Beyond The Pitch with Joao Martins
Most sports organisations and schools are sitting on commercial value they cannot see. The wrong audience framing. The partnership that was never pitched correctly. The pricing model that should be charging three times more.
Beyond the Pitch breaks that down.
Each episode deconstructs the commercial decisions behind the biggest properties in sports and education. Not the results on the pitch. The strategy behind how they actually make money - the partnerships, the pricing, the positioning that most operators never think to question.
I'm João Martins. I run Fever Pitch, a sports and education agency that builds and operates commercial assets for clubs and international schools in Europe. I'm not analysing this from the outside. I'm operating inside it.
For the people who run these organisations: club MDs, school CEOs, commercial directors, and the investors who back them.
Want to come on the show or suggest a topic? Reach out: https://linktr.ee/joaoinlinks
Beyond The Pitch with Joao Martins
The IMG Academy: building a $1.25 Billion Sports Education Empire
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Most sports academies sell coaching. IMG Academy sells college scholarships.
A tennis coach borrowed $1 million to buy a tomato field in Florida. 46 years later, it sold for $1.25 billion. How? By understanding what parents actually hire an academy to do: get their kids into college, not teach them better footwork.
In this episode, I break down how Nick Bollettieri built IMG Academy into a sports education empire by rejecting the industry playbook. You’ll see the three-pillar revenue model generating $300 million annually, why a 92% NCAA placement rate justifies $80,000 tuition, and how they turned facilities into margin machines across 14 sports.
This isn’t about tennis. It’s about productizing outcomes instead of inputs, building defensible pathways instead of generic services, and charging based on economic value instead of cost. The framework works for any business solving a high-stakes problem.
