HOW TO GET INTO THE SPORTS INDUSTRY
I had the pleasure to speak with Euroleague Basketball MBA students during my recent trip to Belgrade to watch the Euroleague Final4 tournament.
In my presentation, I talked about how:
✈️ I started out as a aviation and car parts lawyer;
💻 I started blogging to build my football industry knowledge;
💼 to get better results instead of just asking for work experience;
📈 opportunities create opportunities;
📅 stretching your career opportunity window works; and
👟 how to start equal races and create hooks when trying to become a specialist.
TRANSCRIPT
Okay. Firstly, thanks everyone for staying for the last talk of the day. I know it's sometimes a bit tricky to stick around for the last talk, but hopefully it can be of interest to everybody.
Very briefly, the only housekeeping that I would say for this talk, and it might be different from the people that have chatted to you before, but if you've got a question on anything that I'm talking about, please just ask it straight away. I've got no problem about being interrupted at all. Usually, the sign of a good, engaged audience is the audience that's actually asking questions because it means they're listening rather than on their phone, daydreaming, thinking about something else that's going on. So, if you agree with me, if you disagree with me, if you have a question about something, if I haven't made things particularly clear, please ask because hopefully the session can be valuable to you; that's the aim.
Over the last few years, or over the last about 15 or 20 years, I've been working in the sports industry and primarily in football and basketball, actually, but a lot specifically in football. And this talk, for the next however long it takes - depending on how long you want to hear my voice - relates to the very basic questions that I get probably most days from an email, from somebody contacting me, from someone speaking to me generally: how do you get to do the thing you want to do? How did you get to be a football lawyer? How did you get to work in the sports industry? How can I go about doing the same or similar things? And so, over the years, what I've done, or tended to do, is give quite bitty advice to lots of people at different times, which share some of my own experiences and my journey and how things have gone. But what I actually thought would be quite helpful is to turn it into a little bit of a talk to explain, in a way, the things that went well for me, a lot of the things that went badly, and things that I've seen, things that people have done really well, things that people obviously could do better and how to chart that journey because I presume most of you all that are here on the MBA course with EuroLeague are either in the sports industry, want to make the move into the sports industry at some point, or are fascinated by the sector and sport, and want to engage in that space in the long term. And that's my journey in effect.
You know, I'm a Liverpool fan. So, we've had a good season which I'm quite excited about.So, I grew up a Liverpool fan, in Liverpool, even though I don't have a very strong accent, but I grew up at Anfield from when I was six or seven years old. And all that happened in my family - the only thing we talked about in our family, was football, really. So, as you can imagine, as I get a little bit older, into becoming a teenager, as I do my exams, apart from trying to do well in exams, everything is sport, and everything is football. And as a result, then what happened is because most of my family are lawyers, I didn't really think too much outside the box. So, I just decided to do a law degree. But as you may think or may actually realise, a lot of law, which I found as well in my degree, wasn't that interesting and there were a lot of very big cases, very long things, lots of regulations, lots of laws, lots of cases. Everything felt quite difficult in a lot of different ways. But as soon as I read a sports case, and as soon as I specifically read a football case, it got a lot more interesting. And it got a lot more interesting because suddenly it stuck that little bit more and that was obviously because I had an interest in the topic, but also because I was starting to think about how I could possibly combine the things that I love, sports and football, with the thing that I do, which possibly was going to be law in the end.
[Aside] They’ve definitely taken a picture of my bald spot haven’t they. You can’t have everything.
So, this is the conundrum that I had when I was doing my undergraduate degree and then I did a master's degree in football broadcasting rights. Then I started with my law job at an American firm. This American firm did absolutely no sports and football law, almost entirely nothing at all, but did little bits here or there. But my idea, or my ideal, was how do I combine law with football or with sport? And the thing that I realised now in hindsight, is I didn't need to, and I'll try and explain that and there's a bit of detail as well if that's alright. But fast forward now 20 years on, and I'm now a football lawyer at a sports firm called Sheridans in London, Soho, and my specific type of work that I do, specifically relates to the football industry. So, I work with football agents and players. I work with some clubs, and I work with quite a lot of high-net-worth individuals and companies that own football clubs on the whole. And what I want to do is just tell you a tiny bit about that journey and how I got from the fresh-faced lawyer with lots of spiky hair to the not so pretty lawyer with not very much hair left, and it started actually by what I like to call my side hustle.
So, I was really interested in football and sport as I realised from my undergraduate degree, and as I realised when I did my master's degree. Whilst doing my day job at the American law firm, that I joined during my master's year, I'd already started writing articles on the football industry on particular elements of broadcasting rights, on particular regulations, and loads of stuff. And as a result, what happened is I got published in - I was actually absolutely delighted - I got published in this quite prestigious law journal called The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal. And I got an article published in there. My mum was very excited for me, which was good. The problem was I think she was the only one of three people that read the article because no one really still reads journals to the same extent that maybe they did a few years before, and the reason why I say that was because what that enabled me to do was to start thinking quite deeply already about the industry. Because I think what people, you know, really enthusiastic students and people that want to get into the sports industry are very much keen on saying is, I've got a passion for sport. And I want to use that passion for sports, obviously, into getting into the sector or the industry that I then want to work in as a result. And what I try and start telling people, I think, which is really important, is you can't just say you've got a passion; you've got to back it up. with something like this MBA course, in truth, and all the other types of things you're doing.One of the things that I started doing was reading everything I possibly could about the football industry. I'll try and give you a little story as to how that came about.
