The Athletic

Hello, I'm Mark Chapman, welcome to the Business of Sport podcast on The Athletic.

Mark's later with us as usual.

Ahead of the Champions League finals, both men's and women.

Our guest today is Craig Thompson,

who's worked on major global sports project spanning 17 sports across 66 countries.

He was one of the founders of the UA for Champions League

and served for 11 years as managing director for team marketing,

the commercial agency for the competition. Just take us through, first of all, Craig,

your career. Welcome to the pod. Born in Los Angeles, migrated to Europe in 1986,

joined ISL marketing, which was a brilliant agency that had exclusive rights

for World Cup, Olympic Games, European championships. I was luckier than you can believe to get in there,

learned the business. Our chairman died in 1989, horsest Dostra, the son of Adidas,

we realized that the new chairman was not going to be the right guy to carry us forward.

Group of us left, started team marketing in 1991. It was actually started. I joined in 1992.

We got the, we did not have the Champions League when we started the team marketing.

Got that in February of 92. Small group of us started building our team and our project around

the Champions League. We launched the first matches in November. The rest of that is history.

Went off to spend some time with my family in the south of France in 2003, which was very enjoyable, but got bored and started working again,

started the Champions Hockey League, very similar to Champions League football for ice hockey in 2008.

And then left back for America after 25 years to San Francisco to run the

America's Cup for Larry Ellison, the owner of Oracle, since that time have been doing a lot

...