Summary

• FIFA’s Trojan Hydration Break: The 2026 World Cup’s mandatory three-minute water breaks aren’t about player welfare — they’re about unlocking $1M-per-slot in-match ad inventory that half-time alone could never deliver. Ed and Jo ask the harder question, though: after the Six Nations picture-in-picture backlash, does cutting the crowd noise kill the ad and the viewer simultaneously?
• The Newsroom That Became a Studio: The New York Post’s pivot to a daily live YouTube sports show isn’t a quirky experiment. Ed argues it’s the clearest signal yet that video advertising has made written journalism economically uncompetitive for distribution. But as traditional publishers chase the Barstool Sports playbook, Jo asks: when the reporter becomes the personality, does sports journalism lose the last thing that made it distinct?
• Major League Rugby’s Personality Gamble: Ahead of the 2031 Rugby World Cup on home soil, Major League Rugby has partnered with OAS Studios to rebuild its entire broadcast around player storylines, not rules, not tactics. It’s the Drive to Survive playbook applied to a sport that has historically resisted putting individuals above the team. Ed and Jo debate whether the UK rugby establishment would ever be brave enough to follow suit, and whether Henry Pollock is sitting on an untapped distribution goldmine.
• X Games Solves the Event Trap: By scrapping its annual handful of events in favour of a full global league , four city franchises, a draft, and a 52-week content calendar, X Games is directly addressing what Jo calls “the event trap”: the brutal peaks and troughs that leave social channels starved between tent-pole moments. The question now is whether a season-long narrative structure can manufacture the same raw stakes that made a half-pipe wipeout unmissable in the first place.
• March Madness Crosses the Atlantic: Disney Plus streaming all 134 men’s and women’s NCAA tournament games in Europe for the first time is a bold cultural export, but Ed and Jo aren’t sure the product travels without the identity. In the US, March Madness is your school, your city, your family. In Manchester, it might just be basketball. Their bet: the real audience isn’t casual fans, it’s teenagers who want to say they spotted the next NBA superstar before anyone else did.
• The Entertainment-ification of Everything: Sitting underneath all five stories this week is the same tension, sport has always sold itself on purity and passion, but the economics of attention are forcing every rights holder, publisher and league to ask whether entertainment and integrity can share the same dressing room. From FIFA’s ad breaks to rugby’s personality push, Ed and Jo ask: is this the week that tension finally became impossible to ignore?

Show Notes

• FIFA to show in-match advertising during 2026 World Cup.
• The New York Post Launches Daily Sports News Show.
• Major League Rugby backs Personality over Technicalities.
• The X Games goes from event to league format.
• Disney brings March Madness to Europe.

Transcription

Ed (00:01.657)
Hello and welcome to the attention shift. In the week, FIFA looked at the World Cup and thought, you know what, this game is missing. More ad breaks. The New York Post quietly shut down its newsroom and opened up a YouTube studio. And nobody’s entirely sure where the line between publisher and creator really went. Major League rugby have decided the fastest way to grow a fan base ahead of the World Cup was to stop explaining the rules and just give people someone to root for.

The X Games killed the event, kept the brand, launched a league, because it turns out 4 tent pole moments a year isn’t a media strategy. And Disney Plus dropped every single March Madness game onto European screens for the first time ever, and asked a continent that didn’t go to a college in Ohio, do you really care about it? Without further delay, you know the drill, 5 stories 5 minutes each Joe, you ready?

Jo (00:54.412)
Ready Eduardo, let’s go.

Ed (00:56.493)
Let’s go over to you.

Jo (00:59.054)
you’re getting great at that. It does make me chuckle. You missed your vocation as a newsreader. Anyway, ad breaks coming to football. groan. Sorry, hydration breaks, not ad breaks.

Ed (01:05.048)
Don’t about that.

Ed (01:16.813)
Sorry. All right, okay. That wasn’t, I didn’t do that on purpose then just to throw you.

Jo (01:21.898)
No, so anyway, yes, World Cup introducing two mandatory three minute hydration breaks per match. Yeah, really? OK. For the first time, broadcasters will be able to sell advertising during a live football match without having to wait for half time. I mean, people really see this for what it is, right? Nobody’s fooled. It’s 104 matches and now they’ve got a whole load of new inventory they can flog. Isn’t that just more commercialisation of the live game of the World Cup?

