge of ensuring that success, speaking to SportsPro a week

SportsPro Magazine | 39

INSIGHT FANTASY SPORTS

after DraftKings’ UK debut. “There are eight and a half million season-long fantasy football players in the UK, and there’s an opportunity for us to help them discover the evolution of fantasy football, which is our platform. The business reason is simply that there is a tremendous opportunity. It’s just a natural extension of our business to be expanding into international markets where there’s going to be interest in our products.”

That interest has been galvanised by launching in the UK alongside highproÀle partnerships with Premier League soccer sides Liverpool, Arsenal and Watford, the latter of whom played host to the ofÀcial launch ahead of their game against Chelsea on 3rd February.

“We got off to a good start on the partnership front, which is a really big part of our US business, where we have Àve league partnerships and over 50 professional teams that we work with,” says Matt Kalish, chief revenue ofÀcer and co-founder of DraftKings. “So with Liverpool, Arsenal and Watford, it’s really the same strategy. The closer of an alliance we can have with some high-proÀle big teams, it helps us from a brand awareness standpoint and it helps the teams from the standpoint of engagement.

“We’re able to show with data very conclusively that people who are playing fantasy are much more engaged with this sort of sport. So that’s something that we bring to the table that’s really beneÀcial. And I think you’ll see in-stadium experiences, a bunch of touch-points like that, but what we’re really excited about is just starting the relationship and getting some experiences out there that money can’t buy, getting people closer to the team so they can engage that way.”

Those exclusive experiences are a big part of the early push DraftKings is making in its UK venture, focusing on the experiential side of what its games can offer, which marks it out from competitors.

“It’s pretty consistent across all of our partnerships that we look for these ‘money can’t buy’ experiences that we can award to our players,” says Kalish. “I think virtually every one of our deals has a component like that, so it might be like a Àrst pitch at a baseball game, or meeting players, or Áying on the team plane to away games. It’s just something that is so interesting that money

40 | www.sportspromedia.com

Jeffrey Haas (left) and Matt Kalish (right) at the announcement of DraftKings’ partnership with Watford FC

can’t buy it, that’s what we look for, and I think our players really appreciate the opportunity to play for prizes like that.”

Kalish notes that being able to launch with three major partners is a considerable coup compared to the company’s early progress in the US, where “it took us over a year to even get one really big league or team deal after launching,” but that there is certain to be “a learning curve any time you launch in a new geography”.

“I wouldn’t say there are major lessons to learn,” adds Haas, “but there will be a lot of small lessons. Around language or representation, marketing, what is working as far as customer acquisition and customer education. We’re a company that is an innovator and to some degree even a disruptor because we’re doing things that have not been done before and we’re trying to do them in interesting, authentic and compelling ways. That means that there’s a lot of opportunity to test the product and the platform in different ways. We’re very pleased to be in a situation today where we’re able to offer it to a UK audience and understand how well received it is.”

While it is still too early to make any judgement on how successful the initial UK launch has been, Haas has seen enough so far to state that he “absolutely believes that as our business continues to grow around the world, in time the Premier League will represent our biggest contests”.

“But I don’t know how long that’s going

to take,” he adds. “Let’s see how things go.

We have a lot of work to do but fortunately we have a really talented team who are working to get that done and as players continue to share with us their feedback we can create a more compelling product that people want to play. But it does require us to continue expanding around the world, to increase the base of players.

“In the US our business has been around for more than four years. People understand what we are and who we are.

In the UK we’re brand new so there’s a tremendous amount of education that is involved, and that means we need to focus on building a foundation of a common understanding and then upon that we can start building other layers of appreciation of the nuances and richness of our product, its breadth and its depth.”

The mid-phase of that growth process after the business was founded, once the machine was jump-started by DraftKings’ Àrst few commercial deals, was, Kalish notes, “a really hot spate”.

“How many industries have come out of nowhere and grown the way daily fantasy has?” he asks. “It’s been very interesting, I think.”

The question mark that hangs over that, of course, given the disruption of the past six months, is whether daily fantasy gaming is just a Áash in the pan or whether international expansion can act as a stabiliser and, ultimately, a growth driver for the business.

“Once we got some early read on the product, like how consumers were adopting it, how engaging it was, I think we pretty quickly came to the point of view that it was a global product,” Kalish explains. “It seems to work in any market that has passionate sports fans.

“Over the three and a half years we’ve been in operation, we’ve built the platform from basically zero to six million registered users. We’ve built up to 11 different sports now that we offer. We’ve progressively built out the platform and the user base over that time.”

Most notably, Kalish claims that “a majority” of users are new in the last six months, roughly the period since DraftKings’ biggest marketing push so far but also since the controversies surrounding the industry really broke.

Either the company’s US$100 million advertising splurge worked or, perhaps, the media furore and legal wranglings have simply encouraged interest in daily fantasy sports, rather than deterred it.

Ultimately, much of the current controversy can be reduced to a single question: is fantasy gaming a matter of chance or of skill? The industry’s detractors, Schneiderman chief among them, answer this heartily in the former the companies themselves deny such claims, insisting that knowledge and experience of the sports and the game is vital.

“Fantasy’s a completely different product >to sports betting@,” contests Kalish. “I think if you asked anyone who plays DraftKings or any fantasy game, they’ll tell you it’s clearly a game of skill. The reasons that they’ll cite are the research that goes in, selecting a successful team, really understanding the game theory, all the angles to how you build a successful line-up. It’s like any other challenging skill game. If you’re a chess player, you’re not going to easily solve the game. You can’t come on your very Àrst day and become the best person. It takes a lot of time, you have to learn.”

Whether or not DraftKings can be considered any more or less a game of skill than regular sports betting on this basis – and it muddies the waters somewhat that DraftKings did apply for and receive a gambling licence before its UK launch – it may be that the company

“How many industries have come out of nowhere and grown the way daily fantasy has?” feels that, in an over-saturated betting market, its product can offer an appealing alternative to those who are both already active gamblers, and those who may be more attracted to fantasy sports because of the wider gaming element.

“For the last year or so we’ve been looking ahead to what’s next and some of the international opportunities that’s out there, we’ve done a lot of evaluation of what are some really passionate sports markets that are out there that are really big and compelling for what we’ve built,” says Kalish.

“The UK came to the top of our list so we’ve been working on getting our platform ready for a UK launch for almost a year now. There’s a lot of work that goes into getting that ready, we’ve iterated a lot on our football products, collecting feedback, making sure it was in a position to meet the needs of the market here. We think we have a great platform to support Premier League, Champions League, and we also support golf and several other sports that are very popular in this market.”

Kalish is keen to stress the fantasy aspect of daily fantasy sports. The format’s greatest appeal, he suggests, is not to those looking to gamble on the outcomes of games, but to the same demographic as popular video games like Fifa and Football Manager, giving the player the chance to put some of their strongly held opinions about sport into some kind of real life practice.

“People really like doing the drafts, and that’s not as big here – there’s no draft in the Premier League, so that’s not as big of a part of the culture, but in America, every sport has a draft and it’s a huge big spectacle,” he explains.

“So it’s like, how do you pretend you’re

the general manager who’s constructing teams and making decisions? I think people are deÀnitely looking for a way to play that role.

“Everyone has a million opinions about sports, there’s that whole fantasy element to it. You can play when you want, you don’t have to play every day. If you know you’re going to be watching matches you can play, but if you’re travelling or if for any reason you decide you don’t want to play, you don’t have to! So I think it’s those two things: being able to draft more often, which is a lot of fun for people, and then not having that commitment where every day you have to follow it for eight months, as you would in a seasonlong game.”

As to how much focus will be placed on international expansion during a troubled period back home, Haas can only say that the UK will be “the vast majority of my focus and my team’s focus”.

“We have an ofÀce here in London with about 20 people in it, and we’re focused on the UK,” he says. “We have a lot of brilliant British staff who are working with us in order to build a successful business here.

“The UK launch is a testing ground for further growth in the UK and then into other international markets. We need to learn from the lessons we’re experiencing today and work to improve our business resonance in local markets. Our objective is to be the largest daily fantasy sports operator in the world but as well as thinking globally, we’re also thinking locally. Right now we’re the biggest daily fantasy football player in the UK market, and the intent is to continue to expanding that so I can say the same thing in every other market around the world where we choose to operate.”

SportsPro Magazine | 41

INSIGHT SOCCER

Shifting gear: Kitbag and the Fanatics global strategy Fanatics Inc sells more licensed sports merchandise annually than any other company but its roots remain firmly in the United States. That, however, is all set to change after the Florida-based firm acquired British online sports retailer Kitbag in February, part of an overarching strategy to replicate its home market dominance internationally.

By Michael Long

F

anatics Inc is synonymous with the business of licensed sports merchandise. No other company sells more jerseys, hats and other branded team gear annually, and in its home market of the United States, the Fanatics brand is a household name.

With annual revenues exceeding US$1 billion, Fanatics, based in Jacksonville, Florida, operates more than 300 online and ofÁine stores, running the e-commerce businesses for all four of North America’s major leagues, as well as other big-name properties like the PGA Tour, Major League Soccer (MLS) and Nascar. Originally formed as a football-focused company in 1995, it has also developed an unrivalled footprint in college sport, powering e-commerce operations for more schools than any other company, and operates a marketleading memorabilia and collectibles subsidiary, Fanatics Authentic.

Having established itself as the number one in its home market, Fanatics is now eyeing expansion beyond US shores. In early February the company took its Àrst signiÀcant step towards international expansion when it completed its acquisition of British online sports retailer Kitbag from Findel plc, a UK home shopping Àrm, in a deal valued at around UK£11.55 million.

“What we can do today that we couldn’t do before is twofold,” explains Doug Mack, the American who has been chief executive of Fanatics Inc since joining from One Kings Lane, an online home decorations business, in April 2014.

42 | www.sportspromedia.com

“First of all, Kitbag gives us immediate scale. There aren’t a lot of US$100 million e-commerce companies in the world. It’s a Ànite group: there are lots of little ones, there’s a handful of huge ones, but this kind of mid-range company that has real scale, it’s not that easy to come by.”

Secondly, for Mack, “it really Àlls in two strategic opportunities for us”.

“The Àrst is to globalise,” he adds.

“Our business is single-digit per cent international right now, when we look at our Canada business and when we look at product that we ship from the US to other countries. That’s single-digit percentage revenues. So with Kitbag, overnight we’re adding over US$100 million in global revenue to the mix, and now international revenues are double-digit per cent.

“Number two is soccer – football.

Soccer is the world’s number one sport; it’s the largest sport in the world in terms of annual consumer spend. Overnight, now soccer becomes one of our biggest sports. It’s one of our top four sports.

So there were two areas that we knew we needed to get bigger in: global and soccer.

With one acquisition, we now have critical mass in both.”

With a workforce of 500 staff based at its headquarters in Manchester, Kitbag’s business is primarily rooted in European soccer, although the company continues to work with clients across other sports including motorsport, rugby, tennis and golf. Its most high-proÀle partners are soccer clubs Manchester United, Real Madrid, Manchester City and Chelsea, in addition to two of tennis’ Grand Slams –

the French Open at Roland Garros and Wimbledon – Formula One and golf ’s Ryder Cup. As well as bringing immediate scale to the Fanatics business, which is now valued some way north of US$3 billion, Mack says assuming Kitbag’s existing footprint made more sense than attempting to expand internationally under the Fanatics banner. “We felt that when you look at Kitbag’s relationships, Kitbag has 25 major relationships in place, including four of the top ten European soccer teams, 500 employees in place, a hundred million dollar e-commerce business, a technology platform that works in ten currencies and 13 languages,” he adds.

“When we look at that, it probably represents a two to three-year acceleration than if we organically tried to build.

Then if you begin to say if Kitbag can accelerate your strategies in soccer and globalisation in two to three years, that’s pretty signiÀcant time to market, is there anybody else out there?

“We didn’t see on the landscape another company with Kitbag’s scale in these two areas and, to be clear, this strategy was very intentional. When we looked at our strategic expansion, if our goal as Fanatics is to continue to be the number one seller of licensed sports merchandise in the world, we need to be global, we need to be big in soccer. Those are two strategic imperatives. We thought that Kitbag was the fastest way to achieve those with the most scale, faster than building, and we didn’t see any other company that would be more interesting to buy.”

Fanatics chief executive Doug Mack (right) shakes hands with his counterpart at Kitbag, Andy Anson, after agreeing to a UK£11.55 million acquisition

Yet growth in the Kitbag business is by no means guaranteed. Findel, facing Ànancial difÀculties and management uncertainty of its own, initially put Kitbag up for sale early last year, with the company about to report losses before tax of UK£2.2 million for the Àscal year up to March 2015. Findel’s decision to pull Kitbag off the market for unpublicised reasons in the spring only exacerbated the uncertainty surrounding the company’s future.

Still, Fanatics kept up its interest.

According to Mack, Michael Rubin, the company’s largest shareholder and executive chairman, originally spoke to Kitbag chief executive Andy Anson about a possible takeover several years ago, and in the autumn of last year Fanatics

decided to put in an ofÀcial written offer.

The customary period of meetings, negotiations and due diligence took place until December, with Findel running what Mack describes as “an opaque process” in which Fanatics “weren’t aware of who the other buyers were”. When a deal was Ànally agreed, it was ultimately down to Mack, as company chief executive, to make the Ànal call.

“We went in and we made an offer to say what we thought the business was worth,” he says now, adding: “It’s absolutely a deal of growth. When you look at Kitbag, it’s historically been owned

by Findel, a larger retail company that doesn’t necessarily specialise in the sports industry. In the last few years, based off

Findel’s public trading statements, Kitbag hasn’t grown much. So our full focus now is: how do we invest in Kitbag and how do we grow Kitbag? And that’s not only the standalone Kitbag.com site, which remains important – that will be very, very focused on being an expert, the best soccer site that there is, as its mission – it also means the partner sites.”

Mack’s conÀdence is supported by the fact that Fanatics has the funds to match its ambition. Last August the company secured a US$300 million investment from private equity Àrm Silver Lake, while it also counts China’s Alibaba Group, an increasingly inÁuential player in an increasingly Asia-focused global e-commerce industry, among its

SportsPro Magazine | 43

INSIGHT SECTION TEXT HERE SOCCER

Manchester United and Real Madrid are counted among Kitbag’s most high-profile European clients

stakeholders. Backed by such Ànancial clout, Mack insists Fanatics will “invest more Ànancially in Kitbag, in terms of ongoing investment to grow the business, than we did to acquire the company”.

“It’s one thing to acquire it, but we’re set aside a multiple of capital and time to make sure that the business really grows,” he adds. “So what it means is that Kitbag as a soccer site will grow. What I think it means is that for the partners, this is a huge deal. We’re a well-capitalised, fast-growing, sports-focused company that has best practices. We will invest in technology, we will invest in merchandise, we’ll invest in physical infrastructure.

“Kitbag is a business that effectively has been, to some degree, underinvested in for a few years. If we’re going to buy this business, we need to invest and it’s not only money, it’s time. We have a team in Silicon Valley of over 250 engineers.

As Fanatics, we’re going to spend US$80 million cash this year in technology. The thinking was, if we’re going to buy Kitbag, we won’t continue to just focus that investment in North America and North American sports, some of that investment will now go into how do we take the Kitbag platform and build upon it. How do we give partners like the major EPL [Premier League] teams better mobile experiences, more personalisation, better search on the sites, faster site speed?”

One “really cool synergy” between Fanatics and Kitbag, adds Mack, lies in the fact that the latter operates the e-commerce business for the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Hockey League (NHL) in Europe. That, he says, ensures Fanatics

44 | www.sportspromedia.com

is now best placed to offer an enhanced service to those major league clients, not to mention all the others within each company’s respective portfolio.

“We’re now a global platform for these partners,” he continues. “As we’ve made this investment, we’re now looking to, say for our partners like Manchester United or Real Madrid, we now offer a global platform and we now will invest much faster than Kitbag would have ever done on its own. So back to your question, all of our work was around if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right and we’re not going to be satisÀed with four of the top global soccer teams. We would like to work with all ten of them, and hopefully as a result of having this global, now north of a billion-dollar company with all of the resources that we have, we’ll be able to provide that platform for those partners.”

Mack is speaking to SportsPro at a central London hotel, shortly before heading up to Manchester to meet staff at Kitbag headquarters for the Àrst time since the takeover. Asked whether the Fanatics board in the States has any plans to cut jobs at Kitbag in a bid to integrate and streamline the business, he is quick to provide reassurances to his new charges up in Manchester.

“At peak, we scale up to 6,000 employees a year, but they’re all in North America,” he says of Fanatics. “Kitbag has around 500 employees and they’re all in Europe. Part of the reason we did the deal is we wanted 500 new employees in the company who have expertise in the world of soccer. That’s something that we had some of, but we want more of. There are no planned reductions or streamlining

related to the deal. What we want to do is invest on top.”

Mack is also adamant that the Kitbag brand will remain in place following the acquisition, irrespective of Fanatics’ ambitions of becoming a global player under its own established moniker. “When I think about the brand strategy, Kitbag and Kitbag.com will remain very much as a football or soccer-focused brand,” he says. “That’s a business that has lots of growth potential. As we as a company have a portfolio of hundreds of sites, we should think of Kitbag.com as one of the major sites within the broader Fanatics portfolio. We’re attracted to the Kitbag brand and it will live on.”

With an international platform now in place, Mack says the future looks bright for Fanatics, Kitbag and their clients, especially those clubs in European soccer who have made no secret of their desire to grow their e-commerce and merchandising operations in burgeoning soccer markets on the opposite side of the Atlantic.

“We now represent the only company that any team or league can go to and say, ‘I want you to run my global e-commerce business,’” he says. “And we truly mean the end-to-end. That’s a combination of capabilities that we have as Fanatics and Kitbag now. We also can run their retail operations, and that can also be US-based, European-based. Another big thing that we do as Fanatics is we have apparel operations, so when we work with partners we’re able to produce merchandise for them as well that they may not have broadly available in the market.

“What we now offer to European soccer clubs that Kitbag could not alone is the notion of a well-funded, large-scale, global e-commerce, retail and merchandise platform. What we have found in the US with our scale is we can go to any given team or club and because of our scale we can run their e-commerce business much more proÀtably than they could on their own.

They are naturally sub-scaled as only being a single team. Now we can go to any European soccer team and basically provide that same level of scale and same level of sophistication that is a better fan experience and they can frankly make more money running it on our platform than trying to do it on their own.”

Controlling cost Infrastructure. Venues. Overlay.

We are independent, a leader in our field and provide our clients with comprehensive, reliable and forward-thinking commercial consultancy advice via our global network of 120 offices.

We combine our global sports expertise with local knowledge, offering a team of experts supported by local delivery.

Host city bids Major sports events Stadiums and arenas

Services

Experience

• • • • • • • • •

• Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games • Rio 2016 Olympic & Paralympic Games • Baku 2015 European Games • England 2015 Rugby World Cup

Budget preparation Risk management Procurement Benchmarking Value engineering Contract management Cost estimating Change control Financial closure

www.rlb.com

Visit us at SportAccord Stand 95

• Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games • London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games • Doha 2006 Asian Games • Sydney 2000 Olympic Games

VOTED #1 COST CONSULTANT IN WORLD ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE

COVER STORY CRICKET

BACK ON THE FRONT FOOT The challenges of the commercial era are common to many international sporting federations but for the International Cricket Council, they come in a unique combination. In a sport caught between its own traditions, expansionist ambitions and a single dominant market, ICC chief executive David Richardson must plot a path to true modernity.

By Eoin Connolly

T

he story of how cricket is run can be told, at least a little, as a tale of two cities. Until 2005 the International Cricket Council (ICC) took residence at Lord’s Cricket Ground, which has stood on the same site in the well-heeled London suburb of St John’s Wood for 202 years. There, the global governing body was a tenant of the Marylebone Cricket Club, an organisation that operated until recent times to almost masonic standards of exclusivity.

Today, the ICC is based in Dubai.

More speciÀcally, it sits in smart but understated headquarters in the stunted development that is Dubai Sports City, next to its own ICC Academy and along the road from the Dubai International Stadium that has hosted the itinerant Pakistan team during their security-imposed exile from home. Building around the sports complex slowed as backers reeled from the effects of a property crash at the end of the last decade: half of those who bought off-plan in the RuÀ Twin Towers apartment complex nearby defaulted on their commitments in 2011. But Dubai is still thriving on its own unequal terms. Money pours in, steel and glass sprouts from the desert sand.

The reasons for the ICC’s relocation were prosaic, relating to

46 | www.sportspromedia.com

the tax obligations of a growing membership. Yet the move was richly symbolic of a cultural shift away from Anglospheric roots and into Asia – principally India – and beyond.

Cricket is a sport of conservative traditions, yet to Ànd consensus in an age of plurality and abundance.

Even before the birth of its youngest and shortest format, Twenty20, it was coming to terms with a new commercial age, but that innovation has brought about a quantum leap. Accessible and highly TV-friendly, T20 has birthed domestic franchise competitions – the mighty Indian Premier League (IPL) chief among them – that pay the top players better than their national boards ever have.

The ICC must adapt to these developments in what are interesting times for international federations. Guiding that evolution on behalf of its members’ representatives is a former Test wicketkeeper: South African chief executive David Richardson.

“As a former cricketer, I suppose we were always very wary of administrators being in the game for anything other than the good of the sport,” says Richardson, reÁecting on how the travails of world soccer’s Fifa and world athletics’ IAAF have made him

A former player, David Richardson has been chief executive of the International Cricket Council during an eventful period since 2012

think about matters in his own.

“So, no sympathy, really, for anybody who’s taking off the top or taking backhanders or awarding their company contracts, etc, just because they are in a position to do so by virtue of their position on a board or something like that. No sympathy for that at all. But having said that, and being in cricket now

with the ICC for over 15 years, I’ve never personally seen any evidence of that at ICC level.”

But while the ICC may have been free of looting and coverups, it has not avoided pained debate about its own governance.

In 2014, to howls of protest beyond its corridors, it passed a series of reforms that granted new powers and greater proportional income to the richest three bodies in the sport: the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), and Cricket Australia.

The measures were enacted to ensure certainty ahead of a new eight-year rights cycle, and to keep the Ànancially invaluable Indian board onside. BCCI president N Srinivasan, then embroiled in an investigation into the spot-Àxing scandal that had afÁicted the IPL and his now suspended Chennai Super Kings team in 2013, became ICC chairman. Whatever their intentions, the new regulations struck a discordant note.

“I think there’s no doubt that what the media labelled as the ‘big three takeover’ hurt the game,” Richardson concedes now, “and the biggest difÀculty all member organisations have is dealing with the inherent conÁict of interest that exists between what’s good for the global game and what’s good for my particular country. That has to be carefully and collectively managed. But as long as the inÁuential people act responsibly, then you can manage it properly.”

Richardson suggests that the dispute over those changes “overshadowed” a wealth of positive news at a time when there are “more people playing and following the game than ever before”. That point, however, partly explains the negative reaction.

The ICC has 105 members, divided into three tiers. At the top are the ten full members, all nations with teams deemed good enough to play Test matches. Then come the 37 Associates, whose number is made up of those countries where cricket is well established

and whose leading lights have graced global ICC tournaments like the Cricket World Cup. Finally, there are the 57 AfÀliate members, representing other territories where cricket is played under ofÀcially recognised conditions. At a time of unprecedented global promise, cricket’s rulers seemed to be reverting to their basest elitist instincts.

Richardson, it must be stressed, was not one of the prime movers behind the reorganisation of the ICC. His job is to enact the wishes of appointed ofÀcials, and that job changed little after reforms that effectively ensconced the status quo. The most telling effect, he says, was that “India have committed to playing, in recent times, more of a leadership role, whereas in the past they used to sit on the outside, wait for things to be debated and then, have their say”.

That has had an unexpected consequence. Last year, after the intervention of India’s Supreme Court, Srinivasan was forbidden from standing for re-election at the BCCI unless he extricated himself from a dense network of conÁicts of interest. He failed to do so. Then his initial replacement, the pivotal former BCCI and ICC head Jagmohan Dalmiya, died in September at the age of 75. He was succeeded by another former BCCI president: Shashank Manohar.

Seizing upon a popular mood at home and abroad to see the balance of power redressed, Manohar was quick to offer a new brand of leadership. In India, he pushed through a series of measures aimed at eradicating the excesses of the

Last year's Cricket World Cup, won by co-hosts Australia, surpassed ICC expectations in a wide range of targeted areas

prior regime. Then he led the BCCI in removing one N Srinivasan as its representative at the ICC. Manohar was appointed in Srinivasan’s place, and will serve until this summer. His rhetoric so far has been quite different from what has gone before. “I don’t agree with the three major countries bullying the ICC,” he said in an interview with The Hindu in November. With the ECB under new management and a new chairman at Cricket Australia, he has since led moves to unpick the 2014 agreements. Richardson believes Manohar’s reformist credentials are to be taken seriously.

“Since Mr Manohar has come in as the new chairman of ICC, there have already been a number of changes made to reverse some of the decisions taken back in 2014 – reintroducing the independent nature of the ICC chairman and removing the entrenched right of certain members to sit on the executive and Ànance committees,” he says. “In fact, the ICC board agreed at its last meeting in February to conduct a review of all the changes introduced in 2014.

“I think Mr Manohar has shown a genuine intention to look at ways of improving the governance, Ànancial and playing structures of the ICC. I believe that over the last few years we have become a more efÀcient organisation and that we are well placed to take advantage of the opportunities that may be presented by the review.”

Away from boardrooms in Dubai and Mumbai, 2015 was “dominated” by the Cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. The tournament far surpassed the ICC’s sporting and commercial expectations, according to Richardson, and reassured audiences and sponsors of the long-term viability of the 50-over a side one-day international.

Such success, Richardson adds, was a lesson that “there’s no substitute for hard work and preparation”.

“The level of pre-event planning across all aspects of the event

SportsPro Magazine | 47

COVER STORY CRICKET

was probably higher than for any previous event,” he says, citing efforts in everything from preparations for Associate teams to anti-corruption collaboration with the police to press facilities.

Joining Richardson for the interview is the ICC general manager, commercial, Campbell Jamieson. He points to the support of national and local government in Australia and New Zealand as vital to the World Cup’s performance.

“I think they really see it as an economic opportunity, more so than just a nice exhibition or sporting event,” Jamieson says. “It’s a business decision to invest in them.”

Those circumstances are not uniform across cricket’s leading nations. Richardson and Jamieson are speaking ahead of the ICC’s secondary global event, the World Twenty20, which is being played in India for the Àrst time from 8th March to 3rd April. The men’s and women’s tournaments are held concurrently.

Where the two local organising committees for the Cricket World Cup laid out plans well ahead of time, their counterparts in India have Áown by the seat of their pants. Playing schedules were not announced until December. Tickets went on sale less than two weeks before the tournament started – to the chagrin of travelling supporters in particular. Throughout February, doubts persisted over whether one of the eight venues – the Feroz Shah Kotla Ground in New Delhi – would emerge from legal wrangling over its availability.

Meanwhile, it was only as SportsPro was going to press that Nine Network and Fox Sports in Australia – where parts of the World T20 are protected for free-to-air viewing by national ‘anti-siphoning laws’ – were able to reach a broadcast deal with India’s global rights holder Star Sports to show the tournament.

Richardson accepts the uncertainty as a part of doing business in a unique market.

“I don’t mean this as a criticism,” he says, “more as a statement of fact, but the culture of putting on events

48 | www.sportspromedia.com

Richardson believes that new BCCI president and ICC chairman Shashank Manohar can be taken seriously as a cricketing reformer

in the subcontinent is a little bit more like, ‘What’s the panic?’ More of a ‘lastminute.com’ approach.

“And they are pretty good at it! They can transform a venue virtually overnight: you go there a couple of days before the game and the dressing rooms look like nothing – cement Áoors, showers dirty, no equipment. And by the time the players arrive, it’s Persian carpets from wall to wall, comfortable chairs, refrigerators fully stocked, beautifully painted.

Sometimes, they might still be painting the door as you go in – but they get it done. It’s a totally different approach.”

The short notice over ticketing is principally a nuisance for fans, but it also denies the ICC any certainty in its Ànancial projections for the tournament. Again, though, the ofÀcial response is phlegmatic, not least in light of the popularity of IPL cricket and of India’s highly successful Cricket World Cup in 2011.

“It’s harder to predict, I suppose, to be certain,” Richardson adds,

“but even in Australia and New Zealand, whilst there were for many matches signiÀcant advanced sales, there were still many matches where tickets were sold on the day.

So you always go into an event, to some extent, holding thumbs.”

And while the ICC expects TV interest to be global, it still accounts for crowds in the grounds being more local in their make-up for the World T20 than the World Cup. The challenge, Richardson says, is making sure that matches not involving the home team are well attended.

The tournament format is eyecatching, and not necessarily for the right reasons. For the second time in succession, 16 teams will take part, more than for any other ICC event. But, for the second time in succession, the eight lower-ranked qualiÀers will compete in a Àrst round for the right to join the eight top-ranked teams in a ‘Super 10’ stage that many will consider the start of the tournament proper.

It looks an unappealing fudge and, moreover, one that might confuse those outsiders the ICC hopes the tournament will draw in.

Richardson, unsurprisingly, offers a different perspective, countering that the format groups together teams of a similar standard throughout. “Anything could happen,” he says. “Every match should be really good to watch.

There’s always going to be onesided matches but at least the risk of that is less frequent.”

Richardson adds that “there would be no reason” not to introduce a more streamlined format once more teams are playing at an elite level. Still, the bipartite structure keeps alive a long-running dispute over the composition of global events. Ahead of last year’s Cricket World Cup, the ICC conÀrmed plans to cut the number of participants in its blue-riband event from 14 to ten. Against the backdrop of ongoing controversy over governance changes, it smacked of a further narrowing of the sport’s horizons – painfully so when debutants Afghanistan were providing such a good news

FIXING FIXING

D

avid Richardson knows all too well about the dynamics of matchfixing. He was a teammate of the late Hansie Cronje, the first captain of post-apartheid South Africa. Lionised by his countrymen and respected throughout the sport, Cronje was exposed in 2000 as having taken money from bookmakers to manipulate the outcome of international matches and bringing young players into the conspiracy. He was banned for life from the game, and died in a plane crash in 2002.

