Unofficial Partner Podcast
Unofficial Partner Podcast
UP491 'Don't use AI to replace thinking'
Arvind Iyengar is chair of Sportz Interactive and CEO of the Sportz Solutions, the global parent company. As such he now oversees a company with 700+ employees working across 40 sports worldwide, with marquee clients including UEFA, The Olympics, NBA, F1, Google, BCCI, Dream11 and multiple IPL franchises. The company is in an aggressive expansion phase, particularly in Europe.
So Arvind is the perfect guest to talk AI, betting, fan engagement and how McKinsey teaches its alumni how to think, and what that means for sport business.
A quick thank you to our friends at Spectacle Partners for the loan of their very nice new Soho office for the recording, and a particular shout out to Ellie Gray who came in specially to let us in and make us feel very welcome. That was very kind, thanks.
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 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here.
Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app.
If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.
AI adoption is not a bubble, right? It is here to stay. It is the way of the future. You need to adapt one way or the other. Or you're going to get left behind. I think there's no question about that. That has been proven. And so what the Premier League is doing with this is essentially saying, we want to get ahead of it. We want to partner with someone that is gonna help us on this journey. And so in that sense, I think it's the right kind of moves that organizations should be making as they look to build out.
Hello, Richard Gillis here. Welcome to Unofficial Partner that was Arvin Dinger, who's Chair of Sports Interactive, as well as CEO of Sports Solutions, which is the global parent company. And as such, he oversees a company with 700 plus employees working across 40 sports worldwide with a lot of marquee clients, including UA for the Olympics, NBA. F1, Google, dream 11, BCCI, and and multiple IPL franchises. So he's the perfect guest to talk AI betting fan engagement, gamification. And Hal McKinsey, he's an alumni himself, teaches its people how to think and what that might mean for the sports business going forward. A quick thank you to our friends at Spectacle Partners for the loan of their very nice soho office for the recording. And a particular shout out to Ellie Gray who came in specially to let us in and made us feel very welcome. That was very kind. Thanks very much Ellie.
Richard Gillis, UP:I thought it would be a nice way in. So given your background and your career, and we're gonna be talking about all sorts of sport and tech. It was irresistible and I want to talk to you about your relationship with AI and Sure. How you know personally and what tools you use and all those things. I've started to use Claude in a way that I was an idiot to start and now I'm coming slightly better, but I'm at an interesting point where we are using it as sort of background for the podcast.
Mm-hmm. Guests.
Richard Gillis, UP:So I thought I'll run this through. So I'll get vin's, LinkedIn details, I'll get a bit of bio and see what it comes back with. And obviously I shared it with you to see it. What did you think when you read through it, was it sort of accurate? Were there any I. Mistakes in there? Anything that you thought, oh, that's interesting. They remembered that or picked that up? What was your sort of response? Because it's quite interesting seeing your life roll back at you. Yeah,
Arvind Iyengar:no, I'd say the first thing before even getting to the response is the way you used it is the right way to use it. Because very often I think a lot of people. Think of AI as a substitute for doing the real work. Yeah. And so for, for lack of a better word, it's lazy AI prompting where you just feed something and you expect the answer. Whereas clearly the way you fed in the prompt there was thought into this is what I'm looking for. These are specific things I'm looking at, these are themes I'd like to talk about. And so you're using AI like an assistant as opposed to a substitute for the work you've done, right? Yeah. You've put a little bit of thought in, you've then gone and written the prompt, and then you've probably done a couple of iterations to get that back. So I think the way you used it is great. And I thought the tool was really interesting. I think it dug up mostly accurate information, got decent timelines or one or two things off about some, company numbers here and there. But you know, overall it was, it was nicely done.
Richard Gillis, UP:That bit about you not doing the work, I think is the most interesting part of where we are now. All of us, you know, in terms of these new tools or, you know, large language model tools, particularly because it's so easy not to do the work. And by the work it mean, so I write, you know, a newsletter for example, it is so easy to do that. Just put it through AI and chuck it out. Yeah. And you're seeing on LinkedIn lots of that sort of material, aren't you appearing and it's just a massive stuff. Some of it good, some of it not, but it's just generally we are in, we're early days, but it's so much of it. But actually what I noticed when I first started doing it is actually I don't remember anything. I don't actually, the difficult bit is actually the work. Mm. So if you don't put it in your own words. If you don't take it and then write it yourself. You are missing most of the value of doing it.
Arvind Iyengar:Yeah. You're missing the essence of the core work, like you said, and what makes it uniquely yours. And I, I've actually had a good rule that came from a friend of mine who said before he goes to any form of ai, he will first write down his thoughts. He will make a concerted effort of thinking, and then use, go to AI and use it as an assistant because ultimately. If you don't do that, then you're gonna lose cognitive ability. You're gonna lose the ability to actually think for yourself, and that's the dangerous part of ai. But the great part of AI is when you actually do all the thinking or a bit of it, and then use it to augment it to the next level. Because AI is gonna do a hundred things that you would never do, right? Yeah. It, it'll do 10 x what a Google search would do in your own research, so it can help you with prep like you did for this podcast.
Yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:It can help you synthesize in a structured way, what matters. It can help you pick up a few themes that you missed on your own. So there's. There's, there's right ways of using it. And and he was mentioning it in the context of his kids using it for homework, right? Yeah. And his kid just like, oh, I've got AI and I've got this done. And there's one end of the spectrum which is, oh, this AI is bad, or it's gonna take over the world. Or, and that's the wrong way to be because it is fundamentally changing the way people work, the way people live in many senses. Because this is a massive shift, like none other that I have seen in my life. And so I think. It is about trying to figure out how to work with it in the best possible way. In, in all forms really, uh, to make the most sense of
Richard Gillis, UP:it. How do you, what tools do you use? Do you, just give me a little glimpse of your day-to-day.
Arvind Iyengar:So I have to start with this anecdote. My name is Vin Ger. My initials are ai. So you're pa to this. I was, the joke in the company is we've been AI led before. AI was cool. So, you know, at some level, I've been doing a bit of this all my life, but I was also trained as a consultant, which means my real skills were trying to synthesize a bunch of thoughts into something without necessarily having the greatest knowledge of it. Right. And so, if you think about it, AI does a lot of what I was doing before, which was. Helping some people write emails in a consolidated way, helping with college apps and everything else. But I use a bunch of tools. The one that I use the most is just the Gemini Suite now.
Yeah, right.
Arvind Iyengar:So Google's come out with a bunch of add-ons to Gemini, and so there's obviously chat, GPT, there's a bunch of others that you start to think about when you think about rep and programming and everything else. But the Gemini Suite for just interview notes, for thinking, yeah, for putting together thoughts and for adding onto what you have, I find incredibly helpful.
Richard Gillis, UP:Notebook. LM
Arvind Iyengar:Is very good, isn't it? Notebook. LM is fantastic. And I mean, we're talk, we're doing a podcast right now. Notebook. LM has a opportunity to take Yeah. Notes converted to a podcast. You can go back and listen to it. So, notebook LM is also very
Richard Gillis, UP:first they came for the podcasters you said. And you said, and you said nothing. It was like, there's a, there's a yeah, notebook. LM is really interesting because you can sort of control the sources, which is obviously the worry about. The, the breadth of the, you know, the material going in, but you've got complete control over that, which I really quite like. I find the outcomes less interesting. I. But I find it as a use. I go there as a sort of note taking, or if I find something interesting, I'll put it in there and store it for later and then maybe sort of work through it in that way. your background, so back to what Claude found, and I'll just read this off because it's, it's relevant to the question that I've got. So you've got the IIT Bombay alumni or alumnus who started his career with McKinsey and co, I'm gonna come back on that in a minute. Participated in ESPN Star Sports Dream Job Reality Show in 2008. Finished runner up leading to a stint at ESS Singapore as presenter and writer. You're an MBA graduate from Stanford School of Business, finished top of your class and was awarded the Henry Ford at the second scholarship. So. Let's start with McKinsey. What does McKinsey do to you? How does it change a person when you go in and when you come out?
