Don't Forget Your Tickets
Don' Forget Your Tickets is a podcast devoted to the unsung heroes of the spectator sports and events industries, the Ticketing Managers. We explore who they are, their well-guarded industry secrets, and how they entered the field. Beyond that, we delve into a broader ticketing realm, inviting experts from various fields to share their insights and stories. Our primary aim is to add value and highlight deserving individuals.
(The podcast was originally named TicketingPodcast.com)
Don't Forget Your Tickets
Phil Carling (interviewed by Adam Leventhal) on the Commercial Landscape of Football - A Live Special from Emirates Stadium in London
The Commercial Evolution of Football – Where Is It Heading Next?
From local sponsors to billion-euro global partnerships, football’s commercial landscape has transformed beyond recognition. But what’s driven this evolution—and where is it heading next?
At Don’t Forget Your Tickets at Emirates Stadium, Phil Carling, Managing Director of Football Consulting at Octagon Worldwide, sat down with Adam Leventhal of The Athletic to reflect on the journey from the turnstiles of Highbury to football’s billion-euro broadcasting era.
With over 40 years of experience, including senior commercial roles at Arsenal and The FA, Phil offers a unique, behind-the-scenes perspective on the rise of the Premier League, global sponsorship deals, the power of brands like Sky and Netflix, and the future of football’s revenue model.
In this episode, they explore:
- The post-Hillsborough transformation of English football
- How Sky and the Premier League changed the game forever
- Why understanding your club’s brand narrative is key to commercial success
- The future of broadcasting – Will streaming platforms dominate football?
Sit back and enjoy the conversation.
This Live Special episode of Don't Forget Your Tickets was recorded at the Don't Forget Your Tickets conference at Emirates Stadium, January 23rd 2025, as the eight out of 12 on-stage interviews that day. Phil Carling was interviewed by Adam Leventhal.
Don't Forget Your Tickets is powered by TicketCo and hosted by TicketCo’s CEO, Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg. The podcast was originally named TicketingPodcast.com
Football is more than just a game. It's a global business powered by sponsorships, broadcasting rights and commercial deals that shape the sport at every level. But how has the commercial landscape of football evolved and where is it heading next? And don't forget your tickets at Emirates Stadium. Phil Colling, Managing Director of Football Consulting at Octagon Worldwide, sat down with Adam Leventhal of the Athletic to bring down the shifting dynamics of football commercial systems. With over 40 years of experience, including leadership roles at Arsenal and the FA, Phil has been at the forefront of major sponsorship negotiations and brand partnerships in global football. This interview is an interview you don't want to miss.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone. Phil, thank you very much for being here. It's a pleasure. First things first. Just break down exactly what your title means for people that aren't aware.
Speaker 3:Okay, so I am Global Managing Director of Football for Octagon. Octagon is a sports marketing agency. We have offices in 27 countries, around about 2,000 employees. What we do primarily is we work with brands that use football to communicate with their consumers. That's it in a nutshell. So currently we've got around about 26 brands that we work with on a regular basis. They all have very significant portfolios within football Everything from FIFA World Cup through to Copa Libertadores. The front of the Liverpool shirt, the sleeve of the Manchester United shirt, deals with Lionel Messi, so on and so forth. So they have very significant portfolios within football. Our role is to consult, to help and to bring those partnerships to life. So that, in a nutshell, is what we do, and I'm a very lucky man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm glad you dropped some big names as well, because some people are reluctant to drop big names, but you did. I like it. Good, let's go back and set the scene for this session the commercial landscape of football, because it's inextricably linked with where you started not only Arsenal Football Club but the history of it, and where your love affair with them started in terms of a working position.
Speaker 3:Yes, so I've been around football for about 35 years. I actually joined Arsenal Football Club as their first ever marketing director over at Highbury, so a decent three iron from here. And I joined two months after Hillsborough. So you know, I have to say the turnover of the club was 4.6 million. 85% of the turnover was ticket income through unmonitored turnstiles. So we don't know how much the gate men were taking as a consequence of that. But that is the environment. You couldn't give sponsorship away. You know that was the environment that I joined.
Speaker 3:35 years later you know we have this shining camelot that is the Emirates, the Premier League, football in general. You know it's remarkable, the transformation. So it's going to be worth plotting how we got from there to now. But I'd like to say that the start of it was actually Hillsborough. You know, tragic as those events were, it did allow the Times to write a headline, which was that football is a slum sport for slum people played in slum stadiums. Very, very harsh, but some elements of truth within that. So that's the sport I joined.