So, when I moved law firm to the firm I was at beforehand, and I was there for about nine years as it says in the second bullet point. For an awful long time, I was a financial services, agriculture, aviation and car parts lawyer. It couldn't be less sexy parts of the law if you tried, by a million miles; that was me, and that's fine. And again, this is a common theme that runs throughout hopefully what I'm going to talk about which is if sport is part of your identity and is the thing that will sustain you in the long term, you don't need to worry about getting into the industry in the short term. That's one theme you'll hopefully come back to. What effectively I started doing when I was doing all of those other pieces of work was trying to build a side hustle and the way that I started building that side hustle was again by reading all different regulations. So, to give you an example, I remember clearly, I was about a year into my job at the law firm and I was asked to read a 95-page European regulation directive on the definition of what a vegetable was; that's the glamorous life of an agriculture lawyer. There’s 95 pages of it. But what it made me realise after a while of reading all of these regulations over a long period of time, in areas that maybe I wasn't entirely passionate about - I’m not sure if it's possible to be passionate about vegetables, but that's a different question - it made me realise that actually I became really, really good at reading regulations. Now it didn't matter if the regulations were vegetables, or automotive parts or sports. So, what happened as you can probably imagine, is I've spent hundreds of hours reading regulations generally. I'm not too fussed if I'm actually reading regularly about the thing I'm really interested in, and it got me really precise about understanding sports regulations. So, for example, the Premier League Regulations now are 560 pages long. The UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations are really nice and only about 95 pages long. The UEFA disciplinary proceeding regulations are a lot longer than 95 pages but not the same extent. The EuroLeague regulations, as I know because I'm on one of the committees, are quite long as well. The point I'm trying to say, which is a really, really, I think, undervalued point of view is: the skills that you develop outside of the sport sector, in whichever sector you are working across, whichever discipline you are thinking about become very, very valuable to you and shouldn't be underestimated, whatsoever. To the extent that my number one phrase, that I plagiarised from somebody else, I don't know who it was, so I apologise that person whoever came up with a very clever phrase, who said: nothing is a waste, and everything is an opportunity. I'll come back to that in a second but the gentleman that had the question…
What is a vegetable? What I'm concerned about is that that’s the question that you asked.
The short answer is it was all to do with what legumes were as a vegetable, unfortunately. It's still etched in my brain.
So, one of the underlying first principles in my talk is quite a counterintuitive one, which is if you want to do the thing you want to do, don't worry about doing it now - is the first, number one really important point because what actually happens is, and again, I'll try and come back to this point again, it actually depressurizes you. I think even when I was a young lawyer and I was trying to get into sport, I always probably put quite a lot of pressure on myself to say, ‘I need to be a football lawyer now. How come I can't work with football clients? Maybe I'm not good enough, I'm only going to do this type of work etc.’ So, all the usual types of insecurities that most people have. What it actually enabled me to do, by doing all of these different types of law, was build a really strong skill set outside of sport, that I knew at the same time would leverage me hugely in sport.
And then what happens as a result, going to the next slide but takes me to the last point which is: you then start building a side hustle. My view is, most people have an awful lot of time to do what they decide to want to do, through conscious or unconscious routines, priorities, ideas, or what they want to do with life generally and my view, completely unconscious at the time, was I knew I wanted at some point to be a sports and football lawyer. I really didn't have that much of a clue about how to get there, if I was going to get there, but I had a really good idea about how I was going to try to do that. And going back to the point, I want to go backwards a little bit, all of the law journal articles that I wrote, I realised no one was reading them or rather, my girlfriend, who's now my wife, was very clever in thinking, why are you writing in sports journals that are behind the subscription paywall that no one's reading? Why don't you just start a blog? So, I thought, actually, that was a very sensible idea. So, I started a blog on my website about trying to demystify parts of the football industry and explain cases, explain things that are coming up. The great thing that happened as a result is that I had to explain complicated principles simply, and when you have to explain complicated principles simply you've got to know your stuff otherwise you get found out very quickly and very easily. I started writing a lot of blogs, a lot of people started reading my stuff. I then started on Twitter back in 2009, I think it was, just as Twitter was starting out - I think, yeah, 10 years. Yep - and started to get a good following there and the mixing of the blogs with my constant reading, actually then led to an opportunity to write a book on the football industry, which I did a few years ago called Done Deal which has been great and has opened up a lot of doors.
So hopefully you can see the first part of the discussion that I want to try and talk about is for over 10 years when I was a non-sports football lawyer, I was doing lots and lots and lots of sports and football related stuff. Someone articulated it much better than I when I explained it to them that that's what I was doing which was saying, ‘oh, well, you're just having a sports/football side hustle’, and they were totally right.
