Seven League Appoints Lewis Wiltshire

Digital sports consultancy Seven League has announced the hiring of Lewis Wiltshire, formerly Twitter UK’s senior director of media partnerships and editor of the BBC Sport website.

Wiltshire left Twitter at the end of December after almost five years building their business outside the US, including serving as its first UK head of sport, and global sports chair.

Seven League has confirmed he will become a consulting partner in the business.

Wiltshire began his career in newspapers as a sports reporter, moving to BBC Sport in 2001 and later becoming editor of the BBC Sport website, BBC Sport’s first social media editor, and the lead editor planning its London 2012 coverage across digital platforms, before joining Twitter as head of sport in 2012, in time to oversee the Olympics for Twitter globally.

He later became Twitter’s global sports chair, then senior director of media partnerships, overseeing all media verticals for Twitter in the UK, Africa, MENA, Russia and Turkey, as well as helping to hire sports personnel for new offices globally as Twitter expanded internationally.

Seven League, founded by CEO Richard Ayers in 2012, is a digital consultancy specialising in sport. It helps organisations including FC Barcelona, Tottenham Hotspur, Juventus, Leicester City, the England and Wales Cricket Board, UEFA and the NBA understand their digital opportunities and risks, strategy, tactics and capabilities.  

Seven League CEO Ayers said: “I’m proud to announce Lewis is joining the team. His creative skills, his broad experience of international media & technology, his sports and sports business knowledge will bolster our capability in these areas. He has a great reputation and is fantastic to work with, so the team are excited to get him on board.”

Wiltshire added: “I am incredibly excited to be joining Seven League. I have known and admired Richard for many years. We share a BBC digital background and in my earliest years as Twitter UK head of sport, I partnered with him regularly during his time at Manchester City, where he revolutionised the way the football industry thought about social media.

“Since then Richard, MD Neal McCleave and the Seven League team, have built one of the freshest, most dynamic and impressive digital consultancies anywhere in the world. I cannot wait to be a part of it, to help Seven League grow even quicker, and to learn from the incredibly talented team that will be around me.”

Wiltshire will start at Seven League in mid-February.