Ed (01:52.505)
Yes, absolutely. I mean, it is in the land of commercialisation after all, So I was reading about this as well. So during the 2022 World Cup final, US advertisers paid $1 million for a 30 second ad slot. the consensus is on this now that these are going to be premium on top of that. They’re already going to be paying more for the ad slots anyway, and this is going to be premium still. yeah, look.

Jo (01:53.518)
Glad we sorted that one.

Jo (02:17.549)
Yeah.

Ed (02:21.72)
You can see exactly what they’re doing here. Just more opportunity to sell more. And I guess the whole piece is to and be as lucrative as the Super Bowl in a sense,

Jo (02:23.821)
Yep.

Jo (02:33.538)
get it, I get that need to commercialise it but hasn’t football always sold itself on the purity of the game almost like English and European football has resisted that American style commercialisation and now the World Cup’s in America and guess what? Hydration bricks. And no, I was just gonna say if this works, which it likely will do,

Ed (02:56.28)
The dorms are gone.

Jo (03:04.084)
Once football learns it can sell ads in hydration breaks, it’s gonna spread, right?

Ed (03:09.272)
They’d almost be better off doing it in the VAR breaks. I don’t know what’s going on with VAR. I mean, that’s the obvious place to start bringing brands in, right? It takes five minutes to make a decision these days on whether a goal’s a goal or an offside’s an offside. You’ve got a real opportunity there that’s not interfering because VAR’s already doing the job of the interference in the game. But you’re right though, like if you’ve got that already and then you’re gonna add in…

Jo (03:15.374)
For sure. Insurance.

Jo (03:29.262)
So true.

Ed (03:35.051)
Other interferences too, like it is going to be stop, start, stop, start. And again, I am not anti advertising because I understand that ultimately, you know, the game has got to be paid for somehow and fleeting fans for tickets is not enough. There’s got to be other ways of getting of getting money into the game as well. But I think I’m re-reading here that the former Coca-Cola and Visa sponsorship exec said it was a no brainer for FIFA to do this. Like clearly they’ve gone and done the research and they know that the brands are queuing up to spend the money.

And you do wonder as well, have they been having a look at a little bit of what went on with the Six Nations and how that’s played out? Because in the last couple of weekends, I’ve not heard as much moaning about it. I’m assuming they still did it.

Jo (04:14.798)
There was a lot of vocal objection when it first happened, right? We spoke about it.

Ed (04:19.266)
First couple of weeks, yeah, Yeah. But I’d not heard anymore.

Jo (04:23.31)
I mean, is it the question, is it just a case of, people moan for this first World Cup and then they’ll just get on with it and that’s it. Ad breaks within live play will just become the norm.

Ed (04:37.048)
I’m not sure because I think if it’s just a one hit and then done and then it’s not done again, people just moan about it the next time around. The only way people don’t moan about it is if it carries on and it stays there. I think what it does show is the value of live attention, how valuable that is. In that moment, when people have got the real attention on it, it doesn’t mean though that you should… Go on, I knew you were gonna say that.

Jo (05:03.566)
And also, I don’t know, I’d like to see that proved. I’d like to see it proved that if the live broadcast suddenly gets littered with a ton of ads, is that advertising effective? You can’t, you’re gonna struggle to convince me that that advertising is really effective.

Ed (05:09.634)
Yeah.

Jo (05:23.532)
because the ad loads on every platform are increasing and people are just screening them out. They’re a nuisance. sometimes I think it actually goes the other way and has a negative impact. Anyway, I digress, but yeah, I don’t know how I feel. It’d be interesting to see how these hydration breaks out and whether it’s gonna be an opportunity for some good quality kind of brand advertising in it. That’d be cool, but.

Ed (05:53.345)
For me, I think it’s and I think we said this before when did the Six Nations. Obviously, we don’t want to harp on about this, but I think it’s how you do it is the key thing. think cutting to a video ad with audio that feels like it’s got nothing to do with the experience whatsoever feels massively intrusive. Squeezing back to whether that’s an L rap or something like that where the game is still going on. That’s not interrupting, but there’s a strong brand message. Yeah.

Jo (06:01.037)
Yeah.

Jo (06:09.687)
Yeah.

Jo (06:17.24)
And don’t turn the audio off.

