We did a podcast on PR. Called it Spin Class, which the participants didn't much like. They don't like the word spin, they prefer reputation, which sounds more grown up, and certainly more expensive.
Hear it here:
The Kirsty Coventry press conference, as we can now call it, was a big bit of the conversation. Jon Tibbs was in the room when it happened and reported back. Context is useful on these occasions. The summary would be that this was a blip at the end of what has been deemed a successful Winter Olympics.
See my previous note, written at the time, was a wearying counter to the PR Week meets Linkedin response, that this was a dereliction of duty from such a senior leader, won't anyone think of the comms department...etc etc.
A few things from the podcast that I'd like to capture here.
That press conference was not a PR crisis, but it is interesting. I'm generally hugely in favour of people saying what they mean when standing in front of a microphone. See also Sir Jim Ratcliffe's 'Colonised by immigrants' statement to Sky. I don't agree with him but it's really important that we know that's how he thinks. My esteemed podcast guests are among the best in the industry and I like and respect each one of them. But their job is to stop this sort of thing from happening. Keep Sir Jim away from a mic. Coventry should have done the bollocking in private. I disagree.
How will Kirsty Coventry deal with Donald Trump? This is the biggest challenge in sports leadership today. The LA28 Olympics is a politically charged moment in the American political calendar: a global platform in Gavin Newsom's home state during election year. Part of the architecture of this from a PR point of view is the dreaded Oval Room meeting cum press conference. But it's far more than PR, it's about what the IOC stands for, and whether Kirsty Coventry can not just defend it, but sell it. It will be the work of a morning for Stephen Miller to frame Olympism as a festival of liberal woke cuckdom. Gianni Infantino didn't have this challenge. FIFA doesn't stand for much, giving him license to wear the red MAGA cap and create a peace prize. FIFA's reputation isn't as valuable.
Bach's shadow. Jon Tibbs said that Coventry was a tough cookie and 'her own person'. I'm pleased to hear that. I've a feeling that the election process did her few favours in this respect, seemingly stage managed by her predecessor to allow his own agenda to continue, led by his 'chosen candidate'.
This podcast has been one of our best performing. Not a surprise, Simon Denyer is one of the smartest guys in the room.
Part of the conversation was about betting.
A question I've asked a few times on the podcast is about where betting sits in the private equity playbook.
I was struck by how bullish George Pyne was on TGL, and how explictly he referenced it as a potential betting product.
The p/e money likes betting for semi-obvious reasons to do with risk diversification and revenue predictability.
As Denyer notes, when evaluating sports investments, "a sport that has a second or third main revenue stream is really interesting compared to a sport that relies on TV for 90% of the money... you've got a material second revenue stream, and sometimes it's actually bigger than sponsorship."
There's a strong link between betting and other forms of fan engagement.
Sports that generate betting interest typically indicate passionate fan bases willing to spend money on that interest, which can translate across multiple revenue streams - merchandise, ticketing, premium content subscriptions blah blah blah.
This diversification appeal operates on multiple levels: Television rights face cyclical pressures from broadcaster consolidation, cord-cutting, and economic downturns. Betting revenue operates on different market dynamics - it's driven by fan engagement rather than media company budgets.
When Sky reduces sports rights spending, betting turnover on those same matches may actually increase as fans seek alternative engagement methods. Unlike broadcast rights that face intense bidding wars and regulatory intervention, betting data deals offer more stable, long-term revenue with predictable margin structures.
The "official data feed" model creates natural monopolies that resist competitive pricing pressure. A sport with strong betting appeal can monetize audiences in markets where broadcast rights generate minimal value, lending a bit of oomph to a rights holder's international strategy. Given this is how the investors think, there's an obvious incentive for individual rights holders to make their sport more 'betting friendly', to take advantage of the arguments laid out above. (We'll park the shouldquestions for a moment).
>>What if…<<
Just for sake of provocation, what would happen if we took a major women's soccer league and pointed it toward this question.
Traditional broadcast rights remain limited outside major tournaments, sponsorship deals lag behind men's equivalents, and attendance revenue varies dramatically by market. Unlike men's football where betting represents supplementary income, for women's leagues it could become a primary revenue driver during the growth phase.
