Castles made of sand.

Whenever you see music festivals like Glastonbury, most people, certainly those with anything resembling musical culture, will think of Jimi Hendrix. Whether at Woodstock or here below in Monterey, he kind of defined the genre, and what we see today is all in some way derivative.

Burn baby burn…

This is one of rock‘n’roll’s most iconic moments.

Back then, when the LP under your arm fully communicated your personal brand, it was very hip to carry Jimi Hendrix. He transformed, from a nobody backing musician, to an absolute TopCat headliner,the man who redefined the electric guitar and black rock music. Adored and respected by all his artist contemporaries, he found complete connection with a generation: what today they call “product/market fit”.

Two decades of founders and venture capitalists (VCs) all know how difficult that is to attain, and even harder to maintain. Because as you scale your new popularity to a wider and bigger audience, as VC demands, you often forget what made you so special and cool in the first place. You start to lose your authenticity, smell a bit naff, amid accusations of selling out for the money.

This is what investors often don’t get, certainly in the unique IP and creative industries, which include sport:

 

Some product/market fit should always remain niche.

Trying to grow it too much is counterproductive and will destroy it.

Many have argued for years that association football is making this exact mistake right in front of our eyes, endlessly chasing revenues and expansion. Crystal Palace not getting allowed into Europe, sacrificed on the altar of the multi-club organisation (MCO). Villa and Chelsea gaming the sustainability limits by selling their female teams to themselves at absurd valuations. Endless fan protests for being priced out of the sport they created. The reaction to the Club World Cup. On and on.

Blatter and Infantino’s quest to globalise and monetise the game is killing it, and there is not a day that goes by without many of us silently weeping. We can feel it slipping away, losing its authenticity, smelling a bit naff, amid accusations of selling out!

Longevity in product/market fit is obviously the “mark” for us all, and that is where true value lies, but it is very very illusive, especially if built initially on opportunism. Building a business on flashes in the pan isn’t a serious strategy. As Jimi explains:

And so castles made of sand
Fall in the sea eventually

– Jimi Hendrix

With Hendrix himself, we never got to find out if he would have maintained his universal appeal over the 70s and beyond. He drowned in his own vomit in 1970, after only three years of success and fame. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. There, too, he kind of defined the whole brand. Him, Janis (Joplin), and Jim (Morrison).

 

Confusing virality with true fan/customer loyalty. 

This week, a splendid American hedgie and his glamorous author wife came to Como on a mission to write a book exactly about longevity, and those companies who maintain their success over hundreds of years and multiple generations of ownership.

They offered breakfast at Villa D’Este and asked my views about what creates truly lasting value and IP, and how investor capitalism should be set up and incentivised to generate it. It’s a question that applies to sport investing, also. I waffled with my best sprezzatura for 90 minutes, over multiple visits to that simply astonishing breakfast buffet at the Cernobbio hotel, went home and coincidentally stumbled across a fantastic piece by a certain Mr Scott Van Den Berg, a commentary on the demise of one of the sport’s most quotable case studies.
(Read here,)

 

Sugar rushes never last.

The Prime energy drink, launched by influencers and celebrity boxers KSI and Logan Paul, has been so successful as to define an entirely new playbook in IP.

If you command a sizeable social media audience, you can basically sell anything to your followers. Millions of PPV buys for naff amateur boxing. You can fill Wembley with crap celeb footballers, sell commodity tequila or sugary drinks to your fanbase. You can even create entirely new formats of a traditional sport by bolting on any old nonsense to famous creators and YouTubers. There is no need to name anyone specific here, and some do this more elegantly than others, but the principle is always the same.

 

Proven audience and loyalty now trumps quality and talent.

In the past, you penned music, wrote books, played sports, and maybe became famous. Now, if you are already “famous”, you can be that rock star, that celebrity author, or even an owner of a King’s League football team. We now live in an arse-about-tit world where the Kardashians can move more merch and ad dollars than Bruno Mars.

