MY CAREER JOURNEY FROM CHILDHOOD VHS TAPES TO SPORTS LAWYER

I don’t have as many glamorous Barcelona pictures as Jessie. In fact, I don't have any pictures. This is it (gestures to bullet points on screen). This is it, and my post-it note.

The thing that I love that Jesse and Erkut do so well, is they tell stories. Stories engage the other side of your brain. One side of your brain is always focused on the facts and the figures, and the other side of your brain is the creative part of your brain which talks to you in colours and stories.

What I'm going to try and do with my very pink post-it, and then also just a few notes here (on screen) - I was trying to retell, or rather rethink, some of the stories that I've had over my career and looking back to almost before my career as well.

Maybe this is some therapy session I'm doing with myself now, but the therapy session I'm doing with myself is taking myself back to when I was a seven-year-old boy in Liverpool.  

I grew up in Liverpool, even though I don't have that much of an accent. There are people in the room that will know… there'll be a lot of people in the room who don't know about VHS cassette tapes; my kids have no idea about VHS cassette tapes, they don't even know what CDs are anymore. I mean, you look at them like what's a CD?

I remember for my seventh birthday I was given the official history of Liverpool Football Club VHS tape. There's two other the Liverpool fans in the room. Just excuse me for that! But the thing was, there wasn't any other content available for me, for us, when we were growing up. There was no YouTube where you could watch Haaland’s every goal, forever, - Suarez, Torres all these things. The only thing that I could watch from Liverpool, apart from the game, maybe every three or four weeks, was this VHS tape of Liverpool's history starting in 1892 until the century where the VHS tape came out in 1992. I swear I watched this video 500 times. No lie.

What it says about me is probably a lot of very odd and strange things, but I was completely addicted. It was the only thing I could watch; it was the only football thing we were watching. I think, it sounds difficult to say but it's important, number one, I’m obviously a geek because I've watched it 500 times, but secondly, I'm completely addicted to football, and sport, as we all are in different ways. We call that addiction a slightly nicer word in football, which is passion. I completely agree with what Erkut said slightly before, which is when we say passion - passion in sport is the thing that sustains us in the long term.

It's very easy to say we're passionate about something.

Well, I'll give you a Latin lesson very quickly, as well, which I wasn't aware of until quite recently. The actual word passion, its origin is pati, P-A-T-I. Pati; to suffer. Exactly. I find it fascinating that the word that all of us use to be able to explain the positive, the thing that we want to do - the passion, is explaining we need to suffer for the thing we really want to do. That's everything that we heard yesterday, its everything we heard of Erkut this morning, everything we’ve heard of Jessie, but sometimes it's mixed and sometimes it can be quite difficult to explain. But the same point is, I am suffering, we are suffering, for our passion because we're doing the thing that's difficult, that's hard, that most people won't do - trying to get into sports field, in lots of different ways - but that is the competitive advantage that all of you have compared to most because most people won't do it. Literally, they will not do it. Human nature or otherwise.

The thing I love about this weekend is people are giving up their weekends to learn, to hear, to be empathetic enough, to be passionate enough, to be open enough to be able to spend a weekend doing the thing that they want to do.

So, I sometimes look back at that seven-year-old boy who watched that Liverpool videotape until it broke, and I remember crying to my parents saying, ‘I need a new VHS tape’, that they did get me thank goodness, otherwise who knows what would have happened, and I think that that was actually where things started. I was still in Liverpool, I still remember, this is much before the internet as well by the way, the only way I could consume content about Liverpool, and football, was a paper called the Liverpool Echo which came out every afternoon, that we had delivered to the house. I would wait as soon as I got home for the Echo to be delivered to the house, to be able to read through the two or three pages of football content. It would only usually be match reports or transfer news, or whatever it was, but I was completely addicted. I had to know what was going on that day about football, and what that translated to slightly later was - all my family are lawyers, my dad's lawyer, my uncle was a lawyer, my cousins were lawyers, funnily enough, my mom's a professional tennis player, and my dad was, obviously, in the courts quite a lot. The funny thing is, my mum explained to me, I'm a complete product of both of them. My dad in the courts and my mum in the courts, just very different ones. So, I combined in the middle to be a sort of a sports lawyer or a football lawyer.

