Hello and welcome to the Sports Pundit Newsletter,
This week began with Wimbledon kicking off, so it’s fitting that this week’s stories lean tennis-heavy. Despite being on the other side of the world, Tennis Australia continue to make headlines and their discussion at Cannes last week dove into their philosophy, and there’s plenty in it for others to learn.
I was also lucky enough this week to feature on the Attention Shift Podcast with Ed Abis. I would love to know what you thought of the episode! Many of the stories covered there are included in this week’s highlights, and I’ll be building this in more and more over the coming weeks.
Here’s what’s coming up:
Tennis Australia Partners with the PGA TOUR for Presidents Cup ⛳
Andy and Jamie Murray launch “The Set” YouTube channel 🎾
PGA Tour approves promotion and relegation structure from 2028 ⬇️
Let’s get into it!
CAPABILITY AS PRODUCT
Tennis Australia took the stage at Cannes Lions last week to explain how its “Hits Different” strategy has powered the Australian Open’s growth beyond a core tennis audience. Within that same strategic push is a partnership announced earlier this month that Tennis Australia will help deliver the PGA TOUR’s 2028 Presidents Cup.
At Cannes, AO’s head of event brand marketing Britt Wickes and director of partnerships Roddy Campbell, a former guest of the Sports Pundit Podcast, laid out six principles behind the brand’s transformation, built around the idea that the AO competes with “everything your audience could choose instead,” not just other sports.
The strategy has already produced new entry points beyond the core tournament such as the AO Live music festival, the TopCourt precinct, and the 1 Point Slam knockout exhibition, designed to pull in audiences who were never going to show up for tennis alone.
Campbell was explicit that AO has set itself a target to feel “at least 50% different every year,” framing disruption as something the organisation is built to keep producing, not something that happens once and gets left alone.
Last month, Tennis Australia announced it will support the operational, experiential and commercial delivery of the 2028 Presidents Cup, its first major project under a newly formed events enterprise built to sell Tennis Australia’s event delivery capability to other rights holders.
The Presidents Cup deal isn’t a marketing partnership in the New Balance or ANZ sense. This is Tennis Australia acting as operator rather than host and packaging the institutional knowledge behind running a Grand Slam and selling it as a service to the PGA TOUR.
Why It Matters
The Cannes appearance and the Presidents Cup deal could be read as two different stories but they are essentially two sides of the same coin.
One side is about pulling new audiences toward the Australian Open brand. The other is about pushing Tennis Australia’s operational capability out toward a completely different market.
In both cases, however, they are a response to the underlying pressure that is brought on by having a fixed calendar slot and a ceiling in terms of how much a single annual event can grow by simply asking existing fans to spend more and more.
We covered Wimbledon’s response to this a few weeks ago when they announced The Wimbledon Court Invitational in New York. This falls on the side of pulling new audiences towards the brand.
The Presidents Cup deal is interesting because it’s applied to the back office, the side of the coin that we’ve seen a lot less.
They are taking event operations, staffing, logistics, accreditation systems built over decades to run one of the four Slams, and selling it as a B2B service to a golf tour that would otherwise have to build the equivalent from scratch.
The timing compounds the value on this, too. Running the Presidents Cup in Melbourne one month before the Australian Open means temporary staffing pools, supplier relationships and local infrastructure can be retained and redeployed rather than rebuilt. This is a margin advantage that has nothing to do with ticket sales or sponsorship and everything to do with sequencing.
Tennis Australia has decided that neither its audience nor its revenue should be capped by the tennis calendar. The AO’s marketing arm is manufacturing new reasons for people to show up who aren’t tennis obsessives and the events enterprise is manufacturing new reasons for other rights holders to pay for what Tennis Australia already knows how to do.
Whether the Presidents Cup becomes a template for further work with other sports, rather than a one-off shaped by geography and timing, is the thing worth watching but the theory (and the fact they have had the conviction to spin up a specific department for external events) is something to analyse and explore further.
GET YOUR TICKETS NOW
On July 10th, we’re bringing together executives from Spotify, Snapchat, Substack, England Rugby, The FA, and Livewire at Victoria Road, home of Dagenham & Redbridge FC, for Sports Pundit’s first Football Media Summit.
Five panels across the afternoon explore where football, media, gaming, and the creator economy are actually heading:
How Are Football and Gaming Rewriting Fan Engagement?
Do Creators or Clubs Own the Football Audience?
How Are Clubs Turning Digital Audiences Into Direct Revenues?
How Are Leading Sports Organisations Embracing Innovation?
What Does Streaming Mean for Football’s Commercial Future?
Confirmed speakers include Kahlen Macauley from Snapchat, Alexandra Adey from Spotify, Arthur Guisasola from Substack, Flo Lloyd Hughes from The Cutback, Rob Gevertz from England Rugby, Tori Horobin from Livewire, John Grabowski CEO of Dagenham & Redbridge, Harry Hugo of Farnham Town FC, and musician Avelino, a former guest of the Sports Pundit Podcast. Further speakers to be announced.
Gates open at 4pm. Five panels from 4:30pm. A World Cup Quarter-Final watch-along kicks off at 8pm if you want to stay on.
Tickets are £12, with profits going to gaming charity SpecialEffect.