Or do we? Prime is now apparently yesterday’s flash in the pan. A dead meme. A warehouse full of unsold inventory. For younger generations, this is a harsh but essential lesson in confusing virality with loyalty. It is so profound as to demand the full attention of today’s Sunday Column.

Are we now building our IP industry of sport on such castles made of sand?

 

The music industry analogy.

Whether via Hendrix, the Oasis return, or Olivia Rodrigo headlining Glastonbury (as was clearly always her destiny), today we are talking music, and the lessons it always holds for all of us.

Many working and commenting on sport don’t like this analogy. They find it forced and inexact, and by this point, tired, overused and clichéd. But they are wrong. They don’t like the analogy because they weren’t there, and can’t really grasp the best parts of it.

Here are the well-known building blocks of “sport as music”:

 

• • The album, the LP, was the perfect “bundle”, selling a high-margin product of 10 songs based only on a couple of really popular ones: the singles.
    → This is just so similar to the concept of the sport PayTV subscription, with some premium rights and a bunch of filler sport. Tech unbundled and destroyed the album, and it will do the same to this subs model of sport. At best, it will totally destroy the high marginality of the business, and many sports rights holders, like artists, will ultimately become poorer.

 

• • Music had its Napster moment when piracy was recognised as truly existential, forcing the total disruption of an entire industry.
    → Substitute Napster for “firestick” now. The cold shower moment always comes late to most, but piracy is the same plague of locusts now clearly devouring the main revenue stream of sport.

 

• • A complacent C-Suite of the music industry utterly missed the radically new consumption trends of kids on a PC. Over-confident fat cats, all gone within 5 years.
    → Same with sport now: very few senior executives in our industry could carry a 5-minute conversation debating why all roads now lead to YouTube.

 

• • A return to the importance of match-day. An up-weighting of the live-event ticketing revenues to compensate dwindling IP rights. Artists now need to tour to make any proper money, as Spotify isn’t paying for lunch, and selling albums is long gone.
    → Sport is now trying to achieve the same shift with hosting fees, corporate hospitality, huge ticket price hikes, and big-eventers.

 

Let’s be clear here. Contrary to popular belief, the music industry has never really recovered from what happened 25 years ago. It has merely adapted for survival, and there have been many victims and losers.

Precious few young artists now get any backing or investment. The (music conglomerate) majors have, by now, de-risked their investments into only proven big-name artists and singers coming out of talent shows with an audience. Conversely, no one in 2025 is dropping marketing and promotional budget on a demo track from an unknown kid in a bedroom. So the industry isn’t developing fresh IP: it has basically mothballed its artist and repertoire (A&R) effort, and is playing it very, very safe. Fill in your own preferred analogy to sport here.

It’s all so very tragic, but perfectly explained in this must-read dystopian article. If you can’t grasp the parallels, I’m not sure I can help. See it here.

 

What’s the best bit of the music industry analogy, you ask?

On reflection, our 20th-century music industry was rather complex and multi-faceted; a real test of one’s management abilities, EQ, and humanity. Your product is an artist.

On a daily basis, you were:

 

• Managing old glorious IP as catalogue and publishing rights, realising that royalties and copyright were two very different sets of IP. “Aladdin Sane” or “The Dark Side of the Moon” were your premier rights and generated annual yield, atop which you planned and built everything else. The base of the cake.

 

• Breaking new artists of quality and longevity, to be the catalogue of tomorrow. Real-deal product like Nirvana, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins.
  This model was, really, a VC business: managing risk and return across your portfolio every day, and reacting when you stumbled across product-market fit. Think of The Verve. When “Bitter Sweet” hits, you move into action with serious commitment and extra growth capital. A music label was a venture fund.

 

• Dovetailing your marketing plan with the artists’ tours for full promotional impact.
  In those days, a tour was seen as marketing to sell CDs. Now that has flipped entirely.

 

• Working to get your IP used in ads and movies. The sync bizdev function.
  Levi‘s and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”. Doing sync well, and maintaining authenticity isn’t ever easy.

