Patrick Nally

Patrick Nally has often been described as the founding father of modern sports marketing.

Through West Nally, the company he founded in 1970 with Peter West, he created the blueprint on which much of sports marketing is based to this day. His vision and innovation have shaped the way the sports business operates.

Patrick’s work created a revolution in sports marketing which involved the identification, ownership and branding of rights and assets, which could then be packaged and offered to category specific sponsors.

This seminal advance ensured valuable exclusivity over a defined and protected set of rights for sponsor brands and, in doing so, ensured that rights owners benefited from previously unheard of fee levels while brands were empowered to create powerful and hugely effective campaigns. It was an approach, which demanded a fresh mind-set from governing bodies, and event hosts, which had previously struggled to manage commercial activities. His approach was the foundation of both FIFA’s and the IOC’s long term marketing strategy

Patrick was responsible for bringing Coca Cola into football; first as the corporate backer of FIFA’s global development programme, then as a founder member of the Inter Soccer 4 programme which generated previously unimaginable sponsorship revenues for major FIFA and UEFA competitions.

He continues to work with many of the world’s best-known brands and leading sports properties and Federations to create outstanding commercial value and marketing benefit for all parties. One of his current roles is to support, as President, the International Federation of Match Poker – a Mind Sport in an eSport wrapper.

For an activity to be recognized as a sport. A “sport” must; • contain an element of competition • not rely on any element of “luck” specifically integrated into the sport and not rely on equipment that is provided by a single supplier.

Nally pioneered the development of Match Poker as a digital method of playing poker, and specifically designed to offer poker as an official world sport”. To meet the definition of “sport”, Match Poker was designed so that a large part of the luck inherent in poker was removed and was achieved by having the same cards dealt to players in corresponding positions each time the hand is played – followed by the same flop, turn and river. A player’s performance is then judged not on how much he won or lost on a hand, but rather by comparing his play with that of every other player who had played that hand. To remove any ‘human error’ Match Poker doesn’t use cards or chips and is fully digital.

Nally remains one of the best-connected individuals and most effective radical thinkers in sports marketing and is at the heart of thought-leadership in the sector through his consultancy work.