Arvind Iyengar:Well, McKinsey does a bunch of things. One, it makes you do everything in a structured way. So even now, even before I finish the sentence, I'm like thinking of the structure of, I'm gonna respond to that question. And so it really teaches you structured problem solving in a very meaningful way. Two, I think it makes you feel like you're solving the world's biggest problems, even if you aren't. And so you're in there, you're a consultant, you're like, oh man, this is like the biggest thing ever. Even if it's, you know, you're trying to figure out how someone needs to implement an ICRP or figuring out how someone needs to IPO, but the amount of access you get, especially for a first job state out of colleges. It's ridiculous. And three, I think it exposed me to a lot of people, both, some of my closest friends now, are friends that I made at McKinsey as well as a number of mentors. And so I think that entire network was really strong. So really the, the problem solving, almost the thing where I, I joked about like, you're solving the world's biggest problem, but that instills in you a bit of ambition to dream big. And, and as I think back now, even with Sports Interactive, it's about how do we make this one of the biggest sports technology companies in the world, right? And so you, you're always thinking big and you're thinking product. Um, but I think the most important aspect is the people because that sticks with you for life.
Richard Gillis, UP:So you get the confidence to say, right, we can tackle big questions. That comes from, it's that it's almost like a sort of, there's a university analogy, isn't there? That, that you, you are being put through a particular process.
Arvind Iyengar:It
Richard Gillis, UP:it is a lot like that, right?
Arvind Iyengar:It's almost like going to like a, an MBA of sorts, sort of finishing school, but almost a thinking school, if that makes sense. Right? It is. It is a way of. How do you distill a problem down to its most fundamental parts and therefore you feel comfortable in any situation, no matter how ambiguous or how far away it is from anything you've done before and be able to apply first principle problem solving to it and with it. I think with it comes a bit of success. With it comes then the confidence to be able to take on anything and to really dream big and think big.
Richard Gillis, UP:Do you think when, you know, back to the first question about ai, one of the things people say quite often is, oh, you know, there will be a cull of the consultant class and you know they are gonna go. A lot of the value that firms like McKinsey bring is in the AI can take away. Do you think that's gonna happen? Do you think that's true? There's some truth in that.
Arvind Iyengar:I think it depends on what part it can and can't take away, right? I think if you've looked at a lot of consulting firms, they've broadened. Their scope, so to speak, from just the super high-end strategic consulting pieces to also getting into a bit of an implementation to also then running transformation programs, to also putting in a bunch of tools and processes. I think a lot of the second order pieces are just gonna get much, much easier with ai, and as a result, consulting firms can become more efficient. But in terms of what makes. A good consulting firm. Right. And not, and again, not everyone does this, and I haven't, sometimes I have a bit of an aversion to getting consultants myself because you don't have enough skin in the game. Yeah,
yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:But I think the truly good consultants are able to look at the world and imagine a future that isn't there, and then put that into a way that makes sense. And I think it's going to be hard for AI to do all of that. And so I think the real high-end elements of strategic insight still has a place, um, in the future. But a lot of the, the deck churning, the synthesizing, the documentation, the tools around it, I think those will absolutely get impacted in a meaningful way by ai. And you're seeing consulting firms adapt, right. Um, you've got some of them with, you know, AI labs, AI studios, et cetera, in terms of trying to figure out what that is in the short term, I think consulting firms are going around telling everyone how to use ai. Yeah. And now that's a new part of business. But, but you're absolutely right. I think they, like many businesses are going to get impacted in a very meaningful way.
Richard Gillis, UP:What do you think when they come in the door? Not, I'm not talking about McKinsey, I'm talking about consultants, third party consultants that come in and say, right, okay. Um, VIN, I'm, I'm going to, I think you need to do this, that, and the other. What, what's going through your mind? How do you rate them?
Arvind Iyengar:Well, my, and, and again, this might be my own bias, having been a consultant myself, and I've said a lot of good things about being a consultant, but my immediate bias is like, oh, I mean, like, you don't know anything about my business. You've not run it and you're gonna tell me how to run it. And so the initial. Bias that I've had probably is a bit of skepticism, but as the company has gotten larger, I've learned to realize that there's a place for someone from the outside coming in with benchmarks from everywhere else, being able to look beyond your world. Like if, if you've been in running a business and you've been doing it for 10 years. Sometimes you have blinders on and sometimes you forget what else is out there. And so used in the right way, it's helpful. There was one client who used it incredibly well where he is like, look, you guys are consultants, but you are not gonna tell me how to run my business, but y'all are smart problem solvers, so I'm going to use, augment you to run my business. And so instead of saying, just give me the advice and then I'll take it, he said, here's what I think needs to happen. Poke holes in it and now go in and drive it in a few different places. And it kind of dovetails back to a start of conversation because it's a bit like using ai. Yeah. Right. If you just go in there and say, figure this problem out for me, you'll get something. But the effectiveness of it is not as good, but you use it collaboratively as an assistant, as someone you're working with and you're co-creating with, you can do a lot more. And I think that's the best way to work with consultants to also set them up for success.
Richard Gillis, UP:So let's talk about the sports sort of par, we'll talk about the company and what the ambition for the company is, but there's just, the bridge into that is, I sometimes want, I don't know, sports relationship to the question of external advice or is it a, quite often people say, well, it's a, it's a bubble. It's very hard to get into the sports industry, get into rights holders and, and advise them. There's whole, there's a whole load of things that we want. Leagues and tournaments and FIFAs and IOCs of this world all, all the way down. There's loads of things they could do. They could be, you know, they could run that. They could be a media house, they could be a entertainment brand, they could be a retailer, they could be Amazon, they could be all of these things. Is there a sort of need for external information or just advice that comes in and And is sport more protective of that? Is it hard enough than, say other sectors that you might have seen in your consulting journey?
Arvind Iyengar:I think historically it has been for a few different reasons, right? One is if you just look at the economics of sport and you look at that value chain, a disproportionate amount of money primarily goes to athletes, players, and. And then you've got team owners who've often made them money somewhere else. And so there isn't as much of an appetite to spend on non-core assets. And the core asset is athletes, players teams. Yeah. As opposed to technology consultants, the infrastructure around it. Right. That's one aspect of it. The second is, historically sports has been blessed because it's got these folks called sports fans. Right? Mm. And these sports fans are different from your everyday consumer. Mm. Right. I don't get out of my car ever thinking, man, that's a great engine oil, right? But if, if, but if Nadal had a great match, I'm like, oh man, yes. I'm Nadal fan, by the way. Right? Yeah. And, and so I'm at the end of it like, man, I'm doing great today. Why?'cause Nadal won it. That theoretically should have no impact on my life. Right. Or if my basketball team does well. Right. Or if Sugarman Gil goes a double century, or if, you know, pry is doing well on the track. Right. I'll, I'll feel good about those things. And so you've got this fandom where you've got this connection with sport that you don't have with other products.
Mm-hmm.
Arvind Iyengar:And so sports organizations have been almost able to get away with taking that for granted. Mm-hmm. Because they've built these strong connections and they've largely been rights organizations saying, I've got this incredible asset. I'm gonna sell it. And they've not had to do much with it. Right. You look at the NBA, which I think is a, is a great organization in the past, was run by lawyers. Start to think about in the David Stern era. Brilliant job, but was primarily a rights organization. That is, we own these rights and we're gonna sell it.
Mm-hmm.
Arvind Iyengar:What's changing now is sports organizations have realized the world is moving on. Mm-hmm. Right? The shorter retention spans, digital is coming in a meaningful way. We can talk about all those trends.
Yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:But as a result, they're moving from rights organizations to either product companies or essentially custodians of fans and having to build direct relationship with fans. Right. And so you look at the NBA now with Adam Silver, you look at what's happened with League Pass, they're essentially thinking of themselves as we want to build direct relationships with fans. And in a world where you've gone from, I just need to sell my rights. Mm-hmm. And so the only advisors I need are the ones who are gonna maximize the value of my rights. Mm-hmm. To, oh, I actually have to now build a direct connection with fans. I need to engage with other people. I think there is more and more openness. To work with external advisors, or at the very least top leaders who are going to help shape the future. Right. And that's essentially what we are trying to do with Sports Interactive. Right.
Richard Gillis, UP:So let's just get specific then. What does, let's, let's talk about what the company does and where it fits in. Because there's a lot of, when you get to, you get to big words, the sort of abstract now, like fan engagement Yep. Is just such a big word now. Data is such a big word. Gamification, all of these things. Let's put some precision around those. Yep. What is it that the firm does?
Arvind Iyengar:I think, let me put this very simply, right. It started off with us being a bunch of passionate sports fans who thought we had some pretty poor sports fans experiences on digital. So selfishly there were 70 of us who said, let's just build better experiences and then we could sell that to, you know, an F1 or a UFA or an NBA or an IPL team and, and see how that comes through. Fast forward, we're now 700 people. And the firm is not just focused on great sports fans experiences, which comes at the core of it, but it's about how are you actually helping sports organizations build for the future on digital? And that is how do you acquire fans in a meaningful way? How do you retain fans, right? Make sure they, once they come in, how do they stay on your platforms and how do you commercialize them with digital at the forefront, right? So that's our holy Trinity of a RC. Acquire, retain, commercialize, the holy arc, if you will. And we're trying to figure out how everyone puts that together, right? And the issue we see is no one has actually figured out all these three. Pillars together, right? Someone's able to come in and say, we'll catch you a ton of fans. Someone's able to come in and say, yeah, we'll make sure your fans stick around. Someone else is trying to sell your rights. But as sports organizations pivot from being large rights holders to going direct to consumer as they becoming D two C, as they get front and center of fans, they need to figure out a new way of monetizing and a new model of the way to work, right? It's, it's a bit like, if I had to simplify it, if you are selling radio rights in the nineties when television was around, you were probably gonna be a gunner soon. And so if you are still today going to be reliant on broadcast ride cycles as your sole source of revenue, and you're gonna do that for the next five, 10 years. It's gonna be trouble because the world is changing, sponsors are changing, everything around you is changing. And so you need to adapt to be able to sell that in the right way, but also augment it with so many other streams of revenue. And so we exist to bring all that to life. Right. And so when you say data, when you say gamification, when you say digital assets like websites and after you say social media, you say automated highlights. Those are a lot of things that we offer, but those are a means to an end. The end is the ultimate outcome of acquire fans. Retain fans and commercialized fans, and help sports rights holders, teams, leagues, organizations, broadcasters recognize that the world is changing. We need to adapt to it, and we need to be at the forefront of providing those solutions.
Richard Gillis, UP:You listed there, your sporting heroes, your tribes, your fandom in particular sports. What do we know now about how to acquire. Fans and by a choir, I mean, not just, I click on loads of stuff.
Arvind Iyengar:Yeah.
Richard Gillis, UP:And one of the questions I quite often come up against is that it feels like, I use this stupid phrase, but I, it feels like I'm going the wrong way up the marketing funnel. I'm go, I'm becoming less engaged, but less engaged with lots of different things. Whereas I used to be very, a core sort of buyer of, you know, sub subscriptions. And I'm doing that less and less now. But I just wonder if that's just because there's so much there. But how do you, what do we know now about why people follow Whispers fans? How would we target, you know, and it's a, you, it could be the local market is less interesting, it's probably more obvious. But then once you get beyond the local market. How, what do we know about that relationship? Because there's loads of people projecting onto, you get to demographics, gen Z can't concentrate. You get to all these cliches around that relationship, but what do we know for sure that works?
Arvind Iyengar:So there's a few different ways to think about it. I think the core question is why are people, sports fans? Every time it comes back to it, it almost comes back to two or three core concepts, right? One is identity, right? You, you view this as who you are, right? Mm-hmm. I am an adult fan. I am a Utah Jazz fan. I am a McLaren fan. Whatever the case may be, right? And so it is core to who you are and so it, you almost become a part of it, right? So I think that's one aspect of it. The second, A aspect is this entire piece of collective effervescence, right? Which is being part of a shared experience while you're watching something, and there are very few of these. Avenues that exist in an increasingly digital and fragmented world when you're in a stadium with, you know, 10,000 other people. Whether that's a concept, whether that's sport, there's very few places that can do this.
Mm-hmm.
Arvind Iyengar:It is this concept of being together and experiencing this moment in time together.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:And that, so it's not just
Richard Gillis, UP:important that I see it, it's important that I think you are seeing it as well. Correct. Yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:And, and which is why, you know, now how do you do that on digital? Geo Star, which is, you know, Disney's OTT platform in India does this whole number of concurrent viewers during a match. It seems small, but when you're watching the game and you're like, oh, there's 20 million people watching with me in a small way, it's challenging channeling that. So they're
Richard Gillis, UP:showing that number as on the,
Arvind Iyengar:they're showing it live. Right. And we were working with them in the early days to just say, how do you just display this on the stream? But that number is saying, I'm part of something bigger. I'm part of the shared experience. Right. And so in a world of. Abundance, if you will. To your point, there's so many things, can I sign up for something? It's, it's almost the scarce assets and there are very few avenues where you can do this collective f of essence. There's very few avenues where you can connect in this meaningful way that I think is part of that shared experience. And that's, that's another reason people are sports fans, right? And then I think the third, which is maybe a subset of all this, but comes out of it, is then the ability to interact and engage and build that community. So how do I then, an old sports fan is used to a one, to many broadcast linear feed, see everything now. People want to engage, now people want to click. Now people want to do something. And so these, I think, tie into certain tenets of why people are sports fans. And then as a result of it, there are certain behaviors and biases that we look at, which I'm happy to talk about. But how do you then start to create experiences that are memorable that. Are easy for fans to consume. How do you build products, whether it's inside a stadium, whether it's at a product, or what we do on digital, which are taking into account some of these factors, to make it a seamless experience.
Richard Gillis, UP:Do you the, the world that you painted that, you know, and we're all on every sport is on that journey from, well, not all of them, actually. There's gonna be a few big sports that we're gonna be fine and it will retain a broadcast rights model because there is a demand for their, you know, and that'll happen. Um, you get to the existential question about where the money's gonna come from and are they, you know, if you are not the NBA, you just signed a, you know, enormous 10 year rights deal. What are you gonna do? Where is, can you monetize those digital fans who are consuming grazing? But it's a different relationship. They're not paying for anything. All of those questions that have been, you know, haunting the sports market for a long, you know, a while, what's gonna happen? How does the money, where does the money go? Is it just gonna be a massive cataclysmic sort of music industry collapse where you know, the money just disappears and a different model appears, but it's a completely different economy and it's, you know, you'll get to a big, get bigger. Model winner takes all type model across different sports, and we're seeing that already. But what, what's your sort of view on that in terms of the monetization question?
Arvind Iyengar:So I think there's again, few angles to that, right? I think one is if you build the right product, they will come, right? And so again, sports movie reference field of dreams, but if you manage to create something for the audience makes very under, right? By the way,
Richard Gillis, UP:field of Dreams, it is under, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:So. We can do, maybe at the end of this, we can do best sports movies of all time. Yeah. Yeah. But it, it wouldn't crack my top five, but it's good. Yeah. Um,
Richard Gillis, UP:do you wanna know my role, my role is if I know, the more I know the sport, the less I like the film. It's really hard for, to me to watch a football cricket film or a golf film, but I can watch a baseball film, so I dunno much about it. So, field of Dreams is, I like Field of Dreams, but I, because the, the, the stupidity of the baseball scenes won't get in the way of my enjoyment.
Arvind Iyengar:That makes a lot of sense.
Richard Gillis, UP:Ted Lasso. I just can't watch it because the football, it's not realistic. It's just, it becomes silly at that point.