SUPPORTED BY DIZPLAI 📲
Your biggest fans are invisible to you. Here’s the proof…
The channels that give you the most reach give you the least data. The Anonymous Fan Index, Dizplai’s benchmark study, proves it.
Ticketing is the richest source of fan data, cited by 67% of respondents. Membership and loyalty programmes came in at 48%, social media at 41%. Broadcast audiences, where most organisations have their greatest reach, are the hardest to convert. 67% said broadcast viewers were their most anonymous fan group.
Supertri’s Chris Williams knows the commercial consequence of that. Relying purely on broadcast numbers, he says, leaves you exposed on your sponsorship proposition.
The Anonymous Fan Index sets out what closing that gap looks like. Download it free and use the Fan Revenue Calculator to put a number on your own opportunity.
HIGHLIGHTS - SUPPORTED BY THE ATTENTION SHIFT
Andy and Jamie Murray launch “The Set” YouTube channel 🎾
The Murrays have launched “The Set,” produced by Prodigy Studios (The Overlap, The Switch) and IMG Tennis, with their first episode featuring KSI, timed deliberately to coincide with Wimbledon 2026 and distributed across The Set, KSI’s channel, and Wimbledon simultaneously.
The launch follows the Overlap template of elite athletes building owned audiences post-career, with Murray himself citing Bryson DeChambeau as the inspiration, the deeper play is direct fan relationships, brand partnerships, and owned IP that broadcast deals have never delivered.
BBC partners with the Sidemen for live World Cup watch-along on YouTube and iPlayer 📺
The BBC and the Sidemen co-hosted a live watch-along of Ecuador v Germany on June 25, streaming simultaneously on BBC Football’s YouTube, MoreSidemen, and BBC iPlayer with the official broadcast embedded inside the creator stream via picture-in-picture.
It is the first creator watch-along partnership for a major BBC sporting event, and structurally mirrors the Netflix/Goalhanger model, a legacy rights holder borrowing an audience built elsewhere to reach young fans who increasingly experience live sport through communities they already belong to.
Snapchat research confirms Gen Z fans check their phones 10 times per match, and that’s the point 📱
New Snapchat research among 1,000 UK Gen Z fans finds they check their phones around 10 times per World Cup match, with 74% reaching for their phone during the scheduled 22nd-minute water break and 72% immediately messaging friends when their team scores.
The data reframes the “second screen distraction” debate entirely - for Gen Z, the group chat is the primary fan experience, and 69% say they would engage with brand content during breaks if it was relevant, making the water break a genuinely new synchronised commercial moment in live sport.
ESPN launches Fan House, its first direct fan identity and engagement platform 🏟️
ESPN has announced Fan House, a new engagement platform powered by Flowcode QR technology launching in August 2026 with college football, offering polls, trivia, sweepstakes, and brand integrations, giving ESPN its first mechanism for building direct first-party fan relationships.
The move is ESPN catching up to where the ad market has shifted: reach was the product, first-party data is now the product, and Fan House is the infrastructure to collect it.
PGA Tour approves promotion and relegation structure from 2028, and bets on the Australian Open as a global premium slot ⛳
The PGA Tour has approved a two-tier Championship and Challenger Series from 2028, with a $20m purse per event at the top level, 20 promoted annually, and no sponsor exemptions, with new CEO Brian Rolapp explicit that the restructure is designed to compete for media dollars through better storylines and commercial inventory.
Simultaneously, the PGA Tour has formally partnered with the DP World Tour and Golf Australia to elevate the Australian Open into a top-10 global tournament between 2027 and 2029, with a new permanent venue from 2028, part of a broader strategy to build premium inventory in international calendar windows that don’t cannibalise North American broadcast rights.
SPORTS PUNDIT PODCAST
On today’s episode of the Sports Pundit Podcast, I’m joined by Jada Balster, CMO at Perk.
Jada is a B2B marketing leader with more than 20 years of experience across companies including Epicor, S&P Global, and Adobe. Today she leads marketing at Perk, the all-in-one travel and spend management platform formerly known as TravelPerk.
In this conversation, we explore how B2B marketing has evolved from a demand generation discipline into a brand-building function, and why Perk recently embarked on its biggest ever marketing investment through a company-wide rebrand. We discuss the role sport can play in accelerating brand growth, including why Perk selected the Audi Revolut Formula One team as its first major sports partnership, and how the company plans to stand out as Formula One continues to get noisier for incoming brands.
Timestamps
02:00 - Jada’s Career Journey
04:00 - TravelPerk Becomes Perk
06:00 - Rebrand Rollout and Metrics
10:00 - Why Sport and F1 Fit
15:00 - Choosing the Audi Partnership
24:00 - Integration Beyond the Logo
27:00 - Activating Across Channels
34:00 - What’s Next for Perk
🔍 Search ‘Sports Pundit Podcast’ wherever you listen, available on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube 🎧
Andy Marston is the founder of Sports Pundit, a community and media platform for sports and technology executives. Through a weekly newsletter, podcast network, lively group chat, and regular social events, he shares industry analysis and connects leaders across the sector. Alongside Sports Pundit, Andy leads Corporate Venture at athlete-backed venture firm, The Players Fund, where he works with high-profile sports IP such as Como 1907 to design venture strategies and drive innovation initiatives.
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