Adding meaningful betting revenue could provide the financial foundation for league sustainability and player compensation improvements.
Women's football generates substantial in-play betting interest during major tournaments - the World Cup and Euros see significant betting volumes. But this engagement doesn't translate to regular league matches because betting operators lack comprehensive data feeds and league betting markets remain underdeveloped. Creating systematic betting data partnerships could establish year-round revenue streams independent of broadcast deal negotiations.
But.
You run in to the c word. Culture.
The (or, A) current trajectory of women's football is as a purpose-led family-friendly product - an alternative to the 'over-commercialised' excess of men's elite football.
Betting runs against that narrative.
Simon Denyer's analysis reveals the fundamental limitation: "It is very, very easy to create a new product... very different to completely changing behavior." 20% of sports fans bet. "That 20% who bet do so primarily on sports they already follow intensively".
The sports that successfully leverage betting revenue - tennis, golf, men's football - had established passionate followings before betting integration. They didn't use betting to create fan interest; they monetized existing interest through betting channels. Chicken, egg.
The other problem is data, or the lack of it.
"You look at how much revenue is being turned over on Serie A Football in Italy... then you go, well, how much of that is in-play? Right. And you'd be amazed. It's like sometimes it's 90%... If 90% of it's in-play... these are all things that require data, and these are all things that are enhanced by having the live video stream."
So the betting angle presents both opportunity and trap. The diversified revenue argument appears compelling, but depends on achieving sufficient scale to generate meaningful betting turnover. This requires substantial upfront investment in data infrastructure, marketing, and content creation without guaranteed returns. The timeline mismatch creates additional complexity. PE investment horizons typically span 5-7 years, but building betting-friendly sports requires behavioral change that operates on longer timescales. The revenue diversification benefits may not materialise within typical investment windows.
More fundamentally, optimizing women's football for betting appeal could undermine rather than enhance the current model, conflicting with broadcast appeal, attendance growth, or youth participation. These competing priorities could fragment development efforts and reduce overall investment effectiveness.
Denyer quotes:
Why the Betting-Broadcasting Convergence Dream Died:
"I don't necessarily agree with convergence of betting and sports broadcasting... there's been one good example of it, which was Sky owning SkyBet. They did a brilliant job of driving subscribers to SkyBet... But I don't think there's been many, many more, and I don't think it's really critical.
The Living Room vs Mobile Reality Check:
"My viewing experience, like most people's now is connected TV, right? I want the best viewing experience for my live sport. So that's on a connected TV. That is not a great place to stick a betting app or betting functionality. It's really clunky... you're suddenly trying to do an accumulator with five different bets whilst on your remote control. It's just not gonna happen.
Betting boosts advertising revenue but don't bet the house on it
"Although it may appear to you to be quite a large piece of the inventory, as a viewer, it's still a relatively small part of the revenue... you are talking maximum 10% from advertising overall. And let's say betting is 30% of that max... So it's kind of from zero to 3% of the overall mix. So it's not as big as you realize."
Wang’s book tackles this lament, which runs through the political conversation from pot holes to HS2.
The lawyer vs engineer framing (Warning, contains nuance).
Blaming lawyers for blocking progress is a trick beloved of populists the world over. They do it because it works. Lawyers are unpopular, until you need one on your side.
So, let’s be careful with the lawyer-engineer binary; I admire China’s bridges but don’t want to live there etc.
The flip of the CCP’s engineering mindset is a chilling disregard for personal liberty, a tendency to social control, treating citizens as raw material to be shaped by policies like one-child and zero-COVID. The results are cataclysmic if you live in the way of the next train line.
With that caveat…Wang characterises the US (and by extension ‘the West’) as a ‘lawyer society’ at the political level, focused on process, rules, and regulatory arbitrage. We reward the mastery of process over achieving results. We incentivise blocking, vetoing and weaponising rules to protect existing interests over risk and building new things.
When in doubt, commission a report.
Sport is an industry run by lawyers for lawyers. Discuss.
If that’s an argument you want to build, it’s not hard to find supportive evidence from the daily news agenda.
