UP366 Chat UP: I never want to hear the phrase 'Palantir for Sport' again

Chat UP is Unofficial Partner's series on AI in the sports business.

Today's guest is Mike Bracken CBE. He built the UK's Government Digital Service, became the country's first Government Chief Data Officer, and now runs the consultancy Public Digital, advising governments and institutions worldwide. Richard sits him down to test a simple, uncomfortable idea: that most of sport's "AI problem" isn't about AI, isn't even about data, and can't be bought from a vendor. What follows is a masterclass in why change management fails, who really holds the power, and where the genuine prize for sport is hiding.

• The two questions that come before any tech decision
• "Why are you asking the question about AI?"
• The standards argument: airports, not algorithms
• The Palantir for Sport question
• It's about power, not technology
• Open v closed, and the wall of money
• Why the single customer view is "a marketeer's wet dream"
• CRM v VRM: the extractive trap
• The bogus-metrics problem
• The trick sport is missing

Chat UP is made in collaboration with TFG Labs. 

⁠⁠TFG Labs is the centre of innovation within the Twenty First Group and is truly the testing ground for groundbreaking sports intelligence. Their team of dedicated AI engineers are using the power of emerging technologies to deliver powerful changes to organisations across the whole sports ecosystem.

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.
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Transcript

mike bracken 0:00

there's essentially two post-war views emergent, which is either we're in charge of technology and we can choose and we have agency over it, or we are somewhat in thrall to technology, and the best thing we can do is to manage our economic model to a bunch of technological changes which are indisputable and which are on a trajectory that we can't control. That's, that's the sort of general thinking with AI at the moment.

0:25

Hello there. Welcome. It's Richard Gillis here, and you're listening to Unofficial Partner, the sports business conversation. That was Mike Bracken, CBE, and this is Chat Up, our series on AI in the sports business. Mike Bracken is one of the most qualified people to talk about this subject that it's possible to find. He built the UK government's digital service and became the country's first ever chief data officer, and now runs Public Digital, and has worked with Presidents Macron and Obama and plenty of other governments and large organizations around the world about the topic that we're discussing today. Chat Up is made in collaboration with TFG Labs, the technology arm of 21st Group. The series was conceived as a place to host the AI conversation and to get beyond just talking about the foundational models and the financial race that is going on at the top of that market and to drill down to questions that really face everyone who works in and around the sports business today, So we talk about Palantir, we talk about airlines, retail, the NHS, all of the questions and the problems that are facing large organizations, and ask what the questions are that are facing sports C-suite today. And that's what this podcast is about, and I'm really pleased with it. I'm really happy to bring it to you. my regular Chat Up co-host, Andy Shora of TFG Labs, is away this week, so it's just Mike and me, and he will be back for the next one. If you are interested in this topic and all the others that we talk about on Unofficial Partner, you will really like the Unofficial Partner Substack newsletter. And there are, I don't know how many thousands, tens of thousands of people waiting for it on a Thursday morning to be delivered to their inbox. You could be one of them if you're not already. If you're listening to this, you probably are. But I need to remind you every now and then. Anyway, I'm Richard Gillis. This is Unofficial Partner, and you're about to listen to a really great conversation. Here's Mike Bracken, CBE

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 2:34

Are you enjoying the WhatsApp group?

mike bracken 2:35

I am. It's really interesting. And I, I'm, I'm not lurking. I've missed out a couple of things, but

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 2:40

Yeah.

mike bracken 2:40

really interesting people there, you know,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 2:42

Yeah

mike bracken 2:42

I've checked them out, really interesting people. So, and you've got, you've got a great list. I've been listening to... I've listened to, like, 30 or 40 of the podcasts now,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 2:51

Bloody hell

mike bracken 2:53

they're really good. I mean, they're really, really good. You've done a great thing here. The guy talking about... I forget all the names in front of me, but I've got them on a, on a list. But guy talking about the sort of false search for advertising data,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 3:04

Yeah

mike bracken 3:05

That was fabulous. That, like, the complete nonsense of CPNs and the whole marketing thing I thought that was excellent

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 3:12

Yeah. We've had him on, Augustine Fu, Dr. Fu, and he's yeah, he's just someone I sort of saw on LinkedIn saying interesting things about five years ago, and we had, we've had him on a few times. But This will be a theme of this conversation, is that there's a bubble, and the conversation most of the time takes place within it between the sort of buyers and sellers the vendors and of, who are selling either research or data or whatever it is. And then, you've got these just these numbers now which you keep seeing. And go, if they go unquestioned, I mean, they just they, they then work their way into proper serious decks, you know. So I'm always interested in, when you then get into the finance realm of the banks or the private equity groups. You can see the same numbers in there 'cause they've just sort of lifted them off

mike bracken 4:01

Just, it's fantastic. It really is. It's like that bit in The Big Short where they find, you know, they go to

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 4:06

Yeah.

mike bracken 4:07

out what the triple A means. It's like... And my favorite one, having been on the receiving end, is when they get things like, you know, "We've 85 million users in the UK." I'm like, "Really? That's more than the population. Yeah, that's great."