So, in my spare time, in the stuff outside of my day job, I was just reading lots of cases, writing lots of stuff, publishing things, and more or less going from there. And if I could end this slide on a particular point, which I think is really important, has anybody read the book Atomic Habits? Yep, started it. Okay. So, it’s by a guy called James Clear, and he basically explains how in order to build new routines you need to start really, really, really small, so it makes it embarrassingly easy to do. Not like this really big ‘I've got to run 10 kilometres a day’. What you've actually got to do is put your trainers on and get out the front door, and then you might decide to run 400 metres instead, and the reason why I say all of that is at the time, even though I didn't really know what I was actually doing, I was building very small, incremental, compounding routines that lasted quite a long time. So, most days, just because I was a football fan, and much to my girlfriend's dismay, every day I was like watching and reading Twitter, finding stuff that would be hopefully interesting, seeing the thing that was of interest. If it was on a legal topic or a regulatory topic, I'd then blog about it, post it on there, a journalist would find it interesting, he'd ask me for quotes or she would ask me for quotes on it, and then in time I managed like to get onto broadcasts and TV companies are phoning up and say, you know that blog you wrote on this we should do that. And, bit by bit, slowly by slowly, incrementally by incrementally, we then got to this position where ironically even though I wasn't doing much football work in my job, I was still doing food, agriculture, TV, film, whatever it was, I was really known in the UK as the lawyer that explained complicated football stuff. I was basically one of these chameleons. I felt that, you know, everyone thought, ‘oh, Daniel’s, the guy that does football law’, but, actually at the beginning, and for a while, I wasn't doing that much football law. I was just explaining it. So, the perception of me as the guy that people remember as doing football related law became the actual reality of the situation.
So, if I move on from side hustle to this question about wanting to work in sports. There are loads of things and loads of different directions I can go in, and hopefully there'll be questions that you have on particular areas, but I think the thing that's really important to say, which I really liked, this isn't a book club, by the way, but I'll keep quoting books until you actually read them because they're worthwhile to read. There's a really good book called Grit by a lady called Angela Duckworth, and she's an American academic, and she's written this whole book about how grit, resilience, perseverance is really, really important, obviously, but the most important thing is it's not something that's genetic. It's the thing that you can get better at and, actually, practice being more resilient, being better at dealing with problems and the stakes and issues that necessarily arise. Right at the end of the book she has this Q&A session and this really resonated with me because everyone I speak to, everyone without fail, when they say I want to be a football agent, I want to be a football lawyer, I want to be a director of a football club, I want to own a football club, I want to work in whatever particular thing in sports and football, they’ll always say, ‘I'm really passionate about football.’ And the reason why I use that particular phrase, because you will hear it all the time, is I didn't realise actually for quite some time, until about two years ago, what the root definition - talking about definitions again - of passion actually is. So, its Latin root is actually Pati, P-A-T-I, and Pati as a Latin phrase actually means to suffer. And so, I find it fascinating that passion is used in a very positive way to demonstrate and articulate to people that, actually, they really want to do something. But, actually, it's the exact inverse of that; what they're actually telling me, even though they might not realise it themselves, is I want to suffer for sport and I think if people realise that actually, that's what they need to do possibly in a positive way if you can turn it into - in order to actually do the thing they want to do, they would probably either use a different word, or probably go about their behaviours in a slightly different way in order to actually get to the thing, into the place, that they actually want to get to.
And the next question I usually try and ask people is when they say, ‘I'm really passionate about sport’, is ‘what are you interested in, in sports generally?’ Now, I don't need to lecture to you guys about what's interesting in sport, basketball, football across the sports landscape because you've spent a lot online and offline, talking, learning, reading, reviewing, discussing all of these types of issues, but for a lot of people, maybe yourselves included. The most important thing to be able to say to someone, when you say, ‘I'm really interested and passionate about sports industry’, is to be able to follow up and say one of the following: the reason I'm passionate, interesting, interested is the following. The thing that you mustn't do is say, ‘well, because I really like basketball and I watched the game last night and it was really exciting because you know, there was a last-minute winner’, or whatever else it might be. The real way that you'd be able to articulate that is to say, ‘well, it's really interesting at the moment in football because when the Super League came along, and JP Morgan was going to invest 4 billion euros and said they’d bring it to all these different clubs. And actually, the reason why the clubs might have needed the money was because of COVID and COVID came along because of all of these matters, from contractual matters, and then this happened, and then transfer values went down and then agents’ fees became more interesting, and then clubs had to rein in their spending.’
You can probably get what I'm trying to explain, which is what you need to be really, really precise about when you're speaking to people generally, is to be able to articulate interesting things about the industry to show actually your worth, to show that you're invested in the industry, and also to show you know what you’re talking about, because it's really easy to do the former, ‘I just really like sports’. It's very difficult to do the latter because what that really shows, I think, is that you've spent considerable time thinking about things.
