10 minute read
Refurbishing the Old Dining Hall
From Queen’s Lane to San Siro Stadium
Current student, Tomas Dwyer (2020, Modern Languages) sat down earlier this year with alumnus Ivan Gazidis (1983, Jurisprudence), current CEO of AC Milan, to chat about his career in sport since leaving the Hall.
“Definitely very rowdy”, is how Ivan Gazidis, ex CEO of Arsenal and current CEO of AC Milan, recalled the atmosphere at his Cuppers final appearance playing up front for the Hall in 1983.
“The thing that sticks with you most are the moments. There are certain moments at Teddy Hall whose importance you won’t appreciate until much later in life.” One of those moments came when Professor Adrian Briggs allowed him to switch courses. “He believed and put his trust in me to make the switch from Physics to Jurisprudence and I’ll always be grateful to him for that.” Ivan also looks back fondly upon the relationships nurtured at the Hall: “Relationships made at the Hall have a depth to them which you can’t recreate later in life, it’s really special.” He also emphasises that it is a time in which mistakes will be made: “There is an expectation now that you guys should have everything figured out and be perfect. When I look back to when I was at Teddy Hall… I had no idea who I was, what I was doing, or who I wanted to become.”
Upon graduating Ivan began practising law in London, before asking for an overseas placement. He was given one in Los Angeles working for Latham and Watkins. It was here over a round of golf that his career path swung towards the world of sports management. “A friend told me he had an idea to start a football league in America, and I said, ‘I want to help you with that’. Two weeks later I’d permanently moved from London to LA.” Despite facing “a huge amount of scepticism”, including the LA Times dubbing it “Mythical League Soccer”, Major League Soccer (MLS) has seen astounding growth in a hyper-competitive American sports market. It cemented Ivan’s view that “the one guarantee is that life will not turn out as you expect it. I had a stroke of incredible luck with that meeting and wasn’t stupid enough to turn down the opportunity.”
After spending the best part of 15 years working on the MLS he returned to London in 2008 to become CEO at Arsenal; a role that comes with the unique corporate challenge of balancing both the on-field and financial performance of the club. “It’s an emotional challenge not an intellectual one. I might feel terrible after a loss, but you can’t allow yourself to go down that pothole.” At AC Milan he has succeeded in re-energising the club across all areas, taking over at a time when it was underperforming on the pitch and found itself in a financially precarious situation. “The club needed to drastically reduce spending and improve its performance. It’s difficult to improve performance even when increasing spending.” To do this Ivan had to buck the Serie A trend of buying expensive, established players with high salaries. “I knew we wouldn’t succeed by following the same approach as other teams in Italy. We instead sought out young players at a reasonable cost who we believed had high potential.” The approach has paid off; Milan now boasts the third youngest team in Europe, finished the season in second place and qualified for the Champions League for the first time in seven years.
The sports world has numerous complex issues to manage but adapting to the rapidly evolving sport consumption habits of younger generations is the most consequential task Ivan believes the industry must confront. “The biggest issue is understanding how the next generation of fans is going to connect with the game. When I was a kid, you couldn’t even watch live football on TV. You had to either go to the game or watch it on Match of the Day. Now you can watch every game live, there’s analysis, transfer talk, fans even talk about people like me! I had no clue who ran clubs when I was younger. Not only that but fans now want to see the training session, the joke between player and manager, who’s his girlfriend, where have they gone on holiday; and it must be authentic. Football needs to adapt to take advantage of the opportunities this presents to connect with the next generation of fans in an even deeper way.”
Ivan’s belief that football must stay relevant and engaging in the modern age is in part due to his view that it is a fantastic force for social change; an aspect of the game he is deeply committed to. This mentality stems from his early childhood experiences in apartheid South Africa. “My father was jailed for three years for his antiapartheid activities. He was in jail when I was born actually. Football reflects the issues we have in society, but it is an overwhelming force for good in showing an example of people of all races and nationalities, colours and religions, sexual orientations and even body types, working together for a common goal. It humanises people who are different to ourselves and this opens our hearts and our minds.” Ivan has vigorously promoted equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives at his clubs and also at the European level. He has also been a big promoter of the women’s game, with Arsenal having one of the most successful women’s teams in England, and AC Milan itself having established a new professional women’s team that this year qualified for the women’s Champions League for the first time in its short history. “Girls and young women are increasingly finding their sense of self worth and place from team sports - as men have long done - away from all of the pressures that are put on them during those formative and sensitive years. Images of strong women achieving things together through football are a tremendously powerful force for good.”