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 4:17

Yeah

mike bracken 4:18

mean, well, it, it has got to the stage where it's beyond parody now

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 4:21

Yeah. Well, you say that, but I don't know. It was sort of at that point about 15 years ago, I think

mike bracken 4:27

I think so. But the, the larger point, which is, it's a bandwagon that no one wants to jump off, is correct. And I think the UK actually has suffered more the UK industry suffered more than most because we are and have been traditionally good at advertising and marketing. You know, that part of our makeup, and

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 4:46

Yeah

mike bracken 4:47

those businesses have really suffered

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 4:49

I wanna start with, we better introduce you and your sort of back catalog, your CV, because you were introduced to me by Alex Balfour, and he said, "Well, if you're gonna be talking about this subject," which we're gonna talk about today, "you better get Mike on," because, you know, few people have been there and have bear more scars in this, uh, in this story than, uh, Mike Bracken. So just give us a little bit of background. 'Cause on the... When I ran it through ChatUp, my, my sort of idiot, uh, AI, i.e. Claude he said, "L- led UK Government Digital Service, GDS, and became the country's first government chief data officer, taking the UK to number one in the UN's digital government rankings in 2016. He's a founding partner of Public Digital." So that's the public-facing bit, but just give me the bit of the reality of it

mike bracken 5:45

Well, that's, that, that's correct. Uh,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 5:47

I didn't mean reality as in it's not true. I meant as in, you know, just some color behind it

mike bracken 5:52

So, Behind that, in 2010, I've been advising politicians, senior institutional leaders for 30-plus years. I was an internet researcher in the 1980s, and there weren't many of us.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 6:08

Wow

mike bracken 6:10

and the web came along when I was well into that career. So I am not particularly wise or smart, I had just had the great bit of luck to be first in the queue and knew a bit more about it. and decided relatively early on that what I wanted to do was not necessarily work in Silicon Valley, but big institutions that I think are important and valuable. So I've worked in seven different industries: media, telco, retail, insurance, finance, government, and now consulting, and had exposure to projects and things all over the world. Worked in, lived in 12 countries, work in... advise about 40 governments plus parts of the UN, World Bank, IMF. So basically, I've spent my career at the intersection of technology, and digital, institutions. and in 2010, in the build-up to what became a quite important election in the UK, because we had a coalition government, both major parties, were in touch and wanted to, have- having had 10 years' worth of terrible technology failures under the Blair/Brown years, wanted to try something different. That different was the government digital service. A whole bunch of people who I don't have time to mention were important in the setting up of that, getting the political space for it to do, and I was its founder and leader, we, really had a good five years of change of government, as in changing government how it works. The physical, or I should say the digital view of that looks like gov.uk and all the various services. What we actually did was take, a fundamental change to the foundations of government, including data, institution management, people, skills, contracts, everything else. We saved... I was part of a group that took 52 billion out of the spend, public spending over four years. I took about four and a half billion just out of digital alone, made the

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 8:07

What, by that, what do you mean by that, taking it out? You saved that money

mike bracken 8:11

Yeah. When I went into government, we were spending 16 billion pounds a year on technology and associated delivery costs. About 4 million of that, a quarter, you can't touch. It's like nuclear submarines and whatnot. So about 12 billion, and we took 4.1 billion out of that. We moved digitization from less than 30% to 85%, so that's all the services you want to use, passports, driving licenses, all that stuff, and we cut out an enormous amount of legacy technology and data contracts, and instead replaced them with more modern standards-based, web-based stuff which is open and has persisted till, till this day. We did that out of sheer necessity. We didn't have a manual. We made it up as we went along. because all governments are roughly the same, do roughly the same stuff, and all institutions do, big institutions, they saw that model and said, "We need to follow that." And now there've been... There's about 350 big ins- government institutions around the world. We helped Obama with... I went over to help him set up his presidential fellows and deal with healthcare.gov, if you remember that, in 2013, '14. They'd, they had messed up again with the big IT system, so we helped them reset that. then I've been helping presidents and prime ministers around the world. Recently, Malcolm Turnbull in Australia, President Macron, I'm on his advisory board, as well as that, a bunch of industry leaders. So I'm less open to talk about the names, but very large banks that you will have heard of, very large retailers, and really helping their executives understand the art of the possible

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 9:44

Right. Okay. And my starting point, obviously this is a, a sports business podcast, but sport is quite often a microcosm of other things and, you know, there seems to be a sort of nice analogy. We get a lot of people on who are on both sides struggling with the, you know, it's, it's an AI question now, but it was a data question previously. And that friction between I want... I need to buy a new thing, some tech, someone is selling me something that promises to solve all my problems, and then five years later we find that actually no, that wasn't the right solution at the time, and you get into that cycle. And quite often in the sports realm, people land on, in-house or contracted in, you know, what's possible inside an organization the size of the Premier League, the IOC, FIFA, or down to an individual team, Man United or Spurs. So you get that challenge and When I sort of looked at what you've been doing, that feels like the same problem but at a ma- much, much bigger scale. So if we take, like, the NHS, for example, my wife works in the NHS, it's, it's feels like a sort of 15-year-old computer system that is whirring away. That might be wrong, but The challenge of getting that into some sort of order feels like a massive version of what a sports team might offer

mike bracken 11:22

That's right. That's right. Well, you know, were I talking to a large sports organization and industry body, I would ask the same questions I asked to a a country or, or the head of the NHS. And the first two questions I would ask are what is your philosophy technology and digital service? And the second is, what is your tolerance for organizational change in terms of how your organization works? until you've got a view of those two things, you really can't answer the questions

