iSportconnect hosts excellent China Directors’ Club

iSportconnect, the world’s largest global private network of sports business executives, successfully hosted their inaugural China Directors’ Club in association with LeSports Connects in the stunning Mission Hills, Dongguan on Tuesday afternoon, 29th November 2016.

The Directors’ Club, one of a series of exclusive, invite-only events consisting of board-level sports business professionals who run and finance the sports industry in major cities in the world, took place as part of LeSports Connects, China’s largest international sports conference, working with LeSports and Branded.

The panellists for the event featured Peter Kenyon, former CEO of Chelsea FC and Manchester United FC; Ma Guoli, Vice Chairman of LeSports; and Andrea Radrizzani, President of Aser Media, as panellists.

The panel was expertly moderated by iSportconnect Chairman Michael Cunnah.

The informative discussion provided great insight into the football industry and into China’s rapidly growing role in global sport and China’s strategy. The panellists spoke freely under Chatham House rules, meaning the information exchanged in the room during the event would not be taken outside of the room The panellists went on to answer a series of questions from a specially-invited audience in a Question Time style format, with the discussion remaining confidential. This was followed by a networking opportunity in a relaxed environment. 

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To register your interest in future events, please contact adi@isportconnect.com

Coming up:

Tuesday, 6th Decermber 2016 – London – Directors’ Club and Christmas Dinner

 

 

 

European Tour creates Rolex Series in major overhaul

The European Tour announced today that it will group at least seven of its marquee events together as the Rolex Series and will be scrapping the Final Series format beginning from 2017.

The BMW PGA Championship, unhealthy the Irish Open, salve the Scottish Open and the Italian Open will join the three Final Series events – the Turkish Airlines Open, seek the Nedbank Golf Challenge and the season-ending DP World Tour Championship – as part of the new schedule.

 The Race to Dubai, formerly known as the Order of Merit, is to remain. Each of the seven events will have a prize pot of at least $7 million.

European Tour chief executive Keith Pelley said that eight or nine events could end up as part of the Rolex Series and he hopes to make it 10 events by 2018.

He added that the $7 million prize money”is the threshold that we felt that was needed to produce something of a high quality” for the series. Investments by the Tour in its television and digital productions and the pursuit of additional marketing and sponsorship opportunities are also part of the plan.

Pelley said the Tour and Rolex will subsidise tournaments such as the Irish Open and Scottish Open to allow them to distribute at least $7 million to players.

The Tour will also start the Access List, which will be a separate money list that will not include earnings from the Rolex Series, the Masters, the PGA Championship or the four World Golf Championships. The top three players on that list will be invited to play in Rolex Series events, and the top 10 finishers will be eligible for full European Tour membership for the following season.

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3 Finance Areas Forever Impacted by the Digital Economy

By Ido Shamgar, order  leading global programs for the finance line of business audience at SAP. He is a seasoned marketing and sales professional who is helping his customers become live digital organizations, by harnessing disruptive technologies.

Today, CFOs are under tremendous pressure to help their businesses evolve into the digital economy, because investments and challenges to business are greater than ever. But how is the digital economy impacting finance and the life of the CFOs? Here are three areas that are going through big changes:

1. Strategy and execution

CFOs are increasingly making major decisions about whether they should invest to develop new capabilities, leverage partners, buy new companies, or divest older components of their businesses. They need to step forward with the information, insights, and the ability to plan and demonstrate what the future looks like.

Behind the scenes, they need to execute on these changes quickly because within any corporation, finance is one of the few departments that is directly impacted by all of the major digital evolutions.

2. Business performance

Finance needs to adopt a strategy that puts the right information in the hands of any member of their business when they need it, so the decisions that move the business forward can be accelerated.

While the technology to get those insights didn’t exist in the past, today finance has the ability to adopt a single real-time platform that transforms the way budget cycles are performed. The month-end close can be just another day of the month, and the annual budget cycle needs to turn into a dynamic planning cycle. Finance has the ability, like never before, to break the siloes so that all the organizations, including planning, treasury, operations, and risk and compliance, are working on the same information and towards the same goals.