 

• Hitting your annual numbers, as a listed company, often with a steady stream of transient bubblegum.
  Pretty boy and girl bands, novelty acts, Christmas singles. Yes, we too sold our fair share of shit unauthentic product, just like Jake Paul, to catch the craze of the moment. To make money. Guilty as charged.

 

Joe Dolce and this abomination kept Ultravox’s Vienna from Number 1!

Every creative business in the world, movies, ad agencies, publishers, music, and sport: they all eat the naff-burger every year. And they smile. The skill in running any such business is therefore in finding the right balance of product mix, and getting comfortable with sometimes having to sell “transient virality”.

This is the real “sport as music” analogy. Old musicbiz guys like me have seen this movie before and therefore aren’t so scandalised by KSI and the Ballers’ League. This kind of compromise was our daily bread and butter, where Norah Jones and Geri Halliwell can both make you money, if you have a sixth sense for balance. De facto, for every Joe Dolce, you also had an Elvis Costello or Billy Bragg, to still make you feel and seem authentic, as a brand and a label.

So important is this point, that it was introduced early in “Sport’s Perfect Storm“‘s second chapter, and it is obviously now the “balance” we all need to find in sport.

How does the sports industry hold its nose and do “naff”, whilst not hurting the quality offering we all love?

(An obvious obstacle to all of this is the disparate governing bodies, all thinking only about themselves. It prevents any attempts at joined-up thinking, with dysfunctional calendars being an easy symptom to observe. This conclusion will be very familiar to Column readers.)

 

The product of naff transient virality.

A manufactured concept designed with precision to attract and please a clearly identified audience, where it is accepted that this product, these artists, will have a short shelf life. In music, a boy band. In sports’ case, an influencer-led challenger league. Elsewhere, it is a comic or game franchise movie, or a hot toy like a Cabbage Patch doll. The business model of the flash in the pan isn’t a new idea. On the contrary, it’s always been there.

From my own direct experience, almost 30 years ago to the day, the Spice Girls were constructed as five individuals, who between them, could potentially connect with every single young female fan. The personalities of Ginger, Scary, Sporty, Baby, and Posh covered the vast majority of teen girls in that moment in time, with a very simple message of commonality: Girl Power.

Tell me what you want, what you really, really, want…

– Spice Girls

Genius subliminal marketing of a well-thought-out product launch, with no pretence of being authentic art. This is the old music industry in its bubblegum money-making guise, and it was our version of what today is a Mr Beast or KSI. And when they get stale after a few short years, you move on and build another product to replace them. Take That, to Backstreet, to Boyzone, to One Direction. Spice Girls to Atomic Kitten to Girls Aloud.

It’s not fucking rocket science, but you always need to be really clear about what you are doing, remembering what is authentic and what isn’t. To find an equilibrium for your business plans and strategy. That’s a wondrous EQ skill to behold when you see it, but sadly you don’t very often in sport. At least not yet.

 

Sport’s philosophy dissertation is incomplete. 

I think it is fair to say that few people in the last 10 years have spoken more than I about changing product market/fit in the sports industry. The need for revolution, not evolution. Think different, take a risk and swim out where your feet don’t touch. Influencer boxers, celebrity owners of football clubs like Wrexham. The shift to platform-ready snackable content formats, hate-watching, bro-betting, challenger formats. The Goal Own Goal podcast has, in fact, over 7 years created a continuum of debate on all of this. Myself suggesting the upcoming inevitable realities, my co-host Grant Williams pushing back in horror.

We sometimes reverse positions, but not on KSI. Grant has never been a fan and has always warned about castles made of sand.

If you change your product to appeal to the latest passing fad and shiny new thing, you will make your business victim to the next new thing, shinier and cooler than you. 

– Grant Williams

Whilst Grant is proven perfectly prescient here, it absolutely doesn’t mean that celebrity boxing and Prime was a bad idea for sport. In fact, the real thought-leadership now is not in defining the segmentation and polarisation of Hollywood versus Arthouse, it is in asking this purest of philosophy:

Who are we and what do we do? 

