Papa’s got a brand new bag.

 

The return of the Sunday Column last week was part of a TTMYGH five-essay compendium about Fourth Turnings, called Fin de Siècle.

“Fin de siècle” is a French term meaning “end of century”, a phrase which typically encompasses both the meaning of the similar English idiom, turn of the century, and also makes reference to the closing of one era and onset of another. Changes which are actually taking place at these junctures tend to acquire extra (sometimes mystical) layers of meaning.

 Wikipedia

These days, one really struggles to not fall into the “end-of-days” melodrama that is so easily provoked by events all around us, in popular culture, finance, business, religion and politics.The evening news bulletins look like scenes from The Matrix.

Il Gattopardo, a previous Column, talked about another such moment of intense change, in Sicily at the time of Italy’s unification, linking to the decaying state of Italian and European football. 

Paolo Maldini, Il Gattopardo – Albachiara Journal

The Fourth Turning in sport in these last two years has since picked up pace, and this alacrity of change brings our industry to a really important Face-Off.

It is today’s Sunday Column.

 

Sport’s Fin de Siècle? 

When I first formally joined this sector in 1998, we were 6 years into the new dynamics surrounding the business of sport. In reality, the English Premier League (EPL) in 1992 kick-started this new professional era, where the revenues accruing to local football/sports teams would no longer be dominated by match-day ticket sales, but by media rights values for live game coverage.

My own Scottish Premier League (SPL) in 1998 had just penned a similar deal (with BSkyB) when I impulsively decided to become its founding CEO. The analogue music business, and its physical CD, was dying, so sport’s new paradigm came along at just the right time to offer me the last chopper out of Saigon for my career in IP.

Perhaps without it knowing, or caring, sport would in fact become the key differentiator in the battle to dominate the emerging Pay/Cable TV media industry, as fans/customers bought subscriptions to the broadcast provider who had exclusive live coverage of their favourite games and competitions.

 

A new era was born, that would change everything.

To that point, the elite end of European football had been dominated by the big passionate working-class cities like my own Glasgow, which had two genuinely competitive franchises in Celtic and Rangers, both regulars at the sharp end of UEFA tournaments. This all made for a pretty level playing field in traditional football across the Continent. Many different names appeared unpredictably in Cups; Aberdeen, Derby, Sampdoria, St. Etienne, Valencia, Panathinaikos, Red Star. 

When instead broadcast revenues started to reward mainly the leagues with big TV markets, it began a true re-ordering of the entire football food-chain. A big club from a country that could offer only small numbers of PayTV subscribers (Ajax and Holland, Benfica and Portugal), got financially blown out of the water by small clubs from the Big 5 leagues of England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France. Names like Bournemouth, PSG, Brighton, Atalanta, Fulham come to mind. These types of clubs, with all due respect, should be nowhere near the sharp end of elite football, but their fulsome media revenues have now also attracted new outside capital, further accelerating the polarisation and imbalance of it all. When was the last time a team from outside the Big 5 leagues won the Champions league?

So it is not hyperbole to say that the growth of broadcast revenues in these 30 years has utterly changed European football. Maybe for the better, but, for many of us, it has been a painful death of a thousand cuts, in a slide into also-ran mediocrity. Humiliating even. Younger fans, who didn’t see the glory days, feel it less, and that war has been long lost.

For 30 years, across all sports, we have seen this unrelenting trend-line of exponential revenue growth from ever-increasing media values. You had the odd blip, like the media recession post the dot.com bust and 9/11, but these can hardly be seen in the 30 year chart.

 

Up-and-to-the-right was the mantra.

It was the trope that became so unchallenged as to lead to some of our industry’s most embarrassing investments, by both private equity funds and broadcasters. No one thought rights could ever go down, but, with hindsight, they were just perfectly correlated to the health of the exceptionally high-margin business called subscription linear TV. Many are now learning that strong correlation works both ways, and spotting it early is the cornerstone of all top capital allocation and investment.

Once the bundle was unpicked, the carnage was actually inevitable. For example, Comcast, the listed parent company of Sky and NBC/Peacock, had a recent very depressing earnings call, as this post on Linkedin explains.

Fin de Siècle.

 

Riding the Media Bull Market.