The case broke South African hearts and gave an insight to everyone else into the scale of the threat that fixing posed to international cricket. A dedicated ICC anticorruption unit (ACU), led today by retired British police chief Sir Ronnie Flanagan, was set up in the months that followed.

Anti-corruption measures have been an ICC priority ever since but, as the fixers continue to make incursions, those measures are the subject of constant review.

“First of all, if I can explain, the whole strategy behind our efforts in that regard is education/prevention, disruption, and then investigation and prosecution,” says Richardson. “It comes in that order.”

The importance of educating players below senior international level – where the ICC is more confident of the preventions it has in place – has grown in the shadow of ‘displacement’. As the targets harden around the highest-profile games, attentions will shift towards “other televised cricket, whether it’s Twenty20 domestic leagues, whether it’s Associate member internationals that might take place, whether it’s women’s matches – that’s going to be the next target”.

“The corruptors have got more sophisticated and we have had to stay ahead of them,” Richardson says. Where once the ICC “put a blockade around the dressing room areas, and that was about it”, now the first objective is to develop information around potential fixers and who they might be in contact with, “building up this information and this network of people”.

The ACU assessed 450 intelligence reports in 2015 and is currently investigating an international team. In most historical cases, though, it has been external bodies – law enforcement or investigative media

Mohammed Amir's return to international cricket after a ban for spot-fixing has divided opinion

– who have provided the breakthrough.

Richardson says the ICC “can’t really afford to just sit back and hope that police organisations around the world are going to do the job for us” but adds that with organised crime so prominent in fixing, information-sharing and MOUs with those authorities are increasingly a part of the anti-corruption strategy.

Richardson wants to see “the introduction of sport-specific criminal legislation in all our member countries that will make involvement in fixing a serious offence”. He thinks it is “difficult to say” whether legalising betting in markets like India would alleviate the problem but also believes “there’d always be an incentive for the gangsters to be involved”. A more divisive question in cricket concerns the deterrent to players.

Recent months have seen the denouement of what is the most emotive fixing scandal since that of Cronje.

Aged 18, the divinely gifted fast bowler Mohammed Amir was one of three Pakistani cricketers, along with his strike partner Mohammad Asif and captain Salman Butt, convicted of conspiring to ‘spot-fix’ incidents in games during the team’s tour of England in 2010. He has since served a five-year ban and a threemonth custodial sentence.

Still only 23, Amir has now returned to the Pakistan team and looks near-certain to star at the upcoming World T20.

Richardson believes that the youngster deserves a chance of redemption.

“Certainly, having been involved with Hansie Cronje, had he lived, he was someone who had definitely learned from his mistake and he would have been… he could have provided value to cricket if he’d eventually come back,” he says. “And I’m sure that Amir might be someone who would be of similar character.

“He made a mistake at an early age.

Everyone makes mistakes, you can’t hold that against people for a lifetime, necessarily. However, there are certain guys who by their very nature just don’t seem to want to learn from their mistakes, and then you’ve got to treat them differently. But, certainly, players should be under no illusions that when you get involved in this type of thing – the risk of a lifetime ban is there.”

Not everyone in cricket makes the same distinction. In November, Mohammed Hafeez revealed he had turned down an offer of around US$80,000 to play for the Chittagong Vikings in the Bangladesh Premier League rather than share a dressing room with Amir. Kevin Pietersen and Graeme Swann, who played for England against Pakistan in that ill-fated summer of 2010, have called for life bans for all convicted fixers.

“You can’t comment,” says Richardson of such reactions, “because that would depend on their personal relationships with those people and what they thought of them as characters. I think that’s up to each individual to make his mind up in that regard.”

SportsPro Magazine | 49

COVER STORY CRICKET

story in Australia and New Zealand.

Richardson says now that the leading Associate nations are “understandably not particularly happy” and that he can “understand the argument” against the cut. Nevertheless, he is clear that the interests of smaller nations are better served by improving standards between each major tournament and creating new “merit-based” opportunities for the best to play against full members, noting that Afghanistan and Ireland are now on the same future tours programme for limited-overs games as the Test nations.

“If we succeed in that,” he says, “underpinned by an appropriate funding model, I have no doubt that very soon we will have 14 or 16 teams capable of qualifying for a World Cup and making it through to the knock-out stages, or 20 teams at a World T20.”

There is another contributing factor to those contortions in tournament formats: the overwhelming importance to cricket of India and its television market, and the need to ensure that the men in blue play as many games – guaranteed – as possible. This is a structural weakness that Richardson is well aware of, and the challenge of bringing new territories into play is one the ICC is now confronting.

With the ECB having reversed its long-held objection under new chairman Colin Graves, one avenue now being seriously explored for the Àrst time is Olympic participation. Senior ICC delegations have met with their counterparts at the International Olympic Committee (IOC), with Richardson and his colleagues also taking part in talks with IOC president Thomas Bach.

Richardson is conÀdent of T20 cricket’s chances of Olympic inclusion but adds that it will also come down to the “willingness of the members” on the ICC side. “There are some concerns, the main one being whether participation in the Olympics will devalue the ICC World T20 event,” he reveals. “We need to investigate

50 | www.sportspromedia.com

Despite a cut in the number of places available in the Cricket World Cup, Richardson is keen to create more opportunities for teams like Afghanistan to play the very best

that as well before making a decision.”

The results of IOC talks were presented to the ICC board in February, with further internal discussions planned for April.

Proponents of Olympic participation argue that it would unlock signiÀcant funds for grassroots projects around the world, with prospects for investment thought to be particularly strong in nations like China. The government there has spent a reported US$15 million a year on rugby sevens since that sport was added to the programme for Rio 2016, and similar sums are mooted for cricket’s hypothetical arrival at the Games.

For his part, Richardson believes that the potential Ànancial beneÀts are “not that easy to quantify” at present but that the case is strengthened by “the stories that sports like golf, badminton and rugby can tell you about the indirect beneÀts of participation”.

“The majority of people are arguing that if you really want to globalise the game, participation in the Olympics is the way to do it,” he says – conÀrming that this is also his personal view.

Were cricket to eventually join the Olympic programme, it would continue a process of transformation that has challenged longstanding conventions. The concept of the bilateral tour is under constant pressure, and the format that has long sustained those tours, the Àve-day Test, is struggling.

“Test cricket does need to

evolve and Ànd ways of keeping itself relevant to the modern day,” says Richardson, who welcomes innovations like November’s inaugural day-night Test between New Zealand and Australia in Adelaide as a means of meeting the needs of the audience.

The Test match is a unique asset and not solely because of its historical value. Few other sporting contests offer the same variety or rich possibility. Yet beyond a handful of marquee series, it is badly sold. “To me, the value of professional sport is a factor of attendances,” Richardson suggests.

“Poor attendances, no one at the ground watching, equates to the perception of a poor quality product, no excitement, boring.

No one wants to broadcast that or sponsor that.”

Efforts at centralising the marketing of Test cricket have been rejected by members in the past on the grounds that local conditions vary so considerably, but best practice is routinely shared.

Jamieson, for example, points to Cricket New Zealand’s use of smaller, yet attractive outgrounds for its Test matches, rather than giant bowls that rarely sell out.

“But as I say,” Richardson adds, “what we can do in my view is to create a competition structure that is meaningful. That is where we are now at. The members have said, ‘Put some models together for us to consider.’”

As the delivery of the sport changes in so many ways, the role of the ICC – still a members’ organisation – must change with it. The question remains as to how that will transpire.

“We’ve just agreed our strategic plan now for the next Àve years and it’s quite simple, really,” says Richardson. “It’s got four key pillars to it.”

The Àrst of these, the “cricket pillar”, is one that “sounds obvious” but is complicated by cricket’s three different formats. As well as encouraging “attacking cricket” through improving pitch standards, the ICC wants to see to it that all of

FROM THE BOARDROOM TO THE MIDDLE AND BACK AGAIN

D

avid Richardson kept wicket in 42 Tests and 122 one-day internationals for South Africa between 1992 and 1998, but the seeds of his future career were sown before then.

“Well, I was a lawyer,” he says. “We only played as semi-professionals back in South Africa in the 70s and 80s. Then, apartheid came to an end, and we got back into international cricket. Suddenly, we were touring for nine months of the year, so I gave up my legal job and became a full-time cricketer. Then after eight years of cricket, I didn’t really see myself going back into a law office, and someone else at that time offered me a job in a sports marketing company.”

That company was Octagon, with whom Richardson “acted for various corporate and individual sportsmen and women, including the South African cricket team”. Then in 2002, he was approached by ICC chief executive Malcolm Speed to take the role of general manager for cricket. “We were just introducing an elite panel of umpires and referees; we knew technology was

these “remain distinctive, have their own appeal, and are sustainable in their own right” in the men’s and women’s games.

Integrity is the second pillar.

Fixing has long been a scourge of professional cricket and, while measures to combat that form of corruption will continue to evolve, Richardson also warns that “the increased focus on power-hitting” and the greater opportunities to secure lucrative franchise contracts could tempt more players to dope.

Building the commercial value of the game in the digital age, ahead of the next rights cycle in 2023, is the third pillar. The fourth pillar, Ànally, is development.

“There are two aspects to this,” Richardson explains. “Firstly, we need to have more competitive teams at the highest level – 12 teams that can play Test cricket, 16 teams that can go to a Cricket World Cup and win the event. 20 teams that can win a T20.

David Richardson in his South African colours

around the corner, the pressure was to do something there,” he recalls. “So, it was a great opportunity.”

Ten years on, Richardson succeeded countryman Haroon Lorgat as ICC chief executive, but that position had not previously been a long-term goal.

“My ambition was to play cricket for South Africa,” he admits, “but I’ve enjoyed working in cricket tremendously and if you are in a position to help, to make a difference, then so much the better. But it’s not only the cricketing aspects of

the job that are interesting. There’s the commercial side, the integrity aspects, technology, biomechanics, and the variety is incredible. As I’ve said, I think the game has made some good progress in a number of areas, it is evolving and it is a challenge keeping pace with that evolution without losing the traditions of the game that so many people, including me, hold dear to their hearts.”

Now 56, Richardson is contracted to the ICC until June 2017. “I’m hoping I can see it through and I don’t get the bullet before then!” he says. “And then take it from there.”

He confesses to thinking little of where that will lead him. “It depends where my children are,” he says. “I’ve got one [Michael] who plays cricket for Durham, another in Newcastle and one in Cape Town. Who knows? I haven’t given it any serious thought. I’ve always jokingly said to Campbell I should go and manage a golf course somewhere. But then he says, ‘But you realise the manager can’t play golf every day?’ So I’ll have to give it some more thought!”

“Secondly, we need to develop more cricket markets, USA and China being the more quoted examples. USA has great potential, with lots of cricketers and cricket fans – we are making a big effort to assist cricket in the USA to take the next step up. As regards China, the focus is more on women’s cricket initially. There are others but I don’t want to risk offending anyone by leaving out any names.

“So we want to take a much more targeted approach towards game and market development than we have done before. We don’t want to see anyone getting less, money-wise, than before, but we do want to allocate more to the better-performing countries and those with the potential to mix it with the best.”

In February, The Guardian reported that the ICC was exploring the idea of a 12-team, two-division structure for Test cricket, with tiers also introduced in

shorter-form cricket. Such a move would be welcomed by many of the better-performing Associate nations – Warren Deutrom, the chief executive of Cricket Ireland, has already spoken out in favour – and would further dissolve the lines between member nations from different tiers.

It seems natural to ask whether this might one day mean that in a sport marked for so long by selective attitudes, notions such as membership status might disappear altogether.

“We seem to be moving, evolving slowly, towards playing and funding structures that reward teams based on the level at which they are performing,” says Richardson carefully. “But as I say, these are exciting times ahead for cricket with ongoing reviews into the governance, cricket and Ànancial structures.

“Let’s not speculate too much just yet and wait and see.”

SportsPro Magazine | 51

INTERNATIONAL FEDERATIONS

WHO ARE YOU? NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR BRAND Your brand is not just a logo or graphic element, it is how the world perceives you; a whole universe of tangible and intangible elements that shape your organisation. Think of Apple, Amazon or Nike and it is easy to understand the benefits a strong brand brings to any business, and the effort and investment required to promote them.

But why is branding important to an International Federation (IF)? A strong brand is vital for any business and, as Salvador Ramirez – managing director of JTA Design – points out, especially for a sports organisation.

“Sport intersects culture, politics and the economy. It has to face constant pressure. IFs are all fighting a similar battle: winning over athletes, fans, sponsors and the media. As such, each

federation is a brand and should be managed with the same assumptions of any business.”

“All IFs will have different business objectives. Some may be trying to gain a place on the Olympic Programme while others may be trying to reinforce their position as a member of the “Olympic Club” in order to retain vital revenues.”

Whatever their objectives, IFs are increasingly realising the importance of a powerful brand and the vital role it can play in helping them to achieve their goals. As Ramirez says, “IFs have learnt in recent years that their brands should focus on the sport they represent and not the institution itself.”

“IFs must turn their sport into a brand that influences the behaviour of existing

and potential audiences and creates opportunities to maximise revenue from their property rights. Audiences’ perception of a sport can be shaped by the brand you create.”

A strong brand provides “brand equity”, which is composed of: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Brand Loyalty – helping to secure all your audiences, safe-guarding the popularity of your brand/sport.

Brand Awareness – helping to expand your audience.

Perceived Quality – the perception people have of your brand/ sport (ie. does it deliver quality entertainment?).

Brand Associations – the direct or indirect associations consumers establish with your brand/sport.

While each federation may share common objectives, they all have to deal with different issues that require bespoke, strategic brand positioning.

business. Strategic branding will bring invaluable benefits:

“I have seen federations desperate to change misconceptions of their sport,” Ramirez said. “Perhaps it is seen as too complicated, unexciting, elitist or old fashioned; maybe people confuse it with a similar sport; or it might be considered local rather than global. Whatever it is, a well-planned brand strategy can help.”

yQ

yQ

yQ yQ

yQ “It is vital that the federation is intrinsically linked with the sport itself and not just seen as an organisation that regulates the sport.”

“A few years ago, IFs based their websites on the organisation itself, prioritising information about the executive board, president, history, committees and commissions. Now, the websites are focused on creating a community and providing up to date information about the sport itself.”

“It is interesting to see that IFs in some cases are now changing their names from institutional abbreviations to something which clearly identifies the sport they represent – an important step towards a strong sports brand.”

In short, a strong brand is perhaps more essential for an IF than for any other

yQ yQ

yQ

yQ

yQ

It will help you secure and grow your audiences It will align your sport with values sponsors want to be associated with It will increase your revenues from broadcasting and licensing It will help change the associations of a sport in the audience’s mind (is it cool? Family orientated? Young?

Dynamic? Global? Clean? Exciting?)

It will help minimise the impact of an internal crisis It will help promote new tournaments and events created by your IF It will help show the world that the federation evolves with the sport itself It will help establish a coherent identity that will make things easier when dealing with LOCs It will help generate appeal in new markets and make the sport/brand more global It will help your federation be transparent and show their leading role.

IFs should push the branding value of their key asset – the sport they represent – and show stakeholders they are listening to their opinions and responding to changes in the world.

They should embrace the power of a strong brand.

the key values of the organisation (cooperation, excellence, innovation, solidarity and respect), its dynamism and the universality of its global membership of 206 NOCs.

JTA Design, with offices in the UK and Spain, offers specialised and unique branding and design services for major international sport organisations such as the Association of National Olympic Committees, SportAccord, FIVB, UIPM, WBSC, the Russian International Olympic University and Generations For Peace.

JTA Design was responsible for the re-branding of the Association National Olympic Committees (ANOC), a dynamic and modern organisation that understands the needs of its stakeholders and has the reach, the capacity and the influence to service those needs. Their new logo and identity successfully reflects

Why is branding important to an International Federation?

A strong brand is vital for any business and especially for a sports organisation.

ABOUT THIS ARTICLE...

This is one of a series of articles that sports branding and design experts, JTA Design, offer free of charge to IFs and sports organisations at www.comms4sports.com.

Visit the website and access periodical straight-to-the-point and practical articles that will help your Communications Department to maximise your branding power.

Topics include: yQ Top tips to grow your email list yQ Transitioning your brand identity yQ The Olympic brand: What you can and cannot do yQ Grow your brand community yQ 9 key aspects of a strong IF brand yQ Are slogans important for IFs? yQ Best email newsletter platforms for IFs yQ The key to brand consistency

JTA Design was also responsible for the creation of the ANOC Awards logo, which reflects the festivity and glamour of the ceremony and features the iconic ANOC Award trophy which was designed to symbolise humankind’s universal potential for sporting excellence.

JTA Design also works with a number of IFs providing brand consultancy and design services that range from logo design to website development, video production, media guides (content generation and design), year books, periodical publications, advertising, stand design, 3D visualisation, online newsletters, etc.

To learn how JTA Design can help bring your brand to life and contribute to your success, visit jta-design.com.

The new brands of ANOC and ANOC Awards, created by JTA Design.

FEATURE GOVERNANCE

Fighting back After a year in which negative stories eclipsed the positive in sporting governance, this year’s SportAccord Convention has taken on renewed significance. SportsPro spoke with representatives from three of SportAccord’s member federations as well as Nis Hatt, the convention’s managing director, to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing sports federations in 2016.

By Adam Nelson

ven across the chequered and colourful recent history of international sporting federations, the past 12 months or so have represented a particularly rocky road for sports governance. 2015 saw the likes of swimming’s Fina, athletics’ IAAF, World Rugby and the International Cricket Council (ICC) host their Áagship competitions, while in soccer and tennis, FC Barcelona and Novak Djokovic continued to press their cases for all-time great status with some astonishing performances. And yet at times it was difÀcult to escape the feeling that the sporting action was anything other than a distraction from the real stories that dominated newspaper columns, on both the front and back pages, over the year.

Perhaps what has been most impressive – for want of a better word – is the sheer spread of crises and catastrophes that have blighted the sector. Soccer kicked things off with the accusations of deep-seated corruption which engulfed the sport and cost the men at the top of its two biggest federations – Fifa and Uefa – their positions. Athletics then picked up the baton and ran with it, as widespread allegations of doping

E

54 | www.sportspromedia.com

led to the indeÀnite suspension of the Russian Athletics Federation (Araf) and with that the threat of a summer Games without the second most successful nation in Olympic history, deepening the woes of the IAAF’s embattled president, Lord Sebastian Coe. Finally, in the Àrst few weeks of this year, tennis served up its own scandal, when an investigation by the BBC and BuzzFeed News claimed to have exposed evidence of match-Àxing going back over a decade.

The sustained, industry-wide calamities of the last year were, to some extent, presaged by the extraordinary outburst of Marius Vizer, then president of SportAccord and still now president of the International Judo Federation (IJF), who used last year’s SportAccord Convention as a platform to address what he saw as International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach’s ineffectual leadership, among other issues in the Olympic movement.

When the SportAccord Convention meets again this April for its 14th annual gathering, it will be under the auspices of a new president – former International Tennis Federation (ITF) head

“We have to do whatever we can to bring back the value of sport to society.”

Francesco Ricci Bitti, who stepped in after Vizer resigned in the aftermath of last year’s broadside – and, arguably as a direct result of Vizer’s protests, is set to offer great concessions to non-Olympic member federations.

Plans to reduce membership to just four umbrella federations – the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF), the Association of Winter Olympic International Federations (AIOWF), the Association of IOC Recognised International Federations (ARISF) and the Alliance of Independent Recognised Members of SportAccord (AIMS) – were scrapped, as was a proposal to merge SportAccord and its sister convention into a single body.

So, after a year of Àghting Àres and plugging holes, this

Dmitry Lovetsky/AP/Press Association Images

year’s convention represents an opportunity to assess the sports industry landscape and, hopefully, begin to plan for a brighter future.

With an Olympic Games on the horizon, a new, reformist president installed at Fifa and a general sense that sport requires signiÀcant evolution, if not revolution, if it is going to revitalise its public image, this year’s SportAccord Convention is a chance for reÁection and catharsis.

“Of course, we can’t get away from talking about governance, transparency, accountability within the sports here,” says Nis Hatt, managing director of SportAccord Convention. “We know that sport has to address this, but we don’t want it to be our only focus. This year the theme of our conference programme for the Àrst day is ‘the Mission of Sport’, and this is what we want our members to look at: what do we want the aim, the purpose, of sport to be? What are we trying to achieve with sport?”

Though a measure of introspection is clearly required, the focus has to remain on the wider world and sport’s place within it, because for all the internal malaise, sport as a whole continues to stand

alone in its ability to reach and affect people on a global scale.

“I know in the world today, sport has gained a very bad image,” says Cornel Marculescu, executive director at Fina. “We have to do whatever we can to bring back the value of sport to society, and I hope that the Olympic Games in Rio will mean the people forget all this and the great athletes who are there are able to give back to sport and show the importance they have in society.”

Along with Marculescu and Hatt, SportsPro also sat down with World Sailing’s head of marketing and media, Malcolm Page, and World Rugby chief executive Brett Gosper, to discuss how best sport’s value to society can be demonstrated.

What’s in a name?

Over the past two years, both World Rugby and World Sailing have tackled the ‘image problem’ directly, engaging in signiÀcant rebranding efforts and revamping their external communications strategies while at the same time addressing some of the internal structural issues that may have hampered their abilities to move forward as organisations.

Marius Vizer, the former president of SportAccord, got into hot water last year with comments directed toward IOC president Thomas Bach

Even the simple changes in name and branding reÁect a desire for greater transparency and a cleaner image, from inscrutable acronyms – ISAF, IRB – to simple, all-encompassing declarations of intent: World Sailing, World Rugby.

In December the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) announced an identical move, becoming World Taekwondo, while last summer, the body running the three tiers below English soccer’s Premier League announced its strategy to market itself as the English Football League, again reÁecting that desire for clarity and simplicity.

“When you look at our old acronym, it didn’t mean much to people who were not in the sport of sailing, who didn’t already know what it meant,” says Page. “To move towards World Sailing, it just made more sense. What do we look after?

We look after sailing, around the world. It was a great opportunity to put the sign out there to align with that new way of doing business and take the opportunity to show that we’re doing those good principles.”

Gosper concurs, adding that the transition to World Rugby “has added to our connection with the fans and the wider public in particular.

SportsPro Magazine | 55

FEATURE GOVERNANCE

“Outside of our traditional audience, people understand who is sending the message and people understand that we represent a movement as well as a sport,” he says. “Our previous name of IRB was a good shorthand for people within the sport, but didn’t allow us to reach outside of the sport in a way that was easy. And the way you reach outside the sport these days is mainly through social media platforms and so on.

“So the realignment of the name shows that we are obviously the governing body, but it also gives a sense of a movement beyond the governing body and the visual representation of the brand, which we’re starting to see across World Cup and other World Rugby properties, has given

56 | www.sportspromedia.com

Top: Cornel Marculescu, executive director of Fina Bottom: Brett Gosper, chief executive of World Rugby

us a greater connectivity and I think from the image point of view it just feels more modern – certainly, we’ve had an uplift in our social media handles. I think a lot of that has come because there’s a greater understanding of who we are.

“Obviously some of that can be connected with the World Cup, but there is no question we saw an immediate uplift even before that.

People are far more interested in World Rugby than [they were] in the IRB. It’s an easier destination to Ànd us and I think it’s led to an attitudinal movement within World Rugby where people are more conscious about our global role. It gives us a sense of being more connected.”

The brand that a federation portrays to the world, Gosper believes, is more than simply a name and a set of design choices.

Done right, it can be an integral part of the way a federation demonstrates the values its sport can bring. The rebranding of World Rugby prompted “a rethink in terms of our own position,” says Gosper. “It wasn’t just a renaming but it was also a positioning of the brand in the area of character.

“We were always values-based as an organisation,” he elaborates.

“Most organisations now are dealing in ‘values’ of one kind or another, so we were looking for a shorthand, something that’s more memorable and would summarise our difference. And that’s why we thought ‘character’, as a territory, is very important for rugby and sits well with rugby.

“We position rugby as a lifeskill sport, and a sport that builds and reveals character. If you’re positioning as a sport of character then, whether you’re dealing in the area of anti-doping, discipline, potential areas of integrity and so on, you need to have great moral compass and a sense of purpose from the governing body. We feel the shift in our branding was a great way to reÁect that back into the world.”

A social solution That increased social media visibility mentioned by Gosper and Page isn’t simply a positive from a marketing and engagement perspective: it can actually help to be a driver in lasting change, opening federations up to their public in an unprecedented way.

Gosper himself is a proliÀc tweeter and claims to spend “at least an hour” every day reading through and replying to Twitter messages sent to both him personally and World Rugby.

“I think it’s an indication that we’re willing to listen,” he says.

“Every tweet that’s directed at me, I read, and I can hear what the public is saying about the sport and subjects affecting sport, but also can send some messaging which isn’t always pasteurised and vanilla, but is giving some views and so on that hopefully stimulate some debate and understanding from World Rugby. You’ve got to be brave enough to get on it and get yourself out there.”

Having a direct line not just to immediate investors and stakeholders, but to an entire global fanbase, allows a sporting federation to both be more transparent – giving them a platform to outline plans and responses to issues as they arise – and more democratic, giving fans a right of reply and an input into the decision-making process.

“We can engage the public through Twitter to ask them their views on laws and law changes and so on, things that we wouldn’t have done as little as Àve years ago, because that’s the way of the world,” says Gosper. “It doesn’t mean everything is voted by the masses and complete democracy, but it’s good to be able to do that based on what your fanbase and your supporters and maybe even your detractors are saying about you.”

World Sailing, Page explains, is using the new media platforms “to be more transparent, to show off all the facets of our sports”.

“We’re far from perfecting it yet,” he adds, “but we’re really starting to

push the whole social media angle as well. Me being a middle-aged bloke, it’s a bit more difÀcult! But getting to grips with that shift and the amount of information you can get out there, is really important.”

To this end, SportAccord Convention is introducing a digital summit for 2016, which will see social media gurus from the biggest players in the Àeld hold roundtables and workshops with international federations, to demonstrate the value it can offer to their brands.

“The digital summit is deÀnitely a new approach as part of the programme, done in very very close collaboration with the IOC and their head of digital media, Alex Huot,” says Hatt.

“We will have workshops that are very much focused toward the international federations and we will have the big social media platforms coming in, and actually talking about what they are doing within sports, and how can federations beneÀt from getting engaged in social media, how can they beneÀt for their sport? So we will have the likes of Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter showing how they can lead the way for change and engagement.”

What are the challenges for the year ahead?

“The challenges are always the reality of life!” laughs Marculescu.

“The most important thing is to do the best that we can as an organisation, to promote the values of our federation around the globe.”

Widely regarded as the second most popular Olympic discipline, after athletics, aquatic sports will be thrust back into the limelight at the Rio Games, just a year after Fina’s biggest world championships to date.

At its general congress last year, ahead of the World Aquatics Championships in Kazan, Russia, Fina passed changes to its constitution – including increasing the maximum age for presidents and vice presidents and extending the maximum number of terms they are able to serve – which seemed more

The state of Rio de Janeiro's waters is posing problems for both swimming and sailing competitions ahead of this summer's Olympic Games

intended to protect the status quo than to modernise the organisation.

For this year’s congress on the eve of the Olympics, however, Fina has “appointed a company who is going to conduct a study on good governance, decision making and transparency,” Marculescu explains.

“That will be ready for the Fina meeting on 5th August in Rio,” he continues, “where we will hear their conclusions, to see if it is necessary or not to do any changes to our existing constitution and do whatever it is we have to do. We are willing to do what it takes to improve and move forward.”

Alongside its actions to ensure its governance is as strong as possible, Marculescu insists that Fina’s proactive, zero-tolerance approach to doping is second to none, noting that the World AntiDoping Agency’s (Wada) initial guidelines “were created based on the Fina doping rules”.

“We have a very huge activity against doping, not just for now but for as long as Fina has been an international federation,” he says. “We will continue with that and continue to invest more and more in Àghting that. Going to Rio we will substantially increase

the number of testing to the top athletes, and the same thing is going to happen after that for the world championships.”

The Olympic Games this year will present a common problem to both Fina and World Sailing. The issue of Rio’s water quality has been a constant worry almost since the minute the city was announced as the Games’ host and, even if Marculescu can agree with Page’s assertion that the natural beauty and grandeur of Rio’s coastlines offer “an opportunity for our sport to really shine”, such issues can nevertheless harm the overall image of a sport if they are not adequately dealt with.

For Page, the fact that the issue has been picked up on at all is a sign of progress and a chance to show that concern for athletes’ safety is paramount and, if widespread change can be achieved, a chance to make a genuine difference outside of the sport.

“This is a result of developing technology, and in that much I think we can think of it as a positive,” he says. “This information and the coverage, the testing that is in place, wasn’t as prevalent eight years ago [when Beijing had

SportsPro Magazine | 57

Pavel Golovkin/AP/Press Association Images

FEATURE SECTION TEXT HERE GOVERNANCE

similar problems which were not immediately identiÀed], certainly not 20 years ago. It’s new for us as an organisation, but it’s an opportunity to make the world better.”

In sailing’s case, making the world better can extend to leading by example when it comes to issues like diversity, a problem which is cause for concern across many segments of society, not just sport, but an area in which sailing is particularly strong, Page claims.

“For a sport like sailing, we’re very fortunate that we’re a very clean sport, we’re not plagued with doping issues,” he says. “We don’t have the temptation as much, without the broadcast rights and not really big money being Áashed around our sport, so there’s less temptation that comes with that.

It’s a great opportunity to be all those things that we just discussed, to be more transparent, more open, and just be able to showcase the amazing diversity we have in sailing to the world. Sure, it carries its certain stigma in some places in the world but at the same time we’re starting to tell stories about how sailing is a way of life for many people.”

For Gosper, the challenges facing international federations are more existential. “I think federations have got to demonstrate they can continue

58 | www.sportspromedia.com

Russia's indefinite ban from athletics competition has raised the possibility of an Olympic Games without the nation's participation

governing themselves,” he says.