Because there are now various versions of “success” available for sport as an “asset class”.

Our American hedgie and his wife were studying businesses which were doing the same thing for a hundred years, but there are also other companies which make their numbers each year winging it with seat-of-the-pants opportunism. The latter business model is one the music industry called “SWATU budgeting”. = Something Will Always Turn Up.

So what type of industry do we in sport want to be?

In truth, we haven’t even started to frame this question correctly. Not enough thought is going into this mission statement. So many old blazers whose only honest thought is clinging onto their own power, now all in a tizzy about new formats and models. So many new financiers looking at sport through exactly the wrong lens with no sense of longevity. Not enough people asking younger fans what they actually want and will pay for.

What to do? Just continue to bumble along and hope for the best?

Or try and offer some leadership?

 

The Thin White Duke can maybe help. 

If your KPI goal is only money and scale, you can and will build everything on short-term transient virality and maybe get lucky for a while. It’s an option. SWATU.

In our case, these things were called compilation albums (the “Now That’s What I Call Music” series was an idea of Virgin’s Simon Draper). As a quoted PLC needing to grow and scale every year, we sought revenues, and for a few years, we made great money with this product. But was it authentic?

No.

Even without the Napster moment, the old music industry was already moving away from the glory and art of the concept album. We were focused too much on chasing money, giving emerging artists less time to develop, and having no feel for balance. And that’s why it’s easy for some of us to see sport making the exact same mistakes today.

One of the absolute wisdoms you learn with age is that doing stuff to please others, to gain popularity, to make money, is more often than not the completely wrong road for anyone really wanting to be special, create something memorable, or have a true brand identity.

Sport, we all know, does want to be special, memorable, and have a unique brand identity. It’s the very definition of the product. So let’s hear a London boy called David Jones, another contemporary of Hendrix, explain it better than I.

His philosophy is very clear, and if we accept the premise and apply it to sport, then maybe we get an idea of a possible future.

Some versions of sport should not seek to please, to gain popularity, to make money. They should set themselves out to only meet their own standards of product and offering, and to hell with anyone who doesn’t like that. We have excellent examples of this. The Augusta Masters, Wimbledon and some others.

These governing bodies noticeably do not compromise to gain attention or followers; they proactively leave money on the table, and they demand a certain code of conduct from athletes and fans. None of these real-deal sports should have KPIs of increasing popularity or monetisation. They should not be looking to please. They are what they are, and we should have the faith that they will be fine if they stick to their standards and heritage. Like Bowie, they remain glorious. This should be the base product of our industry of sport.

What else is in here to be protected?

The working class authenticity of sports like American football (college and NFL) and soccer, being priced fairly for the pocket of the ordinary Joe? The Olympics? Imola? This should be the real work of the stewards of our industry. Defining the Crown Jewels.

Interestingly, a version of this has been tried before in the UK. In 1991, the Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker, devised a list of events not permitted to be broadcast solely on the emerging pay-television services. Making them always available, guaranteeing ubiquity over exclusivity. And that was a Tory government.
Here (click) are the list of events. It’s educational. And it can be done.

If the new mantra from this diary in 2025 is now “Protect, Experiment and Convert“, one could perhaps start here, and learn from the All England Club and Augusta National. Stop thinking of the money as your only KPI, and watch how things then clarify in your head, just like the Thin White Duke tells us.

That then leaves you with one last task.

 

Define the acceptable protocol for naff sport. 

We’re far from the shallow now. It’s scary, but necessary.

How do you deliver T20 whilst protecting test cricket?

How do you do a Club World Cup and Champions League without utterly distorting the domestic leagues’ balance and calendar? How do you end the warped incentives that mean finishing 4th in your league is more important than winning the FA Cup?

Perhaps a column for another day.

It won’t be easy, given all the competing divergent agendas and politics around sport today. But nobody said it was easy.

Come up to meet you, tell you I’m sorry, you don’t know how lovely you are.

– Coldplay

This is the perfect apology that we all owe sport, for what we are currently doing to it.

We can do better. And must.

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