Even the sainted Parkrun doesn’t get through Whitehall without yet another feasibility study (from The Times this week).
This next one is from Ed Warner’s Sport Inc newsletter:
Since the labels lost control of the formats, tech companies commoditised the product.
Look at the video streaming wars. Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus are in a bloodbath. But they have a distinct weapon: Differentiation. If you want to watch Stranger Things, you need Netflix. If you want The Last of Us, you need HBO. Yet, if you look at music: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal all offer the exact same product: A library of 100 million songs. As Jimmy points out in the podcast, this lack of differentiation turns music into a utility. Music is now indistinguishable from tap water or electricity. “Right now, music streaming is a utility,” he says. “All the services are exactly the same, they do the same trick. If one of them lowered their price the rest are toast, because there’s no unique offering.”
So music as utility. Collapse of intangible value (until you get back on the vinyl).
This next bit is on the crappy economics of Spotify:
Here is the financial reality that Wall Street has historically hated about standalone DSPs like Spotify.
In a normal tech business (like SaaS or Netflix), as you gain more subscribers, your profit margins increase exponentially because your fixed costs stay relatively stable. Once Netflix pays $20 million to produce an original movie, that cost is fixed. Whether 1 million or 100 million people watch it, the cost doesn’t change. The margin expands.
Streaming music operates in reverse. Because DSPs pay out roughly 70% of every dollar earned back to rightsholders (labels and publishers), their costs scale linearly with their user base. Every time a song is streamed, a fraction of a cent leaves the building.
Iovine put it bluntly: “The streaming services have a bad situation, there’s no margins, they’re not making any money.”
This model only works for Apple, Amazon, and Google, because they don’t needtheir music platforms to be wildly profitable. Amazon uses music as a loss-leader to keep you paying for Prime. Apple uses it to sell $1,000 iPhones. As for Spotify, or any standalone music streaming company, they’re kind of screwed.
From mass audience to micro communities: The conclusion will resonate with the sports biz.
If Streaming Isn’t the Endgame, What Is?
What if Jimmy is right? If the DSPs are “minutes away from obsolete,” what replaces them? Well, I’m not sure the DSPs are going to disappear overnight, but if you’re an artist or a manager trying to sustain yourself in this evolving music economy, the answer is direct ownership.
The artists who will survive the next five years are the ones who are quietly shifting their focus away from the “ATM Machine.” They are building their own cultural hangars.
They are capturing phone numbers on Laylo. They are driving fans to private Discord servers. They are focusing on ARPF (Average Revenue Per Fan) through high-margin merch, vinyl, and hard tickets, rather than begging for fractions of a penny from a playlist placement.
We are witnessing the death of the “Mass Audience” and the birth of the “Micro-Community.”
The music industry has spent a decade obsessing over how to get a million people to listen to a song once. The next decade will be defined by artists figuring out how to get 1,000 people to care forever.
Imagine for a second that instead of Polymarket, this was FanDuel announcing an exclusive partnership with Substack. Or Draft Kings. What would your reaction be? What would everyone’s reaction be?
'Not Holy Grail truth'. I've been reading feature interviews with people from the prediction market firms. A comms playbook is emerging. Specifically, they talk a lot about truth. Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour defined markets as 'making the world a little bit smarter about the future', not 'Holy Grail truth, but better than the alternatives'. This explains the above Substack deal, and others with news outlets, which place odds in to news stories. See previous note re Truth as Commodity. Mansour's co-founder Luana Lopes Lara said 'Kalshi is trying to be a newspaper in a world of op-eds'.
Financialise everything. This clipshowsMansour saying“The long-term vision is to financialise everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion". He told the FT: 'Some of it could the future of, like, climate change and the future of our politics, and others can be, like, sports because a lot of people care about that'. The word Kalshi is derived from Arabic, meaning 'everything'. Mansour grew up in Lebanon. The push back is that few things in life have a yes/no answer, so it's hard to work out when something should be paid out.