Arvind Iyengar:Mm. Understood. That, by the way, is a great show just because of the kind of character it's Yeah, I know, but as, as I think just coming back to it, I think the, the real question is how do you figure out the right audience for your sport? Right? And so, not everyone's gonna be an NBA, not everyone's gonna be Formula One. Not everyone's gonna be, I. You know, IPL and Cricket, but you look at Kadi and Cricket or you look at surfing in the US with World Surf League, or you look at what flow sports has done with amateur wrestling. There are audiences for several sports. The key is to crack into your core audience and then serve them in the most meaningful way. And that, I think is, is step one of being able to build that audience data, know how to target serve the right content and, and I think the future is not necessarily a winner takes all. I think the future is probably a. A suite of being able to offer the right content to the right fan. And going even further to say, Richard, if you go into a, into something that's sport, it shouldn't, like for example, if you're watching sports movies, I. There should be enough intelligence picked up that it shouldn't recommend Ted Lasso to you. Yeah. Or it shouldn't recommend a football based portrait to you. It should recommend Field of Dreams, right? For me, it might have a different algorithm. And so what I see is different from what you see and you're getting to that degree of hyper-personalization, right? Mm-hmm. And so how do you get to that degree of one-on-one personalization over time Today, it should still be not one-to-one, but one to smaller manys versus a one to all that existed years ago. And so once you start to create that, fans are being like, oh, this is something that is relevant to me, that is unique to me and that I might be willing to pay for. And at the same time, brands and sponsors are getting smarter, right? Soldiers are getting sponsor, are getting smarter. And so as this world is getting sharper and sport is sometimes a few steps behind. An industry like e-comm where things like first party data have been around for years, right? Because that's the core of the business. But as brands are getting smarter, as everyone's getting smarter, they're gonna ask you for targeted information. And so no longer is a vanity metric of, I had 5 million people watch this and it's great versus. I had 50,000 people who are coming back every day and who are gonna spend 15 minutes on the platform and are going to and fit this demographic profile. They're perfect for you. Sponsor X.
Yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:That is going to be the thing that unlocks revenue in a meaningful way. And you need to be smart enough to get to that point where you've got all that intelligence.
Richard Gillis, UP:So the sponsor, so it's a
Arvind Iyengar:sponsorship, an answer. So that's the answer with sponsorship. I think it'll also get that way with broadcasting. It'll get that way. With digital rights, you'll get to smaller and smaller feeds. You'll, you can start to break up those rights in many meaningful way versus that big broadcast deal. And then if you start to send fans what they want, that's the D two C answer because people will then start paying for a subscription saying, oh, this is relevant for me. Right. Squash, for instance, gets a lot of people coming in, buying that package, even if it's not got a lot of TV rides, because there are a lot of ardent sports fans and they're figuring out how to get to them in a meaningful way. So. You unlock D two C, you unlock sponsorship, you start to unlock new and new streams of advertising and media rights as well as you start to create different cohorting. And so you suddenly have essentially a new paradigm of revenue streams, which is not relevant on one single broadcast. Rights are gonna come and save the day, but multiple streams, the big rights holders will, could survive anyway on the back of broadcast deals. Mm-hmm. And then some. But the made and smaller ones are gonna have to figure out how to unlock all these streams in a meaningful way. And the ones that do it will survive and thrive, and the ones that don't will perish. So it's not as cataclysmic as music where everything. Falls down after an Napster and writes and everything after that. But it is one where folks who don't adapt will perish because they've not done the right service for their sport.
Richard Gillis, UP:Let's just take that then, because your sports interactive, I see in the middle of this marketplace. So you've got the rights holders on one side, you've got the fans on the other, and you are one of the companies that is sort of run, you know, between those in various guises. And so I'm, uh, this is, let's just play around with that for a minute because if you, if we say right, let's just think about, the premier League UA for MBAs of this world. The 10 year plan then is, okay, we've got enough money to do this. We're gonna invest a lot of money in become, you know, where would we put our money? Because I can see a sort of mission creep. Into areas that are potentially lucrative, but third parties at the moment are taking the money.
Yep.
Richard Gillis, UP:So it could be, um, you know, one of the obvious ones is OTT broadcasting where you say Right, okay. The Premier League, it probably will develop a D two C broadcast element in certain parts of the world where they've got, you know, they can experiment. They're not gonna do it when Sky is still paying them a few billion quid, or NBC, but there are areas where you can sort of start to see a different model. So there's broadcast, there's, there's other areas like betting quite often. Mm-hmm. Often think is actually, there's a whole load of companies that are taking money outta the sports economy that if I was a rights soldier, think actually could we keep some of that? The retail bit is another thing. So again, could we become better at doing that? So we are the rights holder. The body gets bigger and starts to encroach and starts to compete with companies like yourself. So, you know, in terms of that mar, rather than paying you as a server service provider, they might say, well actually, could we do what sports Interactive do? What do you think about that scenario? You've got a pro, you probably have to be a certain size of rights holder to be out to think about that. So it's not a squeezed middle question, but it's a sort of probably a more top end question.
Arvind Iyengar:No, I think that's a fair question. Right? What do rights holders need to do? First of all, right? They need to make sure they've got the best product out there from a sport perspective. That needs to come before everything else, right? So invest in making sure it's scalable, it's right format of game. So the product is going talk about everything else. Then as we talk about this particular digital ecosystem, if, if I was a right holder, I'd say the two things to invest in are own digital asset maturity, right? And so what do I have that's direct, directly fan facing so that who knows where third party platforms are going to go? Who knows where the third party pieces are gonna end up, but. Do I have more control of my assets? And then am I investing in fan intelligence? Right? How well do I know my fan? It's one thing to say, I've got 2 million fans. It's another to say this is what each and every one of them are. So I would invest in that. The question then is, what are those that you build in house and what are those where you rely on folks who've got expertise to have done this and this is the only thing that they've been doing, and have been doing it for leagues across the world and, and therefore can I rely on their expertise? Right. It's a bit like saying, well, should every company build their own CRM or should they go to Salesforce or you know, does everyone need to build their own IT infrastructure? Should they go to Oracle or SAP? Right. And at some level you've got the specialists.
Mm-hmm. And
Arvind Iyengar:so you want to. Tap into the expertise because Oracle is gonna paint you a picture of the world five years from now that you yourself may not be able to imagine, because that is their bread and butter.
Mm-hmm.
Arvind Iyengar:But then you apply your expertise to customize it to your unique needs because then you're saying, well, this is the core infrastructure, but I actually know a lot more about the Premier League, or I wanna have a little bit more control of my destiny with this. Mm-hmm. And so the really big ones, instead of building from scratch, would then work with someone to say, here's what that needs to look like over the next few years. And I will have a lot of input into it, and there are pieces of it that I can carve out that are unique to me, but I'll still leverage the overall expertise because. Doing all of it from scratch is like reinventing the wheel.
Right? Mm-hmm.
Arvind Iyengar:And it's similar to what you, premier League just announced their partnership with Microsoft
Richard Gillis, UP:Yes.
Arvind Iyengar:Copilot and everything that they're gonna try to build out over the next years. What did you think about that
Richard Gillis, UP:announcement? What was your, I mean, I, I, my thought I wrote about this on, on the Substack yesterday was was there's a, I can see how these things work. That's just whether or not there is a long term, short term question about whether the work that you've identified at the beginning about, you know, the transformational change, digital tech, AI fits a sponsorship framing because they've gone from Oracle to Microsoft. And does that matter in terms of if you are inve, if, okay, okay, we're gonna go with Microsoft for the next 10 years. But what we are actually, what's actually happening is that they frame that as a sponsorship relationship, which is by definition we'll have a term end, and then there might be another change. And we saw something similar happen around blockchain and that, you know, people jumping in with blockchain partnerships. So sport tends to take a new thing and want to package it as a sponsorship.