3. Core financial operations and compliance

A substantial wave of automation is coming into financial organizations. Increasingly, the effort is moving out of the back office and into strategic and performance support roles. Organizations that undertook this move in the past have seen back-office cost reductions from 20 to 40 percent. As machine learning and other new technologies mature, companies will be able to reduce back-office costs even more.

In addition, automation and the adoption of real-time compliance systems will allow organizations to keep up with the pace of the digital economy and new regulations much more easily.

As these trends happen at an unprecedented speed, finance professionals are being asked to expand into new areas and take on new responsibilities. They are becoming more involved the strategic decision-making of the organization. With a host of new, ready for prime-time technologies at their disposal, they are in a unique position to get out of the back office and apply their analytical skills and business insights to set their company on the right course.

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To learn more, check out these business cases of CFOs adapting innovation into live business insight.  To understand the trends shaping the future of financial management, read the research Thriving in the Digital Economy: The Innovative Finance Function. More information is also available at the Digital CFO video and theSAP Digital Boardroom video.

This article was originally featured in The Digitalist

Special Report: The cyber challenge

Sports clubs and brands have spent a lot of money beefing up their security in order to secure their assets. However, like many other industries, cyber security can occasionally be overlooked.

A special iSportconnect report found that for some in the sports industry, there is still some work to do to prepare for a cyber attack, especially as hackers become more sophisticated in the way that they are able access systems.

Phill Everson is a partner at Deloitte, and leads Cyber Risk Services unit in the UK, assessed the risks brands and clubs could potentially be exposing themselves to:

“Many companies have been buying technology and establishing security measures to prevent attacks, but unfortunately that is not always enough. No longer risks, these are now obvious threats and criminals will continue to target organisations with great consequence. The challenge now is the difficulty at which companies can implement the necessary security to keep out attackers, even after they are in.”

Both WADA and, more recently, the International Paralympic Committee, have experienced a breach of security resulting in the leakage of athletes’ personal medical records and website outage, respectively.

Everson and his team at Deloitte know a thing or two about cyber security. Part of their work in is to conduct ethical hacking, known as “penetration testing”, to ensure the security of clients’ systems is up to scratch. They ‘attack’ to CBEST standards – which represents the highest benchmark of hacking capability that businesses are expected to withstand.

While sports organisations may not obviously need the level of protection other organisations do, as Everson points out, anyone could be a target.

“There is a lack of understanding amongst some organisations on the danger,” said Everson. “This is across industries, but a sports club may think that they are just in sport and not a target for cyber criminals. Unfortunately this is not the case. More can always be done as the cyber threat evolves.”

Some clubs and brands may be thinking that a successful malicious attack may be nothing more than a temporary outage that can be fixed by a change of passwords.

However, many hackers will seek to remain hidden staying in the system for months potentially, and siphoning off confidential data in this time.

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“The duration of a breach can be as much as one hundred days, or more,” explained Everson. “You need a whole set of monitoring and intrusion detection tools to detect a breach, which can take shape in many forms.

“For example, a club can be commercially attacked, with the, e-shop or ticketing system targeted. Likewise, you could also see their reputation attacked, whether it is a denial of service, or changing the website home page. You could even see a breach that changes what is displayed on screens during a game. It may be a case that they simply want information. All are possibilities.”

A few years ago there were only a handful of people armed with the skill to breach almost any system. Sadly, that is no longer the case explained Everson.

“What was once known to the few, is now known to the many. Attackers may not necessarily be focussed on a sport business, but what is certain is that attacks are increasing, both in number and significance.”

This is clearly a serious issue that clubs need to be aware of however unlikely the perceived threat:

“It would be prudent to think about the assets on your system and those that are most valuable.” Continued Everson. “It may be obvious, but there may be less obvious ones, too. What would be the consequence if you were denied access to them, or they were changed without your knowledge, or broadcast to your competitors? What protection should you put on those assets? These are key questions to think through. Of course, attackers only need to be lucky once.”