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 11:53

What do, what do people normally answer to that, those questions? 'Cause they're big questions

mike bracken 11:57

Well, look, because you're dealing with big institutions in NHS, our philosophy is that we want to be in charge of technology. We are unhappy with this being done to us

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 12:07

Yeah

mike bracken 12:07

then I go, "Good. As a result, you are in no fit position to take charge of technology, largely because the organization's shape and size you have makes it impossible for you to display nationwide or institution-wide technology standards because you've been chopped up into lots of competing bits. are you willing to do that?" And then they go, "Well, I would love that to happen." And then you go, "Great. I'll ask you again, are you willing to do that?" They say, "Well, we might be able to do a little project on the side." And that's where we are with the NHS, and it's where we are with many institutions. I suspect having talked to some of your colleagues on the WhatsApp group, that's sort of where we are with sports as well. so first question is the most challenging, and that means that most institutions that do embrace that change of, how they're set up, that usually comes from a crisis or an

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 13:04

Yeah

mike bracken 13:04

threat. Which is why, if you remember gov.uk came from a cross-parliamentary crisis of failure of repeat technology programs in government, failures in tax, pensions, justice elsewhere, and parliamentarians basically said, "We have to try something different." And many institutions at the point of crisis or challenge then get to a point of saying, "Are we set up right to be the sort of technology-based organization that we need to be because it's so central to how we want, want to run oneself?" If not, and most institutions are not ready to change their shape and size, then I think there's a sort of secondary question, which is, well, what... Should we limit your ambition a bit, but what can we do with your existing shape and structure? And it's up to sports bodies to do that. My small take on that would be many of them haven't really grasped that question yet. The art of the possible for sports, particularly some of the regulatory bodies, sorry, some of the cross-government bodies, i- it is huge. But they've really not grasped that because they're still wedded to a sort of buy one system and it'll work, go to an agency for some innovation model. And you'll get some of that, and it's okay, you won't get... you won't shift the dial really

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 14:19

r- If you're running something large, you know, whether either in sport or outside of sport, and quite often you look at the end of... There's a personal level to these big decisions in terms of wanting to be at the front of a big decision, look- looking sort of thrillingly decisive. Buying a new tech system is one way of doing it. I'm an ex-teacher. When we ever got money in the public sector, you know, we would, you know, the, they would announce a new computer room, and there were 101 different ways of spending that money, but it was a nice signal for all lots of reasons. And I think one of the things that's running through the AI conversation that, that we quite often talk about is that the CEO, the C-suite, has seen something they want. This is what they want. And AI has sort of crystallized... Data is a really boring but important bit of this question, but AI has taken that and made it into something that is really beguiling to people who want change, and they, they- it almost represents something. And I don't, you know, how you then get there, you quite often land on silos and, and, you know, sales is not talking to marketing, is not talking to performance, is not, you know... All of these things are smaller versions of what you're talking about, isn't it?

mike bracken 15:35

Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is my, my tolerance for change. So the first question, I think, the first issue is to grasp is like, why are you asking the question about AI? If AI is the answer to the, to the problem, what is it you can do to solve a problem requiring a sort of advanced technology? 'Cause most of the problems that your sports organizations are facing are pretty prosaic. really quite dull, frankly, but they're

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 16:00

Yeah

mike bracken 16:02

And so it's things like, why have you got multiple databases of users and addresses and of payment details? why on earth would you do that? Why do you need a bunch of advanced technology to unpick that rather than make an organizational decision about how you're going to work? I'll give you some ludicrous examples from government. I remember s- I think we had six different parts of business and education departments which essentially gave money to students, student loans, student grants. There

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 16:28

Yeah

mike bracken 16:29

there's a sort of 16 to 18-year-old body up in Coventry, they do some. And I went round to each of them. I said, "This is great work, great work. How do you give the money to them?" They said, "Oh, you can write them a check. We send them to them." I said, "Oh, great." I said, "So you share like the um, "Oh, no, no, we have our own." I said, "Well, as far as I know, there's only one University of Manchester or where it is. Like, can't we share the address?" "No, no. Special and unique and different." And it's this sort of nonsense that gets in the way of most organizations. NHS, good example. Now, in sports organizations, that generally is a micro conversation, like the performance director's not speaking to the commercial director. That's not a technology problem, that's a management problem. Gotta sort that out. On a more macro sense, that's where it gets interesting because you and I are football fans, I am, you know, primarily a fan of a football club, but I'm also a football fan, and I have certain characteristics that means I attend stuff and buy stuff and want to work that with other people, family, friends elsewhere, and so on, and a bunch of ancillary services. But there's no common identifier that everyone's using to identify me as a certain category of football fan. There are thousands of bespoke CRM systems and other such data analysis tools which are putting me in categories of... I heard you the other day, I think we're just Generation X, I think. You're a, you're a bit younger,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 17:47

Clinging. I'm clinging to gen- Gen X.

mike bracken 17:50

I'm hanging on by my fingernails. I don't know what the previous one was. But you know, why do you need all those tools if there wasn't a common standard or platform that says, "Yeah, I'm in that box"? And by the way, you can all use my defin- you can all use that definition because we all share it. it's this idea of having shared platforms and shared protocols, which sounds quite benign, but when you think about it, most of the world works on that basis. So get on an airplane. work out you're gonna land somewhere. It's got a three-letter suffix where you're going to go. It's like LHR for London Heathrow. That system called Sabre sort of saves an enormous amount of time for airlines and everyone in the industry so you know where you're going to go, right? It's not difficult. As those very simple For example, why are there not similar examples of that in sport? Why don't we just share what is obvious and common and often not changing so we can all work to and innovate on those, uh, bases? I think the answer to that is twofold. don't want-- they're not built to share and understand wider value, and most importantly, they're having micro arguments about which bit of their machine is in charge of which bit of data. Most people don't care

