Sports Loft Podcast

Hosted by Sports Loft

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Apr 2026

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About the show

On the Sports Loft podcast, we talk to the founders and CEOs of the most exciting tech companies that can be applied to the sports industry. We discuss the companies they are building, the problems they are solving and their vision for the future of sports & media.

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April 16, 202635 min

The Realest: Turning memorabilia into recurring revenue

Charlie is joined by Scott (DJ Skee) Keeney, CEO and Co-Founder of The Realest, to talk about the untapped revenue stream sitting inside every sports organisation - Memorabilia.Using its on-site authentication technology, The Realest has transformed sports memorabilia from a market previously plagued by fraud into a structured, high-value marketplace. Their platform handles every step of the process: from authentication to fulfilment, photography, and sales. Beyond primary sales revenue, The Realest gives teams and leagues a new way to engage fans and access to a secondary market that generates perpetual royalties on every resale. Since presenting at last year's Sports Loft Summit, The Realest has closed a $12 million Series A backed by OneTeam Partners, PGA of America, and Elysian Park, and has worked with clients including FIFA, the Philadelphia Eagles, and the Ryder Cup.In this episode, Charlie and Skee discuss:•⁠ ⁠How witness-based authentication and tamper-proof markings are eliminating fraud for fans and teams•⁠ ⁠How memorabilia can generate multiple revenue streams from a single item with minimal operational lift on the club's side•⁠ ⁠What the $12M raise means for The Realest's international expansion plans into Europe and Asia•⁠ ⁠Why physical, authenticated items are becoming more valuable in an AI-dominated world

March 28, 202638 min

Badge: Building fan experiences in Apple & Google Wallet

“Every company now has a TikTok strategy… yet more people now use mobile wallets than TikTok, so why don’t you have a wallet strategy?”Eric Senn, CEO and co-founder of Badge, joins Charlie on the Sports Loft podcast to discuss why the mobile wallet is quickly becoming the most powerful interface for fan engagement. With mobile wallet usage now outpacing platforms like TikTok, Badge has built the infrastructure to enable sports organisations to meet fans where they already live. Eric explains how sports organisations can move beyond using wallets for simple digital ticketing and create a branded experience that is pre-installed on every fan’s device. Coming off the back of their recent $13.8m Series A funding, we hear about the rapid growth Badge has seen since we heard from Eric at last year’s Sports Loft Summit.Some of the topics we discuss include:How the pre-installed mobile wallet provides a 'lighter weight' entry point for fans compared to the high-friction journey of downloading a traditional team appHow Badge enables sports organisations to trigger notifications and relevant sponsor offers precisely when a fan reaches the stadium gate through geofencing.Why developing across Apple, Google, and Samsung wallets is a massive engineering task and how Badge simplifies this into a single API. Integrating wallet passes with stadium POS systems to track real-time ROI and fan spending habits.

December 8, 2023Episode 6155 min

Reviewing our trend predictions and looking ahead to 2024

In the words of host Yanni Andreopoulos, this week on the podcast we gathered “the greatest minds Sports Loft has to offer” (oh dear!) to discuss our 2023 sports, media and entertainment tech predictions. We explore how these predictions have influenced or failed to impact the industry landscape, shaping the year that's now coming to an end. We ask: were memberships re-imagined by sports teams? To what degree did rightsholders become content businesses? And did the industry really get smarter on data? Find out what we think, as Yanni holds Andy and Charlie to account on what we got right and what we got, err, not so right. Warning: contains multiple references to Hull City football club. Show notes: Gerard Pique's new Kings League Juventus' fixtures list reveal video Sports Loft Podcast – The role of machine learning in sports, and how to build an AI startup Sports Loft Podcast – BMW, Karta and marketing in the metaverse Sports Loft article – From AI to data enrichment: five sports trends to watch in 2024 Timestamps: 7:00 – Sports will get smarter on data 17:30 – “We are a content business” will become a reality 24:45 – AI will complement (not replace) content creators 31:00 – Memberships will be re-imagined 38:30 – For now, the metaverse is multiplayer online games – that people actually play! 48:00 – Our 2024 predictions

July 15, 2020Episode 59 min

Sports Loft Member Series: an interview with Zone7 CEO Tal Brown

Nicolas Miranda from Sports Loft and Catapult Sports talks to Tal Brown from Zone7. They discuss how Zone7's algorithms help their clients, such as La Liga's Getafe, protect their athletes from injury. They talk through the challenges for elite sports teams in returning to action following the covid shutdown.

