Publisher is Dead

This isn’t an article about failed business models of digital content, viewability metrics, or low programmatic CPMs. Alas no. But if you’re into that stuff……you may, en passant, like this old Column. 

The fourth estate is bankrupt.

The time for merely predicting what is going to happen in our sector has ended, and it is no longer interesting (to me) to be pontificating about a coming Storm. People rightly now want to hear a constructive vision for what to do, ideally from the perspective of the field of action, not the press box. 

Re pontificates, Habemus Papum! We have an American Pope, a sport-loving Bostonian even, and that’s a fascinating dynamic in a moment when you can’t watch a player interview in America, without mention of God. Let’s see where all that goes. 

Today’s Sunday Column is a personal story about an Italian town called Modena, and a bad man who didn’t feel any duty of care to it, or to anything really. About a thug who wrote, in the first person, a fair few chapters of the text book of corporate carpet-bagging and hubris. A pirate. 

But it is really about the dangers of uncontrolled ownership of historic assets, especially reflecting on what we all need to do to safeguard this beautiful thing of ours, called sport. That’s worth writing about.

Protect, Experiment, Convert!

 

Captain Bob

At the start of the 90s I found myself on a conference call with the infamous Robert Maxwell, one of the last great media tycoons of the 20th century, also briefly the owner of an English football club. Maxwell in 1990 had acquired the globally-famous football sticker company, Panini, that at the time also happened to be my employer. 

To be very clear, Captain Bob was a savage robber-baron, and his full life story is grotesquely epic in every way, better than any Grisham airport thriller you could imagine. Take a good biography of him to a beach lounger this year. Thank me later.

Originally a Czech, he had escaped the Nazis in WW2, fought for the British, and became a genuine war hero. A similarly fearless pillager in business, he assembled in the 70s and 80s a vast empire of high profile media and IP assets, mainly through rampant and reckless acquisition. He lived his life under the suspicion of being a secret Mossad agent, and was in fact buried in Jerusalem.

No one is sure who Robert Maxwell really was, maybe Keyser Sose’ himself, but his daughter Ghislaine has certainly kept up the family reputation for ambiguous evil, as the Madame fixer for a certain Jeffrey Epstein.

Lesson 1: Fruit rarely falls far from the tree.

 

Welcome to the NFL

On this particular day, he was raping aggressively bullying the directors of Panini to secure access to the Modena company’s prudent cash reserves. Maxwell, an imposing physical presence, brought the full weight of his “personality” to that call, in what was a simply extraordinary 20 minutes . I was young and luckily not a protagonist in what unfolded. In all honesty, my decade of finance work experience to that point would have offered me no useful preparation or protection for what I would witness that day.

“I don’t fucking care about directors’ personal responsibilities or minority shareholder rights, get my money to London by close of play today or you are all sacked.”

Selfishly, silently, I did wonder if that would include a nobody like me. Did he know the names of all participants on the call? Unlikely, I concluded, so why not sit back and enjoy the show. In some strange way it was clear to me that this was a “moment”.

The ferocity of that verbal vitriol, delivered bizarrely in his rather plummy English accent, showed no respect for anything resembling company law and good governance, and it was, for me, a very raw crash-course on the harsh realities of business and high finance. The last naiveties of a young man, a CA, blown away. All those worthy modules and exams on the Ethics of Business.

Yeah right! Welcome to the NFL. 

 

“Winners Go Home and Fuck the Prom Queen”

This was the real sharp end of business back then, the zero-sum game of winners and losers, of players and the played. The natural habitat of Alpha Man, the corporate raider, where doing “your best” wasn’t ever an acceptable excuse for failing.

Over subsequent years, for some reason, I got more than my fair share of experience with those types. Murdoch, Berlusconi, Sugar, Branson, and all the Ant Hill Mob of football club owners along the way. Even the odd Crypto Bro.

These very badly behaved adventurers-in-life aren’t ever boring employees, guns-for-hire on a corporate organigram. They are the maverick wealth-creators, the risk-takers, people who build something of real value with, to quote Scarface, nothing but their balls and their word. They are Sir Francis Drake playing bowls before sinking the Spanish Armada.

