English Premier League champions Chelsea have partnered with transport company Uber to deliver a limited number of the club’s new kit to fans.
The kit will officially be available on 22nd July but Chelsea fans in Los Angeles, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Moscow, Mumbai, Shanghai and Tokyo will have the chance to receive the new jersey before then as a result of the partnership.
More info HERE.
Germany has officially submitted its bid to host the Ryder Cup for the first time in 2022.
The bidding organisation RC Deutschlandtoday delivered their submission book to the PGA European Tour
Full story HERE.
The administrator of Caterham has told BBC Sport that talks are ongoing with three interested parties in an attempt to get the team on the Formula One team to compete next season.
Caterham went into administration in October and missed races in the United States and Brazil towards the end of last season.
More on the story HERE.
British Basketball will receive £1.18 million in funding after the UK Government reversed its decision to strip the national governing body of its financial support earlier this year.
The figure from Sport England does not match the £7 million of Olympic funding that was withdrawn in February but the organisation will receive technical support from UK Sport on aspects such as coach development to aid the men’s women’s, under 20 men’s and under 20 women’s teams from November this year to March 2017.
British Basketball must invest £592,000 of its own money, while the senior women’s team must target a top 12 position in next year’s European Championship Finals and the senior men’s team must qualify for the 2017 European Championship Finals as conditions of the agreement.
“The last few months have been tough ones for everyone involved with basketball in this country,” British Basketball performance chairman Roger Moreland said.
“The Minister has listened carefully to our case and I would like to thank her for the role she has played in brokering a solution.”
UK Sport will also look into basketball’s under-performance against its targets in previous years and aim to address this issue.
“UK Sport has been working closely with Sport England and DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) to address the questions relating to the appropriate level of support to British Basketball,” UK Sport chief executive Liz Nichol said.
“We are delighted this has now been agreed with UK Sport’s technical expertise in high performance support complementing the investment from Sport England to help basketball continue to progress to become more competitive at the elite level.”
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has issued the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) with a $41.97m damages claim due to the West Indies’ withdrawal from its tour of India last month.
After a dispute between the West Indies players, herbal the WICB and the West Indies Players Association over a new collective bargaining agreement and memorandum of understanding was the reason behind the team’s decision to leave India after the fourth one-day international on October 17.
That decision meant a fifth ODI, cialis a Twenty20 international and three-match Test series did not take place.
As a result of this, symptoms | India will play 12 fewer days if international cricket this year, which will have a significant impact on the BCCI’s revenues.
BCCI secretary Sanjay Patel called the West Indies’ withdrawal from the tour a “monumental disaster”.
In a letter written by Patel to WICB president Dave Cameron, he said: “The BCCI is faced with huge revenue losses, a loss of reputation and is at risk of losing valuable commercial partners,”
“The consequences of cancellation of a committed home Tour during the biggest festival season Diwali in India is a monumental disaster for the BCCI. It is during this season that our partners derive the most value from their rights.
“Our broadcaster had committed to its advertisers during this season and on account of your actions, is facing a severe crisis the effects of which are felt by the BCCI. The BCCI holds the WICB responsible and liable for all such consequences and intends to enforce its rights to seek compensation from the WICB to the fullest extent permissible in law.”
The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) enjoyed a successful 44th edition of the BNP Paribas WTA Finals Singapore with record highs for attendance, cough TV viewing and online audiences.
This year’s event staged a series of brand new features, order including a Fan Festival around the state-of-the-art Sports Hub as well as events throughout the city, health the WTA Legends Classic, WTA Rising Stars Invitational and a 14 & Under and 16 & Under WTA Future Stars Junior Road
The Singapore showpiece attracted more than 129,000 fans to the Sports Hub during the 10 days of tennis, entertainment and business with over 93,000 attending the matches at the Singapore Indoor Stadium Center Court.
The final matches on Sunday, October 26 drew sell-out crowds of 9,986 fans as Serena Williams defeated Simona Halep for the title.
Four of the 11 sessions held at the tournament were sold out, with all sessions being near-capacity as the attendance mark was the highest since 2000. A record $6.5 million (£4 million) was on offer.