“You’ve got to earn selfgovernance, particularly when you’re dealing with properties as sensitive as sport, where everyone kind of feels like they own a little bit of it. In the next 12 months all federations have got to try and demonstrate that they can be accountable, that they can be transparent, and they can be answerable, and that they are no more prone to issues of fraud or integrity issues than any other organisation, corporate or otherwise, in our economic system. But there is clearly a lot work to be done in that area.

“Obviously there is a cloud over two very large federations in the Olympic movement in recent times, which affects everyone in the business. It’s something that is not good for sport in general.”

How can the SportAccord Convention help?

“I would say it’s almost an evergreen, in the sense that this is the only convention, the only platform, where all of the international federations, the IOC, our stakeholders, ASOIF and AIOWF, and also our other stakeholders come together once a year to host their meetings and discuss what is hot and not in sport this year,” says Hatt. “And

then in conjunction with that, we have press and media coming in, we have host cities, bid cities, candidate cities, and all the other commercial entities that have a vested interest in being associated and afÀliated with the sporting community. Everyone is coming together for the only time to assess the state of the business.”

The sense of communality and co-operation is hit upon frequently. The feeling within sport is that, since issues at any level affect the industry as a whole, it is only by pulling together that the issues facing the sector can be fully overcome.

“Good governance, for me, is when you have people that are supporting you and coming along with you,” says Page.

“All your fans, all your members, all you stakeholders from all those different areas that Àlter in to this sporting organisation, when you have good support from all of them, and from your peers as well, because you can’t believe that you’re going into anything alone.”

“One of the things which can tell you if you’re strong or not so strong is participation,” adds Marculescu. “At our world championships last year, the level of participation from the national federations was higher than ever, and we will continue in our policy of supporting them.”

Hatt concludes by restating that SportAccord Convention is “a unique opportunity for any of these sport associations and international federations who has aspirations in bringing their sport forward”.

“This is the purpose of this platform,” he says. “And I think this is the uniqueness of what SportAccord is offering, in bringing all of these communities together where they can sit and discuss in one place at one time with all the different decision makers instead of travelling like crazy around the world and trying to catch up. This is the true strength of the convention.”

Copyright IFF WFC2015/Ville Vuorinen

TAKING THE FLOORBALL WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS TO A NEW LEVEL

One of the main successes was without doubt the good cooperation between the different stakeholders of the Event, the LOC, the IFF and the Host City Tampere, a city that really knows how to attract and develop events.

The integration and visibility of the Event in the everyday life in the City of Tampere both before and during the Event, was a key element, where the City and the Cities Main Events Office as being part of the Local Organisation Committee gave real depth in the preparations and made it possible to have the WFC as a part of the activities of the City of Tampere. Just as some examples the adjacent projects, with a graffiti competition in the tunnel between the two competition venues, organized by the City cultural office and the clothing of the main street statutes with the National team jerseys of the home team made it a special occasion for Floorball.

The theme of the World Championships were Magical Together, which was well visible in the sold out arena of the Final day, with a new world record audience for women’s Floorball in the WFC, with a total of 6.517 spectators, out of which the majority were young women under the age of 20 years.. The playing format which gave all teams a real possibility to reach the

medal games, worked well with Slovakia and Germany challenging the top teams in the tournament.

The IFF has adopted a strategy where every match in the championships is streamed on the IFF YouTube channels and they had a total over 530.000 spectators during the Event. In addition to the Internet-Stream a total of 34 matches were broadcasted to one or more TV stations around the world in over 15 regions, which reached in the direct or delayed broadcasts over 3,2 million spectators in average. However the Final had a reach of over 839.000 spectators during over-time in Finnish TV. The Internet-TV stream was also shown on the IWGA World Games channel to increase the visibility of the Sport.

Floorball´s long term strategy on visibility and promotion of the Floorball sport is to increase the number of countries taking the signal and hence raising the awareness of Copyright IFF WFC2015/Kimmo Pitkänen

The 10th IFF Women’s World Floorball Championships (WFC) 2015, which were played in December 2015 in the City of Tampere, in Finland, were in many ways a success for the Sport of Floorball, the Local organizer as well as women’s sport in general.

Floorball for women and men on equal terms.

The WFC2015 was a real showcase for the sport in many ways apart from the good matches and excellent spectator figures, it also activated a lot of young women, to participate in the event as a part of the Go Girls Floorball campaign run by the Local organizer and the adjacent event during the championships. One of the targets of the Event, was to invite and encourage female players to start coaching juniors in the future. So far the results have been very good as the number of new girl teams have started to grow.

In addition to this the WFC2015 was also awarded the Nordic EcoCompass title, as the first international Sports Event in Finland, based on the environmental management standards. ISO 14001 and EMAS designed for sustainable events.

In principle all the waste from the Event was categorized and no paper programs were available for the audience, but all information was distributed in the venues to the audience and the teams via the free internet connections and digital communication. The EcoCompass is organized in cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Finnish Olympic Committee.

Overall the IFF Women’s WFC2015 opened up a new way for how IFF Events can and shall be organized in the future.

IFF Alakiventie 2, 00920 Helsinki, Finland | Phone: +358-9 454 214 25 | Fax: +358-9 454 214 50 | E-mail: office@floorball.org

www.floorball.org

FEATURE FENCING

THRUST FORWARD Fencing is one of the original Olympic sports but, like many of its peers, must now adapt to the challenges of a rapidly changing environment. FIE president Alisher Usmanov explains how the global governing body is working to ensure that a classic pursuit remains relevant in a new age.

By Eoin Connolly

60 | www.sportspromedia.com

F

ew sports are as expressive of the origins of modern sport as fencing. A discipline steeped in military tradition and ancient combat, it was very much the sort of competition that the forefathers of the organised age believed they were gifting to the world the century before last.

The same is true of those who founded the Olympic Games.

Fencing has been a mainstay of the modern event, featuring at every edition since the grand return in Athens in 1896. It is an institution.

The president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach, is a fencer. He won gold in the foil at Montreal 1976.

But times change. The question today is how to make sure fencing still looks like an Olympic sport deep into the 21st century. The Agenda 2020 reforms introduced in December 2014 have opened up the programme to all manner of potential new entries, most of them trying to demonstrate a greater afÀnity with a younger audience.

Alongside baseball/softball, likely to make an appearance in a nation that obsesses over it, those sports on the shortlist for Tokyo 2020 are karate, skateboarding, sport climbing and surÀng – none of them pastimes that Baron de Coubertin might have been familiar with, but all with some hope of exciting the attention of viewers less familiar with the Olympics.

The newcomers at Rio 2016, rugby sevens and golf, may not be cut from quite the same cloth, but they boast in abundance other assets desired by the IOC: an international proÀle and commercial appeal.

Though they can be sure of their place at the Games, and in the established order of world sport, the likes of fencing must work now to reiterate their value.

Since 2008 the response to that challenge has been led by the Uzbek-born Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, president of the International Fencing Federation (FIE). Far from being daunted by what lies ahead, Usmanov sees a

sport ready to capitalise on fresh opportunity.

“Fencing is developing in line with the current trend of globalisation,” he says. “Today, fencing is a truly global sport.

The FIE includes 150 national federations from Àve continental confederations. The latest additions are the fencing federations of Uganda, Samoa, Rwanda, Madagascar, Ghana, Jamaica and Mauritius. The FIE continues to receive applications from potential new members.

“We are always working to increase the popularity of fencing around the world. The introduction of new rules and technology will make fencing easier to follow for spectators, which will enable the sport to attract greater audiences.

“The world championships and Grand Prix series are already Àrm Àxtures on channels like Eurosport and Euronews. Currently, the FIE is in negotiations with major broadcasters in North America, China, Japan and South Korea to renew our rights deals or strike new ones.

“As fencing is gaining in popularity among a new generation of fans, we are discussing multiyear deals to televise or stream competitions throughout the season, which proves that our efforts to develop our sport around the world are making signiÀcant headway.”

Usmanov is a man whose reputation precedes him. He holds interests in metals Àrm Metalloinvest, telecoms giant MegaFon and internet company Mail.ru. In sport, he is one of several major shareholders in Premier League soccer club Arsenal while his holding company, USM Holdings, set aside a reported US$100 million for investment in Russian eSports community Virtus.pro last October. But there is no doubting his commitment to fencing; his links to the sport are longstanding and deeply personal.

“I started fencing in the seventh grade at school when I was 13 years old,” he reveals. “In the 1950s and 60s, fencing was a sport which

“FENCING HAS NEVER BEEN SO WIDELY REPRESENTED AROUND THE WORLD AS IT IS NOW.”

Usmanov with IOC president and Olympic gold medalwinning fencer Thomas Bach and Russia's Inna Deriglazova

attracted full crowds. Yes, we didn’t have the technology that we have now but these matches were real battles between armed competitors.

“For boys like me, it was really interesting. I would also add that fencing is a very intelligent sport.

It forces you to make decisions quickly and, in my opinion, it helps develop determination.

“I devoted ten years of my life to fencing and I still love the sport.

I became a Master of Sports and competed as part of Uzbekistan’s national fencing team, winning several competitions. Then I decided to pursue another career. So for me, fencing is, as the French say, le premier amour. I put my heart and soul into the sport and it is very dear to me.

In return, fencing has left a mark on my character and my personality, for which I am grateful.”

Usmanov’s mission, and that of the FIE, is to ensure that a sport not renowned for its accessibility is able to captivate more youngsters and more potential viewers. Recent years have seen a signiÀcant modernisation and rationalisation of the FIE calendar. The introduction of the Grand Prix series in 2014 has led to a focus on major international centres like

SportsPro Magazine | 61

FEATURE FENCING

Boston, Shanghai and Seoul. There is a heightened appreciation, too, of the need to educate the uninitiated in the subtleties of the sport, and of its three weapons – the epée, sabre and foil.

In August 2016, of course, there is a quadrennial chance for fencing to do this on a scale that simply does not exist at any other time, whatever the FIE’s best efforts.

“The Olympic Games are the pinnacle of any sport,” Usmanov says. “Our primary goal is to organise exciting, memorable competitions. The London Olympic Games in 2012 were a great success and we are conÀdent we can build on that this time around.

“Rio 2016 provides a gateway to a wider fanbase in South America, a region where the sport has not historically been as popular as in Europe, for example. The boost in our sport’s visibility due to the association with the Rio Olympics will lead to a signiÀcant increase in our TV audience moving forward.”

Usmanov describes engaging Brazilian fans as “one of the FIE’s key goals”, and the work of creating awareness in the Olympic host nation has been ongoing for some time. The last FIE Grand Prix event in the 2014/15 calendar, an epée contest, was held in Rio from 22nd to 24th May last year, and it was preceded by Rio Fencing Grand Prix Week. Held in partnership with the Brazilian Fencing Confederation (CBF), that initiative gave locals the chance to

62 | www.sportspromedia.com

watch demonstration bouts and even try the sport for themselves, with the youngest visitors given balloon swords.

Media coverage came from Fox Sports, Globo Sports and newspaper La Dia, but the city’s residents were the real target. Local organisers must move up to 180,000 tickets to sell out the fencing events at Rio 2016, and generating momentum and a groundswell of interest will be critical to the success of that operation.

Fencing’s test event for Rio will run from 22nd to 27th April, when it stages another Grand Prix event for epée and the world championships for the men’s team sabre and the women’s team foil.

“We are also staging a fencing demonstration in Rio to coincide with the test event,” adds Usmanov.

“Locals will be able to give fencing a try and win tickets to the World Championships.

“As part of our ‘Fencing in Schools’ programme, top coaches will

The FIE is taking steps to make fencing clearer to follow for spectators on TV and in the arena

Tissot is one of the FIE's two major global partners but Usmanov is keen to add more

tour dozens of schools in and around Rio de Janeiro in February and March to give demonstrations and classes, showing children how and where they can get into fencing.”

For those in the arena and the potential audience around the world, there will also be a new look to the sport as a production.

“We are always working on improving the visual appeal of our competitions,” Usmanov explains.

“In Rio, we will be adopting a new ‘Field of Play’ design, which will ensure a good view of the fencing pistes for all spectators, regardless of where they are seated. New lighting effects will turn the Ànals into a real show.”

But for most sports, including fencing, the conundrum has long been to translate that two-week burst of global exposure into something like solid progress. The FIE leadership now feels it has a calendar that posits a sustainable, dependable offer to sponsors and supporters and now, through the IOC, it also has another avenue through which to pursue new converts.

Later this year, the IOC will launch the Olympic Channel, a global OTT television offering available around the world, 24 hours a day. Speaking to SportsPro in January, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) chief executive Yiannis Exarchos explained the form the service would take, and how it would help sports with less mainstream exposure to get people active and involved.

Rather than a traditional, linear proposition, OBS and the IOC are attempting to develop something altogether more forward-looking.

According to Exarchos, the channel will “initially prioritise mobile, because we believe that this is the entry point for the demographic we’re looking for”, while there is also an emphasis on “creating those forms of content that are really relevant to the millennial generation”. An important goal, he conÀrmed, was to “have some signiÀcant role in sustaining interest in those sports” without widespread mainstream coverage in

between Olympic Games.

If the channel is successful, the possible beneÀts for a sport like fencing are readily apparent.

Indeed, the FIE has a notable interest in the project.

“I believe the Olympic Channel has great potential,” says Usmanov.

“The standing of the International Olympic Committee and its extensive capabilities will enable the channel to develop quickly and attract new audiences. The Olympic Channel will be a major, multiplatform sports broadcast operation that will facilitate the promotion of fencing, as well as other sports.

“In the run-up to the Olympics, the FIE has already prepared a wealth of fencing content for the channel’s editorial team: athlete proÀles, short documentaries, interactive graphics and photo galleries, which can all be used by the channel’s various platforms, be they internet, mobile or television.

“We understand the importance of gaining prominent exposure on the Olympic Channel and recognise that only the most compelling, innovative and well-structured content will help increase the popularity of our sport. We are also anticipating some competition among the federations to submit the most exciting content.

“Overall, the creation of the Olympic Channel will allow us to demonstrate our capabilities as an international federation, so we are looking forward to its launch.”

The long-term health of

The Carioca Arena in Rio, which will host fencing at the Olympic Games this year

Usmanov, who began fencing at an early age, hopes to spread the sport to a new generation

fencing is also likely to depend on the expansion of the global body’s sponsorship programme.

The FIE currently has two major sponsors. One is Swiss watchmaker Tissot, which serves as the ofÀcial timekeeper for all global fencing events, and the other is Megafon.

Hosts of championships and Grand Prix events are entitled to carve out local partnerships but it is also clear that there is plenty of scope to diversify the FIE’s commercial portfolio. “The FIE has been actively working for several years now to make fencing more attractive to commercial partners,” Usmanov conÀrms. “We understand that the key issue is the number of viewers.

“The visual appeal of a sport depends on many factors, but most of all it needs to be easy to understand for spectators.

Historically, fencing was a pursuit

of the elite; Àrstly in the form of combat, then as a sport. As a result, the nuances of the rules of fencing are not always clear to broader audiences. One of the main goals of the FIE is to rectify this situation while conserving the beauty and chivalry of our sport.

“For example, we are currently testing a system that will provide full data on each fencer’s actions: the number of attacks, counterattacks, and so on. This data can be both displayed on screen at the venue and integrated into television graphics. The implementation of this kind of system would provide fans watching in the arena or on TV with a more comprehensive view of the match.”

2016 is certainly a critical year for the sport of fencing. Nonetheless, its most prominent evangelist is optimistic about its future, and proud of its current condition.

“Today, I think we can say that in the whole history of the FIE, fencing has never been so widely represented around the world as it is now,” Usmanov suggests. “There is still a lot of work to do to reach new heights in the Olympic family.

But we have everything we need for this – large-scale competitions, entertaining matches and the compelling stories of champions.

We are aiming to bring up a new generation of fencing stars.

“Our sport deserves as many fans as possible, both at the venues and watching at home.”

SportsPro Magazine | 63

POWERFUL STRATEGY

UNLOCKING SHANGHAI

BUILDING A WORLD CLASS LEAGUE

As part of a global City Attack initiative, adidas China retained Gemba to develop bespoke marketing plans for Shanghai. Grounded in proprietary research and market insights, Gemba identified the key drivers of the Shanghai sporting landscape to develop a concise plan to drive the adidas business is this highly influential global city.

From conception, commercialisation, communication and on going monitoring, Gemba has played an integral role in the development of the hottest league in the world – The Big Bash League. In 2010, Cricket Australia commissioned Gemba to assist in building a business case for the fledgling Twenty20 competition.

Gemba provides ongoing strategic advice and insight that has seen the competition smash attendance and broadcast records in 2016.

FOOTBALL IN EMERGING MARKETS A leading FIFA partner appointed Gemba to define the role of football and the World Cup across five emerging markets. Through consumer research, stakeholder consultation and practical market experience, Gemba developed five World Cup Game Plans for China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. These strategic plans highlighted the unique football characteristics of each market while identifying specific opportunities for global alignment.

UNDERPINNED

BY GLOBAL INSIGHTS. The global sport & entertainment industry is not renowned for its quality data and insight. Recognising this key gap, Gemba developed a global research program to ensure greater understanding of how consumers engage with their passions. Gemba’s proprietary research now operates across 15 markets worldwide, to deliver real local insight supported by a global context. Unlike other studies, Gemba measures sport & entertainment together, providing clients with a holistic view of how their audiences interact with leagues, teams, athletes, brands, events and celebrities.

GET IN TOUCH GLOBAL

EUROPE

AUSTRALIA

Rob Mills

Maeve Moriarty

Andrew Condon

CEO Gemba Group

General Manager

Head of Marketing

rob@thegembagroup.com

maeve@thegembagroup.com

andrew@thegembagroup.com

CHINA

NEW ZEALAND

AUSTRALIA

Yan Mao

Richard Howarth

Dale Wood

General Manager

General Manager

Head of Strategy & Insights

yan@thegembagroup.com

richard@thegembagroup.com

dale@thegembagroup.com

www.thegembagroup.com

@thegembagroup

GEMBA OPINION

ASIA – THE ENGINE ROOM FOR GROWTH OF GLOBAL SPORT OVER THE COMING DECADE, THE GLOBAL SPORTS WORLD IS GOING TO SHIFT ON ITS AXIS, AND THAT TILT WILL BE TOWARDS ASIA. This change will present immense opportunities and massive challenges to European and American sports organisations.

Sport as a cultural and commercial force has centered on Western leagues and teams since the early 1960’s. When the industry and consumers think of iconic teams, competitions and athletes, thoughts traditionally turn to Manchester United, The Yankees, The Lakers, Pele & Messi, The Champions League, The Monaco Grand Prix and The Masters.

While these properties will remain incredibly powerful, they and many major players of the sports industry will be more and more dependent on revenues from Asian markets.

China, now the world’s second biggest economy, is leading the reorientation. As a centralised economy, people take notice when the Chinese Government speaks, and the Beijing bureaucrats have indeed spoken. The current administration, led by football crazy President Xi Jing Ping, has publically stated the ambition to build the world’s biggest sport economy. This would result in an industry worth $850bn by 2025.

Unlike similar statements in the West, this is not a political soundbite. Already the roll out of 20,000 football programs has commenced in Chinese schools.

This objective will be achieved within five years, with a longer term target of 50,000 schools over ten years.

And when the Chinese Government acts, the private sector responds. Wanda, a

business that traditionally focused on property development, is on an aggressive growth trajectory with the acquisition of the World Triathlon Corp, European Sport and Media agency InFront, as well as a major stake in Atlético Madrid. Late last year, Shanghai-based CMC Holdings made a $400m investment in City Football Group, the owners of Manchester City FC, New York City FC, Melbourne City FC and Yokahama Marinos.

The other major factor in China’s impact on global sports is the gradual deregulation of the media sector. Historically, almost all sports content has been broadcast on the government-controlled sports channel, CCTV5. This has stifled the value of rights deals and removed innovation from the media sector. Over the past couple of years, the emergence of alternative broadcasters is sparking the interest of global sports administrators. Internet streaming platform Letv has aggressively acquired rights for Major League Baseball, the ATP tour and the US Golf Open.

All three organisations would have benefited significantly from having a buying alternative to CCTV5. The impact and implications for European and American sport are game changing.

As broadcasters in China build reach and revenues, their appetite for premium sports content will be immense.

This will mean more broadcast dollars, but will also mean changes to the way American & European competitions are run. Expect more events to be played in China, and not just pre-season competitions and friendlies. The Chinese want the best and their economic power will demand premium content, played on Chinese soil.

China is not alone in shaping the global industry. India is already having a massive influence on international cricket. Reports suggest that 80% of the International Cricket Council’s revenues originate from Indian sponsors and broadcasters. This economic power shift makes India the key player in the global administration of the game. Meanwhile, the Indian Premier League has created a world-wide battle for athlete talent. The huge salaries now on offer mean that some players are forgoing national representation to chase lucrative club contracts and endorsement deals.India’s influence doesn’t stop with cricket. The International Premier Tennis League (IPTL) was developed and funded

by Indian interests and launched in 2013 with five teams playing across Asia and the Middle East. While not officially sanctioned, the tournament attracts the best players in the world and its stature was further enhanced when Coca-Cola bought a stake in the controlling body.

While on the subject of tennis, it is not ridiculous to suggest that China could lay claim to the fifth Tennis Grand Slam. In the same way that Formula 1 augmented the traditional events of Silverstone and Monaco with new events, why wouldn’t the Grand Slams want a premium event in what will be the world’s largest economy?

Chinese fans would argue that they deserve the absolute best content. The money men would argue that the Grand Slams can’t afford not to be there.

The move to an Asian orientation has already started. A Rugby World Cup in Japan in 2019, an Olympics in Tokyo in 2020, a Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022… This run of events would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. Now it is a simple reality for a sports industry where the economies of traditional markets are flat, and incremental growth will come from emerging Asian nations. This trend has only accelerated with political volatility in Russia and the implosion of the Brazilian economy.

Western sport organisations and brands will need to move from having an ‘Asian Strategy’, to building their global strategy with Asia Market at its core.

To do otherwise will put them at risk of missing massive growth opportunities.

Rob Mills CEO Gemba Group

@millsyrob

THE PROFILE JB BERNSTEIN

Million dollar idea As the agent to a handful of the most famous names in American sport, JB Bernstein had already enjoyed an eventful career before a foray into India and the project that would change his life: TV baseball contest Million Dollar Arm. Still sticking to the day job, he reflects on a life in the sports industry as the subject of a Disney film.

By Eoin Connolly

J

B Bernstein has enjoyed what is known in US sporting parlance as a ‘storied career’.

After an apprenticeship in branding and advertising in the 1980s, he went into sport with memorabilia and collectibles giant The Upper Deck Company. It was there, as director of development, that he helped create the concept of ‘milestone marketing’ – the creation of licensed products to celebrate a sporting landmark or achievement. Early examples included a line commemorating National Hockey League (NHL) legend Wayne Gretzky’s

66 | www.sportspromedia.com

record-breaking 802nd goal in 1994, and another issued when Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino set what was the all-time National Football League (NFL) record for touchdown passes. Soon it would be Bernstein’s own clients receiving such accolades.

In 1993 he became a sports agent, co-founding the Access Group of Miami.

He went on to represent three of the biggest stars in American sport over the subsequent decade, record-breakers to a man – NFL stars Emmitt Smith and Barry Sanders, and Barry Bonds, who rose to the top of a tarnished era in Major League Baseball (MLB). All three remain Bernstein clients today.

Bernstein kept a hand in the licensed goods sector, serving as head of licensing for the startup Major League Soccer (MLS) from 1995 to 1997. But it was the development of athletes as brands that would be a central industry trend of the period and Bernstein moved with it, building campaigns around Smith and Sanders and relieving Bonds of his ties to the group licensing initiative run by MLBPA, the baseball players’ union.

All of that is prologue to the chapter that would earn Bernstein an international proÀle and celluloid immortality: his move into India to create TV baseball contest Million Dollar Arm. But in spite of that and outside interests – he also holds a PhD in physics from the University of Southern California (USC) – he remains a player agent today.

How has the agency life changed in the space of your career?

Wow. I mean, like any business, the business evolved. When I first got into the agent’s business, it was really in its infancy compared to how complex it is and all the different moving parts that it involves right now.

Back then, you would do a guy’s contract with his team and maybe, every now and again, you would get a call from a company like Pepsi saying they wanted to put him in a commercial. But there was no social networking. Maybe he did a charity golf tournament and you helped him to organise that, or helped organise his fan club – very, very minimal amount of work. And really, I don’t want to say limited opportunity, but certainly nowhere near the opportunities that exist now.

If you look at where the business is now, obviously you do the guy’s playing contract but now you’re not only actively going out and

recruiting those marketing and endorsement deals for them, you have to actually make the case. You have to show a guy’s value to the brand and how they’re going to get a return on their investment if they use them as a spokesperson, how to implement them.

Social networking in and of itself is massive – handling that for an athlete, handling the social media platform and the digital footprint, is probably the most important part of the job and it’s hugely time-consuming.

Because what they get on the field, they get.

To give it to you in a soccer example, if David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo is the best player and he makes x, then everybody else is slotted against that salary based on how good they are compared to the best. So your on-field salary is really locked in based on where you rank amongst your peers at that position, whereas with the marketing deals it’s the same kind of thing except I don’t have stats in the newspaper or a ranking that I can show.

I actually have to build that case and show how our player reaches x amount of people; how when he posts something on a social network, there’s this much post-reach. We data-mine our athletes and the brands so that we can find alliances that make sense based on all this data-mining that’s available now. So technology and the increased use of celebrity spokespersons has really transformed the business of being a sports agent dramatically.

“You’ve got to be smart, you’ve got to be aggressive, you’ve got to really understand the market.”

Have you found that the fundamentals that you apply to your own work have changed in that time as well? And has the atmosphere changed for sports agents?

Has it got more competitive? Is there more bite to it?

Yeah. For sure, it’s a more competitive environment. I mean, when I grew up as a kid, I don’t think I was even really aware that players had agents. You never heard of any agents and, certainly as a kid, you wouldn’t even think there’d be a need. You’d figure, the

team calls you up and says, ‘OK, here’s your contract and now you go play baseball for the Yankees.’ So growing up, I didn’t even know this job existed and I think most didn’t.

I think now, it’s kind of pop culture – almost to the point that agents on some level, I guess, are a cliché. Maybe that started with Jerry Maguire – all the way through to Million Dollar Arm, which is another movie that’s about an agent…

Certainly, TV shows like Ballers, TV shows like Entourage, that show this caricature of what the life is, coupled with the fact that there’s a huge earning opportunity, has really crowded the market with tons and tons of agents. And that has pluses and minuses, having such a deep market. There are a lot of people out there who are very good; there are quite a number who are not really qualified or are not really able to compete as agents, yet they’re out there because this is a great opportunity if you can somehow get one great client and strike it big.

So it’s an interesting field.

In terms of strategies or fundamentals, they’re basically the same. You’ve got to be smart, you’ve got to be aggressive, you’ve got to be a great negotiator, you’ve got to really understand the market and, more importantly, you’ve got to be able to manage relationships. You’ve got the relationship with the client, the relationships with the teams – and that’s really on two levels: you’ve got the front office staff, the general manager, the owner, the sponsors, all that kind of stuff, and then you’ve got the coaches and the other players and things like that. You’ve got to manage the families, you’ve got to manage the fans, you’ve got to manage all the brands you’re involved with, and so being a good relationship manager is really key, and so is being able to understand how to service all of those various needs.

***** For all his success with his earlier clients, it was in 2006 that Bernstein began the project that will probably deÀne his career.

Together with venture capitalists Ash Vasudevan and Will Chang, the latter of whom had spent almost a decade ruminating on the nature and the limits of athletic potential after a disappointing performance in the San Francisco Marathon, he hit upon a concept melding the two media success stories of the decade – sport and reality television – in one of the world’s exploding media markets.

With Vasudevan, Bernstein

SportsPro Magazine | 67

THE PROFILE JB BERNSTEIN

Barry Sanders (left) and Emmitt Smith (right), two of Bernstein’s earliest clients in the National Football League, are both still represented by him to this day

founded Seven Figures Management and put together a scheme designed to unearth a US sporting star in south Asia.

Million Dollar Arm launched in 2008 as a TV talent contest with a difference.

Introducing baseball to an Indian audience which was broadly unfamilar with the sport, it gave youngsters across the country the chance to pitch for US$100,000 prize – or US$1 million if they could throw three 90mph fastballs in succession – and a trip to the US to try out for the majors.

It was an adventure and an eye-opener for Bernstein – with a broadcast deal agreed on a handshake – but at a time when his US business was slowing, it was also a considerable success. 35,000 young hopefuls chanced their arm, with eventual winner Rinku Singh and runner-up Dinesh Patel following Bernstein to the US. Both had trained as javelin throwers but after working for just a few months with celebrated USC coach Tom House, they were able to show the Pittsburgh Pirates enough to land professional contracts and minor league berths.

The television programme, too, has endured. Subsequent editions were reinforced by ofÀcial MLB afÀliation and an inverted version called Million Dollar Bat, giving North American baseball players a shot at cricket’s Indian Premier League (IPL), is also in the works.

Let’s look back on that experience of going to India and setting up Million Dollar Arm. What inspired you to do that, first of all? What position were you in in your career at that time?

68 | www.sportspromedia.com

Well, my business partners and I were always looking for the next big thing. And the goal of Million Dollar Arm was to create the Yao Ming of India, in essence, and that’s where the thought process started. It was: ‘Hey, I bet if India’s got this massive untapped pool of men, there have to be natural athletes in that group. Even if it’s a smaller percentage, the total number is so high there have to be literally thousands of guys walking around in India who have capabilities to be able to be pro athletes in various sports.’

It’s just that India – other than cricket, obviously – doesn’t put a really high value on sports. One of the things that I always laugh about was that you can’t get a scholarship in any sport other than cricket to a university and, really, they don’t even give that because if you’re good enough to get a scholarship, one of the clubs sucks you up, or one of the IPL clubs, or you go and play in England.

So, ultimately, athletics is really different in India than it was in any other culture that I’d ever seen. Even in China, it’s competitive: the government comes to villages, they take kids, they pull them out of villages, they train them, they’re proficient in many sports.