Their character and their achievements sadly come as a single package in my experience. One thinks of Lord Flashheart. 

“If you want something, take it.”

Bob Maxwell in a nutshell.

You might not want these types marrying your daughter but by God they are the authentic protagonists of the history books. Think of the TV “fiction” Succession (loosely based on Maxwell’s despised rival Rupert Murdoch). Truer than you would ever believe; these people all exist. 

Younger readers shouldn’t be scandalised. They certainly shouldn’t be triggered. This is just how it was back then, the same ruthless hardball of late 20th century sport. An Alex Ferguson, a Dennis Lilley, the 99 call of the Lions.

Larry Bird!

Magic (Johnson) is displeased that his forever rival is being demeaned by the young upstarts so next day he repeatedly feeds Bird the ball, to allow him to extract cold revenge. Glorious stuff. The friendship and respect of the two greats of their generation, having mutual pride in who they had been, and still were.

In our day, this was the stuff that tested your worth, table stakes to even allow you to be on the battlefield in the first place. A right of passage. Today you may find it called toxic masculinity. 🥺

 

Pirates and Davy Jones’s Locker

Maxwell was never going to escape his inevitable demise. The very next day, after our call, the lifeless body of Captain Bob was found drowned in the Atlantic, having apparently “fallen overboard from his yacht”. Many speculated on darker conspiracies and, given how years later Epstein “committed suicide” in a prison cell, who knows? Either way Maxwell was now sleeping with the fishes, and no tears were shed.

I so remember the exact words from my boss, breaking the news to us:

“Publisher is dead”.

Amusingly, Maxwell always insisted on being called “Publisher”. A funny little aside, but in reality a relatively banal anecdote amongst so many hardly-believable other yarns that flew around the corridors of all his businesses. The bar for Maxwell shock-value was very high.

“ that’s nothing, did you hear about when…….”

After his death, the days that followed would expose to everyone the litany of lies, frauds and thefts of a desperate man, who had, et al, stolen the pension money of his employees (including me). All in an attempt to keep his over-indebted empire liquid. That’s why he needed the Panini cash flow. He was running nothing more than a Ponzi scheme at the end.

Let me tell you that there are many others in 2025 doing exactly the same thing. You just haven’t been made aware of them yet. PS: It’s always about the cashflow. Always. That’s why they hide it in the Notes to the Accounts. It tells too much.

Panini was sold to De Agostini  and I was sent back to help run the UK, to try and reclaim that market back from Topps who had stolen the English Premier League (EPL) sticker license. That in itself was useful, as my first experience of the infinite weakness of any business which only “rents” IP, as opposed to actually owning it. You are always vulnerable. 

I would leave Modena and Italy. Even my side-hustle at Sky Sports. 

But not for long. It’s a very difficult place to leave in the rear mirror.  

 

Tortellini Torre e Tette

Food, medieval towers, and pretty girls. Not a bad promo slogan for the region of Emilia-Romagna 😉. And yes, that was the formal strap-line back then, on postcards. 

I had first moved to Bologna at 21, in a decision that would in truth positively colour the rest of my life. I returned for that Panini gig 5 years later, and ultimately married one of those pretty girls, from Parma.

Aside from the famous latin-lover beaches of Rimini, this is a serious place, full of successful family-run companies of hardcore engineering and design excellence. You don’t piss about here if you want to succeed. You work hard, and you take very few prisoners.

Sean Connery and Larry Bird would have been at home.

Modena lies slightly NW of Bologna, Imola SE, and together they represent what in business is called a cluster. The whole area in fact is referred to as Motor Valley, home to high-end performance brands like Ferrari, Ducati, Pagani, Lamborghini and Maserati.

They like fast cars and bikes! Ideally with the grid-girls still around, if we are being brutally honest.

Despite this very significant entrepreneurial wealth, the entire region is profoundly socialist-red in its culture and politics. One of those absurd contradictions that make Italy the beautiful enigma that it is.

