Working with investors and portfolio businesses in sport

Investment firms acquiring sports assets or backing structural change in sport face a risk that does not always appear on a balance sheet. Stakeholder confidence, public narrative, fan sentiment and the perception of governing bodies, governments and commercial partners are all financial variables. When they are managed well they support returns. When they are left unmanaged they erode value - sometimes quickly and sometimes in ways that are very expensive to recover.

The gap between strong financial engineering and strong stakeholder and communications strategy is where investment value in sport is most often lost. A compelling deal can be undermined by a narrative void that others fill. A well-structured franchise model can face resistance that slows commercial progress. An ownership change can harden into controversy before the new investors have had a chance to make their case. In each case the underlying asset is sound. What is missing is the capability to protect and build value through strategic communications and stakeholder alignment.

Managing those risks requires a different kind of expertise to the financial and legal advisory that typically surrounds a deal. But it deserves the same seat at the table. That is what we provide.

WHAT WE BRING TO INVESTMENT FIRMS AND THEIR PORTFOLIO BUSINESSES

Stakeholder and reputational risk identification

Before a deal closes or a structural decision is announced, we map the stakeholder and reputational landscape that will shape how it lands. That includes fan communities, governing bodies, media environments, political relationships and governance sensitivities. Understanding those dynamics in advance is one of the most commercially valuable things an investor can do.

Proactive stakeholder relations

A void in the narrative does not stay empty. It gets filled by the most vocal critics and the least informed commentators. We build proactive stakeholder relations programmes that create awareness, understanding and support for the change before opposition has a chance to organise. Not to spin the story but to ensure that the audiences who will shape public perception have had a genuine opportunity to understand it.

Ongoing strategic communications counsel

Portfolio businesses in sport operate in complex stakeholder environments where reputational risk is constant and communications decisions have commercial consequences. We provide ongoing board-level advisory covering corporate affairs, issues and crisis management, leadership communications, content strategy and the kind of senior counsel that helps organisations shape their environment rather than simply respond to it.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR LONG-TERM RETURNS

Sport is unlike most investment categories. The asset has a public dimension that cannot be separated from its financial performance. Fan trust, media narrative, government goodwill and regulatory standing are not peripheral concerns. They are the conditions under which commercial value is created or destroyed. For investment houses with a long hold horizon, the organisations that understand this early will consistently outperform those that discover it late.

The evidence for this is not abstract. At Birmingham 2022, managing an 80-person team and a 17 million pound budget through the largest Commonwealth Games ever held meant operating in an environment where reputational risk was constant. Reputation and commercial delivery were not separate workstreams. They were the same workstream. At UEFA, working across more than 20 national associations, the pattern was consistent. The associations that treated communications as a value creation function outperformed on the metrics that mattered most — government funding, commercial income and public trust.

HOW WE WORK

We work with a small number of clients at any one time. That is a deliberate choice. The quality of advice we provide depends on genuine depth of engagement with each client's situation, not the ability to deploy a methodology at scale. We are not an agency. We are a senior advisory with a specific and hard-won expertise.

We are currently exploring a limited number of new advisory relationships with investment firms active in sport where strategic communications and stakeholder alignment are part of how they think about protecting and growing the value of what they own.