Ed (06:19.552)
Visual without the audio I can live with because I’ve seen it when I’ve traveled and it doesn’t bother me that much When it switch when you switch the audio on as well that it’s almost the game itself even though there’s nothing going and gets relegated then it feels too much, but

Jo (06:25.016)
Mm.

Jo (06:32.686)
I think there needs to be a lot of testing and learning to figure out how it sits alongside and doesn’t jar. Anyway, next story.

Ed (06:40.13)
Yeah. Next story. So the New York Post have turned its newsroom into a YouTube studio. So they’ve launched a daily show called Shine Time, hosted by Adam Shine, funnily enough, because he’s got his name in town. So it’s a live weekday show that’s streamed on YouTube and on the Post website. It’s a sports show. It combines live commentary, guest interviews, reactive sports debate. And again, it’s that broader shift of

what are now becoming digital first publishers moving into that space of YouTube essentially, where they feel like ultimately they can then can, I guess, take a cut of the ad money. There’s no other reason that they’re doing it right. And it’s effective these traditional newsrooms who from their perspective, they feel like they are well set up to be able to create good quality content. And I’ve had a look at the content. It’s well produced. It’s visually appealing.

Jo (07:34.2)
Mm.

You didn’t like him though. Much.

Ed (07:39.384)
He’s not my favourite, I’m not gonna lie. mean, yeah, I had a bit of a look earlier today and I was gonna say you could hardly tell what he was saying and I’m sure anyone watching or listening to this probably says the same about me. So I mean, that’s overly harsh. But yeah, look, I guess there’s a brashness to him how he does things. But again, I’ve not grown up with him as a presenter and I think a lot of people, certainly in the US, do know who is and he’s very well known. So it’s that.

Jo (08:02.861)
Mm.

Ed (08:08.085)
you know, he’s definitely got a specific style to him.

Jo (08:11.928)
If this is the final kind of tipping point where traditional news media publishers that are ostensibly to this point written word journalists, if you like, they know that they have to have video now. mean…

You can’t just rely on written journalism anymore. You need your video. We’re all visual processes now in terms of, you know, we go to YouTube and TikTok to find things out. So video, even for your sports news, is kind of non-negotiable, right?

Ed (08:47.967)
Yeah, because ultimately, like video advertising is the most valuable form of advertising. So that’s why they’re pivoting more and more. I’ve had a conversation with a few, just the first pubs over the last couple of weeks and they’re saying, look, we’ve tried all of these things and we feel like we really need to move into video because ultimately that we really want to start to earn the big bucks and they’re thinking about how can they create, unique programming. I could look, there’s not a lot, there’s not a lot wrong with

He brings big energy, he’s got big opinions, he’s gonna be very click-baity how he’s gonna go about doing what he’s doing and they’ve only just launched with it right in the last week or so, so it’s very early stage. It’s doing about 5,000 views on YouTube per show, but I think actually it’s more of a clip form. think that hour long they’re gonna be clipping that up and putting it on lots of other. So yes, the live is important to them.

Jo (09:16.526)
Hmm.

Jo (09:23.639)
Yeah.

Jo (09:30.978)
Yeah.

Jo (09:36.3)
which can often drive more engagement than the show itself. mean, look at Saturday Night Live or look at late night talk TV in America. It’s all of the social clips that do the heavy lifting now really rather than the show itself, right?

Ed (09:48.866)
Yeah, lots of people say, well, why do it live in any way? Why not just pre-record it? Because ultimately, as people are watching it live, this is Zane’s stuff, they’re already doing half the job for you of telling everybody else what he’s just done. And by the time they tell anybody else what’s just done, the clips start to drop and the people can see themselves and it just fuels the whole experience.

Jo (10:06.414)
I get that it’s a growth opportunity for people like New York Post and traditional news publishers. Does it cheapen sports journalism though? Because it turns it more into sports entertainment when it’s less of your sports reporter writing your news report and more of a personality.

Ed (10:29.471)
I think sports journalism and sports… I think sports journalism and sports entertainment for decades already. I mean, look, you travel to the US and you watch a lot of the shows that are there, like Sports Nation, things like that, and the way they’re delivered. You look at, obviously, the way that Sky over the last 10, 15, 20 years have done Transfer Deadline Day and with Jim and his yellow tie. I mean, it has become entertainment in itself already, so I think this is just…

Jo (10:31.628)
Or am I just being snobby?

Jo (10:38.092)
Okay.