Arvind Iyengar:So I think the Ben, the benefit with sport is you can, and, and this has happened all the time, there's blockchain before that, there were IT services. Yeah. Before that there's scamming solutions. Before that there's something else, there's always an opportunity to say, Hey, actually look at this as a sponsorship play. And then it's kind of a qui pro quo. So you come in as a sponsor, but you also do the transformation at the backend. And so you're essentially getting someone to. For doing the transformation, and so it kind of nets off, right? And then with, in the blockchain world, with everyone looking to make a splash, they were more, and with, you know, bit of fundraising done in there, they were like, yeah, we're happy to block a bit of money and this gives us a bit of Yeah, yeah. Some credibility. And we get the sponsorship and so everyone's like, yeah, I'll take the money. Right.
Richard Gillis, UP:So, so it's an unfair analogy for the, the Premier League Microsoft deal is, is, I'm, I'm not saying it's the same as that. Yeah. But you can start to see that there is a principle there that
Arvind Iyengar:that could be, but I think this to me is slightly different in that, to me, blockchain and everything that was there was a bit of a fad, right? And with the benefit of hindsight, you can say that now, but it's an area we stayed away from because while the core tenants of blockchain, et cetera. Are still critical and important. I think everything that everyone was trying to do with NFTs and trying to create a whole new world of assets that were unclear if they had any real value, clearly felt like a bubble. AI adoption is not a bubble, right? It is here to stay. It is the way of the future. You need to adapt one way or the other. Or you're going to get left behind. I think there's no question about that. That has been proven. And so what the Premier League is doing with this is essentially saying, we want to get ahead of it. We want to partner with someone that is gonna help us on this journey. And so in that sense, I think it's the right kind of moves that organizations should be making as they look to build out. Now, who should they be partnering with is also a bit of a question where you can, you can get the technology, but you also need the sport expertise.
Hmm. So
Arvind Iyengar:how do you bring both of those in? And if you're a large team, like the Premier League, you can bring in the sport expertise. Whereas if you're a smaller or midyear league, you'd want someone who's also able to bring that in together. But overall, I think it's a sensible thing when you start to look at what that transformation needs to look like and how you build it out over a few years with any of these organizations, sometimes it's down to then how it actually gets implemented. Because in many organizations, which you'll see in sport, this always gets political. And then it's down to who's doing this? And then sometimes we've seen in certain nos. You know, they've done five different digital transformations at the same time. So then they've got someone that's doing a single sign on, someone else that's doing the digital asset, someone else that's doing a CRM, someone else that's doing a CDP, and then all these things are not talking to each other. And everyone is like Digital transformation. Yeah, yeah. And then you look at, it's like, what? This is just a mess you've ended up with. Right? And so, yeah. Get
Richard Gillis, UP:McKinsey in
Arvind Iyengar:there you go. Who else is gonna come and fix the entire problem? Yeah. I don't wanna say good money after bad. It might be bad money after bad, but whatever the case may be. I think the important thing therefore, is having the vision upfront of knowing how these pieces need to fit together with the recognition that it's dynamic and moving. Yeah. And so you need to assess every six months to see if it's all coming in versus sometimes doing it in disparate parts and then you're like. These are five pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but they're different puzzles.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah, I think it's, I think it's sort of interesting'cause there's also the, the question about backing the right horse in terms of the tech, and you know, particularly in ai, every week there's a new thing and you mentioned, you know, Google, Gemini, what it was six months ago, Google was sort of asleep at the wheel. They're, they're chasing and now it's, you get these new things that are coming out, which again, is frothy. So you can't just be responding on a week, you know, month by month basis. So you need certainty, but it's really interesting. But,
Arvind Iyengar:but just to jump in there, I think the point there then is to make sure you're building your systems to cater to the fact that this is a world that's gonna change every six months. Right? So don't, like, if you're building something on an LLM, don't tie yourself into one thing. Have the ability to say. We built this on this structure, but today we can then take this out and put this somewhere else and it works just as well. Right? It's almost like being agnostic to the fundamental layers in which everything works, but the programming language sits separately.
Yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:So that as and by the way, everything is gonna get faster. Everything is gonna get cheaper, computing power is gonna increase. Right? That's just the way it's standing. Right? We've all heard of Moore's Law. This is like Moore's law on steroids right now, right? Yeah. And so it's all going to just move at a speed that no one is gonna be able to fathom, right? A year ago someone was in there selling us, we'll build you a custom LLM today, you can just do that on a GPT-4 or you can do that somewhere else, right? So I think making sure you're building out with the flexibility so it's an easy take out and plug in somewhere else is gonna be critical, um, for the future when,
Richard Gillis, UP:so. Let's talk about the sort of, there's a lot of cliches about the America, Europe. We, we quite often running through this podcast people, we talk about Europe and America in terms of the, the sports model and the economy. And you've got one is open and chaotic, the other one is closed and, and sort of, boring. No, I'm kidding. But it's Which one was which again? Yeah, yeah. So you've got a sort of, you go franchise model and then you've got all these new, you know, sports saying, right, we need to be a bit more like the Americans. We need to have structure, we need to have certainty. The, this is the, the investors are usually saying this's not the fans are the American investors about, yes. And then you've got, there's a question here about what the Indian market, you've got your, you know, you started as an Indian company and now a global company. I know you're working with rights holders in the States and in Europe. So just talk to me about. What the difference is that you find from your lens, because again, we don't often say, what about India and what the difference is there? And what you found when you, you are coming into Europe in a big way now. What do you see and what are the, what are the, is it cultural differences? Is it actual sort of business, how business is done? Decisions. What do you think?
Arvind Iyengar:I mean, we probably need a couple of hours to unpackage all the differences, especially on the cultural aspect, but on, on sport. Look, we've, we look at these markets in many different ways, right? Everyone, you are super familiar with Europe and how that works. And likewise with the US and I, I do think the US is ahead in terms of how it's thinking about digital in a meaningful way. They, I think they, they've been faster to move on from, you know, kind of the local and match data global and everyday. Mm-hmm. Which is, I think the mantra folks need to adopt as a, they really expand, right? It's not just. You know, who's playing today and how do I get bums on seats? It's who are the millions of audiences, millions of people, and an audience that I have all around the world. You know, you've got Man United fans in Indonesia and the Philippines, and how do you cater to those, right? And so I think the US has done a good job adapting to that. And that market itself works quite differently. India's very unique, right? India's got the benefit of scale, like none other. And I say that usually when we're in meetings, I'm, I'm talking about some of the things we've delivered, right? And so we're like, oh, India has 900 million. Monthly active cell phone users, right? Mobile users and people like 900 million. Like that's a lot. We're like, oh, we worked with the Kaba League and they had, you know, 200 million people tune into the broadcast for this season. People like fall off their chairs, right? Yeah.'cause you've got that benefit of scale. India, I think has done a bit of a leapfrog on a lot of technology pieces, right? You look at the highest concurrent usage viewers for a single sports event. The IPL was the first to pass, you know, the the Red Bull space jump and everything else going past 10 million, gonna 20 million and more, right? And being able to handle that scale on technologies unprecedented. You've had an entire generation of folks just kind of leapfrog from like 3G to 5G, and then just get super adept at using. The phone is the first portion of, content. And then India's got all these regional languages. But there's also been this element of video first, right? This, the statement I once heard, that video is the new English, right? And so you don't really need to care about language, but you just get video out and it works well. And now with the, I told you about translations, transcriptions, real time adaptations, et cetera. And so I think there've been a lot of leaps when you just start to look at the scale of numbers on technology. When you start to look at the IPL, the premier, the Indian Premier League, right? The biggest cricket property out there. I mean, you look at the rights, right? 2 billion plus for a five year deal on TV rights and you know, 2 billion plus on digital rights, right? Call it two and a half to three each roughly based on your conversion rates. And that's for a 74 match lead that's running for two months in a year. Right. On a per match basis, that's somewhere from 10 to 15 million, depending on whether you add everything up for a single match. That's more than any other league in the world, other than the NFL. Right. Which is probably closer to 30 plus Premier League for context of maybe 10, 11 million per match. So it's got fewer matches, but just what it's achieved in terms of those rights numbers. And then you look at franchise valuations, right? CVC came and bought in a, yeah. Team sold now. Yeah. The Gujarat team, 900 million valuation top teams are worth a billion plus. It's a league that didn't exist. You know, 20 years ago, and it's already up at these numbers and that, I think, and it's running for two months in a year. Mm-hmm. It's not eight months like the NBA, it's not like the Premier League. And so I think the, the numbers are staggering. At the same time, I think it's a different market when you start to think about monetization, right? So when I worked at ESPN, many years ago, most markets were revenue was 80% subscription, 20% advertising, right? That's typically how TV worked, right? When you look at the US I. Back in the day, for every whatever Kong subscription, four or$5 of that was attributed to ESPN. India was the reverse, right? 80% was advertising, 20% was subscription because consumers didn't pay for as much.