The second thing that happens when you start thinking about things, and again, this isn't really - this isn't a really easy thing to do, and you might see it happen, hopefully you've seen it happen to yourselves, but you'll definitely see it happen on stage when you're watching industry veterans talk about their industry generally, is that they never talk about things in isolation. Never. Doesn't happen. When a person that asks a question of an industry executive that's worked in the space for decades. It will start off usually in the micro, which is very, very specific and almost always if they've given a good answer, it will branch out to the macro; they’ll talk about why it's important for the wider industry space. And the reason why I say that, and why it's important, is what they're actually doing is they're connecting their knowledge dots together. As you become more senior, as you become more knowledgeable, as you are reading more, as you're speaking to other people, as you're demonstrating your knowledge, as you're investing yourself, as you're building your like invisible foundations, the best thing that happens at some critical mass, some critical time, is your brain starts connecting all of these different, disparate dots together, these knowledge dots, which then massively helps you in understanding the area that you want to go into or maybe already in. And that's really important because in the end when everyone says, ‘well, you know, I want to work in basketball or tennis or cricket or you know, USC or whatever else it might be, what should I be reading about?’ And the answer is just one very, very easy, straightforward principle which is just follow the money. Follow the money flows in and out of sport, the ones at least you can see, because what ends up happening is you quickly realise where the commercial realities of the sport are. If I give you a few tips you could probably know the first is subscriptions to TV broadcasting, broadcasters paying for rights, ticketing, commercial sponsorship and everything else that comes with that. I know you've had talks on Metaverse and other things as well, which is an interesting space in itself. I'm probably telling you things that you guys already know but what's massively, massively, massively important is - something I'll come on to in a second and the next slide - about the difference in learning for learnings sake versus learning for exams, and it's something that I've only just really appreciated over the last year or so. I'll come on to that in a second, but the point being is that I've myself, for a long time, studying law, learning law becoming, you know, junior lawyer or whatever you're reading and learning law possibly because you need to pass an exam. It's like a transactional thing: if I do this and I get this grade I will get to this next stage, and I will then pass and then find the next thing. When you start learning for learnings sake because, you know, you're thinking, actually, my identity is caught up in the thing that I want to do. You stop learning as a transactional thing, this to this, but actually because you're like, if I learned this, this might lead me to this, which then can connect to this and then if these three things work together, I get better insight on the industry, perhaps. So, I just want to talk in a little bit of time about our relationship, or rather my relationship, with exams which was terrible because, actually, I was fine with exams. That was the problem. I had a great memory; I still have a great memory. If I can remember that I have a good memory. But sometimes, my brain works slower than others. So, you can imagine like I have these big cogs working in my brain, like the cogs don't work very fast, but when they do get there, they're usually pretty good which means that my memory can be quite strong. So, I can memorise things all day, but your memory is useless if you need to, you know, work out a solution to something in 20 minutes. Why is someone testing me for my memory’s sake, when actually they’re not really the skills and the skill set and the tools and the bits that I need in order to achieve the end goal? Which leads me then to the next bit on getting hooks.
If anyone has any questions, please keep just spit them out. I've got no problem. Yeah.
Q: You talked about following the money in whichever industry you pick. What about the countries where there's not much money, like UK’sbasketball for example. What do you follow there because there’s not much, besides London Lions, there’s not much to, you know, follow.
All I would say is you don’t need to necessarily worry about being too narrow. So, I could say well, I’m really interested in grassroots football in London, but it’s probably not that commercial. What I mean is that, yes, let’s just say you’re interested in basketball, so, basketball can be in lots of different directions if it’s NBA, Italy, if it’s in EuroLeague, or if it’s in UK, but what I mean is your knowledge base shouldn’t necessarily be so narrow as to be like I need to know everything about UK basketball. I think it should be, right, NBA does this with their financial regulations, British Basketball League does this, for example, EuroLeague does this with its cost control. I’m just giving you some very brief examples. The great thing about any sport is it has lots of different jurisdictional and component parts. So, I wouldn’t worry about being too narrow in certain ways, but making sure that you can see big picture sometimes as well.
Q: Would you be comparing UK Basketball with NBA with such different countries and whatever is going on behind them would you compare them, or just take it as separate and take whatever information you can get from each?
I’m always of the view that the more information you can get on anything, the better. My one phrase to take away for today is: nothing is a waste, and everything is an opportunity. So, if we take that one logical step further, it doesn’t matter whether you’re reading 10 hours a day about the NBA and you’re not thinking about UK Basketball for the time being, or vice versa.
But that leads really nicely on to my next point, actually, which has to do with getting hooks and what I mean about getting hooks is actually, probably directly on to your point.
So, I’m now to my clients at least, and slightly wider audience, known as the guy that knows lots about football law related stuff. So, whenever there's a query about the agents, regulations, or the transfer system, or how a transfer should be done, or about the laws around agents or takeovers, or disputes or whatever else it might be my clients hopefully know that they phone me up because I'm the guy that can sort out their football related stuff and find solutions to it. That's what I call the hook, more or less. The hook is: Daniel’s the football guy that can help me sort out my problem. What I realised after a while was, what was really important for me, was to develop an identity which related to the thing that I wanted to do. I know it might sound like a quite a straightforward thing, but actually it's a very difficult thing for after awhile somebody to say ‘oh, you're the guy that does football stuff’. What I mean by that is, as you develop your knowledge base, let's just say it is in British basketball, what you need to be able to do is two things quite well. The first, is an internal knowledge, aggregation i.e., how much knowledge can you gain, retain, and then understand about the British basketball industry, for example. The second thing is then starting to talk about it externally or amplify externally. Everything in between is going to be quite difficult, and what I mean by that is that at an individual level people buy into the person that's doing the thing. If I'm at Sheridans, you know, as a lawyer, as one of the 100 lawyers, or wherever it might be in a much bigger organisation, we're all selling something. I'm selling my services as a lawyer, you know, EuroLeague is selling its product as a marketing entity, but to broadcasters across the world, for example.