Jo (10:53.462)
Mm.

Ed (10:59.829)
What this, it’s that last moat, as it were, distribution. This is allowing these publishers to think about distribution of content and normally would have been confined to their broadsheet newspaper. You see it on the newsstands now because of what they’re doing. They can go in theory anywhere with it. And it’s the convergence of media essentially, really, isn’t it? That everyone just ends up doing.

Jo (11:16.941)
Yeah.

Ed (11:28.011)
The reality is the same thing and then what wins through, well, the best content in theory.

Jo (11:32.91)
I guess, know, now as well as being a sports reporter and journalist, you’ve to be a presenter too, right? But actually, most young people who are getting into sports media are likely to have played around with creating video anyway.

Ed (11:48.994)
But also that was, if you think about it the other way as well, I remember when I worked in football 20 odd years ago, and we were dealing with local media, back then local media news reporters were being trained how to use cameras and do audio and stuff like that. So that was the reverse of it. So they could do it all themselves. And that’s not even, I think it’s only been talked about in recent years mainly, but that was already happening certainly at a BBC level 20 odd years ago. And you’ll have seen it yourself, right? So it’s the reverse, but the same in a sense that one person can…

Jo (12:11.32)
True? Yep, very true.

Ed (12:18.699)
can do it all.

Jo (12:19.886)
Okay, what about rugby?

Ed (12:22.185)
Okay then. Right then, so Major League Rugby, and it was funny, I having a chat with a friend of mine at the weekend, he was was Major League Rugby then? Major League Rugby is a league in America, a rugby league, they’ve got a league playing rugby in America, so for anyone watching or listening to this, Major League Rugby is a rugby league in America. But I was quite surprised when I explained this, and I think sort of the normal person on the street wouldn’t, like we know what it is, but wouldn’t necessarily know that, and I was lucky enough three, four years ago to go and see the LA team.

in the Coliseum of all places and it was very early on in that process of Major League Rugby so look it wasn’t a massive turnout and so much so that after the game we were able to go on the pitch and throw a ball around. mean it was amazing to go in the Coliseum and do that but essentially Major League Rugby have partnered with OAS Studios and they’re looking to rethink how matches are presented across broadcast and digital and for anyone doesn’t know OAS Studios they come very much from a gaming culture, entertainment, music so clearly Major League Rugby

Jo (12:52.334)
Mm.

Ed (13:21.899)
rugby are thinking about how do we turn this into, how do we make this more entertaining than, God, I’ve got to be really careful what I say about rugby here, more entertaining than rugby naturally is. And they really want to focus more heavily on player personalities, storylines and character led narratives. Now, I don’t know enough about Major League Rugby at the moment. I know we did have a, I think Chris Robshaw went out there a few years ago to play Major League Rugby. I’m assuming that Major League Rugby are going to try and sign some of these personalities.

Jo (13:47.31)
Mm.

Ed (13:52.061)
Otherwise, they’re creating them from scratch, which is a tough old gig,

Jo (13:58.703)
Yeah, and I knew nothing of this story until we were researching what to talk about. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was really interesting, given that of the sports in the UK, rugby does to me to seem the least keen on surfacing individual players. It’s about the team and there’s no kind of tall poppy syndrome. Nobody stands head and shoulders above the rest. It’s about the team.

I get that and in a way I like it, but also there’s no getting away from the fact that increasingly young people, they fall in love with the people inside sport before they fall in love with the sport. It’s the characters. know this. So the, feels like by not acknowledging player personalities and them as a distribution mechanism that actually

rugby could be doing itself harm in the long run. And I think about like Henry Pollock and how there was so much potential in him as this kind of young, cool player. But when I, a few months ago, I kind of ventured an opinion on LinkedIn about, you know, he should be put front and center. People were like, no, no, no, no, we don’t do that. Whereas, you know, this feels very light. I mean, creator sports network,

I think Michael Cohen posted something about athletes who were streaming content on their own personal channels and their social. It’s really powerful. We know that creators and athletes are a distribution layer that’s been largely under-leveraged. So I think it’s really interesting that Major League Rugby is doing that first.

Ed (15:39.223)
Yeah, there’s an interesting quote here from Paul Guest, who’s the SVP of Sports and Growth at OS Studios, and he said, I would argue that’s probably all sports. That’s not just a US rugby thing. I think more and more now, like you…

Jo (16:01.238)
Interesting how the US are not afraid to say that out loud though. I don’t think you hear sports execs in the UK saying that too loudly.