So that was where the origin of the idea came, and then once you start thinking about India and looking for athletes, well, obviously – as we just said – only cricket is played there, really. Everybody grows up playing cricket.

So the only sport that’s similar to cricket is baseball. And you start thinking, maybe I could find a guy who could throw a ball really fast in India. And that’s kind of the progression of how it worked. Then once you realise what you’re looking for, we sat back and said, ‘The best way to find someone is the same way American Idol or Britain’s Got Talent or any of

these other TV shows does it. That’s the best way to find talent: to put up a TV show, give a kid a chance to make some money, and go around the country and get them to come out and try their hand.’

So that’s the origin. People always, I guess, want it to be a more complicated story but it really was just a bunch of guys – my group of partners – trying to figure out what the next best big thing would be in sports agency.

It’s obviously a very different market from the US – which is probably as well developed as you get in the sports industry. How prepared were you for it?

You know, I had never been to India before I went out there for Million Dollar Arm. I’d been to a lot of countries, I’d travelled all over the world, but I just hadn’t been to India. I think that, ultimately, I was prepared in some ways – business-wise and in what we wanted to do media-wise, and things like that – but in terms of the actual execution of the contest, and local customs, and all the intricacies of working within the Indian market, that was definitely stuff I had to learn on the fly.

What were the most important lessons that you took from the experience of going to India, both within that market and in being prepared for anything, working internationally?

Every job’s different. Every time you go out on one of these new ventures, there are things that you have to adapt. There are basic core business values – passion, overcoming adversity, integrity, those are things that are endemic to any deal. But there are certainly things that are indigenous to each region and then, within that, each deal.

So with Million Dollar Arm, there was the culture. Obviously no one knew what baseball was so we had to come up with a way to position the contest so that we could get a lot of kids to come out and try – you were doing a cricket contest in America it would be very difficult to excite American boys to come out and try their hand at throwing a cricket ball – so I think you really have to be creative in how you do that. And, certainly, there were some cultural things that were challenges.

For me personally, though, it’s very odd because every deal that you ever do will change you financially – either for the better or the worse. That is the nature of the deal – it’ll change you one way or the other. And every now and again you get a chance to do a deal that you can involve some community and reinvestment in, and does something that’s also great for the community, and that’s always nice. But it’s very, very rare in your career to get a deal that changes you on a fundamental level, and the time that I spent in India, and the time that I spent with Rinku and Dinesh here in the United States, really changed who I was not just as an agent but as a person. It was a really unique deal in that respect because it not only forced me to evolve the way I did business and to reevaluate the way I was going to do business, and challenges that I had, but it really made me look at who I was as a person. And it’s very rare that a deal like that comes along.

For someone else going into India as an outsider to do business, what would be the one piece of advice you would give them?

Wow. Just one piece of advice, huh?

Or what several pieces of advice?

Other than the best place to eat? I think the best advice I could give anybody in India is to respect and understand how business works there. Don’t try to bring the way business works or the standards and practices in your country to India. I guess ‘don’t be ethnocentric’ would be a good way to sum it up, and I think that that’s really what it comes down to.

They have a different way of doing things there. Certainly, their way probably wouldn’t work as well in America; the American way wouldn’t necessarily work so great in India.

And I think that any time you travel abroad, the last thing you want to come off as is ethnocentric or elitist or as someone who is not willing to adapt to the local way they do things. You’re not going to get anywhere.

The local people there, ultimately, hold all the cards. No one cared whether or not this

Top: Bernstein crowns Rinku Singh the winner of Million Dollar Arm. Below: With Singh and Dinesh Patel in the US

contest was going to happen in India. I had to get them to care about it. I had to get them to want to invest and put their time and energy and resources into this. And in order to be able to do that, you really have to come at them on their level, from their perspective.

You’re doing Million Dollar Bat now, but have you been tempted to get more involved in the representative market in India – maybe look at working with cricketers or anything like that?

You know, I definitely thought about it, and for some agents it might be fine. But for me, I’m a high-touch guy. I like to be there, I like to be face to face, and the reality is that with a young child and a wife and all the business I have here, I wouldn’t be able to be physically in India in a way that I would be able to really help guys the way I can here in the United States.

And it’s not just being face to face with a client: if you want to do a deal with Pepsi or Coke, you’ve got to be in their offices, you’ve got to know them, you’ve got to understand what’s going on, you’ve got to talk to them all the time. And it’s just very, very difficult to devote that kind of time halfway around the world and not give up everything here. So I’m a big believer in that you’ve got to be in the mix, and there’s no way you can be in the mix from halfway around the world.

I don’t care what they say about teleconferencing and Skype – even if you’re like me and you’re willing to stay up all night and you don’t sleep much and you don’t care about the 13-hour time difference, you still have to physically be there to be able to get brands and athletes and to really be the partner that they need to secure deals and to execute those deals.

SportsPro Magazine | 69

In the limited time you’ve had there, though, doing subsequent editions of the TV programme, have you been conscious of the market changing in India and of the sports industry evolving? Particularly with the IPL, which has almost been concurrent with Million Dollar Arm. As a matter of fact, one of my first stops on the Million Dollar Arm tour was in Bangalore, which was right around the very first IPL match. I’m actually friendly with [former India cricketer] Anil Kumble’s brother, so I went to the Royal Challengers Bangalore-Kolkata Knight Riders match, which was unfortunately not the best match ever for the Bangalore team. But I was immediately hooked on T20, and I’ve seen what they’ve been able to do.

So I mean, I was literally at the first game for IPL and, I can tell you, what those guys have done with that league is nothing short of incredible. The amount of growth, the amount of reach, the power, the product, the fans. I know they had a little bit of a scandal but the love of cricket and the way the league is structured is probably strong enough to withstand that.

Ultimately, it’s really an amazing business model when you look at that league versus a league like the NFL, and you look at the TV contracts they’ve been able to secure, and the franchise fees they’re charging, player salaries – and the thing is, you’re only talking about a two-month season. With baseball, people say, ‘Oh well, A-Rod or whoever makes 30 million bucks a year.’ He plays from February 1st to November 1st. There are guys in the IPL who are making that for 60 days, and then they go to their other clubs and they get their Pepsi endorsements… so it’s really amazing and I’m in awe of what the IPL and the BCCI has been able to do. They’re an amazing organisation.

Looking at the other aspect of what you did or were trying to do with that project, a lot of other agents now seem to be pursuing this crossover star concept.

You’ve got Jarryd Hayne going over to the NFL from rugby league in Australia, West Indies cricketer Kieran Powell trying to get into the MLB mix – is there an element of the gimmick in that or is it something that’s really not been explored enough by people who are looking out there for talent?

I don’t see it as a gimmick – I mean, you know, provided that you’re talented enough to compete in that league that you’re trying to compete in. The only time it’s a gimmick is if some team signs a guy who can’t play,

70 | www.sportspromedia.com

Chris Pizzello/AP/Press Association Images

THE PROFILE JB BERNSTEIN

Dead ringers: Bernstein (right) with Jon Hamm, who portrayed him in the film adaptation of Million Dollar Arm

just for the purpose of getting the PR hit. So I think in the case that you mentioned of Hayne in San Francisco, who played for the 49ers for a minute, and certainly some of the other crossover-type things, we’ve seen that in America forever. I mean, you look at guys like Deon Sanders or Bo Jackson – these guys were All-Pro as American football players and All-Pro American baseball players simultaneously. They were playing both seasons in both sports.

So when you look at that, you say, ‘Well, why wouldn’t a cricket player be able to play baseball? Why wouldn’t a rugby player be able to play football?’ It’s really just kind of one step away from what’s already happened many, many times in the United States where you had multi-sports stars.

Almost, I’m going to say, half of the big, bigtime college athletes here in the United States probably could have gotten scholarships in multiple sports, you know, but they pick a sport and focus. So I don’t think the concept that a really athletically gifted player could be successful in multiple sports, I don’t think that’s a crazy concept.

So it’s been a very interesting paradigm shift but I think it’s been for the better. And ultimately, I think that the merging of sports and the blending of sports makes so much sense. I see, as we develop this concept, the real long-term wind is that you get some guys in the IPL from the United States, you get these guys from India and some of these cricketers to come to the US to play, and then, ultimately, you have partner teams where the New York Yankees might be a partner team to the Kolkata IPL team. And they do friendlies and matches. I could even see a charity game where you brought in the winning IPL team

and you brought in the winning World Series team and you had a mixed-format game where you played 20 overs of cricket and then played three innings of baseball. So I see the desire for that kind of sports consumption and I think that that’s where this is all heading.

***** The postscript to the Million Dollar Arm story has a suitably unlikely Áourish. The programme had attracted the attention of Àlmmakers from its formative stages, with a Sony Pictures Entertainment project in the works as early as 2009. The rights to the story were then transferred to Disney. In 2014 it released Million Dollar Arm, helmed by Craig Gillespie, with a screenplay by Tom McCarthy and a cast featuring Aasif Mandvi, Alan Arkin, Lake Bell, Bill Paxton, and Mad Men star Jon Hamm as Bernstein himself. It was a modest commercial and critical hit.

Inevitably, the story is restructured and sweetened to Disney tastes but the sweep of it is accurate enough. The accent is on personal growth, with plenty made of Bernstein’s Àsh out of water experience in India, and of Singh and Patel’s subsequent misadventures in the US. There is also a romantic angle – Àctionalised, but reÁecting the fact that it was during this period that Bernstein met his wife, Brenda, with whom he now has a Àveyear-old daughter.

At its core, however, is still a remarkable sporting tale of the underdog – one that Bernstein is happy can be retold again and again.

What was it like being a Disney film character?

The most bizarre and unexpected experience to date, for sure. It was amazing, and really flattering, but certainly almost like an out of body experience. Everybody plays that game: who would play you in a movie? And to actually be able to answer that question with a DVD is very, very weird.

They were quite generous with your casting…

Yeah, I mean, well, you know, I’m such a dead ringer for Jon Hamm… Not quite.

But the main reason why I was really excited about the movie, though, was that I really wanted Rinku and Dinesh’s story to be told. I wanted it to be told widely. I wanted people in India to be proud.

You know, what these kids have done is really unheard of. To go from a position where they had never heard of the sport of baseball when they came to United States in May of 2008.

They’d never heard of it, never seen it, didn’t know it existed as a sport. Even when they competed in the contest, they were just throwing a ball.

They had no idea that the winner was going to America to try to be a pro athlete. They had no idea about baseball, about America; they didn’t speak English. And to go from May of 2008, landing here in the United States, and literally signing a pro contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates in November of the same year – and then, literally 13 months from the day the kid stepped on American soil, Rinku won his first game in baseball. I don’t think that’s ever been done in any other sport, where a guy just woke up one

day, it’s a sport he’s never heard of, and a year later he’s competing at the top level with the best players in the world.

It’s really an amazing story so I was really hopeful that the movie and the book and all that stuff would give Rinku and Dinesh their due. Because, ultimately, I did my job. I did what I was supposed to do. I’m supposed to find new business. I’m supposed to come up with ideas. Me and my business partners, that’s what we get paid to do. Rinku and Dinesh did something that’s never been done in the history of sports. They took the most massive risk – leaving home, walking away from jobs in the army, leaving their families, their culture, the food, the language. What they had to endure, mentally and physically, to accomplish what they accomplished, is so amazing.

So that’s what I was really hoping came out of the movie and I was really proud that it did.

I thought that it did. I thought Disney and the actors did an amazing job of really showing what these kids faced both on and off the field, so I’m proud of it.

How has that experience changed all of your careers and your lives, and how has it changed the way that people interact with you?

Well, it’s obviously changed all our lives.

They’re very famous – not a lot of kids from their villages have had movies about them, so that was something that was really nice – and certainly they were able to make a good amount of money.

Dinesh played for two seasons in the minor leagues here. He had some sponsorships; did

Bernstein (centre) with Million Dollar Arm winner Rinku Singh (second left) and runner-up Dinesh Patel (second right) and their cinematic counterparts, Madhur Mittal (left) and Suraj Sharma (right)

well. Ultimately, he was released, went back to India. He works with us there now and we try to help him out as much as we can. I think of him as kind of a son. It’s weird to say but I do really think of him as a son that I never had. He’s just got married recently and had his first child, and he spends a lot of time going around the country talking to kids and trying to inspire them.

There’s not a lot of dreams, as I’m sure you know, in the villages of India. To go to America and play professional sports and go to the White House and meet the president of the United States, and the things and the money that these kids have made, and to be able to buy their parents homes… That hope is something he does a good job of spreading around the other villages, and talking to kids and going to schools – I’m really proud of that.

And Rinku continues to compete here in the United States. This is a big year for him. This, hopefully, will be the year that he makes it to the very top level of Major League Baseball and makes the pro team. He had an injury last season that he’s recovered from and he’s pitching great. Spring training starts in about a month so we’re excited for him for this year to see if he can bring this journey to its real, ultimate fruition.

But I’m very close with both of them and, look, anybody can imagine that having a movie made about you is going to be transformative in so many ways. I think the thing that we always try to do a good job of is rather than taking it from the angle of celebrity or fame, we try to use it as a lesson that anything’s possible if you’re willing to make the sacrifices that you need to make in order to be successful. And we just kind of stand as a testament to that. It’s not about a movie or being famous or any of that. It’s really just, ‘Hey, the only thing you should be really learning from us is that if you work hard and you make the sacrifices that you’re willing to make – and you get a break here and there – you can have a whole lot of success as well.’

So that’s kind of how I look at it.

What’s ahead for you now?

A lot of the same stuff. I continue to build our agency. We continue to grow. I’ve been doing this since 1994. We’ve expanded into corporate consulting, I do a lot of corporate speaking and motivational speaking. As I said, we’re looking to expand the contest in other ways as well, potentially other sports, other countries.

So I’m very much still on the same track I’ve always been on, just trying to find the new next best thing and hopefully being able to do a good job as the opportunities fall.

SportsPro Magazine | 71

THREE DISCIPLINES ONE JOURNEY

#RoadToRio

www.fei.org

FEATURE NEW ZEALAND

Kotahitanga Auckland’s unique major events strategy is built on the Maori concept of balanced partnership – kotahitanga. Stepping inside the city’s sporting framework for a week in February, SportsPro discovered its effectiveness first hand.

By James Emmett

74 | www.sportspromedia.com

Monday 1st February

T

oday is Auckland Anniversary day.

Where better to spend it than in Auckland itself? SportsPro is in New Zealand’s largest city for a week, attempting to get under the skin of sport here. Auckland is widely acknowledged to have one of the canniest major events strategies in the world; it uses events – predominantly, but not exclusively, sports events – to propel its broader cultural, economic and societal objectives. SportsPro is here to Ànd out how.

Observed as a public holiday across the northern half of the North Island of New Zealand,

Auckland Anniversary day marks the arrival of William Hobson, the Àrst governor of New Zealand, to the Bay of Islands in 1840. It is also the start of what promises to be one of the busiest weeks in Auckland this year. There are numerous cultural celebrations planned across the city today, and a seafood festival to boot; the Àrst of a series of one-day international (ODI) cricket games between New Zealand’s Black Caps and old foes Australia will take place at the iconic Eden Park on Wednesday; the signing of the controversial Trans PaciÀc Partnership (TPP) international trade deal is set to take place, amid anticipated protests, at the city’s towering SkyCity hotel on Thursday; Friday marks the start of the annual

New Zealand's largest city, Auckland lies on an isthmus to the north of the country's North Island

NRL Nines activities, a three-day National Rugby League pre-season jamboree that has taken place in Auckland since 2014; and Saturday is Waitangi Day, another public holiday, this time to mark the signing of New Zealand’s founding document.

Auckland lies on a 2km-wide isthmus to the north of New Zealand’s North Island. Waitemata Harbour to the north opens east to the Hauraki Gulf, and Manukau Harbour to the south opens west to the Tasman Sea. With coastline spanning 3,700km, it is a wider urban area that has been shaped by its relationship with bodies of water.

One of the Maori names for the city is Tamaki Herenga Waka, which translates roughly as ‘the place where many canoes are tethered’, since

SportsPro Magazine | 75

FEATURE NEW ZEALAND

this was a busy Maori trading centre long before modern New Zealand was founded. It is a city of 1.5 million people, and it is estimated a third of all Aucklanders own a boat.

Today, the waters around the ‘City of Sails’ bear that out, as vessels shimmy to and fro around the harbours for Auckland Anniversary Day Regatta, the busiest single-day sailing event anywhere in the world. The harbour is protected, meaning the waves are minimal, but the wind is up.

Conditions, therefore, are, as the New Zealanders would say, ‘mint’ for racing, and it’s easy to see why Auckland is rumoured to be the only regular stopover port on the Volvo Ocean Race that is not required to pay a hosting fee.

Before the Rugby World Cup rolled in to town in 2011, the America’s Cup, hosted here in 2000 and 2003, was the single biggest catalyst for the pedestrianisation of Auckland’s waterfront, with the total rejuvenation of the rundown Viaduct Harbour carried out to act as a hub for the events around sailing’s most prestigious competition.

Queens Wharf, just beyond the teeming Viaduct area, was spruced up to act as the main fan zone for the Rugby World Cup. It remains a pleasant, vibrant legacy of that event today. Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED), the city council entity that has been the engine room for Auckland’s drive into major events in recent years, has its ofÀces in this area of town, and is one of several organisations running events down on the waterfront today. The

76 | www.sportspromedia.com

3,000

Auckland’s major events roll call

events facilitated by Auckland Council each year

The wider Auckland Council facilitates nearly 3,000 events every year. Home to basketball’s SkyCity Breakers, rugby league’s Vodafone Warriors, rugby union’s Auckland Blues, Auckland Rugby, Counties Manukau, and North Harbour Rugby, cricket’s Auckland Aces, and the Northern Mystics netball team, Auckland also regularly hosts All Blacks rugby union, Silver Ferns hockey, and All Whites soccer. As well as national championships across a full range of sports, and annual events including the NRL Nines, the ASB Classic WTA and ATP tennis tournaments, and a round the V8 Supercars, Auckland’s recent one-off or limited multi-year international events include:

According to some estimates, a third of the 1.5 million people in the 'City of Sails' owns a boat

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

FIA World Rally Championship 2010 Pan Pacific Youth Water Polo Festival 2010 ISA World Junior Surfing Championship 2010 Four Nations Rugby League 2010 IRB Rugby World Cup 2011 ITU Triathlon World Cup 2011 FIH Champions Trophy 2011 Volvo Ocean Race Auckland Stopover 2011/2012 FIA World Rally Championship 2012 Pan Pacific Youth Water Polo Festival 2012 World Roller Figure Skating Championships 2012 ITU World Triathlon Grand Final 2012 ITU World Series Triathlon Auckland 2012 - 2014 ISF World Softball Championships 2013 UCI BMX World Championship 2013 Auckland Tall Ships Festival 2013 A-Class Cats World Championship 2014 Oceania Aquatics Championship 2014 Table Tennis World Veteran Championships 2014 IRB Junior World Championships 2014 Pan Pacific Youth Water Polo Festival 2014 Volvo Ocean Race Auckland Stopover 2014/2015 ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 Fifa U20 World Cup 2015 Finn Gold Cup 2015 Lions Tour 2017 Rugby League World Cup 2017 IMGA World Masters Games 2017 FIH Women’s World Hockey League 2017 Volvo Ocean Race Auckland Stopover 2017/2018

organisation is also co-ordinating from the headquarters of the Auckland Transport Operation Control – constructed for the Rugby World Cup and representing a new integrated model for major event logistical support. Police, Àre service, transport, and security representatives are all housed under one rather swanky seafront roof.

Tuesday 2nd February

M

artin Sneddon is New Zealand sporting royalty. He’s a former Black Caps cricketer, as were plenty of his family, and his grandfather was part of a posse that bought the original swamp land for the development of Eden Park stadium. Sneddon’s deÀning moments have come not on the Àeld of play, however, but off it.

Since he retired as a cricketer, he has been, variously, chief executive of New Zealand Cricket, the Tourism Association of New Zealand, New Zealand Rugby Union, and the organising committee for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. He is now chief executive of Duco Events, which takes its name from the Latin for ‘I

The All Blacks parade through the streets of Auckland after winning the 2011 Rugby World Cup

Martin Sneddon, chief executive of Duco Events

lead’. The organisation has a relaxed ofÀce of about 20 in Auckland’s central business district. Its owners, David Higgins and Dean Lonergan, are boxing enthusiasts and now match-make by committee for Joseph Parker, a Kiwi heavyweight of PaciÀc Island origin who is being touted as an opponent for British ingénue Anthony Joshua.

The company has a 50-50 deal with Sky NZ for Parker Àghts, and they’re getting around 35,000 payper-views a Àght. The real money will come, however, when Parker achieves some international success.

Naturally enough, Sneddon believes the Rugby World Cup was a seminal moment in New Zealand’s history. It gave New Zealanders and the wider international community belief in the country’s ability to host largescale events – a belief that is not to be underestimated given New Zealand’s total population is just 4.5 million and the fact that the country had initially been scheduled to co-host the 2003 Rugby World Cup, but had the rights taken away from them when they couldn’t commit to World Rugby’s ‘clean venue’ sponsorship policy. Cricket Australia afforded them more respect during the co-hosting of the Cricket World Cup last year as a direct result, Sneddon attests.

The international media, too, have a different view of New

Zealand post-2011. Sneddon says that the British press in particular were cynical about New Zealand’s capability, but they were won round with the warmth and professionalism with which the tournament was organised. At an early stage of the preparations, Sneddon set about drumming home the idea of ‘the stadium of four million’ and that New Zealand’s Àrst duty was in hosting, not setting up an All Blacks win – although, of course, the cathartic home victory was a huge help.

Wednesday 3rd February

T

he day begins with a quick hike up Mount Eden for a panoramic view of the city, which, though relatively small in population, is spread in size. The wider Auckland metropolis sits on top of a volcanic Àeld. There are some 50 volcanoes that pepper the landscape in every direction as far as the eye can see.

Many of the mountains have been preserved, untouched by the urban sprawl around them, creating a fantasy land feel to the cityscape as unspoiled green mounds rise to meet the sky above.

Towering above it all is the Sky Tower, the 328-metre telecommunications and

SportsPro Magazine | 77

FEATURE SECTION TEXT ZEALAND NEW HERE

observation tower opened in 1997.

At the base of the iconic structure is the SkyCity hotel and casino, and waiting in the lobby is Julie Garlick, SkyCity’s general manager for marketing. It is Garlick who persuades high-proÀle sports and entertainment Àgures to take a tour around the tip of the tower on the nerve-racking SkyWalk. Most don’t need much persuading; it’s their agents that need to be talked round. When Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar went up there while on a tour in 2009, the uplift in New Zealand’s proÀle in his home country was immediate.

There is a spate of hotel building underway in Auckland but, for now, SkyCity remains the preeminent venue for visitors. The company has also committed to spending NZ$500 million building

Auckland a new, hi-tech convention centre in return for an extension to its current casino licences.

Although SkyCity operates Àve outposts across New Zealand and Australia, it is the Auckland site for which it is best known, thanks in part to its various sports sponsorship activities. Garlick’s department has deals across cricket, netball, badminton, and the World Masters Games, but the standout is probably the naming rights deal with the New Zealand Breakers, the sole Kiwi basketball team competing in the Australian National Basketball League (NBL).

The team’s front ofÀce and practice facility over the Auckland Harbour Bridge on the North Shore is the next stop on the tour.

Basketball is enjoying something of a surge in popularity in New

The fearsome SkyWalk is available to any visiting athlete brave enough to take part

SkyCity is the naming rights sponsor of New Zealand’s only NBL team, the NZ Breakers

Zealand. Part of this is due to the phenomenal recent success of the Breakers, who have won four of the last Àve NBL championships.

Part of it, according to Breakers general manager Richard Clarke, is due to the shrewd cross-platform marketing being undertaken by the National Basketball Association (NBA) and its ofÀcial uniform provider Adidas in New Zealand.

According to Clarke, the All Blacks rugby union team have a stipulation in their own sportswear supply deal with Adidas that requires the players to wear NBA jerseys while they’re relaxing in hotels on team duty. Anecdotally, at least, the strategy seems to be working.

Auckland is the only place SportsPro has been to outside the US where NBA jerseys outnumber Premier League replica shirts on the backs of the general public.

Clarke is preparing to

Auckland: SuperCity Auckland spent some NZ$97 million (US$64 million) on its efforts within the wider country’s hosting of the Rugby World Cup, and has measured benefits exceeding NZ$500 million (US$330 million). But a structural shift inside the corridors of power in the region that took place while the country was organising the 2011 tournament has arguably been more influential in setting the trajectory for Auckland’s future success.

78 | www.sportspromedia.com

It was in November 2010 that Auckland formalised its ‘SuperCity’ structure, cutting out the bureaucracy and merging seven councils and one regional authority into one entity named Auckland Council. The impact of this change cannot be overstated.

Decision-making processes were streamlined, budgets were pooled, and self-interest and waste were almost totally eliminated. Len Brown was elected as the first mayor of the newly created SuperCity, and as part of his first 100-priority plan, he

set down a vision to turn Auckland into one of the most ‘liveable’ cities in the world, driven partly through events. And from that, ATEED was born.

The SuperCity, combined with the confidence that came with a successful home Rugby World Cup, meant that suddenly road blocks, both real and metaphorical, were not such a big deal anymore. Kiwis got better at pushing themselves and the boundaries of what they believed they were capable of.

When the world comes to play,

we pull out all the stops Auckland is a city of sports lovers. Whether it’s on the field, in the water, on the track, or on the court, we embrace international sports events like no other city in the world.

With first-rate venues, experienced experts and large-scale fan activations that transform the city, we put your event on the world stage. And that’s what success looks like.

J000539

J000539 Photo: Vincent Arenes / Volvo Ocean Race

majorevents@aucklandnz.com aucklandnz.com

VOLVO OCEAN RACE AUCKLAND STOPOVER 2015

FEATURE NEW ZEALAND

hand the reins of the team over to former player and current commercial chief Dillon Boucher at the end of the season. Clarke himself is off to Australia, having taken on the role of starting up a new NBL team in Brisbane, Auckland’s twin city. There’s a lot of cooperation between the two similarly sized cities and, in fact, ATEED is in the process of trying to engineer a city sporting swap of kinds: get all the codes playing their Àxtures on the same weekend, to get everyone coming over from Brisbane en masse.

The Breakers split their home games between the North Shore Event Centre and the larger Vector Arena in the CBD. For the Vector games, they tend to draw crowds of around 6,000, and Clarke explains that they put on the classic NBAstyle entertainment pieces during the breaks in play – the Kisscams and air guitar battles – but with a down-to-earth New Zealand twist.

The team operates on an annual budget of between NZ$5 million (US$3.3 million) and NZ$6 million (US$3.9 million). Almost NZ$1 million (US$660,000) of its annual revenue comes from corporate hospitality. NZ$2.2 million (US$1.45 million) comes from a growing pot of sponsors, NZ$500,000 (US$330,000) of that from Garlick’s SkyCity.

Later, at Eden Park for the ODI between the Black Caps and Australia, the sun sets on the famous old ground and on captain Brendon McCullum’s international career in Auckland with a stirring Kiwi victory.

80 | www.sportspromedia.com

Thursday 4th February

A

ccording to Garlick, one of the key objectives the Breakers’ sponsorship fulÀls is in its ability to reach female audiences. The team has worked hard to create a family atmosphere at its games and among its fanbase but, in fact, New Zealand registers some of the most impressive Àgures globally when it comes to female participation and interest in sport. Staggeringly, for a country of under Àve million, there are one million people across New Zealand – split roughly down the middle in gender terms – who volunteer in sport.

According to Peter Miskimmin, the chief executive of Sport New Zealand who meets SportsPro this morning at the ATEED ofÀces, sports people have long been role models for both genders across the country, from recently retired All Blacks captain Richie McCaw back to pioneering mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary.

Traditionally, boys grow up wanting to be rugby players or cricketers, and girls grow up wanting to play netball and hockey.

Indeed, there is more than a touch of glamour about the New Zealand women’s hockey team. Not only are the Black Sticks ranked fourth in the world, but they also have a habit of marrying their male sporting counterparts. America’s Cup sailor Dean Barker is married to former Olympic hockey player Mandy Smith; All Blacks legend

The All Blacks take part in another haka at Eden Park (left), while the Black Sticks celebrate a goal at London 2012.

There is a degree of romantic crossover between the teams.

89 per cent of children in New Zealand do

three or more hours of excercise per week

Dan Carter is married to current Black Sticks striker Honor Carter, while McCaw himself is engaged to Carter’s teammate Gemma Flynn.

Miskimmin, an Olympic hockey player himself at the 1988 and 1992 Games, says that in New Zealand children have a safe, playful upbringing. It’s a shoes-off, roamthe-wilds kind of place. And the statistics bear this out. 89 per cent of children in New Zealand do three or more hours of exercise a week.

It is the role of Sport NZ, which looks after elite sport and participation, to identify talent, polish, nurture and target opportunities. There is a clear pathway, as Miskimmin sees it, from early physical literacy, to participation, to high performance.

The organisation’s current budget is NZ$130 million (US$85.55 million), NZ$42 million (US$27.64 million) of which is ploughed into its wholly owned elite subsidiary High Performance Sport NZ. That fund got a NZ$20 million (US$13.16 million) top-up for London 2012, where New Zealand won 13 medals, four more than in Beijing. They want 14 for Rio and 16 from Tokyo.

Miskimmin says that Sport NZ had been toying with the idea of replicating the Australian model of basing their high performance centre somewhere in Europe.

Travel is the single most inhibiting factor in the development of New Zealand’s athletes. Though New Zealand is within one Áight of most of the world’s population – and Emirates has just launched the longest commercial passenger

Áight currently available, a gruelling 17-hour schlep from Auckland to Dubai – the fact remains that it takes more than 24 hours to travel to or from Europe or the east coast of America. Travel is the one overwhelming cost for New Zealand’s sports network and it typically takes longer for their athletes to be able to compete internationally. Miskimmin believes that a healthy, comprehensive events strategy here in Auckland not only showcases New Zealand to the world, but provides a critical platform for Kiwi athletes to gain international experience and perform well in front of home crowds.

