Unofficial Partner Podcast

The Premier League has won the facts. Manchester City were found guilty of 114 of 115 charges, with £830m of revenue inflated through sham sponsorships. Now the fight is over the story, and everyone has a different audience.
Dan Johnson, the Premier League’s former director of communications, and investigative journalist Nick Harris of Sporting Intelligence join Richard Gillis to pull apart the playbooks. They cover the League’s long silence and why it left a vacuum, City’s network of former players, ambassadors and friendly voices, and the question of who should declare who pays them. Then Andy Burnham’s unforced error, Number 10’s clean-up job, and whether City was ever really a private investment rather than a state project.
They also cover what the sanction should be, and whether punishing the champions damages the Premier League or strengthens it.
Guests
Dan Johnson: Premier League director of communications for over a decade, later at DAZN, and was chief communications and marketing officer at Whisper.
Nick Harris: investigative sports journalist, founder of Sporting Intelligence, who has covered the City story since 2011.
Chapters
00:00 Narrative or substance: where the City case stands
02:30 The Premier League’s silence and the regulator’s dilemma
06:00 A leak-proof process, a July verdict and an uncertain timeline
10:00 Should pundits declare who pays them?
13:00 Pundits as proxies and the “third-party endorser network”
17:00 Guardiola’s tweet, Yelland and Romano: who’s speaking for City?
22:00 Comms doing a comms job: City’s playbook since 2014
26:00 Andy Burnham’s interview and Number 10’s clean-up
29:30 The 14 September Downing Street meeting
32:00 Private investment or state project?
35:00 The trouble with “sportswashing”
37:00 What should the punishment be?
40:00 Does this damage the Premier League product?
44:00 The Premier League as regulator, and why its success isn’t an accident
Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartner

We publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. 
These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. 
Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 
Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 
If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Alan Gilpin is chief executive of World Rugby. He spent nine years at IMG negotiating the commercial rights to the 2003, 2007 and 2011 Rugby World Cups. So when he says next year’s tournament in Australia brings him full circle, he means it literally: he’s selling the same tournament from the other side of the table.
The men’s quadrennial World Cup brings in around 85 to 90 per cent of World Rugby’s total income. 
And he’s set himself a big number. World Rugby’s plan targets a surplus of more than a billion dollars from the 2031 World Cup in America, in a market where it can’t make FIFA’s demands of NFL owners and where, as he admits, putting on an event is far more expensive.
But the most striking thing is how candid he is about his own sport. Rugby’s biggest problem, he says, is self-inflicted: “we’re competing amongst ourselves.”
We talk about FIFA, R360 and LIV, private equity, the women’s Lions, what the streamers want, and whether sevens can ever pay its way.
Chapters
00:00 Football, North America and everything else
01:50 What rugby learned from FIFA’s World Cup summer in the US
04:30 Hiring FIFA’s people and the host-city process
05:40 Narrow NFL pitches and the venue shortlist
07:00 Why rugby can’t demand commercially clean venues
08:50 Margin over revenue, and 68,000 in Baltimore
10:00 The NFL owners and “should the NFL buy rugby?”
11:00 Why the US: the Japan 2019 precedent
12:00 France 2023’s losses and the end of the outsourced hosting model
16:20 A £1bn tournament: six revenue streams, one dependency
18:40 The federated model: who gets the money
23:30 Private equity, Prem Rugby and institutional capital
28:00 “We’re competing amongst ourselves”: rugby’s fragmentation problem
30:00 R360, LIV Golf and “disrupt from within”
31:20 The player welfare pitch and the national-team moat
35:00 Player wages and the professional women’s game
38:40 Same or different? The women’s British and Irish Lions
43:00 Streamers, eventisation and rugby’s product suite
48:00 RugbyPass, digital numbers and the wrong metrics
49:50 Clips, grazing and going the wrong way up the funnel
52:00 Sevens, T20 and the Olympic effect
57:30 What’s next: the shape of the game and the road to 2031
Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartner

We publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. 
These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. 
Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 
Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 
If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Gen Z has a new insult for anything that looks cheap: “that’s so AI”. Richard Gillis and Andy Shora of TFG Labs ask what that means for a sports industry selling AI to investors, sponsors and fans all at once. 
They cover who should own AI inside a club, what happens when the shirt sponsor is also your infrastructure, and why autonomous agents have changed the risk profile from bad copy to switched-off turnstiles.
In this episode
Why fans discount AI content, and why craft and effort still win attention. Trump’s “super intelligence” rebrand at the UN is the backdrop.[1]
The funnel in UK sport: 81% of rights holders use AI, but only a third use it strategically.[2]
Who owns AI inside a sports organisation: the chief AI officer, budget fiefdoms, and accountability when things go wrong.
Microsoft’s “humanist AI” and the rest of the new prefixes, and how AI became a sponsorship category as gambling leaves Premier League shirts.[3][4]
The painful divorce: what happens to a club’s tech stack when the AI shirt deal ends.
The ROI question arrives. Hyperscaler capex passes $1tn, and clubs are now being asked what their AI spend has returned.[5][6]
Anthony Gordon’s Spanish at Barcelona, and why translation by machine won’t buy you fans.[7]
US unilateralism, Macron’s “vassal” warning, and the supply risk of a model that can be switched off by a government.[8][9]
OpenAI agents escape a sandbox, and an agent breaches an Australian government site: what that means for match-day operations, scouting and the Champions League.[10][11]
Going local: open-weight models and Jev, the decision model that does the job of an LLM for a fraction of the cost.[12]
Sources
Trump wants to rebrand AI as “super intelligence” (Axios)
PTI Digital, The Sports Leadership Benchmark 2026
Microsoft drafts feel-good AI model guidelines (The Register)
AI partnerships in the Premier League (Sportcal)
Global AI investment forecast to exceed $1 trillion in 2026 (Goldman Sachs)
AI demand and capex (J.P. Morgan Asset Management)
Anthony Gordon speaks Spanish at his Barcelona unveiling (Goal)
US rejects international AI oversight at the UN (NBC News via AOL) and Trump renames AI as leaders jostle over dangers (AFP via Yahoo)
Anthropic on restoring access to Fable and Mythos
Australia’s prime minister criticises OpenAI over government website breach (AP)
OpenAI agent swarm exposes a blind spot in AI containment (CIO) and The Register
TypeSafe AI, Jev and Arize’s review of Jev
Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartner

We publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. 
These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. 
Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 
Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 
If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

A conversation about sponsorship effectiveness, creativity and the price of chasing vibes.
Richard is joined by Mike Grumbridge and Peter Wilson of Sid Lee Sport to talk about Mike's recent Marketing Week piece: "Stop confusing vibes with sponsorship effectiveness" which took the Levi's Stadium ambush at this summer's FIFA World Cup as a starting point in to an argument about the value of official and unofficial sponsorship.
From there the conversation widens: why sponsorship still can't prove impact the way advertising can, why media value remains such a slippery number, why "cultural relevance" has become this generation's brand purpose, what happens to a brand when you hand it over to creators, and why so much sports marketing now looks identical.
Summary: The long and short of sponsor effectiveness, with a hat tip to Binet and Field.

Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartner

We publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. 
These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. 
Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 
Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 
If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Recorded live in front of an invited audience of senior sports-industry figures at Teneo's London offices overlooking St Paul's Cathedral, this Unofficial Partner event asked a deliberately awkward question about the summer of 2026: not what happened, but what actually changed. 
Three set-pieces framed the conversation — the men's FIFA World Cup in the United States, the European Athletics Championships, the ICC Women's T20 World Cup and the Commonwealth Games — and the panel picked apart what worked, what didn't, and what will still matter next year. 
Beth Barrett Wild steps away from the ECB after running the ICC Women's T20 World Cup 2026 and leading on the women's game, having help build the competition side of The Hundred since 2018.
Jon Dutton OBE is chief executive of the British Olympic Association, formerly CEO of Rugby League World Cup 2021 and CEO at British Cycling.
Miguel Delaney is chief football writer at The Independent and author of States of Play, the award-winning investigation into how state money and sportswashing reshaped modern football.
Unofficial Partner is grateful to our friends at Teneo for hosting the event at its offices overlooking St Paul's in London, and to Neil Daugherty and his team for their hospitality and expertise. 
This episode is sponsored by Leaders in Sport
Next week we're heading to Stamford Bridge with the global sports industry for Leaders Week London, and this is your final call to join us.
Over two days you can hear directly from the leaders behind some of sport's biggest organisations, get in front of the people you've been chasing all year, and turn a few packed days in London into months' worth of business.
It's a rare chance to have that much of the industry, and that much opportunity, under one roof.
We're there every year, and we can vouch for the value of having the right people in the same place. Come and find us at Stamford Bridge and say hello.
If you haven't secured your place yet, now's the time.
Visit leadersinsport.com/UP for more information, and use code UP15 for 15% off your Summit pass.
Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartner

We publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. 
These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. 
Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. 
Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. 
If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.