What I mean by the external projection is once you feel that you're actually at that critical mass of being able to explain interesting things about the sector and industry that you're learning and understanding and talking about, you've then got to be able to project that externally because there's no point just keeping it to yourself. The way that you do that is by projecting stuff. I've seen some brilliant Tik-Tok accounts now doing this really cool thing, they're not singing or dancing, they're telling really interesting things in 30 seconds. I'm not saying do that but what you've got to do is find your own medium to be able to tell the external community this is what I am interested in, this is what I am aligning myself to and this is what I have insights to be able to give. If that's a blog, if that's Twitter, if that's a podcast, if it's speaking to people in the industry, about the stuff that's of value to them; that's effectively what I mean when I say get the hook. The hook is more or less the thing that in 15-20 years’ time, people will say, you're the basketball guy, you're the British basketball guy. He knows this stuff in whichever field it might be. And it's a dual, parallel path you've got to take. You can't do the external without the invisible internal starting position, because otherwise you just get found out really easily. The difficult part is you will always have that type of imposter syndrome, where lots of people will always say, ‘I'm never going to know enough about this’, whatever I read in the hundreds of hours that I've done, and I'm never going to be good enough to be able to articulate things in whichever way and you've got to find that balance between feeling that comfortable enough that you might know your stuff enough. But have faith in the knowledge you are going to be going way, out of your comfort zone, for the first two or three years in actually demonstrating your value and your knowledge and your worth and everything else that comes with it. Basically that's what I mean by a hook.
And the next thing, which I think is probably one of my most undervalued bits that I try and say in talks to crowds like you guys, in truth, is there are tonnes of people out there that have 15/20/25 years head start on all of you from a knowledge perspective. What I mean is that me, for example, if any of you guys wanted to be a football lawyer, and let's just say you were just starting out as lawyers now, I've got a 20 year head start on you on all of the regulations that are already out, on all of the cases, on all of my relationships, on all of the communications, of all of the content of everything that I've done. So, I am not competing with you at the moment because I know more stuff than you guys, full stop, or any one individual person. But where you guys have a massive competitive advantage right now is time. You have the advantage of time mixed with novelty and what I mean by that hopefully is as follows.
I'll deal with novelty first. If possible, you've got to find the trends in the industry that are just starting now, and I’ll explain why that's quite important - and that's inadvertently how I did things right at the beginning of my football career. There were about three or four different topics which arose around me starting as a junior lawyer, who didn't have family responsibilities, didn't have kids, just had a girlfriend, played football on the weekends. I had time outside of my job to be able to invest in particular things in this knowledge building, and three things were happening. One was a thing called Third Party Ownership in football players, that was like external companies that could buy transfer stakes in players, and the second thing was Financial Fair Play, which was the cost control rules in football. As soon as those regulations and soon as those cases happened, they were new areas of law. They were different - just new regulations. And that meant I was starting an equal race with every other single sports lawyer that wants to become an expert in those regulations. Straightforward and simple as that. If I wanted to start a race with a lawyer, or whoever else it might be, that had been a serial lawyer that had worked on hundreds of transfers over a 30–40-year period. I can’t compete with that because they've got the experience, the knowledge, the know-how - everything else that comes with it. But what I did was I started reading all of these regulations, writing lots about it, speaking with loads of people, doing all the usual stuff, and what that actually led to was me having a competitive advantage over most other people in the legal sports industry because no one else was investing the amount of time on those topics that I was. Basically, because who the hell wants to read 150 pages of football financial regulations. Very few is the answer, but I was one of those people that wanted to.
So, I'll try and give you a more recent example, which is as the speaker just before Javier would have, I think, mentioned. He talked about Metaverse and everything else that came with it. Presumably he was talking about Web3, he was talking about crypto, he's talking about NFT stuff as well. I know NFTs and crypto and Bitcoin and everything have taken a bit of a dive at the moment and that's just, you know, whether that's a speculative impact on lots of different things beyond my paygrade - but what I said to quite a few of our junior lawyers about a year ago, or just over, because we were doing a lot of work inside intellectual property rights for footballers that we're doing stuff in crypto or NFTS, or visual stuff, or content related stuff as like, become the experts in NFTs, know everything you can about that landscape and start reading about everything you possibly can for six months. Go on a proper digital exploration of that particular market, so, you become the sports and entertainment NFT lawyers over the next five years because no one knew what NFTs were, you know, 18 months ago-two years ago. It was a properly new area of - well a new product, new digital product more than anything else. Hopefully then you can see what I'm trying to get at in relation to then this last point about starting equal races. What you've got to understand is you might have particular industry focus or particular sector focus that you really want to nail down and that's absolutely fine, but you don't have to do one thing at the expense of another thing. You can be the best British basketball industry insider that there might be, but that doesn't mean that a particular area of basketball commercialization you also can't be studying and knowing about at the same time. Which means that what you constantly need to be looking out for, by reading and by doing it, by speaking to people, are these new industry trends, which you can become very quickly in six to nine months, a micro expert in. So, if you can imagine in any particular sector, there are so many silos of knowledge and subsections of knowledge. The idea ultimately is in the first place to target one or two. In the medium term it's to target five to ten, and then in the long term, what it's to do with is to target those ten to fifteen but be very, very deep with each of those silos in terms of your knowledge and in terms of your understanding. So, then you get to a position where you start off becoming pretty good, quite quickly, at new things and in time, you get very good at a lot of things.
I'm saying this very stupidly, but hopefully you get the point. Any questions?
We'll keep going.
I appreciate everyone has still basically got their eyes open with about 10 minutes to go over the last day. So, thank you very much for that as well. Almost - oh no, I haven’t finished! No, you're not going anywhere. This is the last slide I promise, two, but that's fine. I'll try and do it relatively quickly if anything.
So, the two last general concepts that I just want to talk through really quickly.