Speaker 3:But Hillsborough was the watershed for three reasons. First of all, it created the Taylor Report and the Taylor Report led to these all-seater stadia. It led to closed-circuit television, stewarding, all the things that we take for granted now. The Taylor Report initiated that. The second thing that happened was the creation of the Premier League, and more or less coincidental with that was the arrival of Sky Television. And again, the transformation that Sky Television had, both in terms of the presentation of the product it really galvanized the presentation, the look, the feel, the excitement of football was massively enhanced by Sky's arrival of football was massively enhanced by Sky's arrival. And secondly, it provided the engine of growth from a financial perspective as well. And again, technologically, the arrival of Sky coincided with a global arrival of pay television platforms who, all of a sudden, they could devote 24 hours, they actually wanted the content, they could spend their whole time just talking about football. And again, the transformatory impact of that from a global perspective was absolutely enormous.
Speaker 3:And again, I'm a tiny cog in what happened there and I will actually call it out. The final thing was that I realised within a couple of days that I was working for a genius and the genius was David Dean. And you know, whatever you say, david Dean created what we have today, both in terms of the Premier League and the club Arsenal. So he had a total understanding, a total vision of what football could become. I genuinely believe that. I believe that when he bought the club and he set in train all the changes, I think he had a very clear vision of what football could become.
Speaker 2:How did he articulate that? Expand upon that point, because obviously we are in a completely different situation to back in the 1980s. Did he see this? Has it all come true or is it deviated slightly?
Speaker 3:I would say that in terms of the broad vision. So what you have to remember was that 92 professional clubs shared equally the television revenue, which was £11 million in 1990. So Shrewsbury got exactly the same as Manchester United. That was the fact of the matter and David had sufficient vision to see that that had to change. It definitely had to change.
Speaker 3:I think he saw that there was a global television market for Premier League football and as a consequence of that, that drives audience on a global level and that then drives sponsorship income.
Speaker 3:Not just your butcher, your baker, your candlestick maker and the local businesses, but global brands then would want to become involved in that. And the other thing that he had, which was, to my mind, a revelation, was he invested a complete unity of purpose around the club. So when you arrived in the morning, you knew exactly what you were there for, you knew exactly what you were striving to achieve. And he invested that not only in the commercial department I mean the commercial department, by the way, was three people back in those days but the ticket office, the lady that did the kits, right through to the coaching staff and the player side of things. So you know that unity of purpose taught me a very, very important lesson. When we look at clubs now that are failing, and immediately I'm thinking that they lack the unity of purpose. That is the thing that they need to. Who are you thinking about? I'm thinking about Manchester United funnily enough.
Speaker 3:So yeah, you can see that David had that vision and he drove it for all it was worth. So, yes, I'm an acolyte.
Speaker 2:Yes, and your season ticket is not far away. I can probably see your seat. Can I not, in terms of your sort of movement. From that point you stepped away from Arsenal and it gave you a good perspective on, I suppose, the growth and the the commercial focus that the Premier League had due to where you were yes, yes.
Speaker 3:So I left Arsenal. I love the club. You know anyone who works for a club knows it's a family and you know that it's difficult to step away from that. The problem is it's 13-day fortnights with no summers off, and you love that and you go for it. But I had a young family, so I was looking for a job that wouldn't involve quite the same level of commitment from a time perspective. It so happened that I was approached about the commercial director's job at the FA. I became commercial director of the FA in 1996. I met Claire there and it was a very, very interesting experience. I was there for five years.
Speaker 3:I think the issue there is that governing bodies are not commercial organizations, they're political organizations. It's something that I tell my clients all the time. Fine, if you're going to do a deal with UEFA, if you're going to do a deal with FIFA, you're going to do a deal with a federation, that's fine. But do bear in mind the politics will be first and foremost with that organization. And I used to report to a commercial committee and the commercial committee was comprised of people from the league, from the Premier League. You know the amateur game as well, the grassroots and all the rest of it, and there were people within that committee who were incandescent with rage if we were doing well, which you know was very strange to me.
Speaker 3:But you know we had fault lines that had emerged as a consequence of the creation of the Premier League. So the Football League did not like the FA and you know the Premier League didn't necessarily like the Football League. So these tectonic plates, if you like from a political perspective, started to impact the commercial side of things, and it's something that we just need to be very aware of as people working in sport is that, at the end of the day, we never lose the politics. So, you know, name any club and there will be politics involved in it. We're seeing that being played out at the moment in the Northwest the arrival of Fenway, let's say at Liverpool, the decision-making nexuses that exist at Liverpool, you know, are governed by the Fenway group, and the fact that there are three individuals who sit at the top of that, who never talk to each other. So, again, you know, there are dynamics which will then have an impact on the commercial side of things.