Everson had this to say for those organisations that are worried about their level of cyber security:

“Make sure you have ways of checking and verifying a breach. Have a plan prepared and rehearsed with the right people. These are things you don’t want to be working out for the first time in reaction to a breach. An external cyber security service provider can run checks for breaches and can quickly begin managing your key information from the inside.”

The thought of your important information available to the highest bidder would cause many CEOs sleepless nights. However, many in the sports industry are recognising the real threat that cyber breaches pose and approaching their electronic infrastructure with the same level of scrutiny as they do keeping stadia, events and staff safe every week.

Thomas Weikert announces ITTF elections candidacy

Current ITTF President Thomas Weikert has announced his candidacy for the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) Presidential elections to be held on 31 May 2017 in Dusseldorf.

The lawyer from Limburg took over the presidency in September 2014 as Deputy President, when then ITTF President Adham Sharara stepped down from the position he held for 15 years, and this will be the first time the German will stand for election as ITTF President.

During the announcement at a press conference organised by the German Table Tennis Association, Weikert said: “In 2014, I did not have to go through an election to become the ITTF President, so I am delighted that I can now also stand for the delegates’ vote for the first time in Dusseldorf in 2017.”

Mr Weikert announced in Saarbrucken, Germany five key central themes as the focal points of his campaign:

TTX: The new version of table tennis, ‘Anytime, Anywhere, Anyhow‘ shall be developed and promoted globally. The aim is to gain new fans and active participants for table tennis.

Table Tennis Marketing: The ITTF will make a greater effort to market table tennis in the future through working with existing partners and finding new ones.

One World – One Game – One Level: Further implementation and development of existing ITTF development programmes. Both establishing and further developing table tennis in ‘small’ nations with the help of the federation’s development programs, and pushing high performance across the world. The joint project between China and the ITTF, ‘Made by China’, has already been initiated, to help develop more international stars across the globe to compete with China.

Table Tennis Digital: Using new digital platforms to achieve an even stronger connection between fans and the sport, and tap into additional markets and the younger generation.

Table Tennis Future: The ITTF is firmly committed to keeping table tennis attractive for players, spectators and the media to further improve its appeal through a variety of methods.

The 54-year-old concluded: “We need to take some important and necessary decisions in our sport in the next four years. My goal is not only to secure an excellent position for table tennis within Olympic sports, but also further develop it.”

 

 

 

ITF appoint Hockey Federation CEO Kelly Fairweather as new COO

ITF President David Haggerty has announced that Kelly Fairweather will become ITF Chief Operating Officer effective 1 January 2017. 

Fairweather is currently Chief Executive Officer of the International Hockey Federation, cialis based in Lausanne, ambulance Switzerland.

“The ITF is excited to have Kelly join us in the role of Chief Operating Officer, ed said Haggerty. “Kelly’s extensive experience in the Olympic movement as well as his in-depth understanding of the challenges faced by international federations made him the perfect candidate to help the ITF fulfil its mission to develop, grow and promote tennis around the world. We have an ambitious agenda as part of ITF 2024 and we know that Kelly’s experience will help us to achieve our goals.”

Prior to his role at the FIH, where he chaired the ASOIF Working Group, Olympic Games and Multisport, Fairweather, 55, was the Director of the European Office of the World Anti-Doping Agency 2009-10, Chief Executive of the Sports Performance Institute of Stellenbosch University from 2007-08, and held two roles at the International Olympic Committee, as Director of Sport from 2003-07 and Group Manager Department of Finance and Administration from 1999-2003.   

“I look forward to joining the ITF as Chief Operating Officer in January,” said Fairweather. “It is a federation that I know well having worked with them during my time as IOC Director of Sport and I have admired how they have grown in stature in the Olympic movement. 

“The ambitious agenda of Dave Haggerty for the future of the ITF and its flagship competitions, Davis Cup by BNP Paribas and Fed Cup by BNP Paribas, has great appeal to me and I look forward to working with him to make ITF 2024 a reality.”


Euroleague announces Istanbul return for Final Four

Euroleague basketball has officially announced Istanbul as the venue for the Final Four end-of-season men’s event in 2017.

