The man who helped to invent modern sports sponsorship – the system that transformed the IOC and FIFA from near-bankrupt bodies into billion-dollar empires – has told his full story for the first time. Patrick Nally’s Game Changer: How Sport Became A Global Empire, published today by Fair Play Publishing, is the inside account of how a small network of men created the commercial machinery that now underpins a $160 billion global industry, and what happened when one of them decided control of the money meant control of everything. The book arrives at a moment when the questions it raises have never been more urgent. As football’s biggest governance scandal in decades plays out, with findings that Manchester City breached Premier League financial rules 114 times, allegations at their heart that concern sponsorship money and where it really came from, Nally’s book explains from the inside how commercial control became the instrument of power in world sport. Game Changer is not a book of scandal. It is the authoritative inside account of how world sport became what it is today, told in full for the first time.
“The past doesn’t just inform today’s debate,” Nally writes. “It explains it.”
In the early 1970s, the IOC was nearly bankrupt and FIFA had no sponsors. Through his agency, West Nally, and with business partner and broadcaster Peter West, Patrick Nally changed that forever. He brought Coca-Cola into world football, created FIFA’s global development programme, which also benefited Australian soccer, and devised the commercial blueprint that became the IOC’s TOP programme – principles still underpinning the industry today.Then, in April 1982, a telex began chattering in his office overlooking London’s Berkeley Square. By the time it finished printing, Nally understood that his business partner, Horst Dassler of Adidas, was taking everything they had built together to move the commercial rights Nally had secured into a new company backed by Japanese firm Dentsu. The new entity, ISL, collapsed in 2001 amid revelations that more than one hundred million Swiss francs had been paid in bribes to sports officials.
“Whoever held the rights held the relationships,” Nally writes. “Whoever held the relationships could make presidents – and did.”
Nally describes himself as the forgotten man of FIFA, and the lost man of the IOC: the person who built the system but was written out of its history.For anyone seeking to understand – let alone reform – global sports governance, Game Changer is essential reading. The governance questions confronting FIFA, the IOC, and football’s clubs and confederations today are not new problems. They are the direct descendants of decisions made in hotel bars and boardrooms that Patrick Nally sat in half a century ago.
- Patrick Nally is widely regarded as the godfather of sports marketing. In the 1970s he co-founded West Nally, the agency that created global sports sponsorship as we know it today. He negotiated the commercial rights to the 1978 World Cup with Argentina’s military junta, devised the blueprint for the IOC’s multi-billion-dollar TOP programme, and sold the world’s first four-year, multi-event global sponsorship package. Havelange, Samaranch, Coe: the leaders Nally helped bring to power are the figures whose legacies, and controversies, still shape world sport.
- Nally has a particular connection to Australia: he was a key figure in bringing the 1981 FIFA World Youth Championship to this country, the tournament that introduced Australian football fans to a generation of future stars, and was a close associate of the then Chairman of Soccer Australia, Sir Arthur George.