We end the Sunday Columns of 2024 today. December for some is the start of Advent, a time of preparation for something more important than random blowhard opinions (on the sportsbiz). For most others, this month is just a time to start winding down for what is now...
The real moral of today’s Column is that in investing, sport or otherwise, people too often act like sheep. Not all companies in an “asset class” are going to be winners. Finance is a game for experienced insiders, who often use marketing words like “asset class” to pitch their own book and market their own expertise. Don’t fall for the macro pitch; stay micro.
Boxing gave the 20th century its finest moment in sport, the match for the boxing Heavyweight Championship of the world between holder George Foreman and challenger Muhammad Ali. This latter was simply an extraordinary man, so great that it is limiting to claim him solely for sport.
In the past, the wealthy took a road called the Grand Tour. The itinerary varied, but almost always included Como. Italy attracts the elite humans, and ‘twas ever thus. One of those new ones is Indonesian and is the owner of Como 1907. This football club makes itself the centre of quality family attraction and activity, on match-day and not, capturing a good part of the tourist dollar. Good investors can see a trend.
The last twenty years have been the markets of the trader/speculator, not the investor. This is a dramatically important statement, a tragedy even, but it is where we are.
“Calling someone who trades actively in the market an investor is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a romantic.” Warren Buffett
Today’s Sunday Column is a trip down-stream, probably just a subconscious desperate attempt to write something that the fucking AI robot can’t yet copy. Only the paranoid survive.
YT is this generation’s search engine, and it is where kids already find everything in their lives. Not just content, but “how-to” videos to get them.
It is the new content bundle, built with 2 advantages: it’s connected to the biggest search engine and maintains the most time spent per platform monthly on television.
The best and most popular historical fiction in the last 50 years, if you exclude wizards and dragons, has always been around mafia. "Godfather", "Casino", "Goodfellas", "Peaky Blinders" and of course "The Sopranos". So, one is always going to be attracted to this...
Como is a state of mind that makes the world and our sector seem a warmer place. It also benefits from being physically distant from any of the big city hubs that have dominated this sector for 30 years. As Grant Williams said at the top, you can’t really explain what this means, but every invitee here now knows exactly ‘what’ it is.
It’s a family thing. An extended family.
Congratulations to Jannik Sinner, winner of two Slams this year. Thanks to this splendid young man and champion, our household is obliged by my wife to see a lot of tennis these days, enjoying Italy’s finest era in the sport from the front seats. The country in 2024...
Today’s Sunday Column feels the need today to object. Football today is often not an easy watch. How many times do you see players, in the EPL, just woefully untalented in the finest arts of the game? Genius is an intangible by definition. I see very few sardines in the seas these days.
Many, including myself, have described these exact moments as a Turning, the Fourth in the cycle in this case, but maybe they are better described as The Twlight Zone. This is a moment of transition, describing perfectly the sport media and entertainment sector today.
In today’s world there are some things no one wants to let you say. Different to what they will tell you elsewhere, women’s football in Europe looks to be failing.
The IOC is doing what many great brands do. They are diluting what makes them special, to go for the mass-market and filthy lucre. The truth is that e-sports isn’t sport! Because computer games can’t credibly translate mens sana in corpore sano.
Sport tends to overestimate its appeal these days and those who believe they can always get their revenue growth by increasing prices are going to get a very big shock soon. Raising prices isn’t the answer. The party is ending.
Every journalist who writes about Italian football is at a disadvantage if he/she hasn’t yet visited the Via Crucis.
The chilling and humiliating defeat to Switzerland gives motivation to explain it, and this is today’s Sunday Column.
Rory is Rodrigo Mendoza. Maybe, just maybe, he has now suffered enough for all his disloyalty, his misplaced confidence in his maturity, his pride. Sport bathes in the sins of pride, greed, and envy. And this is today’s Sunday Column.
Today’s Sunday Column is absolutely more romantic philosophy than callous pragmatism. In this era of robots and AI, humanity feels so so attractive, yet fragile and fleeting. One day you’ll ask yourself what you did, and whether it was any good.