Martin Sneddon revealed on Monday that he was frustrated that the central government hadn’t kicked on and been ambitious with its major events strategy post-Rugby World Cup. He was disappointed that people scoffed when he suggested a potential bid for the Fifa World Cup last year. Miskimmin believes that the Fifa Women’s World Cup is a more realistic target, and he’d like to see Auckland have a crack at hosting the Commonwealth Games again, too.

Though it’s happening slower here than elsewhere in the world, New Zealand’s population base is shifting as urban areas – principally Auckland – spread, and people are attracted by the jobs and cultural life on offer in cities. Auckland has long had the largest Polynesian population of any city in the

world, but the ethnic make-up of the city is changing, too, and there has been particular growth in the local Asian population.

The challenge for New Zealand, says Miskimmin, is in preserving the country’s heritage as a sporty nation in the face of those population changes.

A new emphasis on short-format sports events – and alongside the Nines, ‘Fast Fives’ netball, hockey ‘Àves’ and Àve-a-side soccer, and, of course, Twenty20 cricket have proved popular of late – might aid the participation efforts here.

ATEED has also been increasing its focus on new events – created

by New Zealand for New Zealand – to stimulate domestic interest.

Red Bull’s Drift Shifters motorsport competition, which takes place across a pinball-inspired track

Eden Park, Auckland’s showpiece venue, hosts cricket under blue skies

Sir Peter Leitch, aka 'Mad Butcher', delivers some motivational words to the NRL’s Vodafone Warriors

on the streets of Auckland, is an example of some particularly creative thinking here.

Meeting over, Miskimmin on his way, and it’s back on to Queens Wharf for lunch on a P&O cruise liner that docked at the harbour this morning. The boat has brought a few hundred fans and some NRL luminaries over ‘the ditch’ from Australia for the NRL Nines event this weekend. Matt Cooper, an ex-NRLer, has suffered with seasickness on the three-day voyage, and he tells the assembled media and dignitaries that he’s been “begging for the needle”.

New Zealanders, it seems, have a liberal attitude to swearing. Turning on the radio this week, it’s been impossible to escape an advert for a particular restaurant chain imploring the listener not to ‘be a dick this Valentine’s Day’. It’s a wonder, then, that Paula Bennett, New Zealand’s associate minister for tourism, doesn’t resort to profanity when she’s introduced inaccurately by the cruise company’s Australian chief executive as Paula Duncan. Instead, she takes the faux pas in her stride, before heaping praise on ATEED for its role in facilitating the Nines. “I reckon ATEED is the jewel in Auckland’s crown,” she says. “Tell me about an event that hasn’t gone superbly.”

Reassuringly, normal service is resumed later on in proceedings when Sir Peter Leitch – a

SportsPro Magazine | 81

FEATURE NEW ZEALAND

local philanthropist and celebrity follower of New Zealand’s sole NRL team, the Vodafone Warriors, who goes under the moniker of ‘Mad Butcher’ – commandeers the microphone to tell one unsuspecting journalist to “sit the fuck down”.

Friday 5th February

T

he annual ASB Classic tennis tournaments – one a WTA International-level event, and the other an ATP 250 competition – are arguably New Zealand’s most successful, genuinely global, regular sporting events. For what are effectively second and third-tier tennis tournaments, with no mandatory participation for the players, both tournaments regularly punch way above their weight – certainly when it comes to the names that Karl Budge, the ASB Classic’s 31-year-old tournament director, attracts each year.

Sloane Stephens, Venus Williams, Ana Ivanovic and Agnieszka Radwanska – all big names on the women’s circuit – are the last four winners of the ladies’ tournament.

John Isner, David Ferrer and Juan Martin del Potro have all won the men’s tournament in recent years. The WTA event won best international tournament – voted for by the players – for the last two years, and the men’s tournament won a best fan experience award two years running as well.

Budge, a former head of sales and marketing at the WTA, has organised the tournaments for the last four years on behalf of Auckland Tennis. All proÀts – and there are proÀts – are reinvested into the growing of tennis around the region. The tournaments are Auckland Tennis’s biggest fundraising tool, contributing some NZ$12 million (US$7.9 million) of the organisation’s total $16 million (US$10.53 million) turnover. Last year, the tournaments made a

82 | www.sportspromedia.com

proÀt of NZ$1.6 million (US$1.05 million); the Àgures aren’t in for this year’s events, which took place in the pre-Australian Open swing in January, but Budge thinks he should be on for NZ$2 million (US$1.32 million). Not bad considering that Àgure was NZ$300,000 (US$200,000) four years ago.

Attendances this year were up 6,000 year on year, and the corporate box inventory of 86 at the ASB Tennis Centre invariably sells out for up to NZ$13,500 (US$8,880) apiece for the men’s tournament, and up to NZ$9,000 (US$6,000) each for the women’s.

Budge has concentrated on raising the hospitality level of late, bringing in Auckland’s top restaurants to do the catering. Food and beverage accounts for NZ$2.8 million (US$1.84 million) now. It used to be a “board shorts and jandles” event, he says, but now it’s Moët, Cloudy Bay and BMW. Auckland Tennis showed impressive resolve and commitment to Budge’s brand positioning efforts recently when it turned down a million-dollar sponsorship from a fast food chain.

Budge worked under lauded Grand Slam tournament director Craig Tiley at the Australian Open for a while, and he is a disciple of Tiley’s ‘player experience’ approach.

Budge sends the players birthday cards, personally picks them up from the airport, drives them to various appearances, makes sure they have gifts every day in the hotel – which is, of course, covered by the tournament – and, crucially, he applies the same treatment to the players’ entourages.

The facilities at Auckland, though small and ageing, are good. Players are near enough guaranteed practice time – there are three match courts and eight practice courts – which is crucial coming up to the Australian Open and not something they get if they opt for the Brisbane tournament, played at the same time as Auckland.

There is an issue, though, and that is the roof – or lack of it – at the ASB Tennis Centre. One stroke of bad luck with the weather and the equity the tournaments have

Auckland’s ASB Classics tennis events punch well above their weight with the players they attract

NZ$2 million in profit expected from this year's ASB Tennis Classics

built up with the players and the circuits could be dashed.

Budge has been in talks with Regional Facilities Auckland (RFA), another Auckland Council body, about funding an upgrade.

Doug Cole, director of strategic partnerships at RFA, is meeting SportsPro for coffee this afternoon.

In a café overlooking Aotea Square in downtown Auckland, where the NRL teams are mingling with fans in a Àne summer mizzle that has done nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of Auckland’s rugby league fraternity, Cole explains that the RFA has been able to muster part of the funding for the upgrades to the tennis centre.

Beneath us Mad Butcher is Áoating around in seventh heaven: a rugby league fanatic, he’s what’s known as a ‘character’, but his heart is, by all accounts, as gold as his sparkly, bejewelled Àngers.

RFA owns and operates three stadiums around Auckland: the North Harbour, or QBE, which is the city’s secondary rugby union venue and home of NZ Football; the Mt Smart Stadium, home of the Warriors; and Western Springs Stadium, which is more of a massive park and hosts motorsport events and concerts. It also operates the Trusts Arena in West Auckland, home of the Northern Mystics

mummu sport

,1 MUMMU SPORT WAS PIVOTAL IN DRIVING A 626% INCREASE ON “RETURN ON AUDIENCE� FOR BOTH THE INF NETBALL WORLD CUP AND THE UCI ROAD WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS

0XPPX 6SRUW LV UHGHĂ€QLQJ WKH UHODWLRQVKLS EHWZHHQ FRPPHUFLDO GHYHORSPHQW RSHUDWLRQV DQG IDQ HQJDJHPHQW 2 8&, 5ŕśˆŕľşŕľ˝ :ŕśˆŕś‹ŕś…ŕľ˝ &ŕś ŕľşŕś†ŕś‰ŕś‚ŕśˆŕś‡ŕśŒŕś ŕś‚ŕś‰ŕśŒ

INF 1ŕľžŕś?ŕľťŕľşŕś&#x2026;ŕś&#x2026; :ŕś&#x2C6;ŕś&#x2039;ŕś&#x2026;ŕľ˝ &ŕś&#x17D;ŕś&#x2030; 6<'1(<

September 19-27, 2015, Richmond, Va. USA

August 7-16, 2015, Sydney, Australia

Richmond 2015 delivered USAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest cycling event, covered by over 500 international media outlets and broadcast live to a global audience of 300 million.

The worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s top 16 netball nations gathered in Sydney for the 14th edition of the Netball World Cup.

UCI Road World Championships is cyclingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pinnacle event. Held annually in an international city as chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) through a competitive bidding process.

0XPPX ZDV DQ LQWHJUDO SDUWQHU IURP WKH RXWVHW KHOSLQJ 1HWEDOO $XVWUDOLD GHOLYHU WKH PRVW VXFFHVVIXO netball world cup in history.

Mummu helped guide the commercial strategy and logistics to deliver a 573% increase in earnings on the ÂżQDQFLDO UHWXUQ RQ IDQV DQG LQFUHDVH LQ GLUHFW UHYHQXH HDUQHG IURP FRPSHWLQJ WHDPV

0XPPXÂśV LQQRYDWLYH 2ŕľśFLDO 7UDYHO $JHQW 3URJUDP posted a staggering 679% increase on audience UHWXUQ GHOLYHULQJ RI WRWDO WLFNHW UHYHQXH DQG D increase in non-government commercial revenue to the Local Organising Committee.

Mummu was directly responsible for delivering:

Mummu was directly responsible for delivering:

Â&#x2021; KRWHO URRP QLJKWV

Â&#x2021; JOREDO IDQ SDFNDJH VDOHV DFURVV FRXQWULHV

Â&#x2021; 7UDYHO DFFRPPRGDWLRQ IRU RI DOO FRPSHWLQJ WHDPV

Â&#x2021; 7UDYHO $FFRPPRGDWLRQ IRU DOO HYHQW VWDNHKROGHUV

â&#x20AC;˘ A$586,600 in new earnings to Local Organising Committee Â&#x2021; $ JOREDO UHWDLO QHWZRUN RQ FRQWLQHQWV

³0XPPX WRRN D ORW RI SUHVVXUH Rয় RXU WHDP ZKLOH GHOLYHULQJ D YDOXDEOH UHYHQXH VWUHDP PRVW RUJDQLVHUV GRQœW FRQVLGHU DW WKH RXWVHW ,WœV EHHQ D SKHQRPHQDO SDUWQHUVKLS´ Tim Miller, COO Richmond 2015 Inc.

â&#x20AC;˘ A$1.5m in new earnings (additional to tickets) â&#x20AC;˘ A$2.78m ticket revenue (excluding public sales)

³2QH RI RXU NH\ JRDOV IRU WKH :RUOG &XS ZDV FRPPHUFLDO VXFFHVV DQG 0XPPX KHOSHG GHOLYHU WKDW DQG PRUH :H LQWHJUDWHG 0XPPXœV WHDP GLUHFWO\ LQWR RXUV DOORZLQJ ERWK SDUWLHV WR ZRUN FORVHO\ RQ PDMRU GHFLVLRQV ´ Marne Fechner, CEO, Netball World Cup SYDNEY 2015

6LQFH 0XPPX KDV H[HFXWHG ORJLVWLFV HYHQW WUDYHO SDFNDJLQJ DQG IDQ HQJDJHPHQW IRU HYHQWV RQ IRXU FRQWLQHQWV 2XU H[SHUW WHDP RIIHUV VWUDWHJLF SODQQLQJ PDUNHW SODFHPHQW DQG H[SORLWDWLRQ RI FRPPHUFLDO ULJKWV WR PDMRU JOREDO VSRUWV GHOLYHULQJ WULSOH Ă&#x20AC;JXUH JURZWK LQ HYHQW UHYHQXHV IRU RXU FOLHQWV 0DUFHO %HUJHU &KLHI ([HFXWLYH 2IĂ&#x20AC;FHU

mummu sport

( PEHUJHU#PXPPXVSRUW FRP 0 7 : PXPPXVSRUW FRP

FEATURE NEW ZEALAND

ATEED and Brett O’Riley Brett O’Riley is chief executive of Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED). He leads a team of around 220, 25 of them devoted to events. With a total budget of around NZ$55 million (US$36.17 million) a year, with NZ$12 million (US$7.9 million) of that earmarked for events, the organisation has managed to do a lot with a little since it was founded in the wake of Auckland Council’s restructuring in 2010.

Working to a checklist of objectives that includes hotel room nights, economic impact, international renown and city liveability, ATEED has been lauded for raising the profile, capability and confidence of Auckland, and impressed within the sports industry with its joined-up approach to major event bidding, boasting a success rate of over 80 per cent, and always looking to bring in events they can put their own stamp on to differentiate from other event hosts around the world.

Often, that differentiation chimes with the marketing around New Zealand as an international destination. ‘Open spaces, open hearts, open minds’ and ‘100 per cent pure’ are the slogans currently being used, and events are designed to bring out the fact that the country is safe, beautiful and populated

netball team, the North Shore Events Centre, part-time home of the Breakers, and the Vodafone Events Centre, on which site a state of the art new water park is nearing completion. The Wero Whitewater Park, built at a cost of NZ$32 million (US$21.04 million), has already been earmarked as a key southern hemisphere base for European national canoe federations looking to escape the bleak northern hemisphere winters. RFA also runs three theatres and a civic centre; as well as the Auckland Art Gallery, the town hall, Auckland Zoo and the Viaduct Events Centre. It’s pretty much just the Vector Arena, Eden Park and the tennis stadium that it doesn’t actually own and operate.

84 | www.sportspromedia.com

with warm, embracing people. The integration of Maori culture, which is at its most visible internationally with the wildly popular All Blacks haka, is also a policy that comes from the top down.

O’Riley speaks eloquently, and in New Zealand’s indigenous language, at a Maori ceremony to mark Waitangi Day, and he is a living example of modern New Zealand, a man whose spirit and culture is an authentic mix of old and new.

O’Riley’s nickname is ‘Brett Net’ on account of his predilection for networking, but watching him at work for a week is tiring in itself. A man of boundless energy, O’Riley’s vim and enthusiasm for new ideas, combined with the close-knit Auckland

Saturday 6th February

A

uckland is hosting the World Masters Games next April, and expects to attract around 25,000 participants to compete in 28 sports across 45 venues.

Conversations in the ATEED ofÀces are already sprinkled with gentle banter about who will be competing in what and why.

Jennah Wootten is chief executive of the organising committee for the event. She has a full-time staff of 27 now, but that will grow to 50 and a volunteer workforce of 4,000 for the event

Council structure, means he is in daily contact with movers and shakers from across almost every sector in the city, suggesting new initiatives, start-up events, or offering help from within the ATEED organisation for the nitty gritty of event organisation.

“When I started at ATEED, I said, ‘We’re going to adopt the Maori principle of kotahitanga because that’s a sense of unity and being at one with your partner,’” he says. “You’re not superior; you sit together as equals and work things through, and I think that has really served us well. I think there’s an enormous pride across the political spectrum in what we’ve achieved. We get a lot of credit for the Nines, but actually we’re just the front end of a big machine that includes Duco and Auckland Transport, the guys that put out the signs on the street, that do the traffic management, all of our partners.

“One of the bits of feedback we get about Auckland, and I think it is a key defining principle for us, is our ability to bring Auckland Incorporated, the Auckland family together; being able to bring Auckland Transport, Regional Facilities Auckland, private sector partners, national government, together.

It’s a small country; we work really hard on partnering, it is our core philosophy.”

A rendering of the soon-to-becompleted Wero Whitewater Park alongside the Vodafone Events Centre

itself – which is huge given there were 5,000 volunteers nationwide for the Rugby World Cup, for whose organising committee Wootten also worked. The operational skills garnered through the Rugby World Cup cannot be underestimated. New Zealand is in

a constant battle against brain drain – and attracting skilled migrant workers is an objective in its event strategy – but many involved in 2011 have stayed on. Wootten says the connections forged during the organisation of that jamboree have helped immeasurably. The prime minister pops in for quarterly update meetings here at the World Masters Games ofÀces and the police commissioner, for example, is on call for Wootten.

50 per cent of the 25,000 athletes – two and a half times more than compete at an Olympics – will be brought in from abroad.

That’s the easy part, Wootten reckons, as there are 85,000 people on the database and they’re more or less all engaged. Her organisation is working with NSOs in New Zealand and Australia ahead of the sign-up launch later this month and it’s the Àrst time that organisers have been allowed to offer split price-point packages in the history of the quadrennial World Masters Games.

The average age of a World Masters competitor is 42. The average wealth is really quite wealthy indeed; they bring their families, they stay on, they eat, drink and enjoy themselves.

Auckland had to Àght off 16

other cities for the right to host what will be its biggest event since the Rugby World Cup and the largest for a decade to come. The operating budget for the event is NZ$34 million (US$22.36 million), but a multiple of that is expected in economic impact for Auckland.

Beyond the money, Wootten believes there will be a huge positive change on people’s lives.

Young people will beneÀt from seeing older people exercising.

The Vodafone Warriors on their way to the final of the 2016 Auckland NRL Nines

Sunday 7th February

F

inals day at the NRL Nines at Eden Park. The tournament is now in its third year of an initial Àve-year licence.

It is representative of a trend developing at ATEED, and across the wider New Zealand sport scene, for homegrown, Kiwiconceived events.

The Nines was the brainchild of Duco Events, and has been such a success that several Australian cities now want a piece of the action. A short-form, nine-a-side version of traditional rugby league, it’s a chance to see all the NRL teams at the same time, in the same

25,000 people will compete in

Auckland's World Masters Games

in 2017 two and a half times more than at the Olympics

place, in something of a carnival atmosphere. The organisers put up AUS$2.3 million (US$1.5 million) in prize money – which is around the same amount for the NRL Premiership itself – so teams are incentivised to bring strong squads.

The whole event costs around NZ$11 million (US$7.24 million) to put on each year. It’s funded in a three-way arrangement between Duco, the NRL and ATEED. Duco sells tickets – and almost 35,000 have been sold for Eden Park today – and sponsorship. Title sponsor Dick Smith went out of business this year and was replaced at short notice with Downer.

ATEED has committed to NZ$10 million (US$6.6 million) in funding over the Àve-year term.

There is no hosting rights fee, but the league might be tempted in the future given the event’s success.

Sneddon underlined his negotiating position earlier in the week when he told SportsPro that the NRL would have to take its commitment to maintaining the game in New Zealand seriously. Without the Nines, and the erratic, 20-year-old Warriors franchise, which is yet to win the NRL title, the sport would die in New Zealand, Sneddon says. To illustrate the point, Sneddon explains that Sky NZ pay around NZ$18 million (US$11.85 million) a year for NRL rights, but only NZ$200,000 (US$130,000) or NZ$300,000 (US$200,000) for A-League soccer rights. New Zealand is currently an important market for the NRL and it would need to think hard about risking that.

On another gloriously sunny afternoon at Eden Park, the Warriors defy the odds and thrill the home crowd by making it through to the Ànal, only to lose to the Parramatta Eels. The 22-4 defeat does nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd, which, predictably, gets louder as the afternoon draws on. They say that New Zealanders only get behind a winning team but the people here seem happy to get behind a successful event, too.

SportsPro Magazine | 85

FIBA TEAMS UP WITH PARTNERS FOR ACCELERATED GROWTH FIBA, the International Basketball Federation, is entering a new era as it prepares to launch a revolutionary competition system. On the back of its revamped calendar’s launch in 2017, FIBA has been looking for additional and innovative ways to achieve accelerated growth.

The first very significant result of these changes has been the announcement, on 5 February 2016, of a groundbreaking long-term EUR €500 million strategic partnership with Perform, a leading digital sports content and media group.

“It is generally acknowledged that basketball, and specifically the FIBA Basketball World Cup as the pinnacle competition of the sport, has enormous untapped potential. This has unequivocally come out of many studies and detailed

business plans,” said Frank Leenders, Director General of FIBA Media & Marketing Services (FMMS).

In order to achieve such growth faster however, resources and investments from strategic partners are required.

“In the process to find such partners, we have been talking to different people who share FIBA’s vision and have the interest and ability to bring resources to the partnership that go beyond the injection of financial resources alone.

FIBA can offer a unique opportunity for strategic partners to benefit from a long-term growth story, which goes well beyond the typical cycle by cycle investment.”

NEW CALENDAR AS FOUNDATION FIBA’s new competition system calls for a calendar

FIBA-Perform deal • FIBA Media, a dedicated unit created by FIBA and Perform, will be responsible for the production and distribution of FIBA content; • The deal is worth an estimated EUR €500m to FIBA over the course of 17 years (2017-2033), spanning four cycles of international basketball, including four FIBA Basketball World Cups (2019, 2023, 2027 and 2031), five editions of each (Africa, Americas, Asia and Europe) Continental Cups (2017, 2021, 2025, 2029 and 2033), qualifiers for each tournament as well as women’s and youth competitions; • Perform will oversee production of all games and lead the way in the technical distribution of content. This will amount to over 5,000 games between 2017 to 2033, as well as all highlights, magazine programming and shortform content.

that will drastically enhance the profile of national team competitions, with official games played during regular windows annually. Between 2017 and 2021, over 140 national teams will combine to play more than 1,200 home and away qualification games to guarantee their place at their respective Continental Cups and the FIBA Basketball World Cup - the flagship event of national team basketball which in 2019 will take place in China.

The total number of live games over the term of the 17-year agreement will exceed 5,000 and include qualifiers as well as major championships, such as the FIBA Basketball World Cup and FIBA EuroBasket.

PERFORM PARTNERSHIP The agreement sees Perform become FIBA’s worldwide partner for the distribution and sale of all media-related rights for national men’s and women’s team competitions (not including leagues and 3x3) over the period of four FIBA Basketball World Cup cycles (2017-2033).

FIBA and Perform have already enjoyed a successful relationship developing FIBA’s digital assets in recent years.

This new agreement marks a step forward in a fast-growing and developing strategic area for FIBA and its international competitions. The world governing body of basketball will retain control over the sale of rights for the entire period of the agreement.

Perform views its strategic relationship with FIBA on a long-term horizon. “We have set it up so there is a lot of investment going in from the start,” said Simon Denyer, Perform’s Chief Executive Officer. “We already know the first World Cup is in China, which is great because the Chinese market is very important at the moment.

The quality of the tournament will be very high and it qualifies teams for the [Tokyo 2020] Olympics.”

Perform will enhance live production, broadcast services and data and editorial distribution through the dedicated FIBA Media unit, along with providing FIBA with its industry expertise and experience.

FIBA will have an active role in respect of all major strategic and commercial activities of FIBA Media, and share in any future revenue growth beyond the guaranteed amount.

Perform will support FIBA in this goal by packaging and distributing all live FIBA content to broadcasters and digital platforms.

INCREASED FAN EXPERIENCE The partnership will see the creation of FIBA Media, a dedicated unit between the two organisations, committed to increasing the value of the basketball fan experience.

FIBA Media will also deliver maximum exposure, on multiple platforms, providing fans with unprecedented access to content.

After the USA in 2014, who will lift the Naismith Trophy at the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019 in China?

Denyer stressed the importance that shortform content would play in increasing the popularity of FIBA events.

“The main thing is to make sure our content is optimised for the younger generations where basketball rates very well,” he said. “If we can get that younger demographic more content, then those people will flow through that system over the next 17 years.”

the years and it will continue to operate from its offices in Switzerland. It will be complemented by a team of experts from Perform based in the UK. On top of that, FIBA Media will leverage upon the global resources and network of Perform in more than 15 offices worldwide. The specific Perform resources, digital technologies and skills will be particularly valuable in respect to the production and delivery of the FIBA qualifiers in up to 140 countries worldwide.

FIBA MEDIA: SYNERGIES BETWEEN FIBA AND PERFORM

MORE PARTNERSHIPS TO COME

The FIBA Media Partnership is not a rigorous change of strategy or elimination of existing structures, but rather it is aimed at bringing together the best of both worlds.

FIBA has built up a strong and valued TV team over

The Perform deal is the first strategic partnership to be signed by FIBA and more are expected to follow, according to Leenders.

“We are looking at ways of accelerating the growth path of FIBA on the basis of

FIBA’s new system of competition • FIBA Basketball World Cup moved to 2019, then every four years (2023, 2027, 2031, etc.).

• Two-year qualification period for each FIBA Basketball World Cup with six windows.

• 2019 will see first-ever FIBA Basketball World Cup played with 32 teams.

• 140 countries will combine to play in 1,200 official games over a 15-month period from 2017-2019 to qualify for 2019 FIBA Basketball World Cup in China.

• Qualification for Olympic Games through FIBA Basketball World Cup and four Qualifying Tournaments.

• Asia and Oceania to play together in an Asia-Pacific region.

• All Continental Cups to follow four-year cycle (2017, 2021, 2025 etc.) with teams qualifying through four windows.

Find out more by going to fiba.com/calendar2017

the new calendar and also to have organic growth.

In order to achieve these objectives, we have identified a number of areas we need

to invest in and for which we need strategic partners to make things happen. One of the parties with whom it’s a perfect fit is Perform.”

FIBA - International Basketball Federation Route Suisse 5 – P.O. Box 29 1295 Mies – Switzerland Tel: +41 22 545 00 00 communications@fiba.com

fiba.com From left to right: Jacopo Tonoli, Chief Commercial Officer of Perform Group; Frank Leenders, Director General of FIBA Media and Marketing Services; Simon Denyer, CEO of Perform Group; Patrick Baumann, FIBA Secretary General and International Olympic Committee Member; Thomas Klooz, Delegate to the Board of FIBA Media and Marketing Services

@FIBA

FEATURE COLLEGE SPORT

THE BIG DANCE

The NCAA Division I Men’s basketball tournament, better known as March Madness, is not merely a highlight of the US college calendar, but a springtime spectacle that sits at the heart of American sporting culture.

By Michael Long

resident Barack Obama famously Àlls his out on national television. Some, the self-styled Billy Beane ‘bracketologists’, like to approach it mathematically, painstakingly poring over regular-season stats, convinced that the secret to success lies in hidden data trends. Others simply go with their gut, backing an underdog here or a favourite there, basing their predictions on the Áip of a coin or sketchy details like the colour of a team’s home jersey.

Whatever the chosen method, over 60 million Americans Àll out a March Madness bracket each year, attempting to correctly predict the outcome of all 67 Àxtures once the seeds are announced on Selection Sunday. For many, it is the bracket that makes the NCAA Division I Men’s basketball tournament unique within college sport.

First held in 1939, March Madness – or ‘The Big Dance’, as it is also colloquially known – is the pinnacle of college basketball, pitting 68 of America’s preeminent universities against each other in a single-game knockout, winnertakes-all contest to be crowned undisputed national champions.

As a sporting competition, the tournament offers a snapshot of what’s to come; a chance to witness the future stars of the National Basketball Association (NBA) perform in the national spotlight before they graduate to the professional ranks. But in many respects, March Madness is not

P

88 | www.sportspromedia.com

purely a sporting competition.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) organises 90 national championships each year, serving more than 460,000 studentathletes at more than 1,000 member colleges and universities, but none captures the imagination of the US public like March Madness. Much of the appeal is that, unlike the US pro sports scene, the tournament is notoriously unpredictable.

Historically, upsets abound, and only once, in 2008, have all four of the top seeds advanced to the showpiece Final Four. Indeed, the odds of Àlling out a perfect bracket are said to be one in many quintillions.

Still, the US public can’t get enough of it. For a little over three weeks each spring, March Madness fever is inescapable. Sweepstakes and pools have been a key feature of the tournament since the mid1970s, helping to drum up public interest in what is otherwise a collegiate championship contested by amateurs. The promise of an underdog story, combined with the purity of the knockout format, only adds to the anticipation and for the many willing chancers, particularly those who aren’t necessarily interested in college basketball, the bracket is less about winning than simply taking part in an activity that has become something of a national pastime.

“That is what draws [people] in; that sense that everybody is participating,” says Mark Lewis, the NCAA’s executive vice president for

“IT’S REALLY A SPORTS SENSORY OVERLOAD. IT’S AN UNOFFICIAL HOLIDAY FROM WORK, IN SOME RESPECTS.”

SIGNED IN

2010 AND RUNNING TO

2024,

THE NCAA’S US TV DEAL WITH TURNER SPORTS AND CBS IS WORTH

US$10.8 BILLION

championships and alliances. “You hear people talking about it on buses on the way to work, you hear them talking about it in restaurants.

‘How’s your bracket?’ – ‘Is your bracket busted?’ is the phrase when your champion loses out. That is a big part of what excites people.”

This year will be no different.

From the always anticipated Selection Sunday on 13th March, when a predetermined selection committee will set the tournament seeds and brackets, all the way through to the Final Four at Houston’s NRG Stadium, home of the city’s Texans football team, from 2nd to 4th April, the American sporting consciousness will be dominated by March Madness.

Not unlike the Super Bowl, the tournament will whip up a tornado of media activity that will not die down until after the winner is crowned. Celebrities and well-known personalities will get involved, explaining their predictions on TV and social media, and some will use it as a PR exercise. Billionaire Warren Buffett, for instance, is offering his Berkshire Hathaway employees US$1 million a year for

SportsPro Magazine | 89

FEATURE COLLEGE SPORT

the rest of their lives if they can pick each winner up until this year’s Sweet 16 round.

“It’s really a sports sensory overload,” adds Lewis, speaking to SportsPro a little over a fortnight out from the start of this year’s tournament. “It’s an unofÀcial holiday from work, in some respects.”

That level of public engagement is all part of the March Madness phenomenon – a welcome occasion for the college scene to bridge the gap into mainstream consciousness – yet there is a balance to be struck for the NCAA. With millions if not billions of dollars wagered on the tournament in unofÀcial bets each year – the overall Àgure is almost impossible to calculate but some estimate it to be as high as US$12 billion, putting March Madness ahead of the Super Bowl as America’s most wagered-on annual sporting event – the organisation must toe the line between fanning the excitement and discouraging illegal gambling.

“The fact that somebody does a bracket in and of itself isn’t gambling,” says Lewis. “It can be fun. It’s whether people are putting money into pools and things like that. I think there is a distinction between wanting fans to be engaged, anticipating the outcome of a contest, and putting sums of money on it as a wagering activity.

