UP533 The Bundle: Super Bowl, cultural relevance v culture war; ITV's in-game ads; FIFA and TikTok

The Premier League has won the facts. Manchester City were found guilty of 114 of 115 charges, with £830m of revenue inflated through sham sponsorships. Now the fight is over the story, and everyone has a different audience. Dan Johnson, the Premier League’s former director of communications, and investigative journalist Nick Harris of Sporting Intelligence join Richard Gillis to pull apart the playbooks. They cover the League’s long silence and why it left a vacuum, City’s network of former ...

Alan Gilpin is chief executive of World Rugby. He spent nine years at IMG negotiating the commercial rights to the 2003, 2007 and 2011 Rugby World Cups. So when he says next year’s tournament in Australia brings him full circle, he means it literally: he’s selling the same tournament from the other side of the table. The men’s quadrennial World Cup brings in around 85 to 90 per cent of World Rugby’s total income. And he’s set himself a big number. World Rugby’s plan targets a surplus of...

Gen Z has a new insult for anything that looks cheap: “that’s so AI”. Richard Gillis and Andy Shora of TFG Labs ask what that means for a sports industry selling AI to investors, sponsors and fans all at once. They cover who should own AI inside a club, what happens when the shirt sponsor is also your infrastructure, and why autonomous agents have changed the risk profile from bad copy to switched-off turnstiles. In this episode Why fans discount AI content, and why craft and effort sti...

A conversation about sponsorship effectiveness, creativity and the price of chasing vibes. Richard is joined by Mike Grumbridge and Peter Wilson of Sid Lee Sport to talk about Mike's recent Marketing Week piece: "Stop confusing vibes with sponsorship effectiveness" which took the Levi's Stadium ambush at this summer's FIFA World Cup as a starting point in to an argument about the value of official and unofficial sponsorship. From there the conversation widens: why sponsorship still can't prov...

Recorded live in front of an invited audience of senior sports-industry figures at Teneo's London offices overlooking St Paul's Cathedral, this Unofficial Partner event asked a deliberately awkward question about the summer of 2026: not what happened, but what actually changed. Three set-pieces framed the conversation — the men's FIFA World Cup in the United States, the European Athletics Championships, the ICC Women's T20 World Cup and the Commonwealth Games — and the panel picked apar...