Speaker 2:You mentioned some of the brands and organisations that you work with now, individuals as well. Obviously, no one deal is the same, but how would you compare how commercial partnerships existed when you started to how they are now, and some sort of best practice, I suppose, in securing the right partnership?
Speaker 3:Well, that sits at the heart, really, of how the game has evolved commercially, and it is certainly the case that this is an industry that, from a commercial perspective, has reinvented itself every three to five years for the last 30 years. So I spoke about some of the numbers and some of the dynamics, and that is particularly true on the commercial and sponsorship side. So back in the day, the composition of the sponsors at Arsenal, let's say, tended to be local businesses. Jvc were actually on the front of the shirt, but it wasn't JVC, the Japanese multinational, it was JVC the licensee, the London licensee for JVC, who happened to be an Arsenal fan. So yeah, the composition, the numbers involved, the type of people.
Speaker 3:You could buy a Champions League sponsorship 10 years ago for 15 million euros. Nowadays you'd have to be paying 70 to 80 million, and the point about that is that that decision does not get made even by the marketing director. The global marketing director is a C-suite decision, because when you're investing 70, 80 million per annum into a property, you need to have all the data and the analytics and the strategy that underpins that. So that has changed. That has changed. Out of all recognition, I would say our biggest competitors now are McKinsey and Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group, you know, because they are the people who claim to have all this data and analytics and the relationships with the C-suite.
Speaker 3:My counter to that is that, yes, they might have all of that data and information, but they're theoreticians, they're not practitioners. We are practitioners, you know. I can tell you, more or less to the nearest thousand euro, how much it costs to sponsor the new FIFA Club World Championship. I can tell you how much it would cost to get yourself on the sleeve at Villa or the training kit or a deal with Lionel Messi, for that matter. I'm particularly brilliant. It's just that I represent money and I'm doing these deals all the time, so I know up to the minute, really, what the marketplace is doing. So anyway, going back to the general point about the data, the information, the sheer heft of what needs to go into commercial decisions in this day and age, it's a completely different environment you asked me about who do, I think, does it well.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean, there's some good examples that you know well in terms of the relationship that you had with Liverpool. It'd be interesting to look at that as a sort of a case study of the work that you did that people aren't necessarily aware of before and now, what that has manifested itself as yeah, so there are two sides to it really.
Speaker 3:So there's lots of insights, data and analytics. That comes from working with the brands and what they need to know Audiences, the composition of those audiences, the socioeconomic and the demographics of that audience. Where do they exist? Is it just the UK or are we talking about a global audience, which more often than not it is? So all of those sort of data points are very, very important from a brand perspective, but it's a little bit like a mirror. If you turn it round, it's actually very, very important to the rights owners as well, ie the clubs and the rights owners such as federations and confederations. So we've actually built quite an interesting business. Now it's a versioning business and we have to be quite careful about who we share the information with. But if we were going to a rights owner, we can say to them is that we have insights now because we work with the brands who are buying your products. So, as a consequence, we can get you dressed for the ball. We can get you positioned as a brand would expect you to be positioned.
Speaker 3:So that has become a very, very important piece for us in terms of working with the rights owners themselves, and we did do quite a big project with Fenway, with Liverpool we're still involved with them and that was a deep dive into their narrative and a global level, which used to be the measure to actually something. That's a creative narrative that you know a brand would want to take hold of and build its own brand proposition around. So that narrative, the creation of that narrative and I would say that that's a very, very skilled piece of work. I don't have the chops, you know, but I have creative planners and creative people who are very good at that sort of thing. Because what would have to happen let's say that you were doing it for Arsenal, right, building a narrative, a creative territory for Arsenal. You would have to take that positioning and give it to a Tottenham fan and have that Tottenham fan agree that it is authentic and has validity. That is the level of truth, it's a brand truth that you're looking for, and the thing then is that you pin all of that around a strapline or a rubric.
Speaker 3:Ours, for Liverpool, was this means more. So that was the positioning that we created. But within all of that was the fact that they don't have a song, they have an anthem, they don't have a stadium, they have a cathedral and all of that nice stuff that brands absolutely love. So positioning that building that they still use it in their sales deck. So when they go out and talk to, still use it in their sales decks. So when they go out and talk to brands, that is their positioning. But there isn't a professional club in this country that doesn't have that creative narrative. It just has to be discovered, it has to be teased out and used as a positioning, because ultimately that is intellectual property and the other things are commoditized. Like I say, perimeter signage, everything that gets eyeballs, is commoditized now. But the thing that you can't commoditize is intellectual property and that unique positioning that each and every rights owner will enjoy.