“One is perfectly Àne, we embrace it; we put out the brackets

90 | www.sportspromedia.com

Mark Lewis, the NCAA’s executive vice president for championships and alliances

US president Barack Obama is a notable fan of March Madness

ourselves. It’s necessary to show which teams are playing who, how they’re seeded and how they’ll progress. We want people to be excited and following their team through the bracket. But I don’t think you have to then say you support gambling in any way.”

The NCAA party line is to oppose all forms of legal and illegal sports wagering altogether.

The body’s literature refers to wagering, in any form, as having ‘the potential to undermine the integrity of sports contests and jeopardises the welfare of studentathletes and the intercollegiate athletics community’. In order to drive that message home, its ‘Don’t bet on it’ campaign continues to be actively promoted on campuses across the country.

“In all of our brackets we emphasise that wagering is prohibited,” says Lewis. “Really, it’s just that vigilance that you try to keep people aware of the importance of it and, knock on wood, I’m proud to say we haven’t had many [cases of illegal gambling]. It is true that there have been some in the past, not in the tournament but there have been some people who have been found

gambling in the college space.

There was an American football quarterback many decades ago who was found to be gambling while in college and he ultimately was found guilty and given a prison sentence.

I can’t say we have a perfect record but we have a very, very good record about keeping that inÁuence out of college sports.”

If the popularity of the bracket has helped to deÀne and propagate the inclusive culture of March Madness, it is also crucial to the commercial success of the tournament. As one of the biggest sporting events in the United States, March Madness has grown into the single most important revenue generator for the NCAA and now drives an incredible 94 per cent of the organisation’s nearly US$1 billion annual income.

“When you look at our national ofÀce, I can’t stress enough how important it is,” says Lewis, who oversees all commercial activities related to March Madness, as well as the NCAA’s other national championships. “It’s the lifeblood of our organisation.”

Though many millions are generated annually through other income streams – championship

ticket sales, for instance, contribute close to US$80 million each year – the bulk of the revenue tied to March Madness comes through centrally negotiated broadcast and marketing rights. The NCAA’s current TV agreement, signed with CBS and Turner Sports in 2010, is worth US$10.8 billion.

As well as delivering wall-to-wall, all-platform coverage, with every game in the tournament to be shown in its entirety across four national networks – CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV – until 2024, the deal guarantees that the NCAA’s member conferences will split an average of more than US$740 million annually over the duration of the partnership.

“I think what is says about the property is that it is one of the healthier sports properties, certainly in the US landscape,” Lewis says of the deal. “That health relates back to some of the other things we talked about earlier, in terms of having more than the hardcore basketball fan watch this tournament is essential to its success. Much like the Olympic Games are, you’re drawing in

Duke Blue Devils celebrate with the NCAA trophy on the podium after defeating the Wisconsin Badgers in the 2015 Men's Division I Championship final

OVER

60

MILLION

AMERICANS FILL OUT A MARCH MADNESS BRACKET EACH YEAR

large segments of society. By our estimations and those of our broadcasters, 80 per cent of adult Americans watched some part of March Madness last year. Now, that may have only been part of one game, it may have been all the games in the tournament. But those kinds of Àgures are not things you see every day.”

While the huge crossover appeal of March Madness has led major national networks to invest heavily, Lewis notes that the timing of the tournament is equally important to its commercial health. “When you look at March in our calendar, it’s a time where certain products are lending themselves to more advertising,” he continues. “You’re coming out of winter, the weather is turning for the better, so certain people start to advertise more: the launch of new cars, the launch of movies, Àts the March landscape very well and so that’s another thing that makes this popular.”

He adds: “When you can draw a large segment of society at a time when advertisers want to put a message in front of those consumers, it makes for a nice mix.

Now, as we would say, that is ‘all hat and no saddle’ in the US unless you deliver exciting basketball. And at the end of the day, that’s what really goes back to what makes March Madness special. More than 80 per cent of our games are decided by ten points or less in the tournament. These are very exciting games, the Ànish is typically unknown until the very last minutes of the game, so it makes for fun entertainment to watch both in person and on TV.” In merchandise terms, too, the tournament unsurprisingly accounts for a big portion of the college basketball business.

Fanatics Inc, the US licensed sports merchandise giant that powers the e-commerce operations for more schools than any other company, sees marked spikes in its sales of fan gear during the three weeks of March Madness – although as Doug Mack, the company’s chief executive, explains, its operation is far more nuanced than simply shifting as many units as possible during the competition’s timeframe.

“It tests every inch of our

SportsPro Magazine | 91

FEATURE SECTION TEXT HERESPORT COLLEGE

business because every week there is a batch of winners and a batch of teams that have to go home,” says Mack. “We have these windows of one-week selling opportunities. For example, we power a site like Michigan State, and when Michigan State is making their run, we can do really well with that. The day that a team like that gets eliminated, suddenly the fan interest drops very quickly.

“It requires extremely surgical execution on our part. Every week a certain number of teams advance and it effectively doubles down on their selling opportunities, and others fall out of the portfolio.

It’s our most intricate execution in terms of the amount.”

On the sponsorship side, March Madness is supported by a suite of blue-chip companies that are signed up to the NCAA’s longestablished corporate partner programme, which covers all 90 of the body’s national championships.

AT&T, Capital One and CocaCola are all designated as top-tier corporate champions while a clutch of other household names like Allstate, Buffalo Wild Wings, LG, Lowe’s and UPS sit one level below as ofÀcial corporate partners. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, sponsors the bracket.

In total, says Lewis, 17 companies are currently on board, having committed anything from US$5 million to “well north of US$20 million” for sponsorship packages than often include integrated television and digital advertisements.

“It’s a good programme and it gives us a lot of visibility as well to further promote the tournament

92 | www.sportspromedia.com

College sport attracts large and loyal fanbases, such as these Duke Blue Devils supporters getting in the mood ahead of their team’s fixture with the Virginia Cavaliers

March Madness is one of the biggest events in the US sporting calendar, with a place in the Final Four a prestigious achievement

“AS ATHLETES, THAT’S WHAT PEOPLE WANT TO COMPETE FOR: TO LINE UP AND SEE WHETHER YOU’RE THE BEST.” to their customers with their advertising,” Lewis adds. “It’s been really successful for us.”

Though there is no prize money for March Madness, the NCAA, as a non-proÀt organisation, does employ a revenue distribution scheme whereby conferences and universities are compensated for their participation. This year 37 per cent of the overall revenue generated will be distributed to active Division I members by way of a US$205 million basketball fund, which is doled out based on a conference’s performance in the tournament over a six-year rolling period. The payments are broken down into units, with one unit – worth approximately US$260,800 – awarded to each institution participating in each game, except the championship game.

Conferences are encouraged, but not required, to distribute the fund equally among all of their member institutions.

For Lewis, however, March Madness is not about the money.

He believes the value of a run to

the Final Four cannot simply be measured in Ànancial terms, for the prestige and standing associated with having a successful basketball programme is the ultimate prize for any institution.

“Really, it’s about sport,” he adds. “The accomplishment that goes with being a Final Four player or coaching in a Final Four – it’s how you judge yourself to be a champion. To me, that visibility the school gets is being able to say theirs is one of the best basketball programmes in the American college landscape. When you look at some of the players who have played in it, they’re some of the best basketball players that our country has produced.

“The fact that lots of people watch it and lots of people attend the event is the icing on the cake, but this is Àrst and foremost, and will always be, a competition for a national championship. As athletes, that’s what people want to compete for: to line up and see whether you’re the best.”

IF YOUR BUSINESS

IS FOOTBALL...

JOIN OVER 1,000 DECISION MAKERS FROM ACROSS THE AMERICAS

RUB SHOULDERS WITH LEGENDS OF THE GAME

LEARN FROM GLOBAL AND REGIONAL EXPERTS

ENJOY THE SOCCEREX EXPERIENCE IN MEXICO CITY

NETWORK with the global football community

INSIGHT delivered by industry thought-leaders

SOCIAL events to support the business experience

...MAKE IT YOUR BUSINESS

TO BE AT SOCCEREX T +44 208 987 5522

E PROMOTIONS@SOCCEREX.COM

W SOCCEREX.COM/AMERICAS

GLOBAL PARTNERS

SOCCEREX

Patrick Semansky / AP/Press Association Images

FEATURE COLLEGE SPORT

MERCH MADNESS US college sport is a key battleground in the fight for sportswear supremacy. With companies investing greater sums in turning campus kids into loyal alumni, the university apparel licensing business is booming like never before.

By Michael Long

he National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) website asserts that ‘amateur competition is a bedrock principle of college athletics’ yet, viewed from a purely commercial standpoint, the big business of US college sport is anything but amateurish.

For years, college sport has been a veritable money-spinner, built on commercially minded, professionally run institutions operating amid the kind of fervent

T

94 | www.sportspromedia.com

fan support that would be the envy of many in professional sport.

Universities with large, successful athletics departments, particularly in the big commercial beasts of football and basketball, have long been raking in revenues to rival many of their professional counterparts. The University of Oregon, currently the biggest earner in US college sport thanks largely to generous contributions from Nike co-founder Phil Knight, generated a little over US$196

million in 2014 according to a recent USA Today report, while no fewer than 20 institutions now amass an annual overall income of more than US$100 million.

Of the many income streams feeding into a university’s coffers, the apparel licensing contract has always been a vital and signiÀcant source for athletics departments big and small, from the Ànancial elite like Oregon, Texas and Michigan down to relative minnows such as Coppin State and New Orleans. Its

sport’s media exposure is undoubtedly emblematic of a wider trend sweeping world sport.

As viewers migrate away from traditional means of consumption towards more on-demand digital programming, sport’s enduring ability to attract sizeable live audiences across multiple platforms is a big sell for broadcasters and advertisers. Premium content is unquestionably a must-have as the viewing habits of discerning fans shift and evolve, and just as rights holders across professional sport are revelling in the resultant Áood of TV money, those in collegiate athletics are also enjoying similarly sharp gains in their broadcast income.

In 2010, for instance, the NCAA signed a 14-year agreement with broadcasters CBS and Turner Sports for the rights to its major basketball championships, including the annual spring-time goldmine that is March Madness. The pact was worth a staggering US$10.8 billion. In 2012, ESPN agreed a 12-year contract for the rights to the newly revamped College Football Playoff (CFP) series.

That deal was valued at US$5.64 billion. Meanwhile individual conferences across the US are negotiating billion-dollar TV deals of their own, capitalising on hearty competition between well-funded networks and, more broadly, an insatiable appetite for college sports content.

The biggest beneÀciaries of this rising Ànancial tide are, of course, the schools and their athletics departments. After committing such vast sums to acquire rights, networks have little choice but to go big on their coverage and increase their output, thereby driving up the visibility for each school and, in turn, the value of the apparel contracts those schools can then negotiate with commercial partners and sportswear licensees. But it is not just the monetary value of the deals that continues to escalate: contracts are getting longer, too. It is now not uncommon to see deals covering

Paul Vernon / AP/Press Association Images

size is often used as an indicator of a school’s place within the nationwide athletics food chain, with funds directed towards the construction of state of the art facilities, paying coaching staff and running scholarship programmes to attract – but not pay, of course – the top high school talent.

In recent times, however, the numbers involved in apparel licensing deals have been soaring across the board. Less than a decade ago, for instance, the University of Cincinnati’s athletics department received just US$135,000 in cash and US$600,000 in equipment annually from its apparel supplier. This year, the mid-ranking school will get US$1 million in cash alone.

When the University of Notre Dame left Adidas to partner Under Armour in January 2014, signing a ten-year agreement worth US$90 million, the deal was the largest ever to be signed between an educational institution and a sportswear company. Since then, the record has tumbled on several occasions. Five of the six richest apparel deals in college sports history were signed after July 2015.

Ohio State University’s contract with Nike, the current largest deal signed this January, could be worth as much as US$252 million if certain performance targets are met. That equates to some US$16.8 million a year. So what is driving this across-the-board growth?

“I think it is a trend across major sports,” says Matt Peterson, a vice president in the sponsorship evaluation and research department at ESP Properties. “If you look at the amount of revenues that these major universities are doing, it’s pretty signiÀcant. You’re talking about an annual increase in overall visibility; there are more games on TV, especially with some of these major universities. 20 years ago these guys might have been on TV three, four, Àve times; now they could be on national broadcasts eight to ten times during the course of a season.”

The recent upsurge in college

The growth in the media profile of college sport has seen interest, and licensing fees, skyrocket

a decade or more, as opposed to the six or seven-year periods they were often negotiated for previously. Indeed, the three richest agreements currently in place, all held by Nike, run for 15 years.

“I think from a length perspective, [sportswear companies] would rather not be back in the marketplace every Àve years just because the rights fees are just going to be continuing to escalate,” suggests Peterson.

“With the Sweet 16, the NCAA basketball tournament, and then the formation of the College Football Playoff, these high-proÀle universities are getting in front of huge live audiences and the fandom is pretty immense. From a rights holder perspective, they’re able to sell through a lot more apparel than they ever were, and from a media perspective they’re being touched upon not only on television but social and digital channels that they had never been able to achieve before.

“The talk value and the buzz value for some of these uniforms and the visibility are pretty immense. I think it is only going to get bigger as social continues to complement the live broadcast.”

Though that growth in media exposure is helping to drive up the size and scope of apparel licensing deals, there is little to suggest that sportswear companies are no longer able to garner a return on their increased investment.

An association with a college is, generally speaking, low-risk, highreward, containing all the marketing beneÀts of a partnership with an elite athlete but with far less risk of injury or reputation-damaging

SportsPro Magazine | 95

incidents on or off the Àeld of play.

And for all the blockbuster Àgures involved, it should be noted that deals are regularly reported in retail rather than manufacturing cost terms.

Of more appeal, though, are the merchandising opportunities.

When it comes to college sport, the thing sportswear companies covet above all is access, not only to professional stars of the future but also the educated, afÁuent, engaged and, best of all, loyal fanbase that the college campus provides. Take the University of Texas as an example. The university has one of the richest athletics programmes in the US, its Longhorns teams ranking alongside those in professional sports in terms of recognition. With its 40,000 undergraduate students and hundreds of thousands of alumni, Texas has topped the Collegiate Licensing Company’s rankings for fan gear and other merchandise sales for the past nine years, so it is little wonder Nike saw Àt to fork out an unprecedented US$250 million for a 15-year contract with the school last October.

“It almost reminds me of Apple,” notes Doug Mack, chief executive of Fanatics Inc, a global leader in the business of licensed sports merchandise that powers the e-commerce operation for more colleges than any other company.

“Back in the day, Apple would go into schools to try to build loyalty to their brands early on. Ultimately the goal of the Nikes, the Adidases and others is they’ve got major businesses in performance sports products like sneakers. The more that a Nike builds a relationship

96 | www.sportspromedia.com

The Texas Longhorns rank alongside professional sporting teams in recognition and fanbase, inspiring Nike to enter into a US$250 million, 15year agreement

Notre Dame defected from Adidas to Under Armour in 2014, in a then-record US$90 million deal

with athletes at the college level, when some of those athletes become pro they’re more likely to stay with their product and endorse their product, which all creates exposure with the consumer.”

Just as the major TV networks are going bigger on their college content, apparel licensees are forever increasing the merchandise inventory they make available to fans. Whereas 20 years ago the products on offer may have included home and away jerseys and a handful of additional items, nowadays the sheer amount of fan gear online is astonishing, with some teams offering multiple strips as well as a whole catalogue of ofÀcially licensed, and professionally marketed, merchandise. The result, says Mack, is that college sport is now one of the largest revenue generators for merchandise businesses like Fanatics, and it is only getting bigger.

“We see college as a huge growth opportunity, huge growth area,” he adds. “It’s a market that is traditionally underserved. In the pro sports, the breadth of merchandise, the kit or the jersey all the way through the fan gear – the T-shirts, the headwear, the hoodies, the Áeece – is so broad, and that is happening more and more now

in college, not only the tier-one colleges but the next tiers.

“We see a huge growth opportunity in the variety and depth of merchandise that we can make available to the college fan, and that’s not only when you’re in college, that’s to the alumni.”

Both Mack and Peterson believe the alumni component, a unique feature of college sport, is of particular appeal to licensees.

Unlike in US pro sports, where team allegiances are open to change as franchises and fans relocate, a university graduate will only ever root for his or her alma mater, remaining an avid consumer of licensed merchandise long after their college days are over. “It’s the closest thing we have in the States to European soccer, actually,” says Mack. “Once you go to that school, it’s for the rest of your life. In European soccer, you’re born into your team and it’s your whole life.”

Peterson adds: “We have a couple of Golden Domers [Notre Dame alumni] here in our ofÀce – they were excited about the switch from Adidas to Under Armour because they knew they were going to get a clean look, fresher, hipper. That change actually re-engages the alumni base and to actually be able to tap into a smart, wealthy alumni

Robert Franklin / AP/Press Association Images

Charlie Neibergall / AP/Press Association Images

FEATURE COLLEGE SPORT

that is motivated to stay involved, I think, is really important. It’s going to drive some decisions when it comes to where these companies actually place their bets.”

Under Armour’s ever more prominent role on the college stage is an interesting one. The embodiment of the challenger brand mentality, the company has built a successful business by shaking up the sportswear landscape and muscling in on the long-established duopoly held

by Nike and Adidas. The brand from Baltimore has grown to become the second largest seller of sports apparel and footwear in the US, having overtaken Adidas in late 2014, and is now generating annual revenues approaching US$4 billion. Whether by luck or design, longstanding associations with the likes of basketball star Stephen Curry and world number one golfer Jordan Spieth have only helped to drive home the company’s fearless underdog-turned-conÀdent highachiever story.

In the college market, Under Armour’s ambition has been no less disruptive. While Nike holds the three largest apparel contracts on record, Under Armour now Àlls spots four, Àve and six, having invested aggressively to assemble a formidable university portfolio to match its growing proÀle. Its largest deal is with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a ten-year, US$100 million contract signed last October. It is, however, its tie-up with Notre Dame that has done more to redeÀne the nature of college apparel licensing deals.

The agreement, signed in January 2014, was not only the largest ever to be signed between an educational institution and a sportswear company at the time, but it also saw the school take an equity stake in Under Armour. Since then, the two organisations have collaborated closely on marketing and content creation, rolling out a host of fresh new apparel lines that have received rave reviews from within and outside the college community.

“Under Armour is a huge

wildcard in all of this, I’d have to say,” notes Peterson. “I’m really impressed with what they’re doing.

They’re Ànding the right athletes, with Steph Curry, Tom Brady at the tail end of his NFL career, Cam Newton – I mean, those are three perennial stars.

“I think they’re a game-changer, to be perfectly honest,” he adds. “I see my nine-year-old kid wearing more Under Armour than I would have dreamt about. I grew up as a Nike athlete and someone that was very loyal to Nike. You see the online videos and just some of the things that you can do from a content perspective that are really impactful.

“These athletes not only want to build their brands, they want to build their fandom as deep and as wide as they possibly can.

Content ultimately is changing that. I think the athletes that have equity, like the Steph Currys, the Notre Dames, they actually put more skin in the game and do more with the relationship than just being a normal endorsee of a product.

I think that translates to a whole lot more authenticity in the long run than just a guy that’s collecting money and maybe has just one signature shoe every year.”

Still, the debate over whether the NCAA and its member institutions should be compensating the thousands of student-athletes who help generate its revenues each year rages on. NCAA schools continue to reap vast proÀts from selling commercial rights and jerseys bearing the names of their athletes without ever paying those athletes a cent, compelled by the notion that, to refer back to the NCAA website, ‘the young men and women competing on the Àeld or court are students Àrst, athletes second’.

Whether that will change in future remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: while the NCAA’s income continues to increase as a result of escalating media and licensing rights fees, pressure on the organisation to review its remuneration policy will only intensify.

TOP TEN RICHEST COLLEGE APPAREL DEALS (BASED ON REPORTED YEARLY AVERAGE)

1.

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY Nike: 15 years, US$252m/US$16.8m pa (January 2016)

2.

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS Nike: 15 years, US$250m/US$16.7m pa (October 2015)

3.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Nike: 15 years, US$169m/US$11.2m pa (July 2015)

4.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON Under Armour: ten years, US$100m/US$10m pa (October 2015)

5.

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Under Armour: ten years, US$90m/US$9m pa (January 2014)

6.

AUBURN UNIVERSITY Under Armour: nine years, US$78.1m/ US$8.67m pa (October 2015)

7.

UCLA Adidas: six years, US$7.5m pa (June 2010; ends in 2017)

8.

TEXAS A&M Adidas: seven years, US$7.1m pa, (February 2015; ends in 2022)

9.

INDIANA UNIVERSITY Adidas: eight years, US$53.6m/US$6.7m pa (August 2015)

10. UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS Adidas: six years, US$6.375m pa (June 2013; ends in 2019)

SportsPro Magazine | 97

FEATURE COLLEGE SPORT

CULTURE CLASH The Aer Lingus College Football Classic, the season-opening US college football game played in Dublin, is gearing up for its third edition in September, when Boston College and Georgia Tech will make the 3,500mile journey across the Atlantic. The organisers are hoping that all parties can benefit from this cultural exchange programme.

By Adam Nelson

hen the Boston College Eagles line up against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets for the opening Àxture of the 2016/17 National College Athletics Association (NCAA) Football Bowl season this September, it will be on unfamiliar territory for both sides. The game will be the third Aer Lingus College Football Classic, a biennial curtainraiser held in Dublin, Ireland, designed to encourage cross-cultural exchange and promote the historical connection between the two nations.

W

98 | www.sportspromedia.com

The Àrst instalment in the modern series of the College Football Classic took place in 2012 but a college game was Àrst held in Dublin in 1988, when Boston College paid their Àrst ofÀcial sporting visit to Ireland, facing off against the Army West Point Black Knights football team. Two more attempts were made – in 1989 and 1996 – but, despite attracting reasonable audiences, the idea failed to catch on.

Part of this can be attributed to the status afforded to college sport in the US when contrasted with

Above: Justin Thomas and John Fadule, the quarterbacks who will face off when Georgia Tech take on Boston College in Dublin this September

its Irish or British counterparts.

Outside of the occasional regatta events such as the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race or the likes of the ‘Colours Match’ between the rugby union sides of Trinity College and University College Dublin, college sport has little public visibility in Britain and Ireland, and certainly doesn’t attract anything like the kind of attention of the NCAA’s Áagship competitions.

However, with awareness of college sport growing and, perhaps more importantly, the

sport of football itself gathering increased awareness thanks to the National Football League’s (NFL) International Series games in London, the Classic looks to have established itself on the calendar. The willingness and desire of the colleges, too, to use the opportunity to build their own brands and bring over fans in large numbers has contributed to the growing success of a venture still very much in its early stages.

“When we Àrst put this together, which was for Notre Dame versus Navy in 2012, we were anticipating about 15,000 international guests,” recalls Padraic O’Kane, chief executive of Corporate.ie, the organising committee for the games. “We ended up with 35,000 – 28,000 from Notre Dame and 7,000 Navy – which is the largest ever movement of Americans outside of America for a sporting event, including the Olympics.

“We came up with a model that is much more than just a game. In 2012 we discovered that college football is far more for an economy and for an event than just that sporting action that happens on a Saturday. There’s so much more to it, and there’s a huge travelling audience of alumni and fans that go with it, so from a tourism, from an economic development point of view it was an obvious one [to do this again]. We were involved in the last two games, we got likeminded people around a table, from public and private sectors, to come on board and drive an event that has just huge beneÀts for Ireland, not

just that day of the event but longterm economic development, longterm relationships between Ireland and America.”

Boston College, the designated ‘home’ team for the 2016 edition, were a natural choice to take part, given the deep historical connection between both the city and college of Boston and Ireland.

“The opportunity came along again and we’d known for a little while that Boston College, the other big Irish school in America [alongside Notre Dame], had interest in coming to Dublin,” says O’Kane. “Our marketing is very focused with the two schools, Irish-Americans living in Boston, because of the huge population there, and it’s an important year in Ireland with the centenary of the Easter Rising, but that won’t happen every year so we need more interest than just the Irish thing.”

Brad Bates, director of athletics at Boston College, also pushes the historical ties, noting that the event is “a tremendous opportunity to bring the entire Boston College community together and celebrate our deep connection to Ireland,” but he echoes O’Kane’s “more than a game” mantra.

“It’s more than just a game, it’s an entire university event,” says Bates.

“We’re planning activities that range from concerts to scholarships to the arts to pep rallies to marching band shows. There are really a lot of layers to this; the relationship with Ireland goes back to our very origins when Boston College

The game's organisers want Dublin to become the home of college football in Europe

The Aviva Stadium will host the College Football Classic again in 2016, after the larger Croke Park took over for the last edition in 2014

was founded as a Jesuit Catholic institution serving the Irish immigrants to the United States and so this dates back to the very beginnings of Boston College over 150 years ago. It’s a very signiÀcant relationship. And it transcends over those 150 years.

“As the world continues to shrink and we become more interconnected I think the sharing of cultural passions is a good thing for everybody. So to have the opportunity to present American football in addition to the NFL games in London and our games back in the 1980s – I think any time that you’re sharing cultural passions and sporting events and activities it just brings the world closer together.”

If Boston College was the obvious choice for the game because of its existing links to Ireland and Dublin – including having an overseas campus on St Stephen’s Green in the city – O’Kane argues that that Irish connection is not the be-all and end-all of the arrangement, and that the Classic can stand as an important event on the college football calendar on its own merits.

“Certainly, having a Notre Dame or a Boston involved, you would think that’s good, but when you look at Penn State travelling in 2014 with 12,000-plus supporters, when you look at Georgia Tech who are going to travel with 7,500-plus supporters, we’ve now seen it’s

SportsPro Magazine | 99

FEATURE COLLEGE SPORT

not just about that, it’s about the excitement of bringing a game from the States to Dublin,” he says.

“From an American point of view, Ireland and Dublin have a lot of European headquarters – the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Dell, Citibank, etc – so a lot of key corporates having their headquarters in Dublin, that helps us. But it does drive it for going forward because obviously there’s only two Irish schools out there, and they’ll travel every ten years or so; it can’t be every year. So it plays its part but it’s not crucial, and Penn State and Georgia Tech have shown that it doesn’t have to be an Irish connection.”

Long-term success will depend on building an appetite for the game in the European market. Where currently, Kane says, the audiences for the games are “probably 50/50 in terms of international visitors versus domestic”, the organisers “know long term we want that to end up being 25 per cent international and 75 domestic”.

“We’re utilising the best teams at the moment, the teams that are going to want to travel with good audiences,” he goes on.

“But they’re not always going to travel in those numbers, so we need to bring the Irish market and the UK market into liking this and wanting to attend this game.

We’ve got to bring a local audience on board with that and part of that development is tailgates and pep rallies, the traditions around American football to get people really engaged, get them understanding the rules, get them to the point that they really like this game and want to come to it.”

That growth, he feels, is happening, again with reference to the NFL’s London residency, which currently sees three games played annually in the British capital, rising to at least Àve from 2018.

“We’re very targeted into American expats who live in London or Berlin or Milan or wherever,” O’Kane says. “But also then with the popularity of NFL in London and the success there,

100 | www.sportspromedia.com

we’re looking at those databases as well, people who want to travel to the games and get into it.

“The Irish American Football Association have grown from six or seven teams to nearly 20 since we started this,” he adds. “There’s 41,000 amateur [football players] in Germany for instance – I think the UK has seen something similar. I think with the use of Sky TV and the access to all these games now, people are getting more interested in them for sure. It’s an opportunity for these schools to also build a stronger relationship, not just with football but to come back with their basketball team or soccer team or rugby team and start building relationships between Ireland, Europe and America.

“I couldn’t get over how big college football is. The legacy here is that it’s not just about bringing sport but building relationships between these universities and the Irish universities and moving that on not only in a sporting aspect but in an academic aspect as well.”

This year’s edition of the College Classic will return to the Aviva Stadium, the venue for the inaugural game in 2012, after a move to Croke Park in 2014 which, while attracting the biggest crowd to date, saw Europe’s third-largest stadium some 20,000 seats short of capacity.

“We were in Croke Park in 2014 for Penn State-UCF and we made

Buzz and Ramblin’ Wreck, the two official mascots of the Georgia Institute of Technology

a decision to move back to the Aviva because sponsorship-wise, they want to see a full stadium,” says O’Kane. “We believe the ideal number is around 50,000 at the moment with that 50/50 split. In time, maybe, you know, if Notre Dame play an Alabama or a Boston College in Àve or six years’ time, we might go back to Croke Park and have a chance at Àlling it. But at the moment we believe 45,000 to 50,000-seater is the right Àt, and the Aviva Àts all that in a very modern stadium.”

Sponsorship becomes more important, O’Kane explains, because of the complicated TV rights situation surrounding college sports. Each school tends to have its own individually negotiated deal with a local broadcaster alongside the NCAA’s partnership with ESPN, which runs its famous College GameDay coverage which, O’Kane says, Corporate.ie is currently in talks to bring to Dublin for the Àrst time this September.

“Whether that comes or not,” he says, “at the minimum this game will be broadcast to somewhere between 1.6 and 1.8 million people in the States. Which is no bad thing for Ireland and for the game.

“One of the problems of doing this is that TV rights don’t come in, because that would be part of their general contract, and just taking ticket sales into account, etc, it

doesn’t stand up,” O’Kane explains.

“You need a certain amount of sponsorship and you need a certain amount of government, local and central government, to support an event like this, too.”

The sponsors for the game are largely local, Ireland-based companies and government bodies, including the game’s title sponsor, Ireland’s Áag carrier Aer Lingus.

Among other local groups are Dublin City Council, Sport Ireland, Tourism Ireland and Dublin Airport, all of whom lend logistical and Ànancial assistance to the running of the game. Working with Corporate. ie “makes perfect sense” for these companies, says O’Kane, because “the returns are enormous”.

“The Notre Dame-Navy game in 2012, for instance, was worth €85 million directly to the Irish economy, and Penn State-UCF €45 million,” he says. “Indirectly, we’ll never know how much these games are worth because the amount of networking and contacts that were made between businesses, between sports, between academic institutions, will go on for years.

Certainly, there’s no loser in bringing games like this.