October 12, 2020Episode 1452 min

Athletes as content creators

How are athletes becoming such great content creators? How are leagues and rights holders helping them to do this? We talk to social content tool Greenfly's CEO Daniel Kirschner and SailGP's CMO Tim Godfrey about how they're doing this. Our founder Charlie Greenwood outlines why he’s excited to work with Greenfly, part of the Sports Loft family. Daniel recalls how he founded the company with his cousin, ex-Mets player Shawn Green, to connect players, leagues and fans through content. We chat to SailGP’s Tim Godfrey about how he’s helped launch a new sport in 2019, that’s now broadcast to millions. The annual competition has attempted to “redefine sailing” and has attracted a younger audience on social media through “personality led” content. Giving athletes access to immediate content at their fingertips has ensured authenticity and enabled SailGP to work with their sponsors to create campaigns that are relevant to both parties and fans. Daniel highlights how producing content frequently is important to maintain engagement and then explains how rights holders are monetizing content and using that to expand sponsorship contracts. Thank you for supporting our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review!

July 6, 2023Episode 4942 min

Apex Capital: investing with the world’s best athletes

In our new series of ‘An Investor’s View’ podcasts, host Yanni Andreopoulos sits down with Antonio Cacorino, founder and CEO of Apex Capital. In this episode, we explore the opportunities around investing in high-growth tech startups in the sports industry, taking a deep dive into Apex's approach to venture capital – investing with active and former athletes. We ask: what qualities do sports people have that make them good investors? Among plenty more, Antonio gives us his thoughts on the evolving web3 and gaming sectors, offers us his pick of exciting growth areas, and explains what he looks for in the businesses Apex invests in. This episode was recorded in April 2023.

September 30, 2020Episode 131 hr 6 min

Data & elite sports performance with Jesus Perez & Tal Brown of Zone7

Data plays an increasing role in elite sports performance management. We chatted to Jesus Perez, assistant manager to Mauricio Pochettino at Tottenham Hotspur for five years, and Zone7’s Tal Brown about data informed decision making. Both set out that context is king. Someone needs to analyse the data. Coaches, like Perez and Pochettino, are the point at which data sets merge and decisions are needed. If done well, clubs can save money because their players are not picking up wages while injured, estimated at £35m a year in the Premier League. They discuss how managers have to be held accountable for players getting injured if the data said they needed a rest. Tal said: “when I'm asked by investors in Silicon Valley ‘why are you in sports, it's not a very big market? There are no sports teams in the Fortune 500.’ My answer is that if you want to create technology for human performance, you need data about it and going back 2, 3, 4 years, the only the only industry that had this kind of data at scale consistently is sports.” Jesus discusses how he has used data to understand players and gives examples from his time at some of the biggest clubs in England and Spain.

March 8, 2023Episode 4244 min

The NFL’s plan to develop global football fandom

For the second year running, this year’s Super Bowl was streamed in Japanese via NFL Game Pass – the league’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform. The goal? To bring new fans to the sport and serve existing fans better. It worked, with viewership increasing year-on-year by triple-figure percentages. Japan isn’t the only country on the radar of Samson Mayall, the NFL’s senior manager of direct-to-consumer. Game Pass delivers year-round NFL content to fans across Latin America in a range of local languages. Germany, a hotbed of American football fandom, has also been trialled. In total, fans can access NFL content in 200 countries around the world. Behind each of the local language streams is Spalk – the remote commentary platform that makes broadcasting multi-language sportscasts simple. In this episode, Yanni is joined by Samson and Tom Read, chief commercial officer at Spalk, to discuss the partnership, the NFL’s approach to developing global fandom and how direct-to-consumer plays a pivotal role in the league’s goal of taking football to the world.

November 29, 2022Episode 3846 min

Reviewing our 2022 predictions and forecasting 2023

Each winter our head of strategy, Andy Selby, sits down with his crystal ball, a highlights video of Hull City’s 13/14 season and a hefty body of research, to predict the major trends that will impact the world of sports, media and tech in the coming year. This also gives us the annual opportunity to look back at the previous year’s predictions and see what came true and what didn’t. In this week’s podcast we do just that, with host Yanni Andreopoulos and Sports Loft CEO and founder, Charlie Greenwood, joining Andy in assessing the 2022 forecast, as well as casting an eye ahead to 2023 and what the year has in store. RSS: 3baa75c089bcedf8a675e5d070333d2db07288b2

August 28, 2024Episode 7745 min

OpusClip: using AI to turn your content into viral shorts

In this week’s episode of the Sports Loft Podcast, Yanni and Charlie sit down with Shubh Jagani, head of enterprise solutions at OpusClip, the AI startup that can turn long-form videos into viral clips with just one click. Today, every organisation – from sports teams to media giants – needs a constant stream of engaging social media content. OpusClip makes that possible, helping clients like VoxMedia, Seattle Seahawks, FloSports, Memphis Grizzlies and Juventus to transform their video libraries into shareable clips, to engage their existing audiences and find new fans. Over the course of the conversation, we cover the companies inception and growth, its relevancy to the sports and entertainment industry, and the company's new product, ClipAnything – which allows users to effortlessly generate specific moments from any video using natural language prompts. Timestamps: 07:00 – Introduction to Opus Clip and Clip Anything 13:00 – Use cases of Opus Clip in sports organisations 16:45 – Opus Clip's virality model 31:00 – How ClipAnything works 36:30 – Model training 40:21 – Company growth 45:30 – The market's acceptance of AI