And that’s important. They don’t really consider themselves classic capitalists in Emilia. They are just building long-term wealth for their family and community. Their home. 

Food inevitably is the key that opens all doors here, including sport, and at Panini we’d often go to lunch at Da Lauro (Lauro’s Place) in the centre of Modena. To say the owner was a Ferrarista is an understatement; he had the full chassis of a F1 car on the wall, and photos with all the greats plastered on what space remained. When they found out I was Scottish, after serving the never-to-be-equalled “garganelli alla salsiccia”, out would come the Nocino liqueur bottle, to settle in to debate Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart.

The afternoon was gone, beautifully wasted, but you made real connections to last.

To some, this may all seem a bit Richard Curtis or Woody Allen romantic, but in veritas only in these places do you fully realise what Ferrari and motor racing mean in this part of the world.

A Ferrari car is only red, and Imola is very much home.

 

Tamburello.

For people like Lauro, the Imola track and its Grand Prix is Mecca, St Peter’s, Camp Nou, Augusta National, the All England Club, Lords. And there are millions of Lauros, entire families, all devoted to the sport. They include Bologna’s own Kimi Antonelli, (the first serious Italian driver for decades. Of course he comes from Emilia. Where else?).

The circuit itself is named after Enzo Ferrari, and it kind of really matters to this community. It defines and completes them. When my wife Raffaella was running Malboro’s motorsport sponsor portfolio, she took me inside the circus, to see it up close.

Imola is Imola. Ferrari is Ferrari. Deep roots and heritage. 

The story of Formula1 (F1) has been written on these straights and corners, especially on the flat-out Tamburello, which claimed the life of, amongst others, Ayrton Senna. There is a shrine to him there.

You getting the picture? Imola, amongst other storied venues like Montecarlo, is the very soul of F1. A cultural asset, not a commercial one.

F1 isn’t really about a celebrity like Usher walking the paddock, or the fake plastic trees of Miami, or even the palaces in the sands of Arabia. All of those are arguably acceptable if “additive”, but definitely not if “substitutive”.

Not in Emilia.

Hardly a difficult concept to understand. And yet it apparently is. Last weekend was a solid example of an industry losing its collective mind.

 

“One of you here will betray me!”

Stefano Domenicali, the CEO of F1, is actually from Imola itself, and tragically it is exactly him who explains the betrayal. 

Imola could drop from F1 calendar – ESPN

He speaks perfect business logic. Paraphrasing:

“ Sport is an asset class. Liberty bought F1 to expand its audience, in demography and geography, to grow the sport and the resultant value of the asset they acquired. The calendar is limited, we need to take races to new markets, and a country like Italy cant be permitted two GPs. We will substitute Imola for a new territory”

If you follow the money, if you speak earnestly at a conference, if you are doing an investor deck, all this makes sense.  But for many, it is the very definition of Judas’s thirty pieces of silver. It’s that bad. 

Many fans, Ferraristi, are disgusted.

“Gare di merda in piena notte senza un tifo reale”

Shit races in the middle of the night with no authentic fandom.

😂

Anger turned to rage, and then fury, when they saw what Ferrari did to its car livery in Miami, to placate a sponsor, and make money. It’s ugly, it’s inelegant, it’s classless, and in the archetypal country of beauty and style, that’s a real fucking problem.

It may make sense to the accountants, brand experts, and commercial directors, but it’s just not on.

A ‘nonsensical mess’ – PlanetF1

 

Barbarians at the gate

Barbarians, raiders, come in many different disguises, and often are difficult to identify.

As Tony Soprano tells us, some of the biggest pirates alive are respectable Wall Street bankers, today also maybe including PE and investment fund executives. High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI).

It’s the American Way. The Wall Street Playbook. One guy wins, the other schmuck loses. 

Fair enough. But here’s the problem.

These people are now all over sport’s capital markets, all pushing to “grow” a sport asset at all costs, no matter what it does to a 150-year tradition. Many are decent people but it’s a culture thing. The greatest difference we have in European sport, from our American cousins, is that we would never ever conceive the idea of shifting a club to a new city because the old one wouldn’t build a new stadium. They are in fact not “franchises” in our eyes. They are fixed community assets.

