NFL & UK Athletics Join Deltatre Sport Industry Breakfast Club
Alistair Kirkwood, managing director of NFL UK and Niels de Vos, chief executive of UK Athletics to talk at the next Deltatre Sport Industry Breakfast Club on Wednesday 6th September.
Kirkwood heads up the NFL’s UK office in London, overseeing all commercial operations, including television negotiations and the staging of the NFL London Games. Under his guidance, the NFL has achieved consistent growth in the UK over the past decade and in 2017 will stage four games in London for the first time. By the end of the year, the NFL will have staged 21 regular-season games in London, with 26 out of 32 teams participating.
UK television coverage of the NFL on BBC TV and Sky Sports reached 24 million unique viewers during the 2016 season, with the Super Bowl achieving a combined television audience of four million on those two broadcast partners.
While Kirkwood has said that there is no chance of a Super Bowl in the UK unless there is a UK-based franchise that hasn’t slowed the continued expansion of NFL into the UK and European market demonstrated not least by the recent announcement of new plans to expand the reach of the NFL Game Pass, the league’s OTT service, across the continent.
De Vos has been chief executive of UK Athletics for the last decade and he also sits on the British Olympic Association (BOA) NOC committee. He is the championship director of the World Para Athletics Championships and IAAF World Championships London 2017, after successfully leading the bids for both in 2011 and 2012. He is also the creator of the Anniversary Games – the biggest non championship athletics meet in the world. He was previously the CEO of Sale Sharks during which time the team won the Premiership Rugby Trophy in 2006, as well as commercial director of the Manchester 2002 Commonwealth Games.
De Vos is responsible for all aspects of delivering the largest sporting event in London since the 2012 Olympic Games. With the strong demand for tickets in 2017, where British Athletics will sell over 1M tickets across the Muller Anniversary Games, World Para Athletics Championships and IAAF World Championships London 2017, demonstrating the appetitive for high quality athletic events in the London stadium, de Vos envisages creating new events and also hosting future major international championships – with the next opportunity likely to be the European Championships in 2022.
Kirkwood and de Vos will discuss all aspects of running major events in the capital, growing and building a wider community of fans, the commercial landscape for major rights holders in the UK and the new technologies, agencies and suppliers that are helping them achieve success.
For details and to book your place click here.
Deltatre is headline partner of the Deltatre Sport Industry Breakfast Club.