So, I've got a good friend who is football agent. He's the agent of Mesut Ozil when he was at Madrid, when he was at Arsenal, he's now moved to Turkey and whatever he does in the future. We've done quite a lot of talks together on a range of like football industry stuff, but we also try and give some talks also on these types of career advice areas and one of his best stories that he tells is that when he was starting out in Germany, as a lawyer, trying to qualify and do all these things. He really loved the football industry as well, and really wanted to get involved, and he tried to speak to the main football agent in Germany at the time that wasn't returning his calls, wasn't returning emails, he would come to the office and would get, you know, a blatant ‘no, he hasn't got time’. And so, what he decided to do, which is quite risky, he went in one day to the agents PA and said, ‘I've got the best up and coming player in Germany, I want to see the agent in order to try and work out a deal so we can represent him together’. So obviously that perked up the agent, he got 10 minutes with the agent a few days later, went in and the agent said, ‘Who’s the player’, and Erkut said, ‘I don't have a player.’ And so, the agent says, ‘Well, why are we still speaking then?’ And Erkut said, ‘Well, look, I'm really passionate about football industry. I want to get involved. I want to be an agent. I want to be able to work out how I can work in the space’. The agent says, ‘Look, thank you very much’ in as polite German as you'd probably be, and told him to get out. But whilst he was getting out Erkut said, ‘This is what I'm going to do for you: every month for the next year, I'm going to write a journal for you. I'm going to deliver it to your office explaining six interesting things that have happened in the football legal community, and if it's of interest to you let me know.’ So, the agent was ‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever.’ – Get out of my office, basically. So, Dr Erkut talk decides to start writing this journal which obviously takes quite a lot of time inside of the studies. Three months pass, six months pass, nine months pass. He's written a journal which probably taken about 25 hours a month to be able to actually research and write and do. Not that he was quite close to giving up, but I'm sure he's pretty close to giving up and you can imagine what happens next. He gets a phone call from the agents PA saying, ‘he's read the latest article and, actually, there's a case involving him in one of the pieces and can you see him tomorrow because he wants you to represent him to get this players money?’. So, you can imagine, cut a long story short, does a great job, get the money, works with the agent, starts his legal career and everything sort of starts moving in the right direction.
The reason why I tell the story is because I think too many people are way too passive about how they go about looking for opportunities in the industry, and the reason why I say that is because not only do I think it is a complete cop out to say write a generic email, ‘Dear Sir, please can I have work experience at your great company.’ You know I think probably the hit rate would probably be 0.0000% to even get a reply, never mind a positive reply. I think what's a really important thing to consider is to put yourself in the position of the person, the recipient of the request, and that I think Erkut did pretty well, but I think you could even take it to a better extreme than that in truth. What you need to be able to do is get the person on the other side to simply say yes and you need to make sure that you give it in such a way as to absolutely make it the case that they need to do very little as a result of saying yes, for you to get into the door. So, what I mean is – I’ll give you an example.
I get 10 emails a week asking for work experience. And the truth is, it's a lot of hassle for me to be able to give work experience. I have to go through HR, they have to do a confidentiality check, they then have to do advanced identification checks, they can't come into the office because we have too much confidential information, I have to put them in a room outside of the office. I need to go and see them every day or whatever it is, or five times a day. I have to spend a lot of time with them. The opportunity cost of not doing work etc. is high. All of the usual stuff. The best email I get - the best emails I get from people are saying, ‘Hi, Daniel, I know your time is really busy. I really want to work in football, in the football industry, I don't need work experience but what I would love to do is write you a research paper on an interesting topic that I think's really useful for you right now. I think these three things would be good. What do you say to me writing this in the next two weeks? 500 words. And if you think it's any good, maybe we'll have a coffee to chat about it afterwards.’ I'm like yes. That's how you get to yes.
The other way - because what people are thinking is that the first time you're in communication with somebody is the only time that you've got the opportunity to impress. You need to do the opposite. You just need to get in the door. Start the relationship, start communicating with the person; enable them to see that you're very good at what you do, not just begging them at first instance - ‘Please give me work experience because I love basketball’, or ‘I love football’, or ‘I love tennis’ or cricket, whatever else it might be. Your aim, if you want to work with somebody is generally to work out how to get them to say yes. Put yourself in their position to be able to do it.
And usually, my advice would be don't target the chief executive or any one senior in your organisation if they're not able to have time to respond to you, generally. That's not saying don't do it, but you need to be able to be clever and think clever about that. My usual approach when I say to more junior people looking to get into the space is don't worry about the ‘Hail Mary pass’. The Hail Mary pass is basically, if I write 1000 emails, generic emails, maybe someone will say yes to me, and maybe I'll get a foot in the door. Whereas the opposite is true. You should actually, probably, write 100 very targeted, specific emails, or try and speak to people in the junior to mid-level of that particular organisation and try and build relationships with each of them over a longer period of time. They are the ones that will be more likely to spend time with you. They're more likely to be the ones that are empathetic to your cause because they have been in the exact same position that you have been and they're the ones that have more time and have much greater intel about the organisation that you're wanting to possibly work for as well. So instead of going for the Hail Mary, 1 in 10,000, pass, you should actually look to target those junior and mid-level individuals at that really exciting place that you want to work, and actually start developing those relationships because I guarantee they are the first ones that know about the opportunities in their team that crop up, for jobs and work and whatever else it might be and if you've kept in touch with that person for 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, 18 months, and they're actually thinking, you know what, this guy knows what he's talking about, or she knows what she's talking about, and I can get on with this person, they are the first ones that will be saying you know what, they'd be really good for that role that's just come up.