Ed (16:07.209)
Yeah… No. Because the US sports fan don’t lambast them for it because they know it’s entertainment whereas in this country it’s kind of like you’ve ruined the purity of the game. Like the point you just made. You’ve ruined the purity of the game now. No, I’m not interested. Thank you. I’ll do something else. But it’s, you know, they think that Major League Rugby fans need to understand the personalities in the game more than the rules itself. They need to have someone to root for but…

Jo (16:12.525)
Mm.

Ed (16:33.354)
We all need to have someone to root for, I had a conversation with someone today about whatever team you’re connecting to, if your team is transient for whatever reason and players are coming and going, it’s really hard for you to almost fall in love for the team you support. There’s certain individuals that you want to connect with. That’s why as a kid growing up, you have a favorite player. Now look, the game’s changed quite a bit now, if you’re certainly from a football perspective, like, you know, that kids are…

Jo (16:35.246)
Mmm!

Ed (16:59.734)
more going after the Messies and not necessarily the local team in a similar kind of way. But I still think that connectivity is still there with individuals, even more so. So I get what they’re And they’ve got a long pathway to the Rugby World Cup. It’s 2031 for the men’s and 2033 for the women’s. Look, it’d be interesting to see how it plays out, right? And if they manage to do this, because it’s such, such a crowded market in the US. And at the same time that

Jo (17:26.818)
Yeah.

Ed (17:29.77)
Major League rugby, want to create personalities, so does every other league.

Jo (17:33.359)
Hmm, that’d be interesting one to watch. think this’ll be, potentially if it works, it’ll be a blueprint for maybe rugby over here following. Anyway, X Games, X Games is launching the X Games League, which is interesting, this story, because it really reflects something that I was actually speaking to Paola and Bengu about, and I joined them on their Business of YouTube newsletter this week to talk about this event trap.

which we’ve spotted on both YouTube and Roblox in the sense that when leagues focus everything on their YouTube and Roblox around the league and around events, there’s a big drop off afterwards. Whereas we know that creators optimize for continuous content. And it’s interesting that X Games, which to this point, it only really had four events per year. So it was experiencing the peaks and the troughs.

on social and of course X Games is, yeah, huge on social, but it’s really hard to sustain between those four individual events. Lord knows how the Olympics do it every four years when they acquire a new audience and then literally forget about them for another four years. Anyway, I digress. So this, you know, I think this is a really smart move because they’re going to this season structure. So.

Ed (18:31.85)
It’s so hard. So hard.

Ed (18:50.72)
But yeah.

Jo (18:58.284)
Gone are the handful of events that used to be the X Games and now it’s this continuous league with regular competition.

gives them a chance to stem those peaks and troughs that we’re talking about, kind of create these ongoing narratives. And X Games really good at that. If we’re talking about personalities and drama, that X Games is replete with that. So this always on content ecosystem, I think it really reflects what I was saying about with with Bengal and Paola in terms of trying to stem this kind of…

got loads of fans, you’ve got loads of interest and then it falls away and then you have to try and bring them back again. It’s pretty exhausting. So if you can just stem that a little bit and keep that continuous content, then we know that attention is likely to stay much more sustained. So I think that’s a really interesting move from X Games and arguably one that’s been long coming. What do you reckon?

Ed (19:53.042)
It’s interesting as well. I didn’t like I said, when I was again, when we were told about this, I started doing a bit of research into as well. So there’s going to be four inaugural clubs that are represented, L.A., New York, Tokyo, Sao Paulo. So it’s instantly a global league of four. Right. So it’d be interesting to see if over time does that develop into more like you got, know, I London’s not an obvious place to have snow and whatnot, but you’d imagine over time because I remember that back years ago, they did an X X Games in Baty Power Station.

Jo (20:08.343)
Mm-hmm.

