
The Breakfast Club is designed to connect the business of sport as we discuss key matters and challenging facing the industry. Today’s session saw the topical attention turn to “Big Events and the effect on the country and role in the economy”. From 1995 to 2010, South Africa enjoyed a consistent run of big international events which helped profile the country and drove the sport industry. However, subsequent to this, these have dried up.
The panel was chaired by Sport Industry Group Chairman, Sgwili Gumede, who served as a strong facilitator and moderator of discussions. Afterwards Sgwili said, “These Sport Industry Breakfast Clubs serve an important role in our industry in bringing people together in an informal manner and on a level playing field as we seek to navigate and grow our industry and its influence on the economy. Sport provides an important cog in our macro South African environment on a social and economic level which cannot be denied. More sessions like will happen in the new year and serve a critical path in the continued development of the industry.”
The Breakfast Club was attended by numerous Federations, Rightsholders, Broadcasters, Brands and Agencies, who were afforded the opportunity to engage amongst each other pre and post as well as with the panellists via a Q and A session. The guests represented oragnisations like Supersport, ABSA, Boxing South Africa, BrightRock, NBA Africa, Power FM, Premier Soccer League and South African Hockey – to name but a few.
Thoko Modise, of Brand South Africa said, “The Sport Industry Breakfast Clubs are an exciting place and wonderful addition to the sport industry calendar. We recognise sport as an important driver of a nation brands’ image, reputation and positive attributes. These engagements and interactions give us a better insight into how we can work better with sport as a sector to help shape our nation’s brand and how we can help the sport industry raise its profile in the economy and on a global scale. The world that we operate is very different to even five years ago so we need to stay abreast with the latest trends, challenges and solutions – both locally and abroad”.
Some of the key takeouts from today’s session included that Big Events play a major role in our industry, their needs to be better co-ordination amongst rightsholders when approaching bids of any nature and as an industry we need to be geared to drive any bids that intrinsically drive value into the industry. These opportunities sit in all federations, not only those that are traditionally strong.
The next Breakfast Club will be taking place in February next year.
By sportingindustry.co.za