What ended up happening is in university, actually, I didn't want to be a lawyer. Honestly, I thought I was going to be a sports agent – it’s a good job (gestures to Jessie) - and law was the default. Law was the thing which everyone said, ‘well just do it because it's a good skillset to be able to start, a good degree and you can decide what you want to do from there.’  What happened in the third year of my law degree, I stumbled on the fact that actually a lot of EU law related matters were to do with sports, lots of broadcasting cases, The Bosman Case, as you might know. There’s a really cool case that's going to the European courts on the Super League at the moment, which is going to be really fascinating, loads of broadcasting things. So, I decided to do a dissertation in my third year on The Bosman Ruling and the new transfer system. Suddenly the spark went off on my head. I was like, oh my god, I can combine the thing that I wasn't that fussed about, law, with the thing I was very fussed about, which was football. I obviously got a good grade – I say, ‘obviously got a good grade’, I got good grades, because I spent 10x more the time than any other person spent on a dissertation because I was just interested in reading everything I possibly could about football, the regulations, the guidance notes, all of the cases, and everything else that happened. Then it sparked another idea in my head.

So, it's funny how we all have these similarities. Erkut, you had to convince your dad to do law, Jessie the same. I remember convincing my dad that I wanted to do a master's degree, but the way I had to sell it to my dad was that I was doing a master's degree in a comparative competition law approach based on EU jurisdictional matters. That's how I sold it to my dad. The actual title for the master’s was ‘Football Broadcasting Rights in the UK’. So, all I had to do is read all these football broadcasting cases across the UK and Europe and write an 80,000-word dissertation. The great thing about that was again, this is very much embracing the geek and the slight, you know, addictive personality that I have in different ways, I can admit it as we’re among friends, I finished the dissertation in about six months because I'd written what I needed to have written. I remember going to my tutor Mark James, who still is at Manchester University, and I remember him saying to me, ‘Well, what are you going to do for five months?’ And so, I was like, ‘I don't know’, and he said, ‘Well, why don't you make some applications to some law journals and see if you can get any parts of the things that you've written, or other things, published.’ And so here is me as a MA master’s law student thinking I'm never going to get anything published, but ended up publishing two articles, one on broadcasting rights and one on investment in football. I got them published and I was obviously over the moon, my dad was obviously over the moon as well, my mum as well. The problem was they were in a law journal that no one reads, probably about six people read it- they’re still available if you want to make it seven or eight, but yeah, it's a while ago now.

What basically happened as a result of me gaining that quite specific football experience early on, was when I then started my law job - and I just want to explain with my law job, it was an American firm called Jones Day; it had no sports law experience whatsoever, didn't really have any sports clients as well. And PS, the year before that, when I was applying to lots of law firms, I only applied to eight law firms first time around, just like a lot of people in this room because ‘I only wanted to do sports’, ‘I only want to do football and that's the only thing I'm passionate about’, ‘If I can't get a sports law job in the beginning, then it's not for me’.

Then the first rejection came, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth and the sixth. When all eight rejection letters came from the sports law firms, the only ones that I’d applied to, I probably had to have a little bit of a rethink about what I was going to apply for. So, I applied to a lot of different commercial law firms, which in hindsight, gave me a really great understanding of law. That's the thing I have realised now. I have to be, without anything else, the best lawyer I can be first.

It's always important to focus on sectors and other things in due course, which I'll talk about in a second, but your underlying skill set is the most important thing. I'm not talking just about law. I'm talking about if you want to be in accounting like Rhys, or you want to be an agent like Erkut and Toby, and lots of others in the room, if you want to be in marketing, if you want to be in PR, if you want to be in comms, if you want to be in content, if you want to be whatever else it might be, what you have to be able to do is do the underlying job well. It's vital. There is no point being a great sector expert knowing things about football or sport if the underlying principles you can't add value to everybody else, which is obviously really important.