Mm.
Arvind Iyengar:And so you have to rely on, there's this massive scale, and I'm doing advertising now that's changing, right? Higher disposable income. India's doing well, GDP growth, you're gonna have more and more spend. And as it's that classic, as you move up the income pyramid, more discretionary income will go towards things like sport and art and et cetera. But you need to think about the economics very differently. Right. And then you look at a company like Dream Levin, which is daily fantasy sports, biggest in the world. You know, India's a market where betting is in pickle. That's another piece that's different, right? It's kind of where the US was before. You know, became the wild, wild best and betting became legal. Yeah. But I mean, dream 11, if, if betting ever became legal would be one of the largest sports books in the world, right? Yeah. But they're very focused on, they've done a phenomenal job building this great, daily fantasy game with the scale that is there in India. And so you're seeing, you know, you have IPL success, you've got tech jumps, you've got, you know, companies like geo Hot investing like crazy and actually taking that broadcast experience to the next level. You have Inplay Gaming, which no one else had done before at the scale they did. So I think you're seeing a lot of technology innovation, but with folks having to adapt and recognize it's a different business model. Um, the other difference in India is just the speed of doing business, right? So we might get RFPs from an Indian sports organization and a European sports organization, a European sports organization is Yeah, we are looking to build for next season. And so we're like in May and you mean. Next season is June, July next year. So we've got 13, 14 months. We're starting to build this out. Um, some of our Indian clients, not all the large ones, but some will say, yeah, we're looking to build for next season. And it's like, oh, it's May, you're looking for June next year? No, no, no. June this year. You have a month to build this out. Right. So just the speed of just trying to put this all together. Is next level. But I think as a result, if you can build a successful business in India, it's actually much easier than trying to do that sometimes in other parts of the world where you're thinking through this, and building with the benefit of time.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah. Yeah. Um,
Arvind Iyengar:and then of course there are the cultural nuances in everything else, in all these markets are very yeah. No, absolutely.
Richard Gillis, UP:And, and it was, it's interesting because obviously the IPL was based, is based on the American model, isn't it? To a large extent. It's what Modi was, you know, an IMG at the beginning, that was the framing. It was gonna be the, the franchise model, closely league, et cetera.
Arvind Iyengar:It's just franchise model, no delegation promotion, expand franchises all the way, play each other home in a way like, um, yeah, I think that that was very clearly the model they looked at.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:And salary caps, we can talk about that as well. US has a bunch in that.
Richard Gillis, UP:Dream 11 I think is fascinating because quite often you see a, uh, there are lots of parallels between the IPL and the NFL and the American market and, and betting. cause I quite often think that betting is actually very underrated in terms of, like you mentioned CVC. I think private equity's view of the sports market betting is much higher up on the agenda than we sometimes think, and I wonder if, I know India's a particular market, but there is a, what role betting plays in the money replacement question in terms of the, the, the way in which, if the broadcast money goes away, the traditional linear rights market goes away, what role will the betting firms want to play and how, how will they monetize that? That space.
Arvind Iyengar:I mean, for a long time they've already been playing a lot of that role. Right. If you start to think about,
Richard Gillis, UP:well, it's sort of, there's a, there's a, sorry, but there is a, they sort of pay a tax via sponsorship or they pay, you know, there is a ways of doing it, but I'm wondering if there is a more fundamental relationship that is gonna evolve between sport and betting.
Arvind Iyengar:So I'll answer that in two lens. When I first came on board to run Sports Interactive, I looked at the different markets, right? And we said, oh, we can serve with data, right? That was a big part of what we were doing back then. So sports data, we can use this analytics, we can do some cool stuff with it. We can help sports teams, right? Like Billy Beans, Sabre Metrics. That sounds really cool. Yeah. And you look at the largest sports analytics companies in the world that are serving teams, 20 million, 30 million, 40 million top line maybe, right? You, you kind of cap out it at some of those levels. And that's because. If that market is not as big as people think it is, it looks really cool. Shiny, sexy on the outside. You can make a nice movie about it, but as you get better and better at it, teams will want to keep that in-house. Yeah, right? Because why do I want to share this with someone else? So that's something teams will absolutely keep in-house. Yeah, because it's not like infrastructure, it's not like everything else when it comes to actual talent recognition, scouting, the, so you'll only get that far, right? Yeah. We were in the next space, which is media, right? Which is then working in this fan engagement space, rights holders, broadcasters, and you look at the top companies there, now it's a hundred million, 200 million back then I'm talking about stats of the world, et cetera, uh, the performance of the world. And then you'll start to look at the media businesses, 300 million, 400 million, et cetera, right? I'm talking about top lines, valuations at a little higher. And then you look at betting and, and, and so media is already an order of magnitude about. The team or the pro market betting is an order of magnitude about media because there's just so much that goes into sports books and everything else.
Mm.
Arvind Iyengar:Now it's an area we've stayed away from because in India betting it's not legal. Mm-hmm. And so it's, it's not an area we focus on, but as you look at Europe and you look at the growth that's happened in the US it was with this big betting boom. Right? And so at some level, there is a, those markets and Tams suggest this could be a$50 billion market, right? Mm-hmm. And so there's, there's a lot there. Um, now what does that role play in sport? You've talked about sponsorship historically. You've talked about money comes in in many different ways. And so there, there are ways in which you can do sponsorship, you can do rights, you can figure out betting rights that people had sold for a long time, dealer rights and non betting, et cetera, et cetera. But I think smarter leagues are saying, Hey, I. We actually want a stake in this, right? So we can either regulate it and then charge license fees to do it, or we can have stakes in these businesses. Mm-hmm. And then share in the upside. Or we can get a share of the fee and we get our cut for doing the official rights. And so I think there are ways in which that betting revenue can get unlocked in meaningful ways.
Mm-hmm.
Arvind Iyengar:Similarly, when you start to think about streaming and everything else.
Mm. There
Arvind Iyengar:may be an audience for the mass streaming, but then you can have sub audiences for betting rights and betting streaming. And that that's another piece where essentially your same TV rights have their own set of betting rights. So I think there are huge ways in which it's already happening and will continue to play a part. The big part where all of this sometimes comes down to, you know, what's the right regulation? There's a bit of a ethical model question on doing it the right way. Yeah. You wanna make sure you're doing it in a responsible way. You have the right safeguards. We've seen examples of. Places where they didn't have the right safeguards and people are then gambling away there life earnings
and
Arvind Iyengar:you've had places where you've got the right cave IC and the right safeguards. And so, you know, they, I think it can unlock a lot of value, but from a personal perspective, it needs to be done the right way.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah, no, I completely agree. And it's fascinating. And, and one of the things, it was interesting, we had, so we had Gareth B on from, um, two circles and they did their IP league, you know, they ranked and they've counted the money essentially. And there's a couple of things. One is that the, so that's everything. Media, right? Sponsorship, merchandise, um, and you've got the usual sort of acronyms. NFL, you've got Premier League up there, you've got IPL. But one of the things that, so in the top 10. It was the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
Arvind Iyengar:Hmm. And that's because they've got a lot funders and they capture
Richard Gillis, UP:The whole market. So there's, I think there a lot of people, there were a couple of interesting, one, the other odd one, which again was about number 12 or 13 in with the really huge rights holders was the US Polo company who have, you know, and that's based on the much Ralph Lauren retail licensing thing. So there are sort of interesting different models that you could sort of see. If I'm looking at, if I'm, again, in that group in the squeeze middle below the sort of, uh, top end, I might be looking at that and saying, I wonder if there is something that we can do. So you sort of start to say the McKinsey question about, well, how would you then go about you, um, tapping in just finding a different model. That isn't relying on this burning platform of broadcast rights market.'cause I am gonna get hit if I am rugby or if I am cricket or am, you know, they're in outside of the IPL.
