Hello I'm Mark Chapman welcome to a new podcast on the Athletic Network, the business of sport.

Now hopefully the title is pretty self-explanatory,

but in a nutshell, every Thursday

will be joined by a panel of the athletics brilliant football

journalist will have the occasional special guest as well and we'll go deep into the

stories that affect all of us clubs, the game we love will discuss owners, agents, key decision-makers,

will take you behind the curtain into the world of football business, and we will talk about other sports as well alongside me each

week will be the athletics football news reporter Matt Slaited be fair to say you are a

sports news Matt Slater, it'd be fair to say you are a sports, news, business, media. I was going to say fanatic, but I wonder whether to say geek, I don't know.

Which would you prefer?

Which would you prefer?

I don't want to be a geek, but if I could at all avoid it.

But expert, expert.

Yeah, that'll do, yeah, I'll take experts.

Do we trust experts now? I don't know but yeah no all guilty as charged well

I like all those things anyway but they're increasingly increasingly

important obviously and they increasingly interlock increasingly important mark as well.

They've always been important Mark.

It's just that you know football writers we've we've sort of kind of shied away from that sort of stuff.

We sort of thought, well, that's not for us.

But look, the bottom line is, you know, it's a professional sport, these are competitions

between companies, you know, the idea that kind of sport and politics

...