So, and that goes back to this point of short and long ideas, of thinking, which is don't think that the only way you're going to get into the industry is doing something which only possibly might work out in the short term for you. You've got to do the exact opposite, which is effectively learn the skills and develop that skill set which will get you into sport in the longer term.
Okay, I think we've probably covered most of these but hopefully same point.So, there's this book called Thinking Slow and Fast. Has anyone read that book? Yep.
So, it's by a professor called Daniel Cayman who's brilliant and it's all about the different choice mindsets in your brain, the A&B parts of your brain, but what I mean when I say think long and short, hopefully you get the first message with what I'm trying to articulate, which is: in the short term, think about the side hustle. You have to think about how can I build this invisible foundation of knowledge which enables me, in time, to be able to articulate interesting things to people who will be able to otherwise see through my bullshit? And it's really, really important. I know in about 20 seconds, whether somebody has really, over a particular period of time, you know, read lots of stuff, understands the industry, can really articulate interesting things that maybe I haven't seen, maybe I haven’t known, gives an interesting view or opinion on stuff. If you can do that short term work, which is difficult to do because you've always got lots going on, what it does is helps build your long-term ambition, because what then will happen is you won't be despondent when the thing that you're hoping happens in the short term doesn't happen in the short term. Actually, you're so invested in the journey you'll continue on for a lot longer because, actually, you can practice that patience that says, I'm building a really good skill set inside or outside of the sports industry. I'm building loads of really good soft skills and hard skills if it's marketing, PR, accounting, law, social media, tech, whatever else it might be. I'm building towards sports becoming my identity. I think that's the really important thing and what it does. I think too many people are just despondent, that at the first sign of things not working out it becomes very quickly the case that like, ‘Ah, I've tried so hard for six months, and it hasn't happened’, ‘I’ve tried so hard for two years to get into sport and it hasn't happened’.
It took me 15 years.
15 years of reading vegetable regulations but moving in the direction that I’m actually at. That shows hopefully, to a degree, the long-term approach, mixed with short term knowledge acquisition to start moving you into the right direction, which takes me to my third point which is ‘think skills not sector’. So, my view is that ideally, if you can, I would tell people that are applying for entry level sports jobs, actually, go into a different sector - if they possibly could.
Q: When you sponsor yourself or propose yourself for a job, would you target a top firm or maybe a smaller firm in which you might have more prevalent roles since day one, let's say?
In the beginning, I was targeting bigger firms in truth, but really, its whatever suits your ideas and your culture.
I targeted an American firm, which in hindsight was difficult because I didn't have much of a life for two years, because I was working pretty hard, but that's fine too. In a way I was happy to look for the best role that came around at that moment, in truth. But what I was saying about the entry level into sport is it's great to love sport but what you've actually got to love is the discipline. I mean, the discipline, the particular area that you want to go into. My discipline is law. Another discipline might be marketing, another discipline might be PR, another discipline might be tech or whatever else, coding, whatever else it might be. The reason why I say that is because I actually think there are much greater opportunities outside of sport, but inside your chosen discipline, to get an unbelievable skillset, experience and knowledge which then in the medium to long term takes you into sport. What happens once you've got 5,6,7 years of experience in that particular discipline, and you say that you've worked with these fantastic brands, worked with these amazing people, that have brought me loads of interesting work, that I've been able to speak to and everything like that. You're in such a stronger position to go into the sports market and say, ‘Well, yes, I think I'm really good at my job because of these skills that I've acquired and that's why I think these skills are transferable into the sport sector’. You make the sport sector want you, not you want the sport sector. And that's a really, sometimes, important mind switch to think about a little bit.
Then the last bit that I would just say, well second to last bit, was - the last one is stretching the opportunity window and that's more or less hopefully quite self-explanatory now but what I mean by stretching the window is if you are thinking short term and long term, if you are thinking more about skills than the sector, what ends up happening is you depressurize yourself to be thinking, ‘oh my god, if I can't get a sports job in the next six months, then that's it’. You're done. ‘The sector is no use for me. I've tried really hard and it's just not happening.’ Whereas if you do the opposite and you stretch the opportunity window, I guarantee what happens, which I think a lot of people, myself included, didn’t probably realise, is that usually you not getting a job in sports is probably very little to do with you. It’s to do with everything else that’s happening in the market, it’s to do with the companies, it’s to do with the industry cycles, it’s to do with the economy. It’s to do with the particular place that you’re in, the network that you have and everything else that comes with it. And by stretching that window, by stretching that time scale and timeline, what ends up happening is you’ve become less despondent and less panicked about the fact that, ‘I’ve invested a year working on the EuroLeague and NBA and if I can’t get a job in basketball in the next year, then Christ what’s the point of me doing this in the first place?’ Where again, the opposite is true.
Nothing is a waste, and everything becomes an opportunity.
So hopefully then, that depressurizing mixed with thinking short term and long leads to my last point, and I promise I'm almost there with two minutes to go, is learning versus exams. The thing that's taken me until about three years ago to realise I was doing it to some degree, but in other ways I wasn't really, is you've got to work out what you enjoy learning about. I know it sounds very easy to think it but it's very, very difficult to have the self-realisation and self-appreciation to know what you enjoy doing. If it's reading, writing, listening, consuming all these different pieces of content. We're indoctrinated until we're 22 or 23 years old doing these memory exams which are no use to me, I don't think, and no use to a lot of people, unfortunately. It's a way of testing, and I'm okay with that. That's fine. But I think once you get your head around the fact that you don't need to learn and you're continually learning not to pass an exam, and you're learning because you're interested in knowing about the thing that you want to know about, your mind just flips around completely. Everything starts connecting to each other not because you have to remember something for an exam, but because you realise it will be useful for you in life and useful for you and your career. Once you flip that round as to not make it a transaction, of knowledge being a transaction, but knowledge being, hopefully, usually, pleasurable because you will gain wisdom and experience and understanding and knowledge from it all. You then begin to realise that actually investing in yourself in lots of different areas can be really useful for you, for your career in your life.