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 19:04

Quite often in sport there is a... So if you wanted to pool the fan base of the Premier League, you run immediately into Man United versus, you know, West Ham or, you know, well actually

mike bracken 19:16

Not

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 19:16

no lo- no longer, but anyway, who I can't, whoever's at the bottom of the small versus the big question. So Man United say, "You know, you can sod off, 'cause we're not gonna share our fan base with your, with you because it's more, it's valuable to us and we, it's our competitive advantage." So you get this, the big and small framing or, you know, per- the, the club versus the league versus, you know, whatever. So there are real commercial incentives at play, and people, it's not they don't understand the necessary sort of the sharing question, it's that they actively are incentivized not to. So that's what you find in, you know, if you work for a marketing agency, broader marketing agency, you've got the, the sort of sponsorship versus media, because they're just competing over the same budget. And so that's stopping all the good stuff from happening. And I don't, I'm, I've come to wonder whether that's a solvable problem

mike bracken 20:13

Yeah, it's solvable. You've got to start by doing the maths. The reason it's, it's not being done is that ind- sports bodies generally, and industries, I'll take broadcasters out of that, generally don't have an economic model to say, "What's the size of the prize if we did this?" Because they're, they're all thinking... All those things you mentioned are essentially different parts of an organization competing for who holds the pen or who holds the, the lever about extractive value creation. In essence,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 20:46

Yeah

mike bracken 20:47

extracting value of me and you from an individual layer, because the entire philosophy of how they work is extractive. It is not collective. And this I think could be a central point to sport, is that CRM, let's take CRM as the most simple and commonly understood tool since we talk about AI, whatever. CRM is a 50-year-old database. It's relation- it's relational marketplace, how it started. And the idea of CRM is essentially an extractive basis. Like I'm going to get football club X is gonna get all my data, and from that it's gonna extract a bunch of value. It's gonna sell it, it's gonna market to it, et cetera, right? It's essentially extractive. And the choice I have over what they do is limited,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 21:29

Yeah

mike bracken 21:30

And at the point of that I'll be like, whereas actually there's another way of thinking about this, which is VRM, which is a vendor relationship management, which is I'm in charge of my data, and I'm gonna give it to you, football club X, but not football club Y, or because I'm gonna favor a trust relationship, and I'm gonna invest in that relationship if I get more of what I want back. at the

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 21:53

Okay

mike bracken 21:54

some of the high-profile scores we're seeing, and I'm seeing this with some of the agency stuff I've looked at, people saying, "Go, we've got higher levels of engagement." You know, it's the Virgin Media problem. It's like, yeah, you can engage with anyone all the time. You can send them emails, you can pester them to death. All they end up is hating you because you won't leave them alone, yet they're not getting a good enough service.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 22:14

Yeah

mike bracken 22:15

I think if sport persists on this, 'cause sport is incredibly sponge-like, people have got a huge amount of in it. I have, and you have, and everyone listening to this podcast has. But there is a limit to how many times you can be asked to look at replica shirts or whatever it may be,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 22:29

Mm-hmm.

mike bracken 22:29

still not getting a good service for ticketing, or five different bits of the same organization have got my address. And there's a tolerance for that extractive stuff. I think we're getting way beyond it now, uh, uh,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 22:41

when sometimes people come on and, there is a... Or we should be more like retail airlines is quite often referenced, and banks as these are good practice. This is what, this is the direction it should be. So a fan and, uh, a football club, it should define its relationship a bit closer to that end of the spectrum and not, uh, you know, a, a traditional fan relationship. And obviously then outside of a sports business bubble, hackles start to rise and you start to get into sort of cultural stuff about fans and what that is. But if we just stay within the bubble for a minute, There's always leaders and laggards in anything, but where, who is at the front end? What industry? I mean, looking at Amazon, is it, is it... What... Just talk to me about who the best in class are. Is it easy to do that in terms of categorizing? 'Cause my assumption's being that sport is somewhere in the middle, maybe towards the end, and because it's got a very traditional view of itself. And then you get to things like, so government, I wouldn't know where that would... I wouldn't... You know, I listened to you at the beginning, I think, wow, this is all solved. This is great. But it, it feels not

mike bracken 23:58

But this is why I'm so optimistic about sport. why. So if you, you gave me examples like banking and airlines. So the examples are given because those industries have rock solid standards and platforms which everyone knows about and works to, and you can then work with them to increase value to customer and so on. The problems with both those industries, banking... The best example in banking is open banking. The ability to layer on a bunch of over-the-top services or new innovative services, but with the guarantee that there's still a sort of cast iron level of clearing and all the rest of it that banking does well. So customers get the satisfaction and the security of knowing they get their conventional banking, but they're getting some innovation over the top. good example of where they adhere to common standards, but both banking and especially airlines are hugely restricted in their innovative capacity because of the regulatory overhead. It's a metal tube that flies at 30,000 feet. There's only so much you can do with that within safety regulations. Sport is a very light touch regulated industry in comparison to those two, but it doesn't have the standards, consequently, it's got thousands of people running around doing busy work with poor or incomplete data sets, and even when they do have better data, they can't deploy it at scale because there's no standards to deploy to. So I think sport's missing a trick by not having these open standards. They won't revolutionize everything overnight. What they will do is give third parties the, and actors within the s- within the industry, the ability to innovate using those shared standards. Sport is an intensely inefficient industry from a technological point of view because it keeps having to repeat everything all the time, and then all of, a lot of its leaders want, "Give me a dashboard that shows X. Give me a dashboard that shows Y." can continue on that for some time, but again, you're not moving the dial there.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 25:56