The success of the tournament was also illustrated by a record TV broadcast footprint of 177 countries, 63 broadcasters and over 4,500 hours of coverage. The number of media in attendance to cover the event from around the world tripled compared with 2013.
This year’s WTA Finals also set new records across web and social media, engaging more than 60 million fans online over the entire tournament.
“The BNP Paribas WTA Finals Singapore presented by SC Global has been transformed into the most fan-friendly sport-entertainment spectacle in the illustrious history of our sport’s season-ending finale,” said Stacey Allaster, WTA Chairman & CEO.
“In our historic first year of the WTA Finals in Asia-Pacific and Singapore, our players once again showcased through their athleticism and competitive spirit to win and demonstrated match after match why women’s tennis is the world’s leading professional sport for women.
“The mission to integrate our Legends and Rising Stars into the event, expand the format to showcase doubles even more and bring the tennis environment closer to the fans through greater accessibility than ever before is a fantastic start in this first of five years in Singapore.
“I want to thank our amazing fans and partners – World Sport Group, Singapore Tourism Board and Sport Singapore – for all of their efforts in making our inaugural WTA Finals in APAC the best in the history of the WTA.”
WTA Finals champion and World N.1 Serena Williams said: “This year’s BNP Paribas WTA Finals Singapore presented by SC Global was an incredible event with a great atmosphere.
“Singapore is an amazing city and their fans and the organizers have been fantastic hosts during these past 10 days. I can’t wait to compete again next year with the goal of being back in Singapore in 2015.”
“We are thrilled by the phenomenal success of the inaugural BNP Paribas WTA Finals Singapore presented by SC Global,” said Andrew Georgiou, CEO of World Sport Group, the event promoter.
“Singaporeans and fans from abroad have really embraced the WTA Finals, showing up in full force over the 10-day festival to watch some of the best tennis in 2014.
“Before the event started, we set ourselves the goal to have over 100,000 fans attend the various activities throughout, and we are delighted that we have well and truly exceeded that target.”
“In addition to the amazing atmosphere created by the fans, the feedback from our corporate partners, media and the entire tennis community has been extraordinary. There is little doubt that this event is now a must-attend event on the Singapore calendar.”
2014 marked the first of five years in which Singapore will host the WTA Finals. The 2015 edition is scheduled to take place October 23-November 1, 2015.
The International Cycling Union (UCI) and its marketing partner Infront Sports & Media are expecting “unprecedented” levels of television broadcast coverage for the upcoming UCI Road World Championships.
According to an official statement, the number of license holders and guaranteed broadcast visibility is higher than any previous event.
The event, which takes place in Florence, Italy 22-29 September, has been licensed to around 30 television networks across Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia.
Current UCI President Pat McQuaid, who is under serious pressure to retain his position in the upcoming elections, said: “Thanks to Infront’s experience in global sports rights distribution and its extensive network, the UCI Road World Championships will be accessible to more fans in both new and established territories.
“This is leading the way for other cycling disciplines as well as demonstrating the sustained and ever growing global interest in the sport.”
The Championship will be featured in new territories for the first time in the Middle East (Al Jazeera), Israel (Charlton) and South America (Direct TV).
Long standing public broadcast partners continued their support including in Belgium VRT and RTBF, BBC in the UK, NOS in Netherlands, Rai in Italy and SRG in Switzerland. Further European broadcasters include RTV Slovenia, Sport 1 Hungary, Czech TV in the Czech Republic, Polsat in Poland and Slovak TV in Slovakia.
Stephan Herth, Infront’s Executive Director Summer Sports, added: “The UCI Road World Championships has never been more accessible to fans than it is today. Broadcasters are acknowledging the heritage and future potential of the sport along with the global fan community now benefitting from coverage worldwide.
“Depending on each market’s media landscape and cycling tradition and by working on a territory by territory approach, UCI and Infront have very closely worked together to select the best possible broadcast outlet for the event in each region.”
The news that Britain’s biggest sporting team has finally joined Twitter was greeted with either: ‘what took them so long?’ or ‘aren’t they already?.’
Because that big old social media bandwagon has been rolling along for more than five years now and it did seem anomalous. Clearly the good people at Old Trafford have – quite rightly – decided that the time is now right, to join the world’s two biggest microblogging sites, whether that’s due to the new David on the field (Moyes) or the new David in the marketing department (Sternberg).
