Nobody wrote a song about losing sport

There’s a song from lockdown about losing dancing. It landed because it was true, and everyone knew exactly what it meant. Nobody wrote one about losing sport, but that went too, and I think it hit harder than most of us let on.

Plenty of people went running, which is a big part of why running came back the way it did. Others bought a Peloton or got on Zwift. I did what I could at home. None of it was really a replacement. The gyms were shut and so were the studios, there was nothing to turn up to, and that’s what people actually missed.

The training is easy enough to replace. The rest of it isn’t. Standing on a start line next to someone you don’t know. The half hour afterwards when everyone’s wrecked and talking rubbish. Going anyway because other people are expecting you. You only notice how much of that you need once it’s taken off you.

It’s why the three of us do what we do. Matt and Pat both played international sport and then went and built businesses. I’ve spent my career building B2B companies. I was in the Gulf for ten years and I’m back in the UK now, but ten years there tells you how the market actually behaves. Which brands travel and which don’t. What a government partner needs before they’ll say yes. Whether people in Dubai or Riyadh will genuinely turn up for a format or just like the look of it. I’ve not seen that mix anywhere else, and it’s why we can take an international property and land it properly, or build one from nothing. Primal came out of that. So did the Series, and there’s more behind it.

What I can’t tell you is how much of that pipeline actually lands. Some of it won’t. I also can’t prove the combination is the reason any of it has worked so far, though I believe it is.

Simon Seward