Again, one of the questions I, again, as an obviously a non-tech person, is the Palantir question. So I- you get to what is it they're selling? So again, it's an NHS question or it's a government question, it's almost comically created for someone like me to not like, from Peter Thiel and the cart down, their public sort of persona through to ICE and or whatever it is. All of that is just noise. I'm trying to get to actually what Palantir is offering. Is it offering something that is different, that is part of this solution? Is that what it's getting at? Why is it so popular, or is it just about lobbying? Is it just about money? Just talk to me about this a bit, 'cause I'm interested. 'Cause people, again, one of the phrases you hear is that, you know, a Palantir for sport. You think, okay, well, that's taking us into a different direction

mike bracken 26:48

Hmm, that's not a phrase I wanna hear again, but there we are. Let's, let's do this properly. So there's a lot not to like with the noise in Palantir. I get that. That's not my issue today. Let's go back and let's look at the Lansley reforms of the NHS in 2011,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 27:05

Yeah

mike bracken 27:06

and what that did was really chop up, in the name of autonomy localization, it chopped up the NHS into about 90-odd trusts and gave a lot of power to doctors. It ma- it was a big reorganization, and it gave a lot of autonomy and then said, "By the way, you're all free to do your own things, but we wouldn't mind if you converged on a set of outcomes, and crossed our fingers." And, you know, some years later, had health ministers with their head in their hands going to me, "Mike, you know, why are we not getting the network, n- network effects of everyone doing the same thing?" Like, because you literally chopped it up into hundreds of pieces without any real common standards or protocols to work to, which is why NHS England was, was quite rightly put in the bin. Now, what then happened is Palantir and others came along and said, "If you use our proprietary technology, the problem we will solve for you is not a technological one, it's an organizational one." Back to my first question, which is, we can make all the bits of data which currently are classified differently in different hospitals talk to each other. Now, there are many technological ways of doing that, believe me. That's not what we're here to say. But Palantir said, "We can do that better than anyone. But the way we do that is our own proprietary technology. So once it's in the Palantir box, we do it, and you get the outcome And for better or worse, the NHS went, "Yeah, we'll have a bit of that." And that means you then have today the classification of health data and much of the personalization of that data being done in a black box, and that's not good because there's no open standard for that. that means today, should you... Today, the c- current position in, say, technically, uh, you walk into or you hobble into a hospital in Aberdeen because you've broken your leg, they go, "Who are you?" And there's no sharing of health data or records because your local hospital is in the And that's crazy in a country like ours, but that's crazy because we've decided that our organization structure is better being chopped up into hundreds of autonomous bits than having a common standard of protocol that you can work to. And here's the news: You can still have 100 bits or 1,000 parts of the NHS, so long as where it matters, they have a standard protocol, and we don't. We decided not to do that. It was a foolish move. And what we said was, in the name of competition, we would have a small number electronic health record companies, there's four major ones, who, who essentially have an oligopoly on the market. And they will use a proprietary service that Palantir gives from its proprietary database and the proprietary technology that you can't see into, and then we'll get the outcomes that we want. And we'll pay them a lot of money, and they will be essentially the owners and drivers of that thing. Now, that's not a great outcome, I don't think. But what would've been a better outcome is if we said, "Tell you what. We'll have a common standard. Everyone with a license or everyone who we choose can use it." They can innovate on it, and the, what they do, the, the better services they create, goes back into that system, and so you get the flywheel of competition and innovation. You get better services for less money. That's how we took loads of money out of government in the first place. What we're now getting is paying a lot more money for an adequate service that we can't control or manage. It just happens to be Palantir in the driving seat. It could be someone else. Until we decide as a health industry that we're going to run and manage our own classification, that's not technology, that's just calling things the same thing, you're going to have this window for proprietary technology companies to say, "Look, without us, you can't run yourself." Now, sport's in that position. It's not as it's not as vitally important as the NHS. It's not far off to some people. But that's the choice. And sport, about now, sport should be making those choices 'cause take football as industry or the IPL, it's... You know, these institutions are big enough to dictate the vendors and suppliers to them and how they work. instead, you know, I think Dan Zwan said it recently, you know, be makers, not takers. And sport is, like the NHS, is now having to take- systems and services provided by third parties that they're contracted to without real m- really much say in, in how they work or the outcomes of them. And that's, that's not a great outcome

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 31:28

So when you go in, your first question, one of them was about philosophy. What's your philosophy? Is that about open and closed? Is that what you mean by philosophy?