Big distinction.

But this is exactly what Liberty is doing to F1. Moving city, uprooting culture and tradition, for thirty pieces of silver. Domenicali should know better in hoping to get away with relocating the Imola “franchise” to some oil-rich ‘Stan.

I’d advise him to reflect more.  Or certainly check the time of the last bus out of his home town!

 

Judas ended up hanging himself.

We are seeing this kind of cultural vandalism all over our industry. Old-boy fans with sixty years in the same seat, being told they now need to relocate to accomodate “premium” hospitality. Local working-class folks being priced out and replaced by the tourists and big-eventers.

Loyal fans leaving their clubs in disgust, to follow lower-level football, that may even be rubbish, but is at least authentic.

If this isn’t a canary in the coal-mine, what is?

 

And it isn’t just football. It’s all sport. 

They are for example managing expectations about the snooker world title leaving the Crucible, Sheffield. 

Hearn: Cash is king in Crucible decision – RTE

Surely there is point with all sport when cash isn’t king, Barry? Surely we all have a duty to stop before we cross that line? We can all be great businessmen and still respect the games and memories of our fathers.

No?

One sentence will dominate the history books when reflecting on this period.

“It was an industry that focussed on short term revenues, with the ardour of Hunt hounds, to not then even get to keep the money for the sport itself. They paid it all, and then some, away to players and agents. Ultimately, they sold their soul for nothing really. How silly!”

This conclusion will be accompanied with a photo of Domenicali, dressed as Judas.

Sport isn’t an asset class!

And what if it isn’t a business?

 

The industry needs to be saved from itself.

We need to do something. Not just wave the yellow flag and call for the safety car. 

There is no one more Adam Smith and free-market than me. Economies only grow, and living standards rise, when the true wealth creators in life, the capitalists, think they can make money investing in a business. That creates jobs.

But competition, enterprise and laissez-faire always needs checks and balances, because it naturally tends to crony capitalism, corruption and monopoly. Pirates like Maxwell always pop up, and they have no soul or conscience, if not a black one. That’s why in business you end up with industry regulators and anti-trust prosecutors.

Sadly, these clerks and paper-shufflers often do more harm than good, acting when it’s already too late, with a preference for “form over substance”. I personally saw them block needed merger in the music business twenty years ago, attack Microsoft  when the internet was already doing that naturally, and now go for Google  when their “search” monopoly is already under siege from ChatGPT et al. 

No, regulators are usually rubbish, but if the industry of sport isn’t careful, these people will be appearing on its doorstep, asking about things like Imola. And we will have no one to blame for that but ourselves. In all this, full respect needs to be given to our German friends and their authentic version of self-regulation.

Germany 50+1 rule. – Wiki

This is what has prevented the kind of PE deal that now looks so utterly absurd in French football, and makes the Bundesliga still the best-run league of soccer clubs in the world. Their entire culture is protected with their own rule. As it should be.

Gut Gemach!

 

Sport must find a better relationship with Big Finance. 

The stewardship of sport for sustainable value isn’t naturally suited to the likes of PE, and this isn’t an opinion or hot-take, it’s arithmetic. 

PE and fund investors need to give their Limited Partners (LPs) a return, and have a 5/7 year timeframe to get that exit. That means they demand a quick pump-and-dump boost to an asset’s financial performance within two (European) rights cycles. Maximise revenues, expand the audience globally, and cut costs. Then punt it. The operational manager of these investment funds, the General Partner (GP), is on the 2/20 fee model and thus even more incentivised on immediate financial performance.

Sport instead has the longest of long-term outlooks. It has been an honest expression of human interaction and competition since Ancient Greece and Rome. It is a cultural pillar of society, with traditions and values. 

We can all see that this is a diametrically-opposed mismatch.

And what if PE doesn’t actually work for sport?

