The thing itself
9 posts>>Sport has reached its Boston Consulting Group phase
I usually call it Sport by McKinsey. The excitement of sport filtered through the lens of very boring people.
Unofficial Rule: Beware expensive consultants using phrases like 'the Beautiful Game'.
See also:
From The Simpson's MoneyBart episode.
Bill James: 'I made baseball as much fun as doing your taxes'.
The ECB has sacked Brendan McCullum, marking the official end of BazBall.
It's worth revisiting the start, because the appointment of McCullum was a response to something. It's a circle of life thing.
In We did a podcast with Mo Bobat...
He told a story about Sir Dave Brailsford doing a session at the ECB. It was about the role of style. Basically you want to be in the top right 'Brazil 1970' box. Bottom left is the sack (I showed this to Warren Gatland just before he got the boot at Wales, no pun intended. He very much saw the irony).
The other two are where the conversation is to be had.
In 2022, England beat New Zealand at Lords due to an astonishing innings from Jonny Bairstow. Peak Bazball. Mo Bobat sent me this message:
Another framework that I’ve often considered and used to discuss with Ed Smith when we considered selection strategy for our teams…
Winning takes care of everything etc.
But you have to be building, or appearing to build.
We'll take losing if it's moving forward.
See this piece from that time:
Unofficial Partner
NotebookLM has added the capacity to create AI generated short videos.
I gave it a try using a part of a podcast transcript from last Friday's episode with Carla Bilche and Joey D'Urso on FIFA.
The gist of this phase of the conversation was the premiumisation of the World Cup experience in the US, facilitated by the high quality stadia and wealth of the American market.
The transcript is here:
Joey D'Urso: [00:00:00] Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco in four years' time because you know, there are some... I went to the Bernabéu a few months ago and it's an incredibly premium stadium, but most of them won't be. And, and obviously the Camp Nou of Barcelona is being revamped, but most of them won't be on anything like the UK the US levels.
Joey D'Urso: And well, fundamentally the local- the consumers can't afford it. I mean, a lot of these US stadiums will be packed with not necessarily kind of the 1%, but just in a city like Dallas or, or Houston or Atlanta, there are a lot of people who are very, very rich by European standards. Um, income's way higher, and the, you know, European and US incomes have diverged massively over the last 20 years.
Joey D'Urso: So there's just a lot more rich people in the US who nothing of spending several thousand dollars for a, a trip for their family, which I think is a much, much smaller market in Europe. And yes, people will fly in and whatever else, but I don't think the prices can be as high in four years' time
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner : Yeah, no, it's a good shout actually. What's the view of, in Buenos Aires, Carla, of FIFA
Carla Bilche: it's pretty much the same. It's very similar in [00:01:00] Argentina. We have two different layers on this conversation. The first one is very related to what we have talked about, how FIFA is changing this this ICP, this ideal customer profile, to a more sophisticated one due to the, the World Cup happening at the States.
Carla Bilche: But there's an als- it's an additional layer which is related to what is happening in Argentina and in the local league, , the Premier League of Argentina, the thing is that we don't have a different ownership. So both the national team and the Prem- Argentinian Premier League are all the, all, all the tiers are owned by AFA, AFA.
Carla Bilche: and there are some teams, and I think Joey already experienced this, like Boca and River, who are charging tickets , in a very pricey way for, for locals. I don't... For example, if if Boca Juniors could, can charge a ticket in $300, and this is like the [00:02:00] minimum wage in Argentina.
Carla Bilche: So it's something really curious that it's happening locally because the AFA is also looking for this revenues maxxing, but at the cost of how local fans and how Argentinian culture is linked to football. So I think these two forces are colliding right now in the conversation here in Argentina.
I ran this text in to NotebookLM and prompted it to create a short form clip. If you haven't used this tool before I recommend it. Like all of the models, it's good at some things and less so at others. What I like about this one is that because it's Google, it makes integrating (stealing) YouTube much easier. It takes the transcript of the film or podcast and runs it straight in to your model in text form so allowing you to interrogate it in more depth.
The end result is here.
My conclusion is that it does a good job of adding value to the podcast transcript version of the conversation, particularly in building out Carla's description of FIFA's new Ideal Customer Profile and Joey's question about what happens to revenue-maxxing when it's a non-American market being targeted. The AI lands on Argentina, because Carla is from there and references Boca's pricing policy.
I don't like the look and sound of it. But that can be handled on a second draft of the clip. The temptation is to push this type of content out under the Unofficial Partner banner as marketing for the podcast. But do too much of it and you end up looking and sounding like everyone else.
Why are Scotland crap? That was the ITV post match chat.
Ian Wright compared them to Norway.
And he linked national team performance to domestic league media rights valuations.
I can see the point but not sure he's right. Or at least, it's a bit simplistic.
There's a lot of links in that chain.
I've never seen a breakdown between average match attendance and media rights values - I assumed the latter is often skewed by local competition in the media market rather than actual quality of the product.
And what of the link between the commercial appeal of the domestic league and national team performance?
If you throw in this Sportico chart it doesn't make it easy to draw that conclusion.
Emma Hayes on the difference between the experience of men’s and women’s football
@atouchmore This dopamine versus cortisol conversation might just change the way you think 👀⚽️
♬ original sound - A Touch More - A Touch More
A big night at the Big Belly Club on the South Bank. And a subject we don't do often.
The business of horse racing was the heading. The resulting podcast is out today.
There's a bit in the middle, where I make a trite statement about how power works and why change is so hard, and Brant Dunshea the CEO of the British Horseracing Authority puts me quietly in my place. 'Gosh Richard, I'd never have known that'.
It made me really laugh listening back to it in the edit.