So, that's the motivational speech done for the day.
Thank you for listening.
Q & A
Everyone’s ready to go it’s ok.
Q: Is it possible to make it into the industry without connections?
Well, it's a great question. And I think what you need to do is ensure you have connections and what I don't mean is like this guy owes me a favour. So, he needs to give me a job. It's every opportunity possible to create a network of relationships. So, I don't usually call it connections or networking. I hate those phrases, in truth. The best way I can try and describe it is you need to find good ways to develop relationships with people in the industry that you want to work in. And I can tell you all some of those ideas that I have, but generally it comes from building your knowledge and then articulating that knowledge to people in the industry in lots of different ways and then finding excuses, positive excuses, to be able to engage with those people and usually, if you can do it right, you will find reasons to be able to speak to people online, via email, at conferences, whatever else it might be.
What I also mean is that sport is a closed field as well, to a degree, like a lot of people in football, I can speak for the football industry, lots of people know each other. Your idea or the point of when you say you know our connection is important. Your idea should be to get within enough people's network in order to start building relationships with people. So, in the beginning, when you're building relationships, just very briefly, the one thing that I think is massively underrated and more junior people should think about it a lot of detail is asking for advice, rather than asking for favours. ‘Can I have 10 minutes of your time to talk about how you got to where you got to?’.
The other thing as well is because people are too keen on impressing too quickly. Usually, my best approach, that I see with younger people, is ask much as possible. Ask open ended questions that give the other person lots of time to tell them how fantastic they are. Really important. Just listen and practice that open ended question mixed with good listening, and recollection for another day. So, you can write down those three things that person has said and then email them again in two months to say, after you've already emailed them, say ‘I really enjoyed our chat the other day I remember you talking about this, this and this bit actually, I read this book, which is really interesting, and maybe we can talk about this some time.’ The more specific, the more details orientated, the more it is about the person and you remembering what specifically they said, the absolute better. The more generic, the more normal, the more it looks like you've written it 100 times to 100 people, you know what's going to happen.
Q: For example, just personally, going into this MBA programme. I was coming in as a sports science student and so this is a completely new avenue to me and coming towards the end of the programme, I'm still uncertain on an area I should maybe kind of niche down into. Do you have any I suppose maybe tips on how to actually focus in on to one area that you know…
… in sports science or in General?
Q: In general, because like I said, I'm still a bit uncertain. There's obviously there's a lot of, you know, areas that I'm interested in, but I just don't know which one you can really focus in on.
Well, you've actually answered your question. So, there's a two-stage process usually to it. The first is - you've just said there are areas that you're interested in. What you've actually got to do is note down those areas in like a little table or whatever else it might be this, this, this, this and this and then start reading.
Just literally do a data exercise.
Start reading pieces of content in relation to those three topics for example, for a month. Note down each particular article that you read down, how much you enjoyed it out of five, and do that for one month and tally up the numbers at the end and see what happens.
I know that's quite methodical, but what I mean is usually - it’s always really, really subjective. It's like, ‘Oh, I like that one. But didn’t like that one.’ What ends up happening in either event is you've got a month's worth of really interesting stuff that you've read and you'll be like, ‘Oh, actually, I really enjoyed that one there, and this one here, and that one here and that one there…’ and what probably will happen if you want my view, I'm not a betting man but if I was, I would say you will probably find a link between the four things that you're actually interested in, which is the next category.
Yep.
Q: Hello, thanks for your presentation, my question is: do you think it's possible to become an international sports lawyer without first being a domestic sports lawyer, having a reputation on your domestic market?
Okay, so there's one thing I should clarify which is when I say sports lawyer, sports lawyer is the exciting part of saying: I'm a contracts lawyer, intellectual property lawyer, disputes lawyer, reputation management lawyer, arbitration lawyer. That bit doesn't sound as sexy as football and sports lawyer, but that's actually what I do day to day and the reason why I say that is because what you need to be very clear and capable on is explaining what your competency actually is. So, when you say the difference between international law and domestic law, for example, if I was to take a matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, CAS, I would need to be an expert in Swiss law, or I would need someone alongside me that is an expert in Swiss law. So, a lot of the time it's actually very important to know what your speciality is, and more importantly, what your speciality isn't.
So, what I would say in the same way, in relation to international matters, whatever they may be, that have an international dimension, is if I have an agent that is working on a deal for a club from Turkey to the UK, I guess there's an argument that that is an international matter, but actually because the contracts we'll be negotiating are based on UK law. So, there is an employment contract and an agency contract based on UK law. I will be able to do that because I am qualified as a UK lawyer, an English and Wales lawyer, to be able to do that. If the opposite is the case, then as an English player, going to a Turkish club, I would ideally want a Turkish employment lawyer to be able to do that because I'm not qualified in Turkish law to be able to give that advice. So, it ultimately depends on the type of matter in relation to the jurisdiction and the competency that I have to be able to do the work in the first place.