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Post Son - what happens to Spurs' Korean fanbase now?
TalentYang Min-hyuk has just been signed on loan by Coventry City, his third loan club since his transfer to Tottenham in 2024 as an 18 year old K League wunderkind.
It’s far too soon to label him the Next Son Heung-min (This is almost a great joke, albeit probably racist).
Son Heung-min has left Spurs for the MLS.
The impact of his departure is felt far beyond the pitch. South Korea account for just over 50% of Tottenham's global fanbase according to a previous Turnstile report.
The same report compared the Spurs-Sonny relationship with that of Yao Ming and
The Snoop Olympic Rorschach Test
The Buy SideLook at this picture and what do you see?
- An abuse of Olympic IP undermining the TOP commercial model?
Or
- What happens when you let creators spread the Olympic message to a vast and non traditional sports audience? Done with wit and a sense of fun, which are not words often associated with the Olympics and/or the IOC.
While we’re on Olympic marketing, is there a more annoying thing in sport than the IOC’s Visa exclusivity clause, which precludes everyone else from buying stuff without fannying around with prepaid Visa cards.
Reward Visa customers, but don’t
How to solve the problem of America
Unofficial Partner is growing rapidly in the US. Substack’s data gives a breakdown of newsletter subscribers, by location:
The podcast audience has always been bigger and more widespread than the newsletter, but each week the data shows the same growth trend across North America - see below.
Questions arising
It’s great news that people are finding and sharing the podcast and the newsletter in the biggest and most influential sports marketplace in the world.
The lure of America brings a question, one I’ve been asked in a previous life.
Twenty years ago, I was editor
Global fan as hallucination
The BundleThe global fan is one of those stories I’m beginning to lose faith in, like the conversion funnel and the pursuit of happiness.
The global fan exists because Netflix, Amazon and Apple want it to exist. And for as along as they want it to exist, the rights holders will play along.
At Sportel last year, Marissa Banu-Lawrence of Fox Sports put it well (on a very good APAC panel hosted by Imran Yusuf of SportBusiness): Australia is hyper localised. Even within Oz you have to go state by state. Australian sports fans are nuts for NRL,
The most addictive algorithm ever built
The ScrollI found an answer to a question I ask every day, usually when I'm about half an hour in to doom scrolling Spurs clips and dogs welcoming their owners back from war: What makes TikTok so addictive?
@asianbossmedia TikTok isn’t just addictive by accident. Its algorithm is constantly learning, testing, and adapting to keep you scrolling — often without you realizing it. #bytedance #tiktok #socialmedia #addictive #algorithm
♬ original sound - Asian Boss - Asian Boss
TikTok isn't playing the same game as everyone else.
The platform's recommendation engine, known internally as Monolith, doesn't care who your friends are. It doesn't