Most sports leagues in the world in these years, as not-for-profits, became therefore very focussed on one simple job. Maximising the value of broadcast contracts tendered to the media market, to then send increasing dollops of wedge back to their member clubs/franchises. To piss away spend on player transfers and wages!!! The rest of what a league (CEO) did, materially, or as comms virtue-signalling, was pretty irrelevant. Your only job was in renewing the media deals every 4 years with significant uplifts.

So we all thought about the fresh valuable new slots when your live games would be played, (4pm Sunday, Monday Night Football, the “midday slot”, asking if the police would ever allow the cherished Friday night fixture. Could we ever get away with breaching the Saturday 3pm closed period?) Where did the emerging digital and internet rights lie, with the league or the clubs? When did rights revert back to clubs (24 or 48 hours?)

These were the animal spirits of the “I’m All Right, Jack” Years. Get into the big league, pull up the drawbridge, and laugh at what were your brother clubs flailing around on the crumbs of what was left. It was all about power, leverage, and finding internal compromise, around a pie exponentially increasing in size every day.

It was a lot of fun for those of a certain character.

This is the business we have chosen, Mikey.

The skill of the auctioneer.

So the real operational ability of any good League CEO back then was clear: bring in as many competing bidders for your tender as possible. Make the market think that “new entrants” to the market were full of cash, ambition, and testosterone to buy the best sport.  NTL, Setanta, BT Sport, the Telcos, ESPN, the early Tech Bros. Your job was to create a sense of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), to make broadcasters bid fully and recklessly, just to prevent a competitor gaining market share. In the later stages of this bull market, perhaps demanded by anti-trust regulators, you would split your games over as many live packages as possible. To maximise revenues from multiple broadcasters, whilst casually screwing the paying fan (needing multiple subs).

”They will always pay. They have no choice.”

Today they do; it’s called a firestick. Piracy killed the recorded music model, and it has now moved onto its next victim.

And here we are in 2025, and this has been our industry for a full generation. It was not a complex business but, sadly, too many people have mistaken a crazy bull market for their own brilliance. They instead just got immensely lucky. 

It has all ended.

It is the Fin de Siècle, and the people who have bid heavy in recent months, at the top, may now be left in coming years with some version of buyer’s remorse, holding the bag.  Imagine paying top top dollar for the regular season pap in the current NBA offering? 

Media’s pyrrhic victory in the NBA – Albachiara Journal

Today, over the peak of the bull market, the role of the Sport CEO has fundamentally changed.

Because Big Media has. When your banker sneezes, you catch a cold!

 

All Things Must Pass. 

Media executives have always been smarter than sport’s. They’ve had to be.  They were running a significantly more complex B2C organisation; managing strategies for content, logistics, customer acquisition and retention, marketing, pricing. To say nothing of the capital markets. 

These people, like Vic Wakeling, Barney Francis, Peter Hutton, knew the true value of content, bought those rights, and took advantage of sport’s superficiality and short-termism. Their bosses like Murdoch and Berlusconi got that whole value-exchange down to perfection and built real equity value through millions of subscribers and rich data on fans. They, in many ways, saw what sport couldn’t. 

This old paradigm wasn’t a partnership; it was very, very clearly a client/supplier relationship, where sport offered its best champagne “for rent” to the highest media bidder, cashed the cheque, and simply disappeared for 4 years. The broadcaster had all the risk, all the costs of content production, all the promotion of the sport, the management of the fan. But the billions created in Sky, ESPN, and Mediaset show who was more shrewd, and got the better deal.

Broadcasters were also delegated as the storyteller of our games. Sometimes that worked well, sometimes less so. It certainly doesn’t work when a competition is split over multiple different broadcast subscriptions. 

Sport’s storytelling is Jackanory – Albachiara Journal

But all things must pass.

🎶 Sunrise doesn’t last all morning.🎶

 

Ps: Poor George. You’ve got all these truly great songs trying, and failing, to get space ahead of John and Paul. 

Tomorrow never knows, but we can still say with some certainty that the Pay/CableTV model has ended. Cut-the-cord. Unbundle the offering. Piracy. Whatever. Bottom line is that the replacement streamers are low-margin businesses, and they just don’t have very much money for sports rights. They will cherry-pick ruthlessly.