Don't look here, look over there. The news strategy is a way of saying Kalshi and Polymarket are not (just) sports betting, despite a lot - most - of the money coming from football bets. The FT says 90% of all fees Kalshi has ever collected have been sports related. News, elections, Taylor Swift, these are markets that talk to the financialise everything mantra. It's about competitive positioning, but also gives legal wriggle room against US legislators seeking to clamp down on online sports betting.
Today's podcast is about how product innovation has changed cricket's audience and the problems that has created for a game wedded to a 20th century economic model.
'You watching this?'
There’s been an unusual feel to the current ICC T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka, one you don't often get during the early rounds of a major global sports event: Uncertainty.
England felt it against Nepal in their first game. ‘You watching this?’ was the gist on WhatsApp last week. In Colombo, Pakistan were 119 for seven in the 18th over, being dragged to the edge of elimination by the Netherlands. In Mumbai, the United States had defending champions India at 77 for six. That’s before we mention Australia; cricket’s big swinging dicks are already out.
For a so-called conservative sport, cricket is ahead of the game when it comes to product innovation
Compact, volatile, accessible to anyone with three hours and a phone signal, T20 has done something fifty-over cricket never managed: it compressed the development timeline for nations outside the traditional power base.
Franchise leagues, often derided for creating calendar chaos, have been a useful training ground for players locked out of the test playing arena.
Afghanistan reached a World Cup semi-final. Nepal fills grounds in Darwin. Italy qualified for the first time. The format works as a competitive leveller in ways that simply weren’t available to previous generations of associate nations, for whom the pathway to relevance was measured in decades.
But what now?
A brilliant product and a functional structure are not the same thing. Cricket has the former. It is still negotiating its way toward the latter.
The financial architecture of the game remains almost entirely oriented toward the previous world. Ninety-six associate nations split eleven percent of a $600 million annual pool.
The appeal of the format and the product has been there for years: associate teams generating the kind of moments that fill highlight reels, win hearts, sell broadcast windows and give tournaments their most unpredictable headlines.
Yet the commercial logic remains circular. Those moments generate attention, attention drives broadcast value, and broadcast value produces revenue. Most of that revenue flows back to the traditional powers, who advance deepest in the tournaments and collect the largest shares of the prize. The teams that supply much of the tournament’s early drama see little of its financial reward.
The calendar, controlled by the boards with the most commercial power, is built to protect bilateral series revenues rather than to create the repetition that turns tournament performances into sustainable programmes.
Under the International Cricket Council’s 2024-27 revenue distribution model, the 12 Full Members — Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies, and Zimbabwe — are the national boards that control Test cricket and hold full voting rights. They share 88.8 per cent of an annual pool of roughly $600 million. The BCCI, which runs Indian cricket, takes 38.5 per cent, around $231m a year, the largest share of any member.
A small team can cause a sensation in February and not face comparable opposition until the next qualification cycle.
This is the paradox every major sport is approaching, whether it recognises it yet or not. The global fan has arrived. Digital platforms have made geography largely irrelevant to consumption. A Pakistani cricket fan in Houston, a Nepali fan in Tokyo, a Brazilian fan discovering the sport through Portuguese highlights on YouTube — they are already there, already watching, already invested.
Who's leading who? And the Public-Private Question
The race for the global fan is typically framed as a distribution problem: how do we get our content in front of more people in more places? Cricket’s data from this tournament suggests the question is already out of date.
The content is finding the audience. The harder problem, the one cricket is living through in real time, and the one football, rugby, and basketball each face in turn, is whether the commercial and governance structures can reorganise around an audience that is dispersed, passionate, and no longer located where the product was designed to go.
Twenty20 proved that the right product can rewrite competitive hierarchies. The next proof of concept is harder: whether the right structure can follow.
America is the microcosm, host of the last World Cup and of cricket's return to the Olympics in LA.
As discussed on the podcast, the US cricket fan has been signalling their obsession for a long time now, to little response from the suppliers.
That latent demand will be filled by public money, in the form of the governing bodies voting for Christmas, or private money, in the form of the franchise leagues and their owners seeking to build team brand followings.
Or there's a third way, cricket interested people living in 'dark markets' go largely unserved by the sport they love. And find something else to do with their time.