Ed (20:22.815)
So look, these things get put together in different parts of the world as well. So it’s global from day one, and they just did a draft as well. So as they lent into sort of the American way of who gets to play for who and who gets to take part for who, sorry. And one of the most established stars in this is an Australian, Chloe Covel as well. So they’re really trying to have a global spread to it. But what they’ve also done as well is this, the athletes will receive 100 % of their service fee as it were, regardless of whether they get injured or

not during the season. Because guess the reality is the more things they do, the more likely they are to get injured. And, you know, we saw some of that in the recent Winter Olympics and Paralympics, right? It is easy to just, you know, you ever so slightly misjudge it, you’re injured and you’re out. The fact that they’re making that commitment to the athletes as well means that they’re probably a little more likely to go for it, I guess, and you get the highest quality competition. So, yeah, it’s interesting.

Jo (20:56.942)
Bye.

Jo (21:17.898)
Some, yeah, I mean, if I was at X Games, there’d be so much that I would be digging into before we started in terms of those narratives. You want to pull out the heroes and the villains from Brazil or from South America or from Japan. And when you’ve got a sustained schedule, I remember when I was working at WWE, know, at the beginning of each season of WWE, you’ve got almost the story meetings, you know, you’ve got the bouts, you’ve got, yeah.

Who’s gonna be the baby face? Who’s gonna be the heel? Who’s gonna steal somebody else’s girlfriend kind of thing. I mean, but you can craft those narratives if you know you’ve got a schedule. And I think that’ll be really, really cool. And of course, makes complete sense having a team based in Sao Paulo, given that South America loves its sports, loves its sex games, and consumes most of their sport content through YouTube, as we know on platforms like Cazetv. So.

I can see it going off. I think, I mean, certainly as somebody who I have a lot of X games and can content on my socials, I can’t wait for this to start feeding through, because I feel like there’s going to be some really good stories that come out of it.

Ed (22:27.377)
expect us to talk about X Games again when Joe’s explained to me what has actually gone on with it because I’m not a follower so I’ve just had just like heights and those kind of they just scare me so not one for me but but again again some of the stuff at the like said Olympics and Paralympics I guess the X Games orientated sports were probably the ones I watched the most and enjoyed the most and there’s some amazing young athlete personalities coming through at the moment

Jo (22:38.506)
god, I love it. I love it.

Jo (22:49.836)
Yeah, for sure. They’re the most, yeah, there’s, and for me, there’s stakes. There’s genuine stakes, right? In big air or the half pipe, there’s stakes. So, and it’s quite quick. It’s watchable because it’s quite quick. You’ve got rider after rider after rider coming down, so coming down the hill. So I can’t wait for that. I’m excited.

Ed (23:03.017)
Yeah, yeah.

Ed (23:18.005)
Cool, right then, March Madness. Joe, what’s the top you got on?

Jo (23:23.342)
I got my Syracuse. I got my Syracuse, T-Shirt on.

Ed (23:25.1)
Syracuse there we go Syracuse So March Madness goes global so anyone doesn’t know what March Madness is March Madness is the men’s and women’s NCAA college tournament that goes live every 17th of March to the 7th of April or there or thereabouts so for the first time ever Disney Plus are going to be streaming all 134 matches across the men’s and the women’s across Europe and South Africa So it’s the first time that European fans will be able to access every game through one

Subscription and also the zone. I’ve done some sub licensing through that as well. I also did in Germany, too I’m excited about this because I’ve only ever really experienced I’ve never been to a March Madness game, but I’ve been in New York multiple times when March Madness is on and It’s an unbelievable experience to be in a bar when there’s so many games going on and it’s not your normal franchise these are college teams so effectively university teams playing off against each other the intensity

Jo (23:59.022)
Mm.

Ed (24:23.889)
is unbelievable and it’s very different to US franchise sports because if you think about it this way it’s more local so a college in theory is never going to franchise so you’re either from that area so that’s your team you went to that college so that’s your team your parents went to that college so that’s your team so in theory that that support of it is always growing and people get really really intense about their support for their college yeah

Jo (24:29.356)
Yeah, because it’s more local.

Jo (24:40.78)
Mm-hmm.

Ed (24:52.533)
I love it, I look forward to every year. I’ve not gone as far as doing a bracket yet because I don’t know nearly enough about it. Bracket being playing a bit of fantasy and making predictions. But yeah, I don’t know how much you know about it, Joel, other than you see a Q’s talk, but I’m excited about this.

Jo (24:56.995)
Yeah.