My issue was that as I started my training contract at this American law firm, I wanted to do more sports law work, with obviously the background in my degree and my master's that I've had, but there was no sports work to do. What I realised quite quickly is I was doing two things in parallel. Every now and then a sports matter came up in the law firm. The reason why it came up was because - there's only a few lawyers in here - but basically whenever there is a new matter at a law firm, the person that's doing the matter has to send an email to the rest of the firm, which can be hundreds of people, saying, ‘we're acting for this client, against this client, on this particular thing’. It's called a conflict check. Basically, every time every time that there was a sports or football conflict check that came up, it didn't matter if it was a property deal, an image rights deal, a boot deal, a transfer, a corporate deal, banking, finance, whatever else it might be, I would literally phone the partner that had written the conflict check and say, ‘let me help you’. He would go, ‘Well, there's quite a lot of work to do, I might not be able to…’ and I said, ‘Don't worry, you don't even need to bill my time for it. I just want to get experience.’

It happened very quickly, actually, on one of the first cases. We were acting for a banking client that was refinancing a very big clubs’ debt - you might guess which one it might be - and what ended up happening was the corporate partner phoned me at five o'clock on a Friday; I was literally one minute away from leaving to go to the pub with my friends that night and then come back and do some work in a bit, and he said I’ve got called in 15 minutes with Goldman Sachs, they want you to explain to them how broadcasting rights distributions work in the Premier League because they need to understand how much money this club is going to be able to make.

He was thinking, ‘Oh, he won't know.’

I was like, ‘Well, I know it's regulation B13.7, or something.’

He said, ‘Oh, can you just explain that to the bank?’.

I went, ‘Of course, that's easy’, because the truth is I'd already read the regulations a lot, but I’d also done part of my dissertation on it.

So, quite quickly, what I realised is I had a skill set already, or knowledge set, that people in my law firm would find very useful. I would basically be the go-to football guy. That continued at the next law firm that I worked with, where I ended up working on about seven or eight different Football Club takeovers simply from looking at conflict checks and saying, ‘I can help with that’, ‘I can help with that’, ‘I can help with that’. Regardless of whether my targets were going to look good, regardless how many hours it was going to spend, regardless of all the other stuff.

The side hustle that was also happening at that time, that I was starting to do, was the extension of what I had done with writing some law journals. So, my girlfriend at the time, now wife - hopefully at some point Holly might come in today so you can meet her but if not, if you come to other events, she’s my biggest fan, or she says she's my biggest fan. She always comes up with my best ideas, literally, she tells me what to do and I then go and basically do it in lots of different ways. She came up with this great idea – I was so happy that I had been published in this law journal, it's such a prestigious law journal, it's so brilliant and she was like, ‘well, how many people have read it?’ And I said, (mumbling) ‘I don’t know’. And she said, ‘Well, don't you think what you should try and do is get your words and your work out to the most amount of people possible? Amplify the message.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, probably. You’re probably right.’ And then I was like, ‘Well, how am I going to do that?’, so she said, ‘Well, why don't you just start a blog?’.

This was back in 2005/6 when not that many people were blogging. I just started writing on all these football topics that were happening at the time; Carlos Tevez and Mascherano happened around that time with West Ham, financial fair play was happening, lots of transfer regulations were changing. What happened at the same time was in 2008 I was in a law firm that was quite heavily focused on technology, there was this conference that I got to help run internally at my law firm, my old law firm. The head speaker, the main speaker, was a person from a company called Twitter, but Twitter just wasn't a thing back in 2007-8 it was literally just starting up. So, it's like okay, well, I'll get the username @footballlaw, I’ll start tweeting things that are coming up, I’ll start blogging at the same time, but the thing was, right, I was doing no football law work or very limited football law work at the time, but what I was doing is building this knowledge side hustle. I mean, you can't imagine, Holly will probably tell you more than I can, if you see her, but my weekends and everything, and evenings, were just simply spent reading cases tweeting, blogging, asking her to read stuff, you know, getting stuff back in, and getting it over, pushing it out. What ended up happening is I developed this - looking back it's quite interesting. You know, I think that professional status is a very difficult world, and word.  People from the outside thought my status was like here (gestures above head) to a degree, not quite the fake it ‘til I make it idea, but because I had a lot of knowledge, I was explaining how the cases were working. I was doing an awful lot of side hustle stuff, but I was probably only doing about 10 or 15% football work.