Calling sport an asset class is actually an oxymoron, and its real value needs protected from impatient financial owners bringing forward revenues and growth. That conclusion is not intellectually challenging to understand, and it’s not new.

Longterm assets managed by people on short-term goals isn’t going to end well. It’s misaligned incentives.

 

It’s always about Charlie Munger.

Show me your incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes. This is probably the most important quote in business (and life in general), and cuts through all the other crap, which is today called “narrative”.

Look at Zazlav at Warner Bros Discovery, making an obscene CEO salary at what is a decaying company, because he is hitting the short-term cashflow targets. Not bidding for rights, cutting talent and writer budgets, and….well….we all know. Ask their staff. 

The corporate C-Suite like Zaz is not personally bonused on the soft touchy-feely stuff of creative coherence and cultural tradition. No, no, no! They get their big bucks for hitting financial targets, earnings-per-share (EPS) , cashflow, and especially share price performance. So guess what they do?

They game those numbers as much as they legally can. They’ll chase short-term revenues and even try to pull them forward (Musk loves that one), they will “adjust” the hell out of that EBITDA number till it looks good, they will use share options, as they can put the cost of them “below the line”. And they will take on debt to buy back their own shares to boost the share price.

 

The Balanced Scorecard of Sport

The older you get, the more malleable and pragmatic your attitude becomes, compared to what in your youth were zealous non-negotiable positions. This is a concept best summarised by Reinhold Niebuhr.

“O Lord, give me the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

You get wiser as you get older.

My younger self from the call with Maxwell had strident opinions on everything to do with accountancy, economics and finance, in a very black and white kind of way.

A “view” was either “true and fair” or it wasn’t.

Profits, balance sheets, liquidity ratios all translated a business’s health into hard objective numbers, and there was an undeniable comfort in all that. But experience tells you that the real truth about value is usually outside the numbers, and this is absolutely the case with sport and all the creative industries. The trick then is finding a metric on which to incentivise people. Academics have been trying to do that for years.

Knock yourself out with this full Harvard piece from Robert Kaplan. It’s quite famous. 

The Balanced Scorecard—Harvard Business Review 1992

In summary it is telling us that the performance of an organisation cannot just be assessed by EBITDA and a few accounting ratios. It needs a wider perspective that isn’t told by revenues and profits.

• How do customers see us? (customer perspective)
• What must we excel at? (internal perspective)
• Can we continue to improve and create value? (innovation and learning perspective)
• How do we look to shareholders? (financial perspective)

Many annual reports from all of today’s big companies are full of the modern versions of this stuff. CSR, DEI, Carbon Impact, Culture. All positive, but rarely mission-critical to how CEOs act, and crucially where they make their big personal bonuses. 

 

“The courage to change what can be changed”

None of us can ever change the human nature and sins of a Robert Maxwell. But we can change how we reward the custodians of our sport. And on what conditions we accept their capital in the first place. In both cases, it cant just be all about the money, and the return on investment. We need to be smarter. And tougher. 

Also because the new money from the PE industry isn’t a model this is working, anywhere. They cant find exits to give money back to their LPs. And they are scrambling for liquidity.

PE borrows against holdings – Financial Times.

They’ve tried their continuation funds, and now they’ve got a new game to prevent someone else, independent, marking their homework.

Sports assets, are being used as collateral to take out loans, just liked mortgage-backed securities in 2007, the precise pre-cursor to the Big Short. I personally think sport deserves a bit more respect than that.

Amor Proprio! Amour Propre!

We absolutely need to bring Balanced Scorecard thinking into our industry, right now. With the correct incentives. It’s possible.

Less about bureaucrat regulators; more about better designed Long Term Incentive Plans (LTIP). Hopefully before it is all too late.

I fear it already is.

The Greek HNWI owner of Nottingham Forest showed us exactly where we are. How low we have fallen, in taking money from all and sundry.  Owners shouldn’t ever get to be on the field. And I’ll bet he can’t name the Clough European Cup winning teams.

I prefer Tortellini, Torre and Tette, and the raw authenticity of Imola.

You know it makes sense.

​