How Craig Thompson helped to create the Champions League

The Athletic FC Podcast

The Athletic

Football, Soccer,, Sports, Soccer

4 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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0:00.0	The Athletic.
0:03.0	Hello, Hello I'm Mark Chapman welcome to the Business of Sport
0:16.0	podcast on the Athletic much later with us as usual. Ahead of the Champions
0:21.0	League finals both men's and women's, our guest today is Craig Thompson,
0:25.0	who's worked on major global sports projects spanning 17 sports across 66 countries.
0:31.8	He was one of the founders of the UEFA Champions League and served for 11 years
0:37.1	as managing director for team marketing, the commercial agency for the competition.
0:42.7	Just take us through, first of all, Craig,
0:45.2	your career.
0:45.9	Welcome to the pod.
0:47.0	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
1:02.4	Championships. I was luckier than you can believe to get in there,
1:06.4	learned the business. Our chairman died in 1989, Horst Dostra, the son of Ad dostler of a dosts.
1:14.0	We realized that the new chairman was not
1:15.7	going to be the right guy to carry us forward.
1:17.4	A group of us left, started team marketing in 1991.
1:21.5	It was actually started.
1:22.4	I joined in 1992. We got the champs, we did not have the
1:26.4	Champions League when we started the team marketing. Got that in February of 92. A small group of us started building our team and our project around the
1:37.0	Champions League. We launched the first matches in November. The rest of that is history.
1:41.5	Went off to spend some time with my family
1:44.2	in the south of France in 2003,
	...

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