Speaker 2:I guess one of the big battles for any football club is the battle not to alienate fans that don't necessarily understand what you're doing commercially and why you're doing it. Fans that come to a football club and go this isn't my club anymore. It's all shiny, it's all beautiful. There's not that authenticity to it. Perhaps I'm not saying everyone's like that, but a lot are. That's a very difficult path to follow, or a bit of a tightrope, isn't it? You don't want to lose your fans by a commercial decision that you make. So what advice do you give to clubs to ensure that they don't make that mistake?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, actually, if you've created a positioning and a narrative that any fan believes is inauthentic, then you haven't done the job. That's really the key answer to it. I think there's also another piece of research that we've done into particularly the domestic fan base, and the reality is that in any club, probably around about 10% of the fans will never be satisfied, and what we say to you budget for them?
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly I think with the, with the rights owners and the brands, we say look, ultimately they're gonna hate you. Yeah, and just go with it. You know I can't give any other answer to it than that let me.
Speaker 2:I wanted to just get your take on. Obviously you're an arsenal fan. You've you've worked at arsenal. You love arsenal. But I wanted to get your take on the tottenham proposition because a lot of people will say that they've raised the bar in terms of their stadium. Obviously, they're going to have financial issues that they have to level over the next few years or decades maybe, but they have a very forward-thinking approach. They've done some very trailblazing things in terms of getting fans to stadiums, NFL relationship, the way that they want more and more concerts, Beyonce, et cetera, et cetera. Do you admire what's been done there or do you think the balance isn't quite right from a business perspective, not from a fan's perspective?
Speaker 3:Well, I have the power to be objective on this particular subject.
Speaker 3:No, I think they've done a remarkable job, an absolutely remarkable job. I mean, it is a state-of-the-art stadium. There isn't anything to compare with it, certainly in Europe, maybe the SoFi in America, but as far as Europe is concerned, daniel has built the statement stadium, so that much is a given. I think the issue there is probably twofold, and again, you know we're on Chatham House rules here, I hope. But I think that they've lost their way a little bit from a technical perspective, you know, particularly with the managers, and again, building that continuity. They had it with Potticino and I think they were maybe a season away from a trophy and maybe a couple of transfer windows, but they didn't persist with it and ever since then it's been a bit of a roundabout and that does get noticed and I think it has a major impact on the commercial proposition. So I think they need to go back to basics and fix that.
Speaker 3:David Dean used to have an interesting thing. He said that every morning he used to imagine, whilst he was shaving, that he had a tattoo on his forehead and it said get a decent team. So what that tells you is that here's someone who was running a club and he understood that the fundamental thing is the performance, the performance on the pitch, and I think you can lose sight of that when you've got this shiny ball ball. You're pursuing relationships with the NFL. You've got relationships with Formula One. You've got Beyonce singing your praises as a concert venue. Yes, all of that's very beguiling, but if it draws you away from your core proposition, which is to do, is to dare to win, right, that is ultimately what it's about Win, win, win and win again. Okay, if you miss that, I think it's problematic.
Speaker 2:Final-ish question. Obviously, we had the Deloitte figures come out earlier on this morning Real Madrid with a revenue of over a billion. Is it pounds or euros? Euros it is euros, yeah. In terms of where this landscape is going to be in 5, 10, 15 years, are there threats to the bubble? Yeah, going to burst, or are we on a steady trajectory?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say the answer to that question is that it won't burst because, ultimately, football is the content that more people in the world care about. That's it really. I mean, you've got four to five billion people who love football, so the nature of that may change. The Premier League could collapse tomorrow, but football will go on because it is the content that people care about. I think the threats going back to the threats, and we talked about it with the broadcast platforms threats going back to the threats and we talked about it with the broadcast platforms is that the engine for growth has been the pay television platforms. They are under pressure. They are under such pressure Piracy is.
Speaker 3:You know, I've got a 25-year-old son. You know he does not intend to pay for content. He will not pay for content. And then the streaming platforms are starting to get wise. They're starting to get wise to elite football. We saw with Netflix and their deal with NFL hugely successful over the Christmas. That gets those executives turned on because they've increased their subscriptions globally by 21 million. Okay, so that is a big chunk of cash. So my prediction for the future is that I think the pay model is probably screwed. I think it's probably screwed, it won't terminate for at least five years, but what it will be replaced by is probably streaming platforms that will stream the content for free. I think it will be streamed for free, but it will be paid for by advertising on a global level, so there'll be no segmentation by territory anymore, which we currently have. It will be streamed on a global basis. So you heard it here first.
Speaker 3:Yeah get my Bitcoin too.
Speaker 2:Phil, time has beaten us. Thank you very much for your time. I hope you enjoyed it. Ladies and gentlemen, Thank you next time.
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