mike bracken 31:38

Yeah, I mean, you know, there is a, a philos- philosophy of technology which I won't bother you with, but there's a sort of essentially two post-war views emergent, which is either we're in charge of technology and we can choose and we have agency over it, and we can choose to be open where it suits us. Or we are somewhat in thrall to technology, and the best thing we can do is to manage our and economy, economic model to an, to a bunch of technological changes which are in, you know, indisputable and which are on a trajectory that we can't control. That's, that's the sort of general thinking with AI at the moment. So it's a really central point. Like, are you in charge of this stuff? Are you determining where it's going and how you use it, or are you going to do the best with it as technological change happens? Now, there's pros and cons to both, but the bigger institution, the more agency they want

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 32:31

Right. Okay. And it's where the power lies. Again, it's a... This is about power, isn't it? It's not about tech

mike bracken 32:39

It's all about power. Look, for 30 years, institutions, including sports, big institutions would buy big IT systems from big blue companies that you're familiar with, Oracle database, I- IBM, Microsoft, companies. Make very good technology, very enterprise technology. And executives would sit around and go, "Well, you know, if, if we hit trouble, I know someone at IBM, I can make a phone call. That, that's the way out of it," you know. As if that's going to work. And then time and again, you have systems crashes and systems failures. That was, that was a nod to power. It was essentially saying, "We've given our power away." mean, a couple of years ago, Airport and British Airways had substantial outages which cost billions, largely because of enterprise IT failures. They'd decided to give that to someone else. And so you don't have to run all your but you do have to in control of the stuff that is really important, like you manage your own approach to it, what you call it, should, what should be open, what should be closed. And I think sport is going almost down the closed line very quickly, largely because it doesn't believe it can do anything else

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 33:50

Just to build on that slightly. So when you... I'm just coming out the back of a, a financial conference, you know, sports investment summit, Sports Pro Investment Summit, and it's the money on stage talking, you know, about sport, what it, what it thinks about when it looks at sport. And the open/close question I think is really interesting because when you see the sort of nascent leagues or growth leagues or people that are launching things, you've got a whole wall of money waiting to be deployed. They like sport for all the obvious reasons. They think it's, you know, an AI hedge. They think it's the fan relationship is, is a super customer relationship, and that's all, all of which is I'm sure true. You then get to, okay, well, what do we want to build? If you're gonna build something from the beginning, so something like a SailGP or a, there's someone there from Horse Racing League set up last week. We've got Padel, we've got all sorts of things, rugby, LIV Golf. They're all looking at Formula One and seeing a closed world where they control everything, and they control everything that is within that walled garden.

mike bracken 35:01

Mm-hmm.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 35:02

That's what they want, and you can start to see that that's how the money wants sport. It's the American model, franchises, you know, investable units, all of that stuff. And then you lay in your questions, and I can see that working. So within Formula One, I can see that, okay, it's just Liberty or whoever's running Formula- owns Formula One can then make a decision about systems, and it's got a constituency, which is sort of... There's always Ferrari versus the rest, but it's a much easier environment than football, which is the Wild West So the easy bit would be to, take the Formula 1 fan would be the, it would be almost the, low-hanging fruit or whatever the cliche is, but it's trying to work out what actually you would do to try and answer your questions. 'Cause your questions are e- simple but really difficult to answer, and I just don't know whether or not you ever get there,

mike bracken 36:08

Yeah

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 36:08

and whether or not it's just the mar- you know, the, the stuff that we dismiss as people and problems are actually the point. It's really difficult and you'll never get to a, the utopia. So it's the single customer view is one that when presented, I hear it and say, "Okay, that sounds really interesting. I, I get that," but I don't know whether or not you'll ever get to that point in a, in an open f- open world

mike bracken 36:37

Well, let, let, there's two is- issues there. Let me take one at a time. The idea of a single customer view, the 360 view, everything else, is a sort of marketeer's wet dream. different circumstances, they are more or less effective. They can be. by and large, in dynamic markets, they don't work. They don't work for two reasons. Firstly, the time and cost of getting the data, and crucially maintaining it, doesn't get you anywhere close to the value that people think you will get out of it. So most people who opt for a c- single customer view do so at, at industry level because their current data practices are shoddy, and they've probably had some sort of hack or something like that. They think, "We've got... I know, we'll, we'll go from being really terribly organized to have, like, absolute nirvana, single customer view." They n- very rarely stop to say, "Well, we've got this data. What are we gonna do with it? Practically, what are we gonna do? How much will it be worth? What will it cost to maintain? When I move house, will we manage that? Who will wash it? Who will verify it? Who will authenticate it?" And the cost for those things are huge and ongoing and complex, and your for how you're gonna monetize that data is rock hard, then you're probably onto a loser. Now, if you can have the... to your second point, different, different sports have got different models. I'm not familiar with Formula 1 I was once part of a group that sponsored a car, but that's for another day. Yeah, I worked for a, worked for a very large company that once sponsored... I think we got a wing mirror or something. And, but there is more of a clear model in Formula 1 because it has got more of a closed market, a set number of races, a set number of drivers. You can atomize the individual who follows that more readily than you can a football fan, and here's why. Because there's no national Formula One. We don't watch England play and, and went and... Also, it's essentially a personalized sport. By that I mean, like if I follow Formula 1, I follow it. If you and I follow football, we're likely to go with friends, family, to different groupings, different competitions, different regulatory bodies. It's messy, and therefore, the more messiness you have in your sport, the more unlikely it is that you'll ever derive value from a single customer view.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 39:05