As the growth of this media industry made sport rich, so its decline now will hit our sector very very hard.

Fin De Siècle.

 

The leaders of sport have no real idea what to do.

Business leaders, (and sport is a business), are like consiglieri. You get peace-time and war-time versions. 

The peace-time version is about managing growth in a constant steady line, being a good diplomat, and promoting the “worthy” intangible HR stuff like Net Zero, pronouns and DEI. The luxury taxes of virtue-signalling. I’m thinking a Tim Cook.

The war version is worried about making payroll, and having a product that resembles something with sustainable market fit, when destructive innovation threatens all around you. That would be Steve Jobs when returning to Apple.

Two different beasts.

Breaking news…

*** we are in war time now. ***

Maybe Tom Hagan isn’t the right guy anymore? But mom did make a little dinner. 😊

 

[As an aside, this is also a warning flag for all those sport headhunters out there. Your old trick of just recycling the same-old same-old candidates is a losing trade in 2025. You are pushing peace-time consiglieri, and we are all at war, fighting to survive. Every day I meet someone new, thinking about starting a new sport headhunter to eat your lunch. Coz you have no barriers to entry, no moat, and no imagination. I recommend you panic. If you get a chance to sell your agency, do it quickly.] 

 

Sport will become a much more complex business. For established rights holders you will need an experienced turnaround guy or company doctor; for emerging sports you will need a start-up guy with founder instincts. There will be no easy rights fee or minimum guarantee, so you will have to share risks and build partnerships, and you’ll have full ownership and control of a complex P&L account, where you will only know your total income at the back-end of things. This will require an entirely different conversation with your providers of talent; athletes. IP will fragment with more and more going to the folks on the field, where the distribution and monetisation of it will be entirely different. 

In short, you are no longer running an auction business. 

 

The plot thickens.

And in this we are just scratching the surface of the change that is coming our way. We don’t need a new bag; we need a complete new set of fucking luggage. Because the opportunities are everywhere, if you are willing to go on an adventure. 

Don’t skip this clip because the “plot does thicken”, and we will for sure be “seeing a lot of changes around here”. A real Face-Off between old and new.

When you strip it all back, the new “bag” goes by the name of social media. Or platforms. Let’s cut the crap and call it for what it is. 

The share of digital eyeballs owned and reachable by old broadcasters and Sport PayTV is reaching a tipping point of irrelevance. Certainly for anyone younger than 50.

I’ll give you 5m to let that sink in, and reach for your addiction of choice.

 

Welcome back.

All roads now lead to Google YouTube, and its platform rivals like Amazon and Netflix. The new leaders in sport will need to get their head around something they’ve never had to do before.

They will have to market and promote their sport, and pay their athletes, without the firm guarantee of safe money upfront with which to budget playing squads. They will be obliged to tell the stories of their games, the glory of their heroes, across segmented audiences, all wanting something slightly different in format and style. They will be forced to recalibrate their P&L to do without easy media rights fees, and more towards match-day ticketing and sponsorship. 

They will look to make deals and partnerships, share risks. But more importantly, they will use their “bait” differently. To attract fish swimming in different pools of audience, they will have to parcel up content, drop it in different places, and cross-promote their arse off. They will be required to fully leverage the creator/influencer economy, and convince their athletes to also join in.

Don’t be evil – Albachiara Journal

Or maybe not? Maybe all isn’t so clear cut?

Maybe we just need to separate a few things out and we will be fine?

 

The Empire Strikes Back.

The Masters, a few weeks ago, reminded us of something that is often forgotten in all this talk of audiences, dwell time, influencer-driven formats, Roblox, ARPU. 

It is this.

At its best, the product “sport” has no rivals as compelling unmissable appointment-to-watch “content.” It has no competition at all. It is unique. A product to die for. The fan loyalty of a mother to her children. 

In time, the things we cherish most will seem familiar to us once again.

And Rory, on his knees with his Holy Grail attained, now sits very naturally with all those other heroes in the sizzle reel.

The things we cherish most are indeed familiar once again. Because, in time, true sport wins! It always will.

For over 5 hours, nearly 6, on a recent Sunday in April, we saw a large percentage of a certain demographic of audience simply in a trance. Immovable. That demographic may indeed be 50+, male, white, but it is also very rich, with still 30 years of significant disposable income to throw at elite golf and such offerings. It is very passionate about what was offered by the Augusta National.