“With a rugby game, if Ireland are playing England whether it’s in London or Dublin, you’ve an invasion of guys who’ll end up in London or Dublin for them weekends, they may stay a couple

Padraic O’Kane (right), the College Football Classic’s chief organiser, with representatives from the two universities

Fans cheer on the team at Georgia Tech’s 55,000-seater Bobby Dodd Stadium

of nights, but they’re in and out to a certain extent,” he elaborates.

“Whereas these are games where it’s a minimum four-night stay: they go around the country, they’re spending money and contributing to the economy, they go over to the UK, Wales, etc. So these are a win for the whole British Isles because people come on holidays they’d never have considered.”

At present, the College Football Classic is projected to remain biennial until at least 2020, meaning two more are currently planned, with the possibility of it becoming an annual event after that. Further expansion, O’Kane suggests, could

come in the form of one of the now myriad season-concluding bowl games, or even the creation of a “Dublin Bowl” as part of the ambition to make Dublin “the headquarters of college football in Europe”, just as London has become the headquarters for its professional equivalent.

“That annual game could be looking at bringing one of the bowl games to Ireland, as part of one of the college bowl games that go on between December and January,” he says. “They play a lot of bowl games in the States around that time – if you win more than six games you automatically qualify for a bowl. So we potentially over the next couple of years are looking to develop that.”

For Bates, the important thing to remember is that this is an opportunity for the students as much as it is for the city of Dublin or the expansion of college sports.

“It starts with the students on the football team,” he says. “Because American football is such a yearround commitment, the students seldom have opportunities to travel abroad, so this gives our students on the football team the chance to go to the country that is most connected to Boston College and experience the culture there. So with our students it’s going to be an amazing and memorable opportunity.”

SportsPro Magazine | 101

FEATURE MOTORSPORT

Nascar returned in February for a pivotal year in the history of American stock car racing. As the 2016 edition of the top-tier championship, in its last season with Sprint as a title sponsor, began at a revamped Daytona International Speedway, its teams were digesting the news of a landmark move to a franchise-based ownership model.

Chuck Burton/AP/Press Association Images

By Michael Long and George Dudley

102 | www.sportspromedia.com

I

Under the new model, each of the teams will now be able to sell their charters – estimated to be worth something in the sevenÀgure range – to the highest bidder, perhaps even to other already chartered teams, for a negotiated fee. There are, however, restrictions. Any prospective buyer will be subject to a vetting process overseen centrally by Nascar while transactions are only permitted once every Àve years.

“Today represents a landmark change to the business model of team ownership in Nascar,” France said, speaking at a news conference in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“The charter agreements provide nine years of stability for Nascar and the teams to focus on the growth initiatives together with our track partners, auto manufacturers, drivers and sponsors.”

A move away from the old ownership system has long been advocated by team owners. Nascar has always been a sport heavily reliant on private sponsorship and teams have forever been slaves to ever-changing economic currents and the year-to-year whim of brand marketers, many of whom follow their favoured driver-cumspokesperson whenever he or she switches teams.

In November, the instability of the old model was once again highlighted when Michael Waltrip Racing, founded in 1995, was forced to shut down after failing to Ànd adequate funding. Rob Kauffman, a co-owner of the team, was a member of the Race Team Alliance (RTA) group that negotiated the deal with Nascar.

It is hoped the new charter system will spell the end of teams existing hand-to-mouth and going out of business for lack of sponsorship, bringing added value and Ànancial stability to each competitor whilst ensuring owners are better placed to plan for the future. As in other US major leagues, team owners will now be able to recoup some of their investment, maybe even make a proÀt, by selling their assets while, according to a Nascar statement,

Chuck Burton/AP/Press Association Images

t t has been hailed as the dawn of a new era. A new season of Nascar began in earnest with the Sprint Unlimited invitation-only event at Daytona in mid-February, but it was developments away from the track that inspired pre-season headlines and gave stakeholders across stock car racing’s preeminent series reason to be optimistic.

On 9th February Nascar chairman and chief executive Brian France announced a major and long-anticipated overhaul of the organisation’s business model, bringing to an end more than 60 years of operating under an independent contractor system that put Ànancial strain on teams across the board and led several to cease operations altogether.

Under the new ‘charter’ system, initially implemented only within Nascar’s top-tier Sprint Cup Series, operating licences have been granted to 36 entries based on participation during the past three seasons since 2013.

A further four entries will be reserved for qualiÀers at each event, making a total Àeld of 40 entrants, down from 43, at every Sprint Cup race.

The initial nine-year charters have been distributed across 19 teams, with the big established names granted multiple entries and smaller outÀts allotted a single space. Perennial title contenders Hendrick Motorsports, for example, have been awarded the maximum of four charters, while Richard Childress Racing, Roush Fenway Racing, Joe Gibbs Racing and Stewart-Haas Racing have each been allotted three.

Two spaces have also been assigned to each of Richard Petty Motorsports, Team Penske, Chip Ganassi Racing, Michael Waltrip Racing, Front Row Motorsports and BK Racing, with Furniture Row Racing, JTG Daugherty Racing, Tommy Baldwin Racing, Germain Racing, Premium Motorsports, Circle Sport Racing, Go Fas Racing and HScott Motorsports given one apiece.

Above: Joe Gibbs Racing’s Kyle Busch celebrates his championship victory in the 2015 Sprint Cup Series.

Left: Nascar chairman and chief executive Brian France announces the new ‘charter’ system for the race series.

commercial partners will be guaranteed continued participation and exposure over an extended period of time.

“This is an important day in the history of our sport that will beneÀt all constituents, immediately and in the long term,” StewartHaas Racing co-owner Gene Haas told the New York Times. “As someone who has heavily invested in motorsports for many years, I’m very pleased with the industry’s commitment to sustainability, collaboration and long-term value.”

According to Nascar, the latest changes are part of the organisation’s efforts to improve Ànancial security and stability right across its business. Last year the body lengthened individual tracksanctioning agreements from one to Àve years, while the nine-year length of the newly issued charters coincides with new TV deals signed with Fox and NBC, both of which kicked in last term. And in addition to the creation of the charters, the new agreement with team owners also includes the establishment of the Team Owner Council, a non-voting entity that will have input into future competitive and marketing discussions.

“I’ve always stressed that if we can do things to improve the business of our stakeholders, we will pursue it,” added France.

“I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished today with this agreement.”

SportsPro Magazine | 103

FEATURE MOTORSPORT

NASCAR SPRINT CUP: 2016 SPONSORSHIP RUNNERS AND RIDERS M&Ms’ partnership with Busch’s number 18 car will extend to a tenth season after a new three-year renewal of the deal was agreed in November.

With the new Sprint Cup campaign having kicked off in Daytona in February, SportsPro presents the runners and riders that have taken to the grid this year.

It was all change in the Nascar Sprint Cup paddock this off-season. As well as the introduction of a new charter system that has brought much-needed stability to the ownership structure within stock car racing’s leading series, established drivers and sponsors switched teams as new names were brought into the fold.

Amongst the plethora of driver sponsorships signed for the season, the standout deals involved the highly marketable Danica Patrick and last year’s Sprint Cup champion Kyle Busch. Patrick left longstanding sponsor GoDaddy.com to land a lucrative 28-race primary sponsorship with Nature’s Bakery last summer, while

JOE GIBBS RACING

STEWART-HAAS RACING HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS

MANUFACTURER: Toyota ENGINE: TRD DRIVERS:

MANUFACTURER: Chevrolet ENGINE: Hendrick Motorsports DRIVERS:

MANUFACTURER: Chevrolet ENGINE: Hendrick Motorsports DRIVERS:

#18 Kyle Busch (2015 champion)

#10 Danica Patrick

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Mars Inc – M&Ms, Skittles, Pedigree Dog Food, Snickers Extreme (32 races), Interstate Batteries (six races)

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Nature’s Bakery (28 races), Aspen Dental (four races), TaxACT (four races), Mobil1 (one race)

#11 Denny Hamlin

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Busch Beer (12 races), Jimmy Johns (21 races), Outback Steakhouse (two races), diTech (two races), Mobil 1 (two races)

PRIMARY SPONSORS: FedEx Express, FedEx Freight, FedEx Ground, FedEx Office, Sport Clips (two races)

#19 Carl Edwards PRIMARY SPONSORS: ARRIS (17 races), Stanley (12 races), Subway (four races), Sport Clips (two races), Comcast/Xfinity

#4 Kevin Harvick (2014 champion)

#14 Tony Stewart (2002, 2005, 2011 champion) PRIMARY SPONSORS: Mobil 1, Rush Truck Centers, Code 3 Associates, Bass Pro Shops (two to three races)

#48 Jimmie Johnson (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013 champion) PRIMARY SPONSORS: Lowe’s Home Improvement, Kobalt Tools, Lowe’s ProServices

#5 Kasey Kahne PRIMARY SPONSORS: Farmers Insurance (12 races), Great Clips (10 Races), LiftMaster (three races), Quicken Loans (three races), Panasonic Toughbook (two races), Mountain Dew (one race), Hendrick Automotive Group (one race), Time Warner Cable

#20 Matt Kenseth (2003 champion)

#41 Kurt Busch

#24 Chase Elliott

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Dollar General (30 races), DeWalt (six races)

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Monster Energy (18 races), Haas Automation (18 races), State Water Heaters (one race)

PRIMARY SPONSORS: NAPA Auto Parts (24 races), 3M (five races), Kelley Blue Book (two races), Mountain Dew (two races), SunEnergy1 (four races)

#88 Dale Earnhardt Jr

Chuck Burton/AP/Press Association Images

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Nationwide Insurance (21 races), Axalta Coatings Systems (13 races), TaxSlayer.com (one race), Mountain Dew (three races)

Team owner Richard Petty, (left) and driver Brian Scott (right) unveil the car Scott will drive this season

104 | www.sportspromedia.com

TOMMY BALDWIN RACING MANUFACTURER: Chevrolet ENGINE: ECR Engines, Pro Motor Engines DRIVER:

#7 Regan Smith PRIMARY SPONSORS: Toy State, Nikko RC, Road Rippers

Mike McCarn/AP/Press Association Images

Stewart-Haas Racing’s Danica Patrick holds some of the most lucrative commercial sponsorship deals in Nascar, including a 28-race partnership with Nature’s Bakery

ROUSH FENWAY RACING HSCOTT MOTORSPORTS

TEAM PENSKE

MANUFACTURER: Ford ENGINE: Roush Yates Engines DRIVERS:

MANUFACTURER: Ford ENGINE: Roush-Yates Engines DRIVERS:

MANUFACTURER: Chevrolet ENGINE BUILDER: Hendrick Motorsports DRIVERS:

#16 Greg Biffle

#15 Clint Bowyer

#2 Brad Keselowski

PRIMARY SPONSORS: KFC, Cheez-It, Kelloggs, Kleen Performance Products, Safety-Kleen, CleanHarbors

PRIMARY SPONSORS: 5-Hour Energy Drink (24 races), Visine (three races), Peak Antifreeze & Motor Oil/BlueDEF Diesel Exhaust Fluid (two races), Auto-Owners Insurance, Fraternal Order of Eagles (FOA), Switch Hitch

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Miller Lite (24 races), Alliance Truck Parts (eight races), Wurth (three races), AutoTrader (two races), SKF (one race)

#17 Ricky Stenhouse Jr. PRIMARY SPONSORS: Fastenal, Zest, Fifth Third Bank, Juicy Juice, Cargill Beef, NOS Energy Drink

#6 Trevor Byne PRIMARY SPONSORS: AdvoCare

#46 Michael Annett PRIMARY SPONSORS: Pilot Flying J, PhilMor (21 races), Cypress Associates, Bene-fit, Allstate Peterbilt, Northland Motor Oil

#22 Joey Logano PRIMARY SPONSORS: Shell-Pennzoil (32.5 races), AAA/Automobile Club of Southern California (three races), Autotrader.com (two races)

WOOD BROTHERS RACING FURNITURE ROW RACING GERMAIN RACING MANUFACTURER: Ford ENGINE: Roush-Yates DRIVER:

MANUFACTURER: Toyota ENGINE: Toyota Racing Development, USA (TRD) DRIVER:

MANUFACTURER: Chevrolet ENGINE: ECR Engines DRIVER:

#21 Ryan Blaney

#78 Martin Truex Jr

#13 Casey Mears

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Motorcraft, Quick Lane (12 races)

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Furniture Row, Bass Pro Shops (nine races)

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Geico

SportsPro Magazine | 105

FEATURE SECTION TEXT HERE MOTORSPORT

FRONT ROW MOTORSPORTS MANUFACTURER: Ford ENGINE: Roush-Yates Engines DRIVERS: Chuck Burton/AP/Press Association Images

#34 Chris Buescher (2015 Rookie of the Year) PRIMARY SPONSORS: Love’s Travel Stops, CSX Transportation (eight races), Dockside Logistics, Taco Bell, A&W All American

#38 Landon Cassill PRIMARY SPONSORS: Snap Fitness, Long John Silver, MDS Transportation, The Pete Store, Farm Fresh, Florida Lottery, CSX Transportation, Dockside Logistics

Martin Truex Jr (right) stands with the Toyota Camry he will race for Furniture Row Racing this year

RICHARD PETTY MOTORSPORTS

RICHARD CHILDRESS RACING

MANUFACTURER: Ford ENGINE: Roush Yates Engines DRIVERS:

MANUFACTURER: Chevrolet ENGINE: ECR Engines DRIVERS:

#43 Aric Almirola

#31 Ryan Newman

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Smithfield Foods (31 races), US Air Force (two races), STP (two races), Fresh from Florida (one race)

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Caterpillar (22 races), Wix Filters, Grainger

#44 Brian Scott PRIMARY SPONSORS: Albertsons, Shore Lodge, Whitetail, Twisted Tea (three races), GoBowling.com, Goody’s Powders (two races)

#3 Austin Dillion PRIMARY SPONSORS: Dow Chemical, Cheerios, American Ethanol and Bass Pro Shops

#23 David Ragan PRIMARY SPONSORS: Dr Pepper (multiple races)

#83 Matt DiBenedetto PRIMARY SPONSORS: Dustless Blasting, Cosmo Motors

#83 Michael Waltrip (Daytona 500 race only) Primary sponsors: Maxwell House

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Menards

CIRCLE SPORT-LEAVINE FAMILY RACING

MANUFACTURER: Chevrolet ENGINE: Hendrick Engines DRIVERS:

MANUFACTURER: Chevrolet ENGINES: ECR Engines DRIVERS:

#1 Jamie McMurrray

#59 Michael McDowell

PRIMARY SPONSORS: McDonald’s, Cessna, Sherwin Williams, Bass Pro Shops, CreditOne

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Thrivent Financial, K-Love

#42 Kyle Larson

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Cheerios, Kroger

106 | www.sportspromedia.com

MANUFACTURER: Toyota ENGINE: Triad DRIVERS:

#27 Paul Menard

CHIP GANASSI RACING WITH FELIX SABATES

PRIMARY SPONSORS: Target

BK RACING

#95 Ty Dillon

JTG DAUGHERTY RACING MANUFACTURER: Chevrolet ENGINE: ECR Engines DRIVER:

#47 A.J. Allmendinger PRIMARY SPONSORS: Kingsford, Clorox, Bush’s Beans, Scott Products, Kroger Company (23 races), Hungary Jack

BRING YOUR TEAM TO WEMBLEY...

With a capacity of 90,000 Wembley is the largest stadium in the UK and home to not only the biggest football events of the season, but also the NFL, Rugby World Cup and various music concerts throughout the year.

In addition to this we have a large number of fantastic spaces available to hire for all types of events ranging from small executive board meetings in a private box, to large conferences and exhibitions in our impressive Great Hall or an elaborate cocktail reception and gala dinner in the exclusive Bobby Moore suite.

In all of our spaces delegates are guaranteed state of the art facilities, world class cuisine, and impeccable service in an iconic venue that will be hard to forget! There are also opportunities to impress the guests further with pitch-side access, and private stadium tours where they can see the royal box, changing rooms and even walk out of the playersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; tunnel.

If you have any questions about the venue and the options available then please contact our sales team on 020 8795 9660 or specialevents@wembleystadium.com who will be happy to answer your questions or book you in for a Venue Viewing Experience to show you all the spaces available.

INSPIRING MEMORIES

COMPANY PROFILE PIXEL UNIVERSAL

Pixelated Pixel Universal, an Australia-based supplier of turnkey LED screen solutions to stadiums and arenas, is looking to take advantage of the lucrative European sports market, realigning itself as a predominantly sportsfocused brand.

P

ixel Universal, a creator and manufacturer of turnkey high-deÀnition LED displays for large-scale venues, has operated successfully in Asia and Oceania for several years, and is now looking to expand and develop its presence in the European market.

With its marketing department based in Sydney, Australia, and its research and development and manufacturing facilities in Shenzen, China and India, Pixel is diversifying its product range ahead of its assault on Europe, planning to offer not just its traditional LED display products, but also a series of revolutionary digital apps and systems to promote fan connectivity and customer engagement.

“We have been live in the European market for the last six years and to our credit, as far as the product is concerned, we have about Àve or six sports clubs that already use our products,” says Shiv Kumaar, chairman of Pixel Universal. “What we are doing now is fully rebranding into a sports brand. Our products will be speciÀc to the requirements of sporting arenas, and be tailor-constructed to stick to the compliancy standards in each of the geographies that the products will be sold.”

Where the majority of such solutions are bespoke and made to order for each stadium, Pixel Universal is able to reduce the costs for stadium operators by providing a universal, fully functioning turnkey product that can be utilised in a variety of environments.

The Áagship product of the range is the Pixel Sports Extreme (SX),

108 | www.sportspromedia.com

Pixel Universal debuted its 2.5mm LED display at last year’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

which Kumaar describes as an “endto-end perimeter solution with exit gates, control centre, power cables and power distributor boxes”.

“Where it differs from rival products is in offering a complete solution – it doesn’t require anyone else to come in and do any work on the system,” explains Kumaar.

The SX, he says, is “a completely full-spec product that will come into Europe as our Uefa-standard product”.

“There aren’t any other companies who are actually practising the lines that we’re doing,” he adds, “whereby we would be actually more or less providing the whole sporting solution, from the whole back end to the customer-facing element.”

The other major component in the company’s LED product range is the Pixel MR-VEW, a full highdeÀnition, low-energy video and replay screen described by Kumaar as “the most energy-efÀcient system in the world built to full

EMC compliance standard to date”.

Pixel’s LED screen solution, he says, will “no more be a product where somebody puts in an effort to pay for it, buy it, and then has to go back and get other sources locally to put it together. It will be a one-stop product which will come as a full solution. It’s also for the safety of the sport, safety of the spectator and bringing more standardisation into the product.”

Pixel’s Àrst-in-kind indoor 2.5mm LED display was demoed and accepted at the 2015 Formula One race in Abu Dhabi, and in 2016 it will introduce more proprietary and bespoke products for 18 F1 races.

In terms of the kinds of European sports and stadiums that can beneÀt from Pixel’s systems, Kumaar says the company is “looking at soccer, rugby, and others, but the sport doesn’t really matter”.

“All sorts of sports can beneÀt from the system,” he says. “It’s more about the kinds of stadiums that need our systems.

Tim Goode/EMPICS Sport

“We are speciÀcally looking at stadiums where we can bring in the technology, bring in the change because most of the digital displays in English stadiums are legacy, they’re of the old format, so we want to bring the new format into play, bring in the hardware, the technical support to install, and some Ànancial support to make it happen,” he adds. “It’s an endto-end solution we’re trying to do, and this whole offering is coming with the trademark arrangement where we will work very closely with our Chinese partners, Shenzhen Mary Photoelectricity Co Ltd, who will be funding the hardware based on the Ànancial bandings of each of the plans, so it will be a more tailor-made Ànancial package which will be funded through China.”

This, Kumaar says, is the most interesting part of what Pixel is trying to do. By offering Áexible Ànancing plans to clients, Pixel hopes to both spread and bring down the costs of implementing LED screens. “What we’re trying to do is bring some credit plans into play which will bring about a change in how we assess the needs of today’s market,” he says. “It will allow us and the stadium operators to look at it in a different way.”

In addition to its traditional business lines, Pixel has also moved into the digital space, offering products to help stadium operators and rights holders to enhance stadium connectivity.

The Àrst of these is FreeFi, a mobile application for iOS and Android devices that offers instant, one-touch connection to instadium Wi-Fi networks, and can be installed at the corporate boxes, in the hospitality tents or around the general concourse areas.

The real premium added over a standard login-based Wi-Fi connection is the access to data it gives stadium operators. “It gives them a way to understand what customers are doing online while they’re in the stadium, what they’re searching for and how they are

using the internet,” says Kumaar.

The data-led approach drives the digital support Pixel offers to stadiums. Its systems are aimed at analysing the value both rights holders and sponsors are getting from adverts and commercial spaces offered around stadiums.

“If you are into sports, you know that it’s all about analytics and data collection,” says Kumaar.

“Pixel’s cloud-based analytic tool, in partnership with Alpha Cloud, brings real media value to sponsorship. Things like, what value did a sponsor get being at a certain part of a football Àeld?

What was the viewing time like, what kind of exposure did it get? So it’s a complete on-time, 30-second trailing software that will recognise brands and give intelligence to give the report. So it’s a very high-end software that is supporting it to the service of the cloud.”

Pixel offers further analytics software which, Kumaar explains, “works with Twitter handles or Facebook handles to give you a feel of who’s looking at what and searching for what in relation to a speciÀc game”.

“We can get analytics on people’s views,” he adds, “and what they are commenting: are they happy with the last matchday? How was their experience in the stadium? So it gives a better proÀling of the fan, to help stadiums become a better place, to help the customer who is interested in our products to

Pixel Universal’s digital tools offer connectivity to fans and highlevel analytics to stadium operators

go back and sell tickets, to give invitations for future events, give timetables of matches.

“It happens in real time, it also gives you data from anywhere in the world, any time there is a game happening – anyone who logs in to discuss the game, we will know.

We use real-world analytics, so if there’s a game in Manchester, we analyse the use of the word ‘Manchester’ during the match and we can know that there is someone who is seeking to understand what is happening.

“So you get a global mapping of where the interest is, which part of the world is showing interest.

Were they a football fan? Was he a customer at the game, or will he be a potential client tomorrow?

It’s basically a tool for gauging the mood and the aspiration of the spectator of tomorrow. It’s a fanconnect tool.

“Pixel is keen to look and serve the market with products that are easy to own, low on maintenance and more built to requirement and compliancy standards,” says Kumaar. “Pixel, along with its technical team, will help to bring elevation in the digital space.”

To contact Pixel Universal www.pixeldisplayindia.com +91 98840 77077 info@pixeldisplayindia.com

SportsPro Magazine | 109

DEALS REVIEW

DEALS REVIEW Sports industry deal-making highlights from February 2016 Fiba and Perform Group confirm ‘groundbreaking’ partnership World basketball’s governing body Fiba has announced a ‘ground-breaking strategic partnership’ with digital content and media group Perform.

The deal, first reported in January, will see Perform distribute and sell media rights to all men’s and women’s team competitions for the next four Fiba Basketball World Cup cycles, covering the period 2017 to 2033.

Under the agreement, Perform has committed to investing ‘close to €500 million’ to enhance live TV production, broadcast services, and data and editorial distribution of Fiba events.

The partnership will see the creation of Fiba Media, a joint venture between the two parties that will serve as the governing body’s dedicated media division. The new unit, which essentially replaces Fiba Media & Marketing Services, the governing body’s existing commercial arm, will aim to increase exposure of Fiba content across all platforms.

According to a statement announcing the partnership, Fiba will have ‘an active role in respect of all major strategic and commercial activities of Fiba Media, and will share in any future revenue growth beyond the guaranteed amount.’

Over the duration of the partnership, which mirrors a similar arrangement Perform has in place with the WTA Tour, Fiba Media will produce more than 5,000 live games including qualifiers and major championships such as the Fiba Basketball World Cup and Fiba EuroBasket.

As well as distributing content to broadcasters and digital outlets, Perform will also promote international basketball across its own platforms, such as Sporting News, and collect and distribute live data via its RunningBall and Opta brands.

110 | www.sportspromedia.com

Jordan Spieth retains grip on SuperStroke

confident the S-Tech grips will deliver the same

World number one golfer Jordan Spieth (above) has renewed his endorsement deal with grip manufacturer SuperStroke.

Under the new multi-year agreement, the American will continue to use the brand’s club and putter grips, including its new S-Tech line.

“I’m excited to be using the new S-Tech club grips,” said Spieth, 22. “I’ve always trusted SuperStroke’s putter grip technology and I’m

performance.”

Spieth, who won some US$12 million in prize money and two majors last season, has become one of the hottest properties in golf since turning professional in 2012.

Named at number two in SportsPro’s 2015 list of the world’s most marketable athletes, he also has lucrative endorsement deals in place with the likes of Under Armour, Coca-Cola, Titleist, Rolex and AT&T.

BBC drops historic BDO deal for new PDC darts tournament

It will feature the leading eight players from the PDC Order of Merit come the end of July’s World Matchplay, and the champion will earn UK£100,000.

“Darts has always had wide appeal and it is great that audiences will get the chance to see all the action from the world’s top players live on BBC Two and across our platforms,” said BBC director of sport Barbara Slater.

Barry Hearn, the impresario at the helm of the PDC as chairman, said the deal signalled “the start of an exciting new era”.

British public service broadcaster the BBC will show the Champions League of Darts after signing a deal for the first time with the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC).

The agreement signals the end of the BBC’s relationship with a rival darts tournament, the BDO World Championship, which it has broadcast for 38 years on terrestrial TV. The inaugural Champions League of Darts will take place on 24th and 25th September in Cardiff.

German soccer team to get the Lego treatment The German Football Association (DFB) has signed a new licensing agreement with Lego.

The deal, announced at a recent toy convention in Nuremberg, will see Lego create a collection of figures resembling Germany’s Fifa World Cup-

HOK to design new FC Barcelona arena US-based architecture firm HOK has been chosen to design a new arena for Spanish basketball side FC Barcelona Lassa.

The New Palau Blaugrana is expected to be ready for the beginning of the 2019/20 European basketball season, and will replace the current 7,500-seat Palau Blaugrana, home to Barcelona Lassa since 1971.

The new arena will be built on the current site of the Mini Estadi, a 15,000-seat stadium which sits adjacent to the Camp Nou, the home of Spanish soccer giants FC Barcelona.

winning national soccer team, Die Mannschaft.

16 Lego players will be made and released this spring ahead of Uefa Euro 2016 in France. They will retail for €2.99 apiece.

The identities of the players and staff to feature in the Lego team have yet to be made public.

“Together with the DFB, we are planning to

launch a new range of Germany national team Lego figures, which will become available in May,” confirmed Joanna Katharina Lazar, Lego’s marketing vice president. “It will excite fans both young and old.”

Denmark-based Lego is the world’s largest toy company by revenue.

The new complex is planned as a flexible space comprising three separate areas: the main 10,000-seat arena, an auxiliary space for 2,000 spectators, and an ice rink.

“This site has tremendous potential,” said Daniel Hajjar, managing principal for HOK’s European office in London. “We look forward to working with the Barcelona City Council, the Barça technical teams, the residents of Barcelona and TAC Arquitectes to further develop and integrate our winning concept with the rest of the Espai Barça project and the city centre.”

For more information on these deals and daily updates from across the sports industry, visit www.sportspromedia.com

SportsPro Magazine | 111

DEALS SECTION TEXT HERE DIRECTORY

DIRECTORY OF SPONSORSHIP DEALS Signed in February 2016 Real Madrid to complete world record kit deal

Dean & DeLuca takes Fort Worth title rights

Delta Air Lines and AEG agree renewal

La Liga soccer club Real Madrid and German sportswear giant Adidas are to sign a world record renewal of their kit supply deal, according to Spanish sports newspaper Marca. The tentime European champions will agree a ten-year extension worth an annual €140 million (US$152 million), eclipsing the value of the contract signed by Adidas and English club Manchester United in July 2014, which came into effect this season. Real are reported not to have entered discussions with any other brands as Adidas had first refusal. Last year Adidas, which has supplied Real Madrid’s matchday and training wear since 1998, also renewed with German champions Bayern Munich until 2030 in a €900 million (US$990 million) deal. Real Madrid have not been at their best this season, and trail bitter rivals FC Barcelona by some distance in the La Liga standings.

Length of contract: 10 years Annualised value: US$152 million Overall value: US$1.52 billion Sport: Soccer

Speciality foods company Dean & DeLuca has signed a deal to become the title sponsor of the PGA Tour golf event at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth. The agreement will see the tournament named the Dean & DeLuca Invitational for the next six years. The tournament has been held at the Fort Worth venue since 1946, making it the most enduring single-venue event on the PGA Tour. The 2016 tournament will be held from 23rd to 29th May, and offers a prize purse of US$6.7 million. Wichita, Kansas-headquartered food retail chain Dean & DeLuca will replace Crowne Plaze as the tournament’s title sponsor. The hotel chain had beenputting its name to the event since 2006.

Financial details have not been released, but the deal could see Dean & DeLuca pay some US$30 million in total. Last year’s event generated US$9.1 million for local charities.

Length of contract: 6 years Annualised value: US$5 million Overall value: US$30 million Sport: Golf

US-based airline Delta has renewed its wideranging partnership with sports and entertainment giant AEG for a further six years. The new deal sees Delta remain the official and exclusive airline partner of Staples Center in Los Angeles, one of several US sports venues owned and operated by AEG, and the LA Kings National Hockey League (NHL) franchise. As part of the renewal, Delta has acquired the naming rights to the three luxury suite levels at Staples Center, while the company also becomes an official partner of AEG’s Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. Delta, which has been based at Los Angeles International Airport since 2009, will receive branding on all tickets and marketing collateral at Staples Center, as well as inarena signage and other sponsorship rights relating to the Kings. Financial terms of the renewal have not been disclosed, but Staples Center founding partnerships are believed to be worth between US$3 million and US$5 million annually.