Today’s Sunday Column asks where in 2024 the exits are for sports investing, and how quick one can get to the door if needed, and if any of us are getting out of here alive. If you don’t know well where the fire exits are, the world is gonna be a cold place.
The ”evolution” you hope for means gradually growing into where you want to be, bridging the gap with small steps of adjustment. Good luck with that. Change comes at you from every direction, cutting off heads, but also creating opportunities.
This Column has been a fierce critic of how professional rugby union has been run in recent years, even after the investments from Big Finance. But the ferocity of those attacks correlates closely to the sadness of how a great sport is, in truth, being messed up.
Sport is changing and shivers will be going down the spine of a good portion of the community reading today’s Sunday Column. They know.
Big Media has been sports’ main client over 30 years, and the engine of its exponential growth, so one should worry, if that engine now looks to be showing signs of spluttering, or blowing altogether. The dominoes will fall quickly. This is the context of today’s Sunday Column.
Today’s Column ends, as it should, with optimism.
There is little immediate solace to offer around the “Storm” that is about to hit our industry, but at some point, the floods will subside, and doves will be sighted. The night is always darkest before the dawn.
Sport as an industry is Winona and Jim at the end of the 90s, and faces the Storm. But it will be back, if it believes.
Today’s Sunday Column is an apology to all those who have reached out to ask for some advice or mentoring. I’ve collected a handful of axioms that, hopefully, are useful in general, but especially to the industry. The answer to getting ahead in sport is to ask yourself where your gaps are in axioms 1-6.
It’s simply leadership, that intangible quality of infinite value. That is what we discuss today, because everywhere we look, the world is very short of quality leadership. And that’s not a small problem.
There has always been, and always will be, a simple formula for commercialising content. If it bleeds, it leads. We know this goes entirely against the idea of today’s safe spaces, and trigger-free zones, but the Colosseum has always wanted its blood. We have always stopped to watch the playground fight. And we cant help but slow down to look at the car crash.
Today’s Sunday Column can only by written on Palm Sunday, the Feast Day of Fickleness.
A good story of rise and fall, of expectations unfulfilled, of the ridiculous power of groupthink, and actually of people really enjoying putting others on a pedestal, to then watch them fail, carry a cross, and then be nailed to it.
This is episode 4 of a fictional series around the lives and times of the McKinsey Sport’s Practice in London. It could be named after any elite firm. All characters are purely fictional, and any resemblance to anyone, or any organisation, is purely coincidental. Events are the fruit of a warped imagination and a sense of never taking oneself too seriously.
The age of the financier is not ending, it’s only starting.
Humans work on three levels: head, heart, and soul. The soul is what remains when we are dead. What our friends, family, and lovers will remember; what our God will judge.
Where are we really going? Intimate human interaction, amongst throngs of people desperate for the belonging of tribe, or into the opposite world of fake AI fun and intense solitude? Great humans have always been the answer. Not, AI, not Goggles, not Sora.
Sometimes a conundrum, with which you have being struggling, presents itself in sharper focus, out of nothing. The sportsbiz today has myriad conundra. And out of nothing, watching Sanremo, one indeed became clearer. Il Festival della Canzone Italiana (Festival...
Will Ari Emanuel break up his baby? Welcome to the world of strategic corporate finance.
This is an article about nostalgia for a football that no longer exists. Riva was the 9, the best there has ever been in Italy.His funeral fell on Davide’s 60th birthday, so today’s Sunday Column is my gift for him. See you at the wall.
The only ever constant in life is change, and we are living right in the middle of a big one now. College sports is undergoing a revolution that will change everything in this industry in America.
“Te volemo bene Mister”. Who was The Special One and what did he teach us? Of all the souls that I have encountered on my travels, his was the most human.
David Soul is dead. Those of the Starsky and Hutch generation will inevitably feel a pang of sadness, of disappearing sands in the hourglass. Not because he was a great actor or singer (he was neither), but as a representative symbol of that era. The first Column of...