What does the future hold? “Right now, the goal is to have Milan at the top of Italian football, playing in the most beautiful stadium in the world (a new billion-pound, state-of-theart home for Milan is currently in the works). After that, who knows? If there is one thing for certain in this industry, it’s that you never know what’s next.”
Professor Carly Howett joined the Hall in October 2020 as a Fellow and Tutor in Physics.
Carly is a planetary physicist and an expert on the surfaces of icy worlds with a long track record in space instrumentation.
Exploring the outer solar system requires patience. It took Voyager 2 two years to reach Jupiter, another two to reach Saturn – then another five and a half years to reach Uranus, finally reaching Neptune twelve years after it launched. Pluto was explored by the New Horizons spacecraft, which took nine years to reach it. Basically, if you launch something to beyond Jupiter you’ve a while to wait, and while the space robot is adventuring, life on Earth continues.
For example, I’m working on a mission that will hopefully go to Neptune’s moon, Triton. This mission was conceived right around the time my second daughter was. I worked on the proposal while pregnant, and I found out we were selected for further study while nursing her. If it is selected it will launch when she starts primary school, flyby Jupiter when she starts high school, and reach Neptune when she’s old enough to vote. This mission will literally last her childhood, and I hope the results will be analysed for a long time after that too.
I’m not naturally a patient person, but for Triton I’m willing to wait. It’s a fascinating world, like nothing else we know of. We think it formed even further from the Sun than Neptune, in the Kuiper Belt, which is the same region of space inhabited by Pluto. Something happened (gravitational instability, or maybe an impact) which resulted in earlyTriton getting kicked out of the Kuiper Belt towards the Sun, where it was captured by Neptune’s gravity. Triton orbits Neptune in the reverse direction to other satellites (which is how we know it can’t have formed there), and at a very high angle. The capture event, plus its weird orbit, provides Triton with a lot of energy. So much so that several billion years after capture, Triton still has enough energy to power plumes that tower eight kilometres (five miles) above its surface and extend several hundreds of kilometres downwind. Maybe there’s even enough energy to make Triton habitable. To know, we have to go there.
There’s an old adage in science that every discovery is made because we “stand on the shoulders of giants”. In planetary science younger generations don’t just stand on the shoulders of giants, we operate their instruments, analyse the data they never got to see, and then (hopefully) make sure there’s more for the generation that follows us. My personal ‘giants’ were those people that built, launched and operated NASA’s Cassini and New Horizons missions.
Cassini’s thorough exploration of the Saturn-system provided data that changed my career. The observations that it took of Saturn’s moons revitalised my passion for science. I went from planning to leave research (and academia) to loving every second of it. Specifically, I became enthralled by the activity on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. This moon is small, even by moon standards (it’s about the same width as the UK), but despite this plumes of water ice continuously erupt into space from its south pole. Some of this ice spreads away from Enceladus, coating its neighbouring satellites and brightening them too. The rest of the ice forms another ring around Saturn, known as the E-ring. Understanding these eruptions is what I’ve been working on for a
Global colour mosaic of Neptune’s moon, Triton, taken in 1989 by Voyager 2. The dark streaks at the bottom of the image are deposits from geyser-like plumes, which were observed to be active by Voyager 2. Image credit: NASA/JPL/USGS
decade.
New Horizons was a flyby mission of the Pluto-system, which means unlike Cassini and Enceladus, it had just one opportunity to take the data and images it needed – there was no second orbit! To up the ante further New Horizons is also going incredibly quickly: 16 kilometres (10 miles) every second. So let’s try and put this in perspective. Imagine trying to take a photograph of a building you’ve never seen before from a moving car. You know where the building is, but you don’t know what it will look like, and you’ve only one chance of taking the picture. Finally, imagine this photograph is very important – so important that a lot of money has been invested into taking it and the world is waiting to see it. Oh, and you are going about 500 times faster than a normal car ride. This is what the New Horizons team was facing.
We knew where Pluto was going to be, but we still didn’t have an accurate estimate of its radius or its brightness (from a distance the two are interchangeable, a bright small thing can reflect the same amount of light as a darker larger thing). The investment was well spent though, the instruments and spacecraft were designed for this challenge, and we got the data. Late at night on the 13 July 2015 I got to stand on the shoulders of my giants as I was one of the first five in the world to see the first high-spatial resolution image of Pluto. New Horizons gave me a moment of true exploration. Now I’m working to pay-forward the favour by putting the next generation of instruments out into the deep solar system. To explore once again and to help my daughter’s generation have their own moment of true exploration of the outer solar system too. Wish us luck!
