This builds on a previous thread: The Unofficial Second Brain
The race is on to productise LLMs and make them specific for the sports business (Clickbait title)
In January 2025 we had Charlie Ebersol, founder of Infinite Athlete on the podcast. I didn’t come out of the chat with any real sense of what Infinite Athlete is beyond an aspiration to be ‘the Bloomberg terminal for sport’, which takes in multiple data sources and turns them in to something useful. That podcast is here:
Variety reports on the pressure to get brands in to the live feed. A story as old as advertising has existed.
Whether this is a story or a non-story rests on whether you think the media side has the strength of will to defend the integrity of the product now.
We're in a weird time, when nobody is happy. TV viewers, sports fans, music buyers...everyone is pushing back on the over- commercialisation of their thing.
Just this week, we've had the same story appear in a different guise, this time on cringeworthy product placement in Netflix's hot rabbi romcom:
Context: This briefing summarises a conversation examining the accelerating trend of consolidation and private equity (PE) investment in sports talent representation, analysing the financial drivers, operational challenges, and future direction of these scaled-up agencies. The series explores "sport and investment and, you know, money in a broader sense and its impact".
The sports agency sector is undergoing rapid corporatisation marked by significant consolidation. Recent examples include Bruin Capital purchasing four firms to form Nomi Sports/As One
Note: 🤖 indicates the following material is derived using Chat_UP, Unofficial Partner's language model trained on our podcasts and newsletters.
Enshittification is Cory Doctorow's term to describe the cyclical degradation of online platforms. The central thesis is that the decline of digital services is not an accident or a result of corporate incompetence, but a deliberate, multi-stage process driven by a policy environment that has eliminated the traditional disciplines of competition, regulation, and user empowerment.
Enshittification follows a predictable three-stage lifecycle:
The FA Player cost about £2million.
It was the governing body’s owned and operated play, built by StreamAMG.
The death knell for the service was the last WSL rights deal, which went big on YouTube over OTT.
The FA will be criticised, because that’s what The FA is there for. Like the BBC, NHS and the Church of England, they are the biggest institutions in the country, so attract haters like a magnet.
For late arrivals to this substack, I’ve laid out