Length of contract: 6 years Annualised value: US$5 million Overall value: US$30 million Sport: Ice hockey

Vikings announce seventh founding partner Northern Trust shifts PGA Tour sponsorship US multinational financial services company Northern Trust has extended a sponsorship deal with the PGA Tour, switching its support from the west coast to the east in the process. The Chicago-based company will take over sponsorship of the PGA Tour tournament currently known as The Barclays from 2017. The tournament, which carries a prize purse of US$8.5 million and acts as a FedExCup play-off competition, rotates around courses in the greater New York/New Jersey area.

Northern Trust will shift its support from The Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, where it has been title sponsor of the Northern Trust Open since 2008. The new agreement will run for five years and, although financial details have not been released, it is likely to be worth nearly US$35 million in total. “From the beginning, we are proud to have worked with the PGA Tour to enhance the Northern Trust Open for all constituents from patrons to players to the Los Angeles community,” said Northern Trust chairman and chief executive Frederick Waddell.

Length of contract: 5 years Annualised value: US$7 million Overall value: US$35 million Sport: Golf

112 | www.sportspromedia.com

Ecolab has signed a deal to become the seventh founding partner of the Minnesota Vikings’ new US Bank Stadium. The St Paul-based cleaning products company will provide hand care, cleaning and sanitation products, water treatment for cooling and heating systems, and other services to the National Football League (NFL) side’s new home, which opens officially this summer. In return, the brand will receive the naming rights to the north entrance to the stadium, the Ecolab Gate, and signage around the arena. In line with the other founding partnerships signed by the Vikings, the deal is for ten years from the opening of the stadium, and is worth US$3 million per year. “Ecolab is a prominent Minnesota business whose CEO, Doug Baker, has long been a supporter of the Vikings and served a key role in the push to secure Super Bowl LII [in 2018] in Minnesota,” said Vikings owner and president Mark Wilf in a prepared statement. “We are excited to officially partner with Ecolab.”

Length of contract: 10 years Annualised value: US$3 million Overall value: US$30 million Sport: Football

Palmeiras announce kit sponsorship Palmeiras have struck a new kit sponsorship deal, believed to be the largest in Brazilian club soccer.

The São Paulo club announced that financial firm Crefisa and Faculdades das Américas (FAM), an educational network, will be the exclusive sponsor of their kit until the end of the 2016 season.

Under the deal the two companies, which share the same parent company, will receive branding in various positions on Palmeiras’ kit. FAM logos will be displayed on the shorts and socks, as well as on the shoulder, sleeve and around the waist of the shirt. Crefisa, meanwhile, will take the main chest position on the shirt, with additional spots on a shoulder and a sleeve. According to Brazilian sources, the deal is worth R$58 million (US$14.5 million), surpassing the Brazilian record, the US$10.4 million shirt agreement Corinthians signed with Caixa last February. Corinthians are yet to announce a new primary kit sponsorship deal for 2016.

Length of contract: 1 year Annualised value: US$14.5 million Overall value: US$14.5 million Sport: Soccer

Topper deal for Botafogo Brazilian soccer team Botafogo have signed a three-year deal with local kit manufacturer Topper, reportedly worth US$10 million in total.

Topper will replace long-term supplier Puma as the kit supplier for the Rio de Janeiro-based club. Botafogo will honour their current deal with Puma by continuing to wear the kit until the end of April. Botafogo, currently playing in the Rio state championships, finished as champions of Brazil’s second-tier national league last season, and will kick off the new campaign in Serie A. Marcelo de Cicco, Topper’s manager in Brazil, said: “This partnership marks the resumption of investment by Topper in football clubs. We are already working with the club to produce a highquality kit that will bring great pride to Botafogo.”

Length of contract: 3 years Annualised value: US$3.33 million Overall value: US$10 million Sport: Soccer

Thrivent Financial renews Leavine deal Thrivent Financial has extended and expanded its sponsorship of the Circle Sport-Leavine Family Racing Nascar team and its driver Michael McDowell. The not-for-profit financial services organisation, which specifically serves Christians, will be the primary sponsor of McDowell’s entry in 15 Sprint Cup races this year, while it will also act as a secondary sponsor for a further 15 events. Financial terms have not been released but, based on comparable deals in Nascar, the renewal could be worth as much as US$8 million.

Length of contract: 1 year Annualised value: US$8 million Overall value: US$8 million Sport: Motorsport

Adidas’ ten-year, US$1.52 billion deal with Real Madrid is the most lucrative kit supply agreement in world soccer

SunEnergy1 backs Hendrick Motorsports rookie

Indy 500 gets first presenting sponsor

SunEnergy1 has signed a three-year sponsorship deal with Nascar’s Hendrick Motorsports. The solar energy company will be a primary sponsor of 20-year-old rookie Chase Elliott’s number 24 Chevrolet SS in four Sprint Cup races a season, and will be an associate sponsor for the rest of its contract. No financial terms were released but SunEnergy1 is likely to be paying around US$2 million a year. Elliott, who won the second-tier Nascar series in 2014, will drive SunEnergy1branded entries in the elite championship on 2nd July at Daytona International Speedway, 7th August at Watkins Glen International, 16th October at Kansas Speedway and 13th November at Phoenix International Raceway.

Length of contract: 3 years Annualised value: US$2 million Overall value: US$6 million Sport: Motorsport

The Indianapolis 500 has its first-ever presenting sponsor, with PennGrade Motor Oil signing up ahead of the 100th running of the event. The D-A Lubricant Company-owned brand will sponsor Indycar’s marquee race, which this year takes place on 29th May, until 2018. May’s race will officially be known as the 100th Indianapolis 500 presented by PennGrade Motor Oil. Reports in the US suggest the deal is worth US$5 million in total. Indiana-based D-A Lubricant has historic ties to the race, having sponsored entries back in the 1950s. Last year the company returned to the event as a sponsor of driver Graham Rahal, who went on to finish fourth in the 2015 Verizon IndyCar Series championship.

Length of contract: 3 years Annualised value: US$1.67 million Overall value: US$5 million Sport: Motorsport

Corinthians sign WinnerPlay sponsorship deal

Lidl confirms Ladies Gaelic Football deal

Brazilian soccer champions Corinthians have signed a new sponsorship deal with WinnerPlay.

The sports betting portal’s logo will appear on the shoulder of the São Paulo-based Brasileirão side’s matchday jerseys until the end of 2018.

The partnership began with Corinthians’ 1-0 home win over XV de Piracicaba on Sunday.

According to Época, the deal is worth a total of R$20 million (US$5 million). The club have set a target of R$60 million (US$15 million) in total income from their shirt sponsorships this year.

Length of contract: 3 years Annualised value: US$1.67 million Overall value: US$5 million Sport: Soccer

Lidl is to sponsor the Republic of Ireland’s Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA). The budget supermarket chain will commit an annual €1.5 million over the next three years to become the official retail partner of the LFGA. It will also title sponsor the Ladies National Football Leagues as well as youth leagues and other programmes.

The partnership will be promoted through print, online and social media campaigns which are also designed to raise the profile of women’s Gaelic football.

Length of contract: 3 years Annualised value: US$1.6 million Overall value: US$4.8 million Sport: Gaelic sports

Unibet gambles on Dutch cycling sponsorship Online betting company Unibet has struck a contentious deal to sponsor the Dutch national cycling team, provided it is awarded a licence to operate in the Netherlands. The Malta-based firm has agreed to replace Rabobank as the main sponsor of the Netherlands’ national cycling body, the KNWU, in a four-year deal worth €7 million and beginning next January.

The new deal would see Unibet title sponsor all Dutch cycling teams competing in European and world competitions, with funds used to support all levels of cycling in the Netherlands.

Length of contract: 4 years Annualised value: US$1.9 million Overall value: US$7.6 million Sport: Cycling

SportsPro Magazine | 113

DEALS DIRECTORY

Thomas Sommer puts name to Greuther Stadium Second-tier German soccer club Greuther Fürth have sold the naming rights to their home stadium to local real estate mogul Thomas Sommer. The ground, previously known as the Stadion am Laubenweg, will be rechristened as “Sportpark Rohnhof / Thomas Sommer”, combining one of the arena’s previous names with the name of its new investor. Sommer has been involved with the club for ten years and had previously floated the idea of funding a new stadium for the team. Instead he has found a more innovative way to invest into the side, with the deal to put his name worth a total of €3 million over five years, reports have claimed.

Length of contract: 5 years Annualised value: US$655,000 Overall value: US$3.275 million Sport: Soccer

Clint Bowyer, pictured here airborne, will carry Visine’s branding on his car in three Sprint Cup races this year

FC St Pauli sign OK deal

Betway takes a punt on AFC Leopards

Singaporean soccer side Young Lions have signed a record sponsorship deal with local internet and mobile platform company Garena, worth up to S$4 million (US$2.8 million) over two years. The deal includes naming rights for the club, which will now be known as the Garena Young Lions. Garena will commit S$2 million in cash until the end of 2017, with a further S$2 million earmarked for the promotion and development of the team, both in their home country and farther afield.

Length of contract: 2 years Annualised value: US$1.4 million Overall value: US$2.8 million Sport: Soccer

Second-tier German soccer side FC St Pauli have reportedly signed a sponsorship deal with energy drink OK. According to Sponsors. de, the deal between the Hamburg-based club and OK’s parent company Valora Holding Germany will last for three and a half seasons.

OK will become a second-level sponsor of the club and, while contract details have not been revealed, Sponsors.de estimates the deal to be worth around €300,000 annually. FC St Pauli sit in the upper reaches of the 2. Bundesliga with half the season gone, well placed for a promotion challenge.

Length of contract: 3.5 years Annualised value: US$335,000 Overall value: US$1.17 million Sport: Soccer

Kenyan Premier League outfit AFC Leopards have entered into a three-year partnership with online bookmakers Betway, worth in the region of US$900,000. Betway becomes the official shirt sponsor of the club, with its head of new markets Antony Priesman commenting that “we chose Kenya because we see it as a gateway to the rest of Africa”. The online gambling company will also use its ties with English soccer side West Ham, with AFC Leopards gaining the opportunity to send players to the Premier League club’s academy to use their facilities.

Length of contract: 3 years Annualised value: US$300,000 Overall value: US$900,000 Sport: Soccer

Visine to sponsor HScott Motorsports

Panasonic puts name to new golf event

Eye drop brand Visine has been unveiled as a new sponsor for Nascar driver Clint Bowyer’s car. Visine will be Bowyer’s primary sponsor for three Nascar Sprint Cup Series events, and will also serve as an associate sponsor and marketing partner for the entire season. Financial terms have not been released. However, based on comparable Nascar deals, this sponsorship is thought to be between US$1.5 million and US$2million. It was also revealed that Bowyer will drive the number 15 car for the North Carolina team, based in Mooresville.

Bowyer’s primary sponsors for 24 of next season’s 36 races will be 5-Hour Energy.

Length of contract: 1 year Annualised value: US$2 million Overall value: US$2 million Sport: Motorsport

Panasonic will title sponsor a new Japanese event on golf’s Asian Tour. The electronics giant will put its name to a JPY150 million (US$1.27 million) tournament at the Chiba Country Club’s Umesato course in Noda City, around 40 kilometres from Tokyo. The deal is likely to be worth around US$1 million.

“Panasonic is honoured and delighted to title sponsor the Panasonic Open Golf Championship following an agreement between our corporation, the Japan Golf Tour and Asian Tour,” said Panasonic president Kazuhiro Tsuga.

Length of contract: 1 year Annualised value: US$1 million Overall value: US$1 million Sport: Golf

Young Lions land record S.League sponsorship

Iowa Corn signs three-year Indycar extension

114 | www.sportspromedia.com

Farmers’ union Iowa Corn has signed a threeyear renewal of its deal to title sponsor the Iowa Corn 300 Indycar race at Iowa Speedway. Iowa Corn, which promotes the interests of its 8,000 members, has title sponsored the race for ten years. The new deal will last until the conclusion of the 2018 race and is likely to be worth around US$300,000 a year. “We consider this renewed commitment as an investment in our state, and we are excited to provide Iowa Corn, the Iowa Corn Promotion Board and the Iowa Corn Growers Association with the opportunity to deliver their message to an international audience,” said Iowa Speedway president Jimmy Small.

Length of contract: 3 years Annualised value: US$300,000 Overall value: US$900,000 Sport: Motorsport

WHERE SPORT MEETS

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND 17-22 APRIL 2016 1

April 2016 | Issue 86

INDEX

www.sportspromedia.com

FEATURE MOTORSPORT

FEATURE NEW ZEALAND

Kotahitanga Auckland’s unique major events strategy is built on the Maori concept of balanced partnership – kotahitanga. Stepping inside the city’s sporting framework for a week in February, SportsPro discovered its effectiveness first hand.

By James Emmett

INDEX OF COMPANIES AND PEOPLE A AC MILAN

16

ACCESS GROUP OF 66 MIAMI

Bell, Lake

66

Clattenburg, Mark

118

Bennett, Paula

74

CLOUDY BAY

74

BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY

88

COCA-COLA

88 32, 54

Bernstein, JB

66

Coe, Lord Sebastian

BETHELEHEM STEEL FC

20

Coleman, David

44, 94

Higgins, David

74

FANDUEL

38

74

16, 17

16

FC BAYERN MUNICH

HIGH PERFORMANCE SPORT NZ

94

Federer, Roger

8

98

Bhupathi, Mahesh

8

AFC

32

BING

88

COLLEGIATE LICENSING COMPANY

AIBA

32

BK RACING

102

CONMEBOL

20 74

AIMS

54

Blake, Ashley

32

Cooper, Matt

AIOWF

54

Blatter, Sepp

32

CORINTHIANS

20

ALABAMA COLLEGE

98

BMW

74

CORPORATE.IE

98

32

Bolton, Sally

32

COUNTIES MANUKAU

74

Alexander, Cherry ALIBABA GROUP

44

Bonds, Barry

66

CRABBIES

118

BOSTON COLLEGE

98

Boucher, Dillon

74

CRICKET AUSTRALIA

46

Brady, Tom

94

CRICKET IRELAND

Braid, Matt

20

BRAZILIAN FENCING CONFEDERATION (CBF)

60

20

10

AMAZON

16

AMERICA'S CUP EVENT AUTHORITY

20

Amir, Mohammed

46

Anson, Andy

44

APPLE

16, 94

ARISF

54

BRITISH EQUESTRIAN FEDERATION

Arkin, Alan

66

BROOKLYN NETS

18

Arrivabene, Maurizio

10

BSKYB

16

BT

16

ARSENAL FC

16, 38, 60

Buchanan, Angus

32

Budge, Karl

74

ASB

74

Asif, Mohammad

46

BUFFALO WILD WINGS

88

ASOIF

54

Buffet, Warren

88

ASTON VILLA FC

20

Burns, Terrence

20

AT&T

88

Busch, Kyle

102

ATEED

74

Butt, Salman

46

ATP

74

Button, Jenson

10

ATP WORLD TOUR

8

BUZZFEED

54

AUBURN UNIVERSITY

94

AUCKLAND ACES

74

AUCKLAND BLUES

74

C

FERRARI

10

Ferrer, David

74

FIA

20, 32

FIFA

6, 17, 18, 20, 32, 74

FINA

54

FINDEL PLC

44

Finding, Andrew

20

Flanagan, Sir Ronnie

46

46

Flynn, Gemma

74

Cronje, Hansie

46

FOOTBALL LEAGUE 54

Cuban, Mark

18

FORMULA E

20

Curry, Stephen

94 10

FORMULA ONE MANAGEMENT

10, 44

CVC CAPITAL PARTNERS

FOX

18, 38

D

FOX SPORTS

60, 102

France, Brian

102, 118

GERMAIN RACING

102

Djokovic, Novak

8, 54

Gillespie, Craig

66

Dodd, Moya

32

GLOBO

32

IPL

46, 66

Dominguez, Alejandro

20

GLOBO SPORTS

60

Isner, John

74

GO FAS RACING

102

ITV

20

Dowling, Jim

16

GODADDY.COM

102

Ivanovic, Ana

74

J

54

Ayers, Daniel

18

Carter, Honor

Duncan, Paula

74

Gretzky, Wayne

66

Grigson, Kiki Guoli, Ma

BBC

10, 54

BCCI

46

BEATS BY DRE

17

BECKER & POLIAKOFF

38

Beckham, David

66

E ECB

20, 46

16, 17, 44

Ecclestone, Bernie

10, 118

CHENNAI SUPER KINGS

46

Emmert, Mark

20

ESP PROPERTIES

94

CHINESE SUPER LEAGUE

16

CHIP GANASSI RACING

102

CHITTAGONG VIKINGS

46

CIRCLE SPORT RACING CITIBANK

ESPN EURONEWS

20, 38, 94, 98 60

EUROSPORT

60

Evennett, David

32

102

Exarchos, Yiannis

60

98

F

Clarey, Christopher

8

FACEBOOK

Clarke, Richard

74

Fadule, John

116 | www.sportspromedia.com

60

20

Gosper, Brett

98

INTERNATIONAL FENCING FEDERATION (FIE)

20

74

74

32

DISNEY

DUCO EVENTS

Bates, Brad

118

INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR SPORTS STUDIES (CIES)

Diamond, Peter

98

74

Barker, Dean

INKERMAN

46

74

GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Carter, Dan

20

6, 32

INFRONT SPORTS & 20 MEDIA

Deutrom, Warren

Garlick, Julie

98

BANK OF ENGLAND

Infantino, Gianni

98

AVIVA

46

94

DELL

16

BANGLADESH PREMIER LEAGUE

8

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

G

GOOGLE

CHELSEA FC

6, 46, 54

IMG

74

98

18

32, 54

ICC

Del Potro, Juan Martin

DUBLIN CITY COUNCIL

16

IAAF

102

32

Ballmer, Steve

I

FURNITURE ROW RACING

Carrard, François

Bale, Gareth

16

32

AUCKLAND TENNIS 74

66

HSE CAKE

De Vos, Niels

8

88, 94

102

46

Godsick, Tony

Chang, Will

20

HSCOTT MOTORSPORTS

Dalmiya, Jagmohan

38

CBS

16

Howard, Shane

102

DRAFTKINGS

54, 60

HOLSTEN PILS

FRONT ROW MOTORSPORTS

88

Bach, Thomas

74

18

CAPITAL ONE

B

74

Hobson, William

18

AUCKLAND RUGBY 74

20

Hillary, Sir Edmund

DALLAS MAVERICKS

98

Casey, John

102

DAILY MAIL

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY

74

74 | www.sportspromedia.com

HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS

Chuck Burton/AP/Press Association Images

FANATICS INC

AER LINGUS

Alonso, Fernando

102 | www.sportspromedia.com

44

16, 74, 94

88

By Michael Long and George Dudley

The outlook for federations in 2016 March Madness and the college boom Auckland welcomes the world

FANATICS AUTHENTIC

ADIDAS

ALLSTATE

Nascar returned in February for a pivotal year in the history of American stock car racing. As the 2016 edition of the top-tier championship, in its last season with Sprint as a title sponsor, began at a revamped Daytona International Speedway, its teams were digesting the news of a landmark move to a franchise-based ownership model.

INTERNATIONAL 54 JUDO FEDERATION INTERNATIONAL SKI FEDERATION (FIS)

118

INTERNATIONAL TENNIS FEDERATION

8, 54

IOC

17, 32, 46, 54, 60

Jackson, Bo

66

Jacob, Mauricio

20

118

Jamieson, Campbell

46

20

Jiaying, Shen

20

JOE GIBBS RACING

102

JORDAN FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION

32

Joshua, Anthony

74

H HAAS F1

10

Haas, Gene

102

Haas, Jeffrey

38

Hafeez, Mohammed

46

Hamilton, Lewis

10

Hamm, Jon

66

JTA

18

JTG DAUGHERTY RACING

102

JVC

16

Hancock, Heather

32

K

Haryanto, Rio

10

Kalish, Matt

38

Haskell, Ethan

38

Kauffman, Rob

102

98

Hatt, Nis

54

King, Lord Mervyn

20

98

Hayne, Jarryd

66

KITBAG

44

Knight, Phil

94

Moonves, Les

118

KOLKATA KNIGHT RIDERS

66

Murphy, Diana M

20

Murray, Andy

118

Kumble, Anil

66

L LA 2024

66

Sexwale, Tokyo

32 32

Platini, Michel

32

Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa

Powell, Kieran

66

SILVER LAKE

44

PREMIER LEAGUE

Singh, Rinku

66

32, 44, 102, 118

38, 60, 118

PREMIUM MOTORSPORTS

102

Prince Ali bin al Hussein

32

PROFESSIONAL FUTSAL LEAGUE

18

N NASCAR

20

LA DIA

60

Lapasset, Bernard

18

NATIONAL RUGBY LEAGUE (NRL)

74

Laver, Rod

8

NATURE'S BAKERY

102

LE ECO

20

NBA

LE SPORTS

20

Leitch, Sir Peter

74

18, 20, 32, 44, 74

Lemann, Jorge Paulo

8

Lewis, Mark

88

LG

88

LIVERPOOL FC

38

Lonergan, Dean

74

Lorgat, Haroon

46

LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS

18

LOS ANGELES LAKERS

18

LOTUS F1

10

LOWE’S

88

M 102

Mack, Doug

44, 94

Mae, Vanessa

118

Magnussen, Kevin

10

MAIL.RU

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

98

UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

94

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

66

Smith, Mandy

74

Smith, Scott

20

Sneddon, Martin

74

SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT

66

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

94

Spieth, Jordan

94

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

20

SPORT NEW ZEALAND

74

94

SPORTACCORD

6, 54

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSINMADISON

SPORTING KANSAS 20 CITY

UPS

88

USA TODAY

94

Q

NEW YORK YANKEES

66

QATAR SPORTS INVESTMENT

NEW ZEALAND CRICKET

74

R

NEW ZEALAND RUGBY UNION

74

R&A

20

Stephens, Sloane

74

USGA

20

74

Stewart, Martin

32

USM HOLDINGS

60

Newton, Cam

94

Radwanska, Agnieszka

Usmanov, Alisher

60

32, 44, 66, 94, 98

Raikkonen, Kimi

10

STEWART-HAAS RACING

102

NFL

USOC

20

REAL MADRID CF

16, 44

STOKE CITY FC

16

RED BULL RACING

10

Sugar, Alan

16

V

REGIONAL FACILITIES AUCKLAND

74

Swann, Graeme

46

V8 SUPERCARS

Symon, Will

20

Vasquez, William

20

Vasudevan, Ash

66

32, 44, 66

MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER

16, 20, 44, 66

O

Maldonado, Pastor

10

O’Riley, Brett

74

MANCHESTER CITY FC

44

Obama, Barack

88

OBS

60

MANCHESTER UNITED FC

16, 44

ODGERS BERNDTSON

20

Mandvi, Aasif

66

94

Manohar, Shashank 6, 46

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

MANOR MARUSSIA 10

O'Kane, Padraic

Marculescu, Cornel 54 Marino, Dan

66

MARYLEBONE CRICKET CLUB

46

Prokhorov, Mikhail

18

Putin, Vladimir

118

10

Reid, Jake

20

RFU

18

Ricci Bitti, Francesco

54

Ricciardo, Daniel

10

T

20

TEAM PENSKE

102

VERO 18 COMMUNICATIONS

TEAM8

8

Vettel, Sebastian

10

Tendulkar, Sachin

74

VIRTUS.PRO

60

TENEO SPORTS

20

Vizer, Marius

6, 54

TEXAS A&M

94

74

TFL

18

VODAFONE WARRIORS

THE GUARDIAN

32, 46

VOLVO

20

RICHARD CHILDRESS RACING

102

RICHARD PETTY MOTORSPORTS

102

Richardson, David

6, 46

THE HINDU

46

Richardson, Michael

46

THE SPORTS CONSULTANCY

32

98

Roach, Freddie

118

66

OPTA

38

THE UPPER DECK COMPANY

Ronaldo, Cristiano

16, 66

32

98

98

Warner, Ed

OXFORD UNIVERSITY

Thomas, Justin

Rosberg, Nico

10

Tiley, Craig

74

WATFORD FC

38

Ross, Stehen

10

TISSOT

60

Wehrlein, Pascal

10

ROUSH FENWAY RACING

102

TOMMY BALDWIN RACING

102

WEST BROMWICH ALBION FC

16

TOP GEAR

10

WILLIAMS F1

10

TOTO

18

Williams, Venus

74

Wilson, Matt

32

Wootten, Jennah

74

P

W WADA

54

WANDA SPORTS

20

Warburton, James

20

P&O

74

Rousseff, Dilma

32

Pacquiao, Manny

118

ROYAL & SUN ALLIANCE

20 66

TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR FC

16

TOURISM ASSOCIATION OF NEW ZEALAND

74

WORCESTERSHIRE COUNTY CRICKET CLUB

20

TOURISM IRELAND

98

WORLD RUGBY

18, 54

Trump, Donald

118

WORLD SAILING

54

TURNER SPORTS

88, 94

54

TWITTER

18, 54, 98

WORLD TAEKWONDO FEDERATION WTA

74

Wu, Ching-Kuo

32

McCaw, Richie

74

Page, Malcolm

54

McDermott, Tim

20

Palmer, Jolyon

10

MCLAREN

10

Parker, Joseph

74

ROYAL CHALLENGERS BANGALORE

MEGAFON

60

Passos, Marcelo

20

ROYAL LONDON

20

Mendes, Jorge

16

Patel, Dinesh

66

RSE VENTURES

10

MERCEDES

10

Patrick, Danica

102

Rubin, Michael

44

Rueda, Gabriel

118

Paxton, Bill

66

MIAMI DOLPHINS

10, 66

PDVSA

10

MICHAEL WALTRIP RACING

102

PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

98

MICROSOFT

18

PEPSICO

66

Ming, Yao

66

PERTAMINA

MISCROSOFT

88

Miskimmin, Peter

74

Mitchell, Steve

S Salmon, Clare

20 66

10

SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS

Peterson, Matt

94

Sanders, Barry

66

PETROBRAS

32

Sanders, Deon

66

20

PGA TOUR

44

Scala, Domenico

32

MLB

32, 66

20

Schneiderman, Eric 38

MLBPA

66

PHILADELPHIA UNION Piccione, Sam

20

SEVEN FIGURES MANAGEMENT

Pietersen, Kevin

46

SEVEN LEAGUE

74

66

94

8, 38

60

MOET & CHANDON

Smith, Emmitt

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

NEW YORK TIMES

74

60

66

94

20, 88, 94, 98

NORTHERN MYSTICS

METALLOINVEST

74

SKYPE

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

NCAA

74

66

SKYCITY BREAKERS

94

74

94

McCarthy, Tom

74

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

102

NORTH HARBOUR RUGBY

118

74

SKYCITY

98

NBL

NIKE

Mayweather, Floyd Jr

PROFESSIONAL 118 GAME MATCH OFFICIALS LIMITED

SKY NZ

UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN

NBC SPORTS

NHL

M&MS

PITTSBURGH PIRATES

U UCLA

94

UEFA

17, 32

UK ATHLETICS

32

UNDER ARMOUR

94 98

66

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE FLORIDA

98

18

Y Yang, David

20

Z Zahavi, Pini

16

SportsPro Magazine | 117

THE SCRIBBLER

by The Scribbler

Whiteout The Scribbler was delighted to learn that Vanessa Mae (right), everybody’s favourite violinist turned downhill racer, had been awarded damages for defamation from the International Ski Federation (FIS). February’s settlement came after it emerged that ‘a number of irregularities’ occurred in the organisation and management of the four hastily arranged, FIS-sanctioned races which

enabled Mae to qualify for the 2014 Winter Olympics. The governing body apologised to the musician wholeheartedly, admitting after all that she kept her fiddling to the stage and the recording studio. That is all well and good but The Scribbler can’t help wondering how many athletes not possessed of world-renowned musical talent might have appeared at the Games by way of similar federation failings.

Dubious circles In a move rarely seen on the ovals of stock car racing’s leading series, Nascar chief executive Brian France steered sharply to the right in endorsing presumptive GOP nominee and rampant satirical caricature come to life Donald Trump for the American presidency at the end of February. Trump appears popular among parts of Nascar’s fanbase, and less so in parts

of its sponsorship multiverse, while France’s nod comes with autocratic figures of fun – and fear – very much in vogue among motorsport moguls. Why, it was only a week earlier that Formula One’s own ruler, Bernie Ecclestone, said that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin should “run Europe” and would “sort out” Syria. Funny how these things come round again...

Anyone’s game

Raise it high

Last year’s Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather superfight was a record-shattering payday for everyone involved in getting it on – or so it seemed. Gabriel Rueda, a waiter and actor from LA, is currently suing Showtime owners CBS for a two per cent finder’s fee he claims to have been verbally promised after introducing network boss Les Moonves to Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach and kick-starting the ultimately successful negotiations. It may not sound like much, but that’s two per cent of US$430 million.

If an introduction is all it takes to earn that kind of money, it’s little wonder so many think they should make a go of boxing promotion – the Scribbler has even heard fight fan Andy Murray’s (below) agency is getting in the game.

The Scribbler is a sucker for a letter and for a sporting trophy, so when he received a letter about sporting trophies this month, well, it would have been churlish not to mark the occasion with a few words. Kiki Grigson and her Inkerman trophy design business are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. Inkerman is behind some of the iconic silverware on offer at the likes of the Crabbie’s Grand National, and home England Test cricket matches. Kiki makes a smart trophy and writes a fine letter.

Congratulations to all at Inkerman.

118 | www.sportspromedia.com

Man in the middle The news that Mark Clattenburg (above) was being investigated by English soccer’s Professional Game Match Officials Limited after joining the books of the Catalyst4Soccer agency caused the Scribbler some distress a few weeks back. Not because of the potential for conflicts of interest in Clattenburg sharing commercial representation with a handful of the Premier League stars he orders around each week – the men in black deserve a little more credit than that. No, the more concerning prospect is that the 40-year-old will ensure the endurance of that most baffling of modern media phenomena, the celebrity referee.

World-class venues for sport and culture, and an incredible sporting history.

Nick Matthew, England Squash Player, three times World Champion Shot taken at The Whitworth, Manchester

To bring your event to Manchester, contact sportsevents@manchester.gov.uk

THREE WEAPONS

TEN DISCIPLINES

#ROADTORIO GET INVOLVED FACEBOOK.COM/FIE.ORG @ FI E _ FEN CIN G @ FENCIN G_ FEI