Arvind Iyengar:I mean, the answer is clear, right? I mean, you said Hong Kong Jockey Club, you said Polo.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:So you get a horse in there and you're sorted throwing a horse on a rugby field and suddenly you'll open up a revenue stream. Now we're, now we're cooking you it. I think product innovation. Yeah. But, you know, no, I mean, no more horsing around. I think the real story is, I think there's, there are ways in which you can figure out the right answer. Right? But again, some of this is unique to horse racing, has its own history of Yeah, punting forever, right? So to rely on that as a single opportunity, I think is gonna be hard and, and again.
Richard Gillis, UP:But you get to sort of interesting questions about, so what happens when a sport becomes a betting sport is really hard. So horse racing has always been a betting sport.
Arvind Iyengar:Correct.
Richard Gillis, UP:Golf is going through an interesting period. Tennis is going through an interesting period. You had stories this week about, you know, players losing and troll betting trolls, you know, have lost money. And then they are sort of going after the player online Formula one, betting on Formula one, betting on tennis, betting on women's football, betting on all of these sort of markets. Something happens to a sport when it becomes a betting sport. And it's, I think, very underrated in terms of, because as, as you exactly say, horse racing has always had this issue and it's got loads of challenges and it's had to deal with these things. Cricket went for a betting scandal. Baseball, you know, but actually what happens when I think golf is fascinating, if you start to turn golf into a betting sport, if you're tempted down that road, cause. I don't know whether the level of interest in the sport, how you then manage that and whether it goes up
Arvind Iyengar:golf, by the way, someone came up with this radical idea of 54 holes in three days. But anyway, I dunno if that level fly. But, jokes aside, I, I think you're right, right? Tennis is the second most bet sport in the world after football. Yeah. And it's a question of how do you maintain the integrity of the sport in a meaningful way? So it's just not lost in terms of being a betting only sport in terms of being massy, if that's the way to go, unless your sport like horse racing is built only for that. And, but at the same time, how do you capture. Revenue from it to help grow the sport in the right way. And so I think it just comes back to having the right safeguards in place. Yeah. Yeah. I think it, and so I, I think betting can help if, but where is betting happening, right? Where either there's popularity for the sport or there's more viewership, or there are, or a sport is uniquely positioned where there's an opportunity to bet at every point, or, you know, golf, you can do this. What's gonna happen on this hole? What's gonna happen here? You can do head-to-head for particular parts of the course. You can do a single round, you can do various things with it. But I I would almost put that as a secondary source of revenue, unless you're a horse racing like sport in there. Mm-hmm. But it's how you, again, going back to building that right product, and I'd say for the last vast majority of tennis fans out there. They won't even know it's the second most bad sport in the world, but they're still watching it because they're watching Alcaraz and they're watching Sinna. Mm.
And
Arvind Iyengar:and so to me, the bigger aspect is how do you grow the sport? And then as you grow the sport, more people will watch it. That creates o opportunities for people to feel like experts. And then as people feel like experts, they're like, oh, I can make money on it. Let me go back. And, and so to create that interest in the first place, I'm going in a different direction and saying, you, you need to kind of focus on those heroes. Right. Someone once told me this whole saying, no one in India is a fan of cricket, the fans of cricketers. It's the ker, ra, Ali, this. Yeah. Yeah. Raz. Sinna. Federer, Nadal, Kovic. Same thing. Right? Who are the heroes in your sport that you're promoting in a meaningful way? And so if I was building a sport, I'd be like, who are the heroes around which I'm building narratives? How do I promote her to be able to tell the story in a meaningful way? And then all the other pieces will kind of flow from that.
Richard Gillis, UP:We did a, an event at Olympic Park a couple of years ago, and it was, we were talking about convergence of sport and betting and one of the things that came out of it was the customer profile of fantasy players and fantasy is fascinating. One, you know, it's, it's over here. It's just the Premier League fantasy product is extraordinary. And I'm wondering where, what the lessons of that are and what the, what that tells us about what people want now from sport. How they, you know, their relationship to it. And it's, it's obviously in your world of there's the sort of sport meets data question. Kids are now, you talk to'em and they just trot out these, you know, what the, they they've got, it's the Moneyball question, you know, it's nearly, it's 20 years ago, I think it was, it was published in the UK and, and it's just transformed that bit of fandom, isn't it? It's really fascinating.
Arvind Iyengar:Absolutely. And I think it goes back to the tenets of what are people doing when they watch sport today,
right?
Arvind Iyengar:Mm-hmm. And, and if you start to look at it, there's about three very meaningful trends, right? One is it's no longer, like I said, linear television screen and passive consumption. It is active engagement, right? And so there's the statistic that I read the other day that 80 plus percent of people watching sport are on a second screen while doing it right. And. 60% of that are using it for social media. And this was not mutually exclusive either social media, 40%, were using it for gaming, 50% we're using it to chat with friends in a group, et cetera. And so you're looking to interact during a game, you're looking to be a part of the action. And so that's why I think gaming is huge, because now I've got stakes in the game to say, is my player doing well? Is my player doing this? And for folks who want to maybe stay one step away from betting and not put where they real put real money in there because they're like, I'm not an expert at this. I don't know if I'll make money now. It's about more than money. It's about bragging rights, right. I'm playing with my friends, I'm playing with my league. I want, I want to go out the next day in office and at the water cooler, same man. Totally destroyed you last night, right? Mm-hmm. And maybe in, in stronger terms, which is not appropriate for this podcast. And so that interaction element is super key, right? And so that's where I think gaming is fascinating because it is getting people in, it is getting people to come back over and over again. And that's how you're acquiring a fan and then retaining them and then figuring out all the other things to do with them, right? So I think that's one super meaningful consumption threat. The other is, do you know what is the younger generation doing? You talked about it, and you know, my nephew is not watching 90 minutes of a football game. Mm-hmm. He's a Westham fan, by the way, so, well, he wouldn't. Best of luck. Maybe that's why. So anyway, he's, he's watching these games and he's like, he's watching them on YouTube, right? He's watching the five minute highlight, the six minute highlight. He's watching folks commentate on it. He's listening to his influencers saying something on it. And so what is the right experience for him? And again, in the past. You know, I would watch games with my mom and my dad.
Mm-hmm.
Arvind Iyengar:And, and we'd just be in one TV screen together. Right. My nephew's not watching it on the TV screen. He's watching it on his device separately. So that generation of fandom is not getting passed down. It's a different viewing experience. So how do you figure out how to engage with that fan a meaningful way? And again, that's someone who will like fantasy or like engagement or like a poll or like some kind of, you know, if you can integrate it into Roblox, that'll be really interesting for him. Right. And he'll be, oh, these are the two things of my world coming together in a meaningful way. So I think there's the entire second screen piece of it. There's the entire wanting to interact. There's this entire piece of people are watching it on a screen, and then there's the entire community aspect of it. It comes back to that collective essence and fantasy. Does that again, in a meaningful way. Are
Richard Gillis, UP:there any, have you noticed in that sort of gamification question and fantasy? Again, I'm using that as a sort of proxy really, for just that space, but. Does it apply to every sport? Can you run a, you know,'cause a lot of people will be looking at the, and we use the Premier League here as an example, be just for lots of things because they're the best at what they do in lots of different, you know, spaces and they're the most popular. But can you run a fantasy, a gamification model like that to every, does it apply to every sport? Is there any, is there a particular secret sauce that they've got?