The finals will take place in the Sinan Erdem Dome between 19-21 May. Next year’s event will be the third time that Istanbul will hsot the Final Four.

Turish Airlines, the national airline of Turkey, are currently the title sponsors.

Basketball has seen outstanding growth in Turkey in recent years, while Istanbul already has a Final Four tradition that’s second to none, so we are excited to be crowning the EuroLeague champion there next May.

“We will return to the Sinan Erdem Dome, one of the finest arenas anywhere in which to watch basketball and the perfect venue to culminate a season in which fans will see all the stars in their own cities for the first time in history,” said Jordi Bartomeu, president and chief executive of Euroleague Basketball.

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Lagardère Sports and Entertainment appoint new Chief Executive Officer

Andrew Georgiou has been appointed as Chief Executive Officer of Lagardère Sports and Entertainment.

Commenting on the appointment, patient he said: “Over the past two years Andrew has done an outstanding job, guidingLagardère Sports and Entertainment through a complex integration process while demonstrating his ability to grow the company’s global capabilities and to develop the business in new areas. The business is now performing well and I trust him to lead the next phase of growth for the division.”

Andrew Georgiou has served as Chief Operating Officer of Lagardère Sports and Entertainment since 2014, overseeing the operations of the Group’s global sports and entertainment businesses.

Before that, he was also Chief Executive Officer of World Sport Group (WSG), a Lagardère Sports and Entertainment company, managing its business throughout Asia. Andrew has been with the company for ten years and brings with him more than 15 years of experience in the sports marketing and media rights industry.

As the new Chief Executive Officer of Lagardère Sports and Entertainment, Andrew Georgiou becomes a member of the Comité Élargi of Lagardère SCA.

 

Sports Digital speakers confirmed for ISC Geneva

Sports Digital speakers confirm for the International Sports Convention 2016, search the world’s largest sports business convention taking place December 7-8, cheap ed 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland.

– 18 sports conferences

– More than 150 speakers

– More than 2000 delegates

– 6000sqm exhibition and networking hall

– More than 64 countries to be represented

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Early booking opportunities are available until September 30, please register directly: https://www.regonline.com/register/login.aspx?eventID=1794022&MethodId=0&EventsessionId

For more information, commercial and marketing opportunities and latest pre-event guide, please contact: info@iscgeneva.com

00 41 216 016 754 (Delegate enquiries)

00 41 216 016 754 (Exhibitor and commercial enquiries)

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NIKE appoints new Chairman as Phil Knight retires

NIKE Chairman Phil Knight has retired from the Board of Directors and the Board has appointed Mark Parker, apoplectic Nike’s President and CEO since 2006, to the additional position of Chairman.

This is the completion of the planned transition that was initiated a year ago.

“Phil’s impact on Nike is immeasurable,” said Parker. “His entrepreneurial drive is and always will be part of our DNA. Along with Nike’s exceptional management team, I am committed to leading our next era of innovation and growth as we serve and inspire athletes throughout the world.”

The Board has also appointed Knight to the position of Chairman Emeritus, with a standing invitation to attend Nike Board meetings as an observer and to lend his experience and time to further the growth of Nike’s business.

“I could not be more pleased with the Board’s thoughtful execution of the succession plan, and am thrilled that an outstanding leader like Mark will head the Board,” said Knight. “I intend to continue to work to promote the company’s business in my new role for as long as I can contribute to NIKE’s success and long-term growth.”*

The Company also announced today that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has been appointed lead independent director of the Board, effective immediately. Cook has been a Nike director since 2005, is chair of the Board’s Compensation Committee and serves as a member of the Nominating & Corporate Governance Committee.

Knight today announced that he has sold his voting interests in Swoosh, LLC, the company he formed over a year ago to hold the majority of his shares of Nike Class A Common Stock, to a trust controlled by his son and Nike director, Travis Knight. After the sale of Swoosh voting interests, Travis controls two of the five votes on the Swoosh Board, with the remaining three votes exercised by Nike directors Mark Parker, Alan Graf, Jr., and John Donahoe.