 

A product called “Authenticity”.

It is the greatest product in this 2025 world of fake, cheap and nasty. It stands out a mile away. It is a Brioni suit in the rack at Marks and Spencers.

A sizeable wealthy market of relatively price-insensitive people, totally intolerant of change in format to accommodate the new audiences that will one day replace them. Because they believe these younger transient content whores fans won’t ever love the sport the way they do, and will badly tarnish the product in their search for volume audience and money.

Augusta National instead leaves so so much money on the table every year. Because it’s playing a long game. In time, always, they will still be there.

All this is the legacy customer base. They are fans who will defend the authenticity of a sport to their dying breath, and they will pay (a lot) to do so. They are the ultimate cash cow business, and the true custodians of our industry. 

This is the very first Sunday Column from 2018, exactly about them.

It is a serious tangible Total Addressable Market (TAM), very distinct from the new challenger “sport content” that is built for platforms. 

Conclusion?

The industry of sport needs to really embrace product polarisation. One suit does not fit all. Brioni or not. 

It didn’t in 2018 either, but we have wasted seven years just talking about this stuff, and giving each other awards at conferences. Years of AYNE that still haven’t delivered a true understanding of what Hollywood v Arthouse really means, practically, in the modern world of entertainment content. 

 

Polarisation of Product-Market Fit.

All this is high-end segmented strategic marketing but people still don’t get what it really means. If you don’t buy that statement, choose any sport you want and ask if they are close to achieving it.

• Tennis and golf. Unable to create a Premier Tour around the Majors and the Principle of Scarcity. Long form sports tearing themselves apart because they can’t get the segmentation of the product right.
• Cricket. Losing the glory of the test match before our eyes. The product has been sacrificed too much at the altar of money and eyeballs. And India. Horrendous governance, according to Wisden, et al. 
• Soccer. Utterly ripped apart in a half-pregnant abomination of leagues all utterly unbalanced and loss making. Anything to head-off a SuperLeague. 
• Rugby. Paralysed by too many governing bodies stuffing a calendar to breaking-point, and still not able to translate the audience of the international game into club rugby. Players overplayed and underpaid. A bloodbath of red ink.
• Boxing. Dominated by circus match-ups involving amateurs with a social audience. And now basically run from Riyadh.
• Baseball and NBA. Losing their appeal with endless meaningless regular season games.

This, ladies and gents, is the Fin De Siècle.

But it is not the end of sport. It’s just the end of an old model. The opportunities in the segmentation of the product are endless, but it’s just going to be harder and more complex.

Sport is worthwhile. Very worthwhile. And we should remember that nothing worthwhile is ever easy. If it was, any old fart could run it.

So if Papa’s got a brand new bag, who then is Papa?

 

The new model of sport is Hotel California.

If I was the President or Chairman of a serious sport governing body, this would be my brief to my recruitment team. And how I would set up “incentives”.

Someone to:

• Protect the authentic history and uniqueness of our sport. Find a way to safeguard the purity of the long form traditional version of our games.This is a cultural KPI. Find a way to structure the sport to preserve the peak of ability and achievement, whilst paying our athletes the wages they deserve.
• At the other end, experiment fully with new formats, based likely around social media audiences, driven by influencers. Ride the wave of fast-moving Gen Alpha and Beta, and find a way to engage audiences. Do not allow other “challengers” to win this space. It is YOU who is the governing body of the sport.
• Work out how to convert the second into the first. Seduce new audiences into long-term interest in the legacy sport. That is where you will get your full bonus. That’s the hard bit. The good news is that a platform like YouTube is perfectly placed to help you. Recommendation engines, creator/athlete content. The trick is to find a way to never let consumers get away from experiencing your sport. This is the new Hotel California playbook of Sport. You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave us. A governing body, to do this, needs to control the entire customer journey of possible evolution; from Kings League to World Cup final; from TGL and Bryson YouTube golf, to Amen Corner; from padel to Wimbledon. From the Lions to Sevens via a healthy rugby club game.

Protect, experiment, convert.

That’s how I see the slogan of this new era.

Thats the new bag.

Aaooohhhh!

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