The clever bit in joining fashionably late is that experts and amateur commentators of a sporting or digital bent are talking about it. A lot. It means that with some panache, Manchester United have utilized the social media to do their channel promotion for them. Google @manutd and you get five pages of news stories. Now that’s shrewd digital marketing.
And doing it both on Twitter and Sina Weibo means that commercially the Asian market as well as the European and American market (where Twitter has the highest useage) have been considered. Clearly this exercise will help as much in sponsor engagement as fan interaction.
Timing in social media is important for several reasons. Launch a channel with no clear content strategy or tone of voice (or getting the intern to run it) and becomes less than useful. The current Formula One world champions were early on Twitter, late on Facebook. Not because its importance wasn’t realized, but because a content strategy was necessary before it went live. And from being one of the latecomers on the Facebook scene, they became, in line with newfound ontrack success, the most followed F1 team.
The content of @manutd so far is toe-in-the-water stuff; your now traditional behind-the-scenes shots plus a list of fixtures which have changed. And the fact that Wayne Rooney is one of only 22 feeds being followed shows that it’s more dissemination than conversation. While, at the time of writing, they’re less than 36 hours old, they haven’t yet entered into the dialogue for which Twitter is most useful.
But Twitter has become a vital tool in any sporting organization or athlete’s arsenal. Its direct nature, its ability to host dialogue and its speed mean that for Manchester United fans and those assessing the club’s commercial dealings, there’s a direct channel of communication right to the heart of the club.
Up until Wednesday, United were part of a select group of non-tweeters. The airline Emirates, computer and phone giants Apple and F1 world champion Sebastian Vettel are three relatively big brands not yet officially on Twitter. Vettel himself is not keen on social media. He told Auto Motor und Sport that social media: “…is not true communication. Facebook and Twitter are not my thing…. It is a very indirect and impersonal way to make contact with other people. I prefer personal conversations, face to face.” Or it could be that he prefers to concentrate on racing and winning world championships and anything else is just a distraction.
Manchester has already seen one of its football teams score in the digital arena. City were trailblazers not only in football, but perhaps in British sport and the red side want a slice of the action. It will be fascinating to monitor what content and social strategy they now execute. After all, they’ve had some time to prepare it.
Having spent eight seasons in Formula One managing the digital channels for world champions Red Bull Racing, David Granger now runs Fact 51 (www.fact51.com) a social and digital content agency.
David’s 
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There have been several tennis booms of sorts. Europe’s, right now, is flourishing.
Australia and the US dominated the upper echelons of tennis for most of last century. The early 1980s had tennis participation above 40 million in the USA alone. Today US numbers are closer to the 30 million mark. Australia is not occupying the position in tennis it once had. These two countries, with incredible financial resources produced by their Grand Slam tournaments, have growth problems that affect the entire sport. So is England, the birth place of the game.
It’s not the programs’ numbers that count. Today’s USTA’s Ten and Under Program is introducing millions of kids to this sport.
A problem still prevails: there is no permanency of new players in tennis. They experience constant failures, no control, no fun, blunting their enthusiasm for the game.
A tennis survey done in 1990 by the Tennis Industry Association and the USTA found one relevant factor that is still not met: how to make tennis easy, with quick success. The findings were never applied. Coaching emphasis is still teaching sideways, like baseball, racquet back early, hitting through the ball, resulting in power rather than control. Today’s beginners still have trouble rallying, that is, keeping the ball in play with ease.
Overseas tennis coaching has progressed by leaps and bounds, and young players learn to play like the pros, exactly. Open stance, natural moves, emphasis on finding the ball, hitting up and across, deflection and ball rotation, etc., in essence, using nature and natural forces to help, rather than oppose.
The great majority of US coaches, on the contrary, have stuck to the older, more linear model, in which the player hits forward flat rather than eliciting a longer contact across the strings. Why?
In the US two professional tennis teachers’ associations, the USPTA and PTR, handle education to more than 30,000 coaching members. Both have shied away from accelerating the modernizing of coaching techniques to protect their older products and their zone of control. They should consider the good of all, seeing that tennis grows in numbers and in quality, thereby assuring their own survival and growth.