And let me tell you the type of work I was doing whilst telling everyone I was the main football lawyer in the UK, which obviously I wasn't. I was doing agriculture. I was doing financial services. I can’t remember them now. It’s so entrenched in my memory – aviation law. I was car parts manufacturer lawyer. That's what I was doing, which meant effectively I was a chameleon. I was telling people what they needed to hear about the experience I had with them in particular, if I was with a financial services client, ‘Yes, I've got lots of experience working with financial services’, if I'm speaking to a football agent: ‘Yeah, of course, I've got lots of experience working on intermediaries work’, if I was working in a football club it was the same.

What ended up happening was two things. One, by the end of the time at my old law firm, I was probably working about 50-60%, sports and 50-40% on all the other types of sector work that I was doing, almost about 10 years ago now. But the flip side was I was blogging pretty regularly. You know, the truth was that then I got a few breaks on to national/international television where CNN would ask me to speak, where Sky would ask me to speak, ITV, BBC, and that in a way was a very big, disproportionate step for me, to be able to convert what I was saying I was doing into speaking articulately and excessively about pretty complicated topics sometimes. And, you know, every time before I go to speak, including now, when Jessie was speaking and I’m like, ‘What am I going to say?’ I remember going on BBC One live seven years ago, and this is BBC One at primetime and someone said to me before I went on, they said, ‘Oh, just to let you know, there's probably about 11 million people watching.’ I was like, ‘Thank you. That's just what I needed to hear at this time in my life!’ But you know, you just blank it out and you just hope you get asked nice questions and go from there.

So, what happened was I realised I had this ability to convert my skill set which wasn't necessarily in football but was in law, with my ability to read regulations, including a lot of vegetable regulations. I realised that football regulations, it turns out, are much more interesting than vegetable regulations. So, I was really happy about that but what I was doing really was reading every rule book that was in football, and in sport, to understand the rules. I remember what happened towards the end of my time at my old firm, Fieldfisher, and I had this decision to make because a few sports law firms had approached me and said, ‘Come and join, we really like what you’re doing’, etc. And I can so empathise with what Jessie said as well because the thing was, I was really happy where I was. I was getting paid well, I had a team that I really enjoyed working with, I was in my comfort zone, and I was doing all the good stuff, but I wasn't doing as much football and sports stuff as I wanted to do but I was quite happy with what I was doing. What ended up happening was - I remember this very specifically – I was walking with my wife Holly, we’d just had one baby, Izzy, who was two, we had another one on the way and she told me off quite badly because I was going to stay. I was going to stay in my firm and be quite happy. She literally like we have spent the last 10 years waiting for this moment for the right sports law firm to come and here it is, by the way, they're willing to invest in you and give you all this time, and effort, and build a great team alongside you and work out whatever strategy you want, and you’re going to say no?

I am more your mum, rather than your dad (gesturing to Jesse). I'm the risk averse, detail orientated, ‘let's not let's not rush into anything’, ‘we're okay where we are’; and Holly is the ‘you bloody better do what I tell you to otherwise there's going to be trouble!’. And she was totally right.

So, I made this move to Sheridans where I've been now for eight and a half years. But my biggest insecurity and my biggest thing that I’ve struggled with, to a huge degree and in huge amounts, was this imposter syndrome. I've done loads of football cases and loads of sports and lots of transfers and all the rest of it, but the thing was I was moving as a partner to law firm Sheridans and part of my business case was I need to tell you how much money I can bring in, what clients I've got, and all the rest of it. The truth was when they said how many clients do you have to bring with and how much money do you think you'd be able to earn in your first six months, can anyone guess what the number was? Zero. Which was quite concerning for me and the partners that we're putting their investment in me to be able to build a sports law practice, they already had a good sports law practice at Sheridans. Two things happened. One was I started working with a client called EuroLeague Basketball. So, here I am the football lawyer whose first client is a basketball company, which is quite ironic in itself. But that had been built for about four years’ worth of attending their events networking, and speaking about the financial fair play regulations, which were the cost control regulations in football, and they needed those regulations implementing in their own competition. So, I joined the NCC Committee, which effectively regulated all their teams as to how they were going to be more sustainable in basketball.  