And so d- d- is the promise of AI that you don't need-- It's gone beyond that. So that was a sort of 10-year, 10 years ago question

mike bracken 39:14

the, he says stroking his chin. One of the benefits of AI is of course, is a, another, it'll be this year's version of a I must say AI is a different thing. Artificial intelligence generally is a collective term for a bunch of technologies which have a lot of value. The AI that's been sold at executive level to solve this problem is it's just like, it's just this year's Bitcoin, blockchain, CRM, whatever. It's the next version. Like if you have AI you can solve this problem. Essentially, if you have relational database management going back 30 years, you can solve the problem. The problem is organizational, as we've talked about, and the

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 39:52

Yeah

mike bracken 39:52

the nature of change. Yes, you can use some AI tools to make it better. I mean, some of the tools, some of the people working with Claude and some of them on your podcast are doing amazingly quick and insightful work, and it's ras- drastically improved and increased the time to market of analysis. So it's has a load of value, in and itself, they are specific sort of dashboards they're creating. They're not taking a systemic view to the data of an industry

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 40:21

So when you look at, again, back to my the finance question, when the money looks at Man United

mike bracken 40:28

Yeah

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 40:29

or Barcelona, and it hears, 800 million fans, and we d- we can chat about how a fan is defined and all the rest of it. And then it, it says, right, okay, why is Man United valued at between, w- w- whatever, five billions, 8 billion quid, compared to Pinterest, which has got a massive valuation and has got, you know, claims roughly similar types of users, or, you know, the big platforms. And the money says, right, okay, I want a fan to be closer to a platform user than a, than, than our definition of a fan in our imaginations. And the clubs want to tell that story 'cause obviously it impacts their valuation as organizations. So the money is waiting to be deployed but it doesn't believe the fan number and/or it's saying, yeah, but you don't know who the fans are, and therefore we're not g- you know, your valuation is gonna be pegged at the story of the fan rather than the reality of it. And the classic sp- you know, the case study of the industry that gets wheeled out a lot is Barcelona, Spotify,

mike bracken 41:45

Yeah

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 41:45

know, and they, they see the difference between how many fans they know or, you know, and the claimed media story. So just walk me through this. What do you see when you hear that type of scenario? 'Cause again, if you're looking from the financial perspective, that's where they see untapped value in the sports industry. It's like even a club as storied as Man United isn't doing it right or it's a, it's... There is a mismatch

mike bracken 42:15

Yeah. I mean, because on the, on the models I've seen, I've seen for some clubs, not Manchester United, is that the models that extrapolate future value, from the sort of fixed issues like broadcasting, which is collective deal and maybe ticketing, but there's limits to that, those projections are based on a series of extractive valuations about how more money can come from individual fans and through which mechanisms. And those projections are based usually on d- on projections that come from different industries like footfall in retail. Like if we have more people through the door, they will generate so much money. So if we have a bigger club shop, they'll spend more. Now, in the micro sense, that is correct. If you have more seats in your stadium that are full, you'll get more money in. But, but the, sort of inflation level in those numbers are predicated on such bogus basis of what a fan is and how they will spend that they're essentially unprovable. And my contention would be that they are mostly there to e- ex- to attract future capital investment by telling people, "Look, if you go in now, the numbers are still going up. You too can get on the bandwagon. The numbers are going up." So we have essentially an industry in football where the majority of clubs lose money and have continuously done for ages, and yet the industry is generating ever more revenues. That cannot persist forever. But people want to get on the bandwagon for a variety of reasons now. They need these sorts of metrics to show it. in a, in a bit way that like advertising and marketing, digital advertising and marketing have been completely, you know, distorted by the sort of CPMs as your show, uh,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 44:03

yeah

mike bracken 44:04

Football particularly, and many sports particularly are going off these, not bogus metrics, but these massive inter- over interpretations of, of what are relatively micro impro- i- improvements to sort of in-game value or, or, or to the, the consumer spend. It's almost as if sports consumers are given no limit to their capacity for spending, and that's, that's just not right.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 44:28

Yeah

mike bracken 44:29

I increasingly don't believe them

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 44:33

Well, you know, you're not the only one. If we bring it back to AI, I guess, is a, is a point. Do you see anything there? Do you think that's a marketing game that is being played largely, or is there some... You know, you're someone who worked on the internet in the '80s before I th- even knew there was an internet. You'd have heard, you know, I've- we've had professors of AI on who, uh, you know, got their degrees in 1995 or whatever. So these things have been around a long time, and I always wonder what it looks like from someone as experienced as you to look at these things, say, "Okay, yeah, that's a marketing game, but actually there's the value and there's the reality of it." And it must be very frustrating that those things, these questions keep coming at, back in the same guise.

mike bracken 45:18

Not really. It's human nature, I think. But AI and various parts of AI technologies continue to add value for sport and embrace them quickly. You know, that's great, they're not going to change the organ- the two questions I asked at the start.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 45:34

Yeah

mike bracken 45:34

up to sport to do that, which is what's your... Are you in charge of this thing or are you sort of just a fast follower? And how quickly will you change your organizational model to adopt technologies? And, you know, I don't think... A- AI a very useful tool for any sport that decided take a decision to unlock the value of, if you like, the collective of sport. Because if you keep doing the extractive, you get more and more skilled at extracting a finite amount of money from me and you, and there's only so much to go. So yes, cost you less over time. You'll be better at it. It won't cost you so much to get the same amount of money out of my pocket, it's still extractive. And over time, I'm getting a bit misty-eyed and romantic, but over time, many of the sporting moments you talk about and you talk about in '25, you'll look back at the year, that the talked about are collective. I