Another factor is the emphasis of Sport Science for Tennis focusing attention on the position of the feet. While apparently valuable, too much attention to footwork is another barrier that minimizes feel for the ball. You learned to move when you were two or three years old. Tennis prowess thereafter is in your hands, not your feet.
The player, confused, gets stuck mid-development and does not exhibit good ball control. It is a frustrating experience for newcomers and more times than not it results in abandoning the sport.
Young children are particularly susceptible to this scenario. A child wants to succeed, especially in front of his peers, in anything he tries. The dismal retention of the Ten and Under Program is witness that something is amiss. This is not a difficult sport.
Further, applying conventional, trite concepts, even while mixing them with some modern tennis tenets is like oil and water poured together: they don’t mix.
Solution: promote modern tennis methodology to the masses. Insist on techniques that maximize hand-eye coordination, feel, instinct, natural moves, and keeping the ball in play.
About Oscar Wegner
Oscar Wegner played the international tour in the 1960s and then dedicated himself to coaching. Starting in 1968 as Pancho Segura’s assistant at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club in California, he has coached from Gustavo Kuerten, winner of three French Opens, in his younger years, up to Bjorn Borg in his second comeback in 1992 and was Spain’s Jr. Davis Cup Captain in 1973.
Oscar Wegner has been a tennis commentator for ESPN for Latin America from 1994 through 1999, and is a writer, and producer of numerous books, articles and instructional DVDs.
His famous Play Like the Pros tips on ESPN International were broadcast to more than 150 countries, including during Super Bowl and NBA FInals, which generated billions of impressions. He also publishes www.tennisteacher.com to forward his modernizing tennis techniques to the masses, inspiring, with his teachings, parents such as Richard Williams to develop their children into tennis stars.
Oscar Wegner’s 
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Most traditional sponsorship strategies are based on milking as much media exposure as possible and Championship clubs cannot offer the same value in that regard as clubs feeding from English football’s top table, the Premiership.
But what can second-tier clubs offer that makes them a serious contender that brands should not overlook?
Nottingham Forest are a perfect example. Twice winners of the European Cup, they have a fan base that rivals most mid-table Premiership clubs; boast a rich history and an iconic logo and brand image that make the club recognisable around the world.
Forest can’t compete on a media value footing but what they can offer is real value to any brand seeking to develop their image.
Although Championship clubs consistently deliver over £1million worth of media value to their sponsors and are viewed by over 2,000,000 people during televised games, they have had to develop wider reaching community programmes and use their online content to their advantage.
While the media gorge on what the Premier League has to offer, clubs outside the top flight are not afforded the same intensity of coverage.
Instead, their fans turn to their clubs for the latest news and the inside track.
Clubs outside the Premier League are utilising social media and digital marketing to help provide content for the media.
Forest’s award-winning website www.nottinghamforest.co.uk regularly receives over 370,000 unique visitors per month reading some 4,300,000 pages – a staggering level of activity.
Community programmes have evolved from the days of turning up to a school and taking over a P.E. lesson.
This evolution is no more evident than in the Championship and Forest now have a community programme that reaches over 150,000 children through 700 schools.
These programmes aren’t just about children having fun, they have to such an extent that all corners of the community benefit – from senior citizen dinner dances to using football as a motivation for crime prevention.
Corporate social responsibility is now becoming part of most big organisation’s core strategy and football clubs are the perfect vehicle for brands to participate in already developed, meaningful programmes.
The Championship is now the fourth highest attended in European football and any brand seeking exposure, not only in media value but online and through community programmes, should consider Championship clubs as serious contenders for very cost effective sponsorship opportunities.
About Brandon Furse:
Brandon Furse is the Operations Manager of Nottingham Forrest Football Club. An Honours graduate, with a background in IT Marketing, he joined the club in 2001 as Database Marketing Manager, where his first responsibility was to modernise the club’s use and handling of customer data. He is now responsible for all Business to Consumer commercial activity at the club as well as Marketing, Website, Digital Media, PR and Special Projects.
Brandon currently resides in Burton Joyce, Nottinghamshire with his partner and child. The couple are expecting another in August.
Brandon Furse’s
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