Jo (25:04.31)
No, well, interestingly, I knew nothing until I started co-producing a show with Sesame Workshop. And a couple of the folks from Sesame Workshop came over and they were talking about Syracuse and they were a mad Syracuse fan. My friend Phil, now works in Copenhagen, doesn’t work for Sesame any longer, but, and he brought me over a Syracuse shirt.

when, I mean, this is years ago, think we, 10 years ago at least that we were producing a show with Sesame. But ever since then, the fervor and the passion that they spoke about when they spoke about Syracuse and March Madness. So this is my second Syracuse jersey, because the other one fell, you know, fell apart in the wash. But I kind of have that, kind of my own little, you know, loyalty because of that. And it, but that is really why

I’m wondering about showing this across Europe and South Africa. I get it. I know of March Madness, but because it is so tied to that college identity and that loyalty, can that or will that emotional connection really translate to audiences who are sitting outside the US who don’t really have it? Doesn’t it just mean that it’s a basketball competition?

Ed (26:22.024)
But is it any different than people who pick an NFL team or an NBA team? think what is great about it is there’s an intensity to it, right? Because ultimately it means everything to these kids who are trying to obviously win this tournament. But also kind of like these are the stars of the future, the NBA ultimately. So you’re not just seeing obviously a tournament at a really, really high level. Some of these players are going to go on to be…

Jo (26:26.445)
Yes!

Jo (26:35.724)
Yeah.

Ed (26:49.96)
the best players for the next 15, 20 years. You’ve seen them really, really early on and the coverage will be so good that they are pointing out to you like who are the ones to really watch out for. But there’s always players that come through it as well that you weren’t expecting who go out, who stand out, who then go on and do the unexpected and then move into the NBA too. it’s exciting for that. look, and I’m not necessarily even a massive basketball fan as such, but what I love about it again is that is the intensity that comes with it.

Jo (26:50.114)
Yeah? The super smells, yeah? Yeah?

Jo (26:58.413)
Mm.

Ed (27:16.816)
And because it is ultimately a knockout, it’s kind of like, and it happens all the time, suddenly the team that you think is the frame, they’re gone. And look, and that’s why again, it’s quite close to European sports in a lot of ways, because American sports generally are, let’s play each other 10 times. Like this is kind of like, you lose, you’re gone.

Jo (27:17.198)
Mm.

Jo (27:25.293)
Yeah.

Jo (27:33.326)
Mm.

Yeah, one of the things that I think is really interesting about it is, I mean, this is the NCAA and Disney quite aggressively exporting that kind of cultural, you know, kind of college sports, March madness in a way that we’re not very good at doing the other way around. You know, we talk about the Premier League, they’re trying to break North America and they want every kid in America to have their Premier League team. The Americans are so much

Ed (27:57.032)
No.

Jo (28:05.602)
better at exporting that kind of fervor. And the other thing that I think is really interesting is kids who are young, of teenage sport fans who are finding new teams to support, new sports, new players through YouTube. I think this is the ideal forum in which to do that because kids and teens love spotting an elite player on the way up. They like seeing them before they’ve hit the mega contracts. They like being able to say to fans,

Ed (28:29.929)
Yeah.

Jo (28:35.419)
But I’ve liked that player since I was 15 and they were only 16, 17 playing in March Madness. So I think it’s actually, it could be genius.

Ed (28:38.206)
Yeah, yeah.

Ed (28:44.852)
And also, if you think about it this way as well, potential for the colleges as well, it’s a great recruitment opportunity for them because there are players, right? There’s lots of players who play in the NBA now who are European or from Africa, right? Or other parts of the world that have then gone on to go through the US college system. This just opens the eyes, I think, to up and coming basketball players, both male and female, that this is a pathway potentially in through education to then go and play at the highest level.

Jo (28:57.166)
Mm.

Jo (29:09.166)
Mm.

Jo (29:15.128)
Yeah, yeah, great. Cool. Okay. We’re at 29 minutes. Look at that efficiency.

Ed (29:17.652)
Cool. We’re done. We’re done. Would you like to wrap up, Joe?

Jo (29:27.173)
god, now the pressure, it’s my turn.

Ed (29:29.426)
We’ve run out of stories, that’s five. We’re done.

Jo (29:32.558)
Thank you for joining us for this week’s episode of the Attention Shift. That’s been Ed Abbas and I’ve been Jo Redfern. Don’t forget to like and subscribe and if you want to feature as a guest or give us some questions, then email us at hello at attentionshift.media and we’ll see you next time. See you Ed.