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 46:37

Yeah

mike bracken 46:38

the World Cup for this year will be one of them. The Olympics last year. The... You know, it... Sport has something that other industries, banking, finance, airlines, the NHS don't, which is it has a latent value of the collective, and its current of technology and digital and data is essentially based in a 30-year model of the extractive of the individual. It's not an either/or, but sport's missing a huge trick, I wonder which sport'll go for it first.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 47:11

Just don't- just take me another layer into that. So what is the... Just be specific about the trick that has been missed, but also what sorts of decisions need to be made now

mike bracken 47:24

Well, the trick that's been missed in understanding that there's a latent value in what I m- may want to do and the value I put in joining in something that's essentially a collective endeavor. I might want to go somewhere with my friends. I might want to meet people in a different place to watch a sporting event. At the moment, the model for that is I need to buy my ticket, I need to organize my transport, and I mainly, may or may hope to organize a bunch of other people who are each dealing with systems that are about them and them only. And that might be a Formula 1 race, it may well be a football match, uh, but there is a value to that sport of having more people collectively decide, "Let's all go and do this together." at the moment, that's getting harder and harder. Look at some of the people that didn't go to the World Cup, for instance, who they couldn't go with friends and family because the nature of or access or transport. And it's not just about putting on hospitality. I don't mean that. I mean giving people the agency and the choice of going, yeah, I might bid more if I could do that. I probably would spend more if I could take once a year 20 people to a match, but I can't afford 1,000 pounds a seat for hospitality because that's hugely extractive. But I would probably put more in if I could organize a collective around an event. Now, some sports which are event-led, like darts and things like that, have realized that. many sports who have got massive m- macro and global ambitions, football and Formula 1 you've named, don't value that. And there's massive amounts of latent value in giving people the ability within, within, uh, limits to organize themselves and to have more agency about where and how they spend. sport is, and football is worse, is continually to tell us when to cheer, when to sit, when to stand, when you should buy your shirt, when you sh- and should you appreciate it and pay a lot more money. That, that's missing the trick, and it's missing the collective trick of what sport represents

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 49:28

So you need someone who is prepared to take a short-term hit for a long, for longer. You know, and the long term could be 20 year. I mean, that's, it's sort of given CEO tenures are, you know, three, five years, it's gonna, uh, you're asking almost an impossible question for someone to fulfill. Even y- I could go in there and with the best will in the world and say, "Right, okay, I've got the, uh, Mike Bracken playbook here," but it's gonna be very... I can't see it working

mike bracken 49:57

I don't think so, 'cause I don't think it's an either/or. You don't have to lose some of the personal stuff. You have to layer on a bunch of the collective stuff. And also, right in terms of it's a longer play because it's about behavior change, and you have to condition your fans to understand this is the way it'll work now, and you have to get new people into that. But so many sports seem to me to be facing sort of existential moments. Look at The, Hundred. Probably saved ECB in the UK in the middle of COVID. You know, I talked to the chief executive then and, and, and the chair. Like, that deal had to be done to save the sport, and that... they were very, very happy to sort of change a lot of the optics about cricket to get them to do that. So sports face these moments quite regularly, one of the things that I think, especially in a changing broadcast world, one of the things I think is that you can use these moments to layer on a new way of thinking about how you engage with your fans and your future fans, and allowing them more agency into how they engage with the sport. Because, this is back to your technological question, because they now have, we all have at our disposal that lets us join in and collect a bit more. irony of these, we're all carrying around a phone with all these tools that allow us to connect. We're using a nice here, Richard. You know, connect on our, on our WhatsApp group, and yet of our clubs and institutions are still trying to deal with us as atomized individuals, as if we don't talk to other people. It's

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 51:30

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I know, it is. And it's... This, it, again, one of the themes that comes back is the sort of, there's the commercial angle as well. So if you then said, "Right, okay, I need, we need a new system," or whatever, it is how you frame it. Is, it, sport is framed around sponsorship, so if you're gonna get into bed with Google or Microsoft or Palantir or, OpenAI, whatever it is, th- that there will be a trade, and that, that tech and data and the customer, they are the value exchange. And so that's where I think the, one of the challenges is, is just on a sort of commercial basis.

mike bracken 52:11

I think it's a huge challenge. If you're talking about distribution, say you deal with YouTube for YouTube, I get that. But surely some sports can say, you know, to, to, to murder your metaphor, like it's not about who you get into bed with, it's about welcoming them into your bed and saying, "Look, this is the way we're organizing ourselves. This is our data, standards, and platforms. You two can play here to add value and change that dynamic." S- not all sports can do that obviously, but some sports are big enough to do that and should be

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 52:39

Okay. Brilliant. Well, Mike, thank you very much for your time. Really enjoyed the chat. I thought I would, and I, and, and I did. That's good. That's always good news. Who is your team, by the way?

mike bracken 52:50

Uh, Liverpool for donkey's years, and most recently Forest Green Rovers who are in the smallest town in the country for a football team

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner 53:00

Yeah, yeah. Well, two very diverse, a little bit of, uh, diversity in the club portfolio. Very good. Right. Brilliant.

mike bracken 53:08

cheaper following one than the other