The second thing that happened was I got an email three weeks into my job at Sheridans. It's through a connection of Erkut, which we'll talk about in a second, but I got an email from a guy called Sam Porter, who is a lawyer at DC United, that MLS club, and he said, ‘Daniel, I really enjoyed your football blog on your website on football broadcasting rights; I’m London for the weekend (and this is Friday evening) are you around at all next week to be able to say hello?’. The problem was, I had to fly - My first two clients were Molde University, in Norway, that I was giving lectures at for the week, I had to fly out Sunday evening and then it turned out that EuroLeague basketball instructed me the next day to come to Barcelona that week for a meeting. So, I had to go to Norway on the Sunday night until Tuesday, I then had to fly back two internal flights via Germany to get to Barcelona for Wednesday meeting, then fly back to Norway for Thursday and Friday for a talk - and this is the Friday before. So, I said, ‘I'm really sorry I can't do I can't do Sunday this week because I’m away but how about we meet Sunday morning really early before I fly to Heathrow?’.  That was the first thing that someone said to me afterwards, they said, ‘I don't think too many people would have taken a Sunday morning 7:30am meeting. But that that meeting literally did change my life, to a degree, and it came about because somebody had read a blog that I’d written four years earlier, that when you did the search on Google for Football Premier League broadcasting rights came up as the number one organic search because obviously it hit the right nerve. What happened as a result is, I didn't know it at the time, but Sam's boss has a guy called Jason Levien was the owner of DC United and was in the midst of buying Swansea City, the Premier League club at the time. I swear I thought it was going to be a 10 or 15-minute chat with Sam. Jason comes along from the gym, in his gym kit and he grills me for two and a half hours. Not joking. What's the regulation on this? How much should the valuation be? To the extent that I remember looking at my watch - we had the breakfast meeting at 7:30 - at 11 o'clock I looked at my watch and thought if I don't leave in 10 minutes, I'm missing my flight to Molde. That turned out to be, effectively, the interview to be the law firm to do the first Premier League takeover with Swansea in seven years in the Premier League. There hadn't been a takeover until before 2012. So, I'm three weeks into Sheridans I don't think I've got any clients, I've just got my first client with EuroLeague and I’m lecturing at Molde University and then after about two weeks of some negotiation, I managed to get the first Premier League takeover deal in eight years.

So, I send my conflict check round at Sheridans and everybody's like, ‘Wow, who's Daniel Geey, this superstar that's managed to get first Premier League takeover in history of our law firm, never mind for the last five years’. And when Erkut says it's luck, my strong view is that it is anything but luck because as much as - I’m not trying to big myself up - but the point is, that would never have happened if I hadn't blogged and spent a lot of time understanding that piece six years ago. It also wouldn’t have happened if I didn't know my stuff when I came to the meeting for them to be able to really grill me very hard. In the same way it wouldn't have happened for Erkut if he hadn't done that course, unless his dad hadn't phoned him up saying we need help because we know you're the guy and it wouldn't happen for Jesse as well with all of the great stuff that you've managed to do for so long, and the languages and going out of your comfort zone.

There's this great quote that I love from a Chinese philosopher that says, ‘opportunities are seized as they are multiplied’ and took me a while to really understand what I think it meant. It basically means the more opportunities you create for yourself the more opportunities happen.

What I am a massive fan of is people just putting themselves out there because the hardest thing to do is ‘doing’ and the easiest thing to do is ‘saying’.  I hope that’s not confused everybody, but that's the point. Everybody talks a brilliant game. Everybody. But, everyone in this room is not just talking they're doing. They’re here for this whole weekend, to do this thing. They’re here to do this great thing, to build knowledge to build networks to find new opportunities, and that's what I love. There were people this morning and last morning here a 7:45am to see who was here beforehand to speak to us. The seminar started at 9:30am. People were here at 7:45am. I mean, it blows my mind a bit which is fantastic, which I really love, is that enthusiasm that people have to invest in themselves to that large degree.

And so, what I just wanted to do was end on one or two important things.