Arvind Iyengar:Not really. I think you can apply it in any sport, but then you need to be smart about what's the form of gamification to apply, right? With. With Premier League or any of the US sports where fantasy originally took off and it's still massive, right? I think the NFL is massive because of fantasy football. You have this every week, games being played over a long period of time. We've got 20 weeks, 26 weeks, whatever that number is, and, and you get that sustained engagement. But you know, we are building games for Formula One, which is a different format and it's only got 20 drivers, 10 teams. But you've got to adapt the format between pick drivers and teams. But you've also gotta have a predictor element so someone can just come in and play a single game. So there are various forms of games where it doesn't always have to be the season long fantasy game. You can figure out drafts and auctions, you can figure out a smaller predictor. You can even figure out gamification in many ways, which could just be quizzes, polls, trivia. You can figure out other elements that exist when there isn't a live game, right? One of the things about fantasy sport is you need. It to complement live sporting action. But what do you do in the off season? You need to figure out another game. Or what do you do if you're a league that is not running for eight months in a year, but two months in a year? You need to figure out other ways to engage that. So I think gamification, without a doubt is key. Right? And you're seeing it not just in sport. I mean, dualing does this when you're trying to learn a new language. So I think it's proven beyond the point that gamification works. How do you then adapt it to the right sport is where you bring in the right sport expertise, you know what fans want, and then apply the right model for that sport. Because if you sat and ran, you know, a fantasy game like this for cricket all season long across its different formats, it's not gonna work. Yeah. So then you've gotta figure out what the right model is for sport, which is what, you know, daily fantasy, et cetera, does. One
Richard Gillis, UP:of the, one of the sort of strangest decisions I think over the last few years has been the FIFA decoupling with ea because I think there's a, we were talking to, um, uh. Finn at the ICC who's head of digital and they would love an ICC game, you know, owned by the ICC. That is a cricket game. Some sort of, it has the same sort of scale. FIFA had one and we, you know, the cliche that on podcasts like this for years was, oh, well, gen Z only know FIFA as a game. They don't know it as a governing body. And then that's now gone. What, tell me, let's talk about that space. What's happening in that sort of area? Who are the, where, where's the excitement in that area of football gaming?
Arvind Iyengar:So it's an interesting one because look, there are multiple reasons. I'm sure you've looked at why FIFA chose to make that decision. And again, we've talked about things being political. Yeah. There's also a little bit of how much power rest with the game publisher, which is ea, which is the governing body. And then when that power balance is not in favor of what one party may perceive as being the right equation, there will be changes. Right. And so I think it's an interesting world with eSports as a whole. Right. And, and I actually think eSports in general is a bit broader beyond. Sports itself. And so I think it's a nice complimentary piece for anyone. And I think you can use it to run a bunch of simulations. You can use it to bring in new audiences or keep them engaged all the way through. I think that's one where some sports are just better built for gaming and some are not. FIFA is great, football is great, right? In whatever shape or form. I think it's really good. But I think several other sports and smaller sports may struggle to create the right gaming mechanic mechanics for it, but any sport where you're like, oh, I want to go in there and play. Interesting. I, I think publishers, and when I say publishers and I'm talking about ea blizzard, et cetera, the guys who make these games, they're trying to figure out where it's worth the investment, where they want the rights to be able to do it, and where you can just almost create a smaller game and, and it works just as well. You're also seeing a trend of these big large games to these smaller. Mobile friendly, easy flick, a button, shorter game type games as well. Right. My nephew will play fifa, but he play it obviously in Fast Forward, not FIFA anymore, but he'll play football on his PlayStation, but it's not, I. He's playing a 90 minute game over five minutes, and it's shorter and shorter. Right? And so you, and, and somehow he still gets like six goals in that time. So I don't know how he does it, but, you are going to move towards these shorter, quick formats of games, et cetera. I think what's really interesting from that space is they've done a lot of work in obviously phenomenal animation. Those are full on studios that are building these games. How much of that can be adapted to create compelling fan experiences with AI to almost, you know, recreate games, create hypothetical scenarios, feed in a lot of this, and then there you can start to say, oh, what if, you know, PSG from this year Met Man United in the nineties? And then you've got, you know, Cantana there and seeing how he's doing, going up against people. And then you start to create interesting scenarios around fan engagement using a lot of that. Intelligence and studio animation that's built in. You feed it in with the right data, you can still start to create simulations and you can add stuff into more fantasy or even betting, which then unlocks more and more markets. So I think there's, there's a lot that's been done in that space, which I think over the next five or six years is going to shape broadcast experiences is gonna shape. OTT experiences, you are gonna shape viewing experiences because of the level of animation and realism that's come in there, ar vr, everything is gonna essentially come out of those elements and it'll have augmented streams into everything else that you're saying.
Richard Gillis, UP:And it doesn't necessarily have to be official IP does it? I mean, it can be just, you know, we had, we had a conversation a few weeks ago in Anne about just the rate of innovation of just creating new IP in Roblox, for example, or on YouTube. Just these, just relentlessly trying these new things. And some of them will catch, some of them won't, but actually the rights holders, the big, you know, asset they've got is this official IP position. Correct. Which is valuable to, you know, to an extent. To
Arvind Iyengar:an extent, exactly. And, and therefore to me that's not, I wouldn't bank on that as a large stream of revenue in the future as a meaningful way because, well, ip No. The IP into eSport gaming. Yes. Right, because. It's valuable to an extent over there. It's valuable in a hundred other contexts. Yeah, yeah. Right. Uh, but in that one, like if, if someone came to me and said, yeah, we're gonna bet the farm on. These eSports Right. And that's the way the world is gonna shape Yeah. For a sport.
Yeah.
Arvind Iyengar:I'd be like, Hmm,
yeah,
Arvind Iyengar:maybe not. Yeah. Yeah. That, that world's really interesting when you start to look at, you know, all these first party games, first Player, roleplaying Games, RPG, first Person Shooters, all of Duty, league of Legends, that entire space and eSports and what's gonna happen there, I think is really interesting.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah, yeah. Let's throw it forward. Just to finish us off with a, the future Sports Interactive. What, what's, what's on your sort of roadmap? Where do you see where the business is going? Obviously we've talked about the global expansion is a, is a key bit to this and we're sitting here in London, so that's a significant, but talk me through what, what else is on your mind?
Arvind Iyengar:I mean, the very simple view is we started off by saying, let's serve 70 sports fans, which we were at the company and maybe millions of others at the time. Now I think it's really saying how do we build one of the largest sports technology companies in the world? And there is, we think a dying need to fix that arc challenge, acquire, retain, commercialize. Every rights holder has got bits and pieces of this figured out, but no one's tracked the Holy Trinity. Even agencies like us, I don't think anyone's cracked all of it. There are lots of people talking a big game or solving parts of the problem, but no one's put it all together. And if you don't put it all together with the way the world is changing, accelerated with Gen ai, it was happening before that. Anyway, we're going to see massive changes. Mm-hmm. Right? And so we want to be at the forefront of that and building one of the largest sports tech companies in the world that is serving sports organizations and along the way, hundreds of millions of sports fans with everything that we built. So that's really the vision International's a big part of it. I'm based in Singapore. We've got a team in India. We've hired a ton of people in Europe. We're gonna be looking at a lot in the us. More than a third of our business already comes from Europe. But it's just how do we expand that even further, while really serving the needs of, you know, sports fans and by default sports rights holders, because those go hand in hand.
Richard Gillis, UP:Perfect. Right. Good place to finish. Thank you. And good luck with the journey, and I know you're traveling a lot, so safe travels.
Arvind Iyengar:Thank you very much, Richard. Appreciate you having me here.