It's very hard looking back to say it, but it's very important to understand. As human beings we have this innate ability to put ourselves down. All our talk to ourselves is negative talk, on the whole, ‘you're not good enough’, ‘it's not going to work out’, ‘don't need to do this thing’, ‘no, you shouldn't, someone else is always better’. Whatever it is. I have it. I call it my monkey. It's my monkey. It's on this shoulder most of the time. It's the instinctive part of my brain, which is constantly telling me the negative of ‘No. No. No. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't rush to make the decision’, whatever else it might be. There's lots of research about how all of us give ourselves a lot of negative self-talk and self-discussion and self-thinking. I think the things that have helped me massively: one is my wife, is the truth, because she's a lot more positive, generally in life, than me, she does and then thinks afterwards, whereas I think a lot and then possibly do after 17 weeks. The reason why I say that is it's massively important to give yourself a little bit more self-love sometimes as well, not beat yourself up a lot of the time, but the most important thing is to surround yourself with people ‘sunnier’ than yourself, and when I say ‘sunnier’, I mean more positive than yourself. I’ll try and give one example.

When Erkut and I went to Mumbai, 2018/2019, we came back afterwards, and I had this chat with my wife. I was saying, ‘We had the best weekend. Erkut was chatting to everybody. He's got all these great ideas; he's doing this next book. He's got this idea to move to America. He's going to conquer the world.’ The truth was I was so energised by your energy, it made me want to do more just in the same way when Jessie I heard your story for the first time, it's brilliant. The brilliant thing that that enabled me to do is - you've got to have people around you that inspire you, you can see that are doing cool things in equal measure. I remember coming back from that trip just thinking, ‘I’ve got to write my book now. I've got to finish my first one, get my second one done’, because you were doing it on the plane, but I was sleeping or something. I was asleep. I was saying, ‘I'm so tired.’ Erkut’s spending three hours typing on his laptop while I'm having a sleep. Then he's out in Mumbai, already speaking in about six different languages to people and here I'm on my Duolingo trying to learn basic Spanish for the first time. You get my point. My point is, generally, I think a lot of people in this room a lot of people in this room are very positive and are very proactive and have a similar mindset. It's really important in your inner circle, innermost circle, to try and create a positive loop. The one person inspires you to do something else, that inspires you to do something else, inspires you to do something else.

The issue that happens, because it is human nature, is we're very good at being inspired but very bad at doing things on a day to day to day-to-day basis. So, I'm a big fan of the phrase, ‘consistency beats intensity’ – it’s the most boring phrase in the world to say. Can you do it for five minutes every day? Can you do your gym workout for 10 minutes a day? Or are you just going to go to the gym once a week for 20 minutes? Tell me which has been a work out better and compound in the long term? Are you going to when you finish your day, sit on your couch, and watch an episode of Netflix, and then when the next thing comes on saying am I going to watch one more episode? Ok, I’ll watch one more episode. Or are you're going to do the thing you wanted to do that evening?

I’ll go back to the first point just very briefly. I've got no problem admitting, we're in a group of friends, there is no such thing as work, and life, and leisure to me. Maybe it's the same with Jessie, and maybe it’s the same with Erkut. I make no apologies for it. It's not what my life is about. My life is all of it combined in some type of blur, which is work, family and play. The truth is it's all play, if you can get it right. So, there's this great tech investor called Paul Graham, his blog is paulgraham.com. It's a really good blog. And he basically talks about this thing where he says he doesn't understand when people say, ‘Oh, I'm working from nine to five, and then I'm doing whatever it is after those times.’ He says, what you actually need to do is create your identity and your identity will be ultimately a reflection of the inputs that you put in. So, take it very simply. If you're watching 10 hours of Netflix a week, that's probably likely to be your identity. If you are studying for five hours a week after your day, that's probably more likely to kind of be your identity that you reflect on yourself and other people. That's ultimately the thing. You are, in the end, a reflection of your consistent habits. That's the cool thing that's going to be happening in this room; it’s going to be the reason why all you guys are going to be joining our LinkedIn group afterwards because the power of the community that's been around today is going to be so vital, and it's going to be part of our support network, so that when we put our next events on, whether you can join or not, whether you want to meet people that are in this room or there are people that can connect you to other people. That's the beauty and the power of the great opportunity could start hopefully today.