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The Hundred: A win for women's sport

With a women's match headlining the launch of the ECB's new 100-ball competition, this week has been an overwhelming success for women's sport everywhere (including video gaming...).

Photo Source: Instagram/ @TashFarrant
The Hundred got off to an almost perfect start last week. So close to perfection, in fact, that Manchester Originals’ captain Kate Cross admitted that “I don’t think I can come off a cricket pitch and be more pleased with a loss”.
 
The headline match was the most watched women’s cricket match in UK history, with a peak audience of 1.95 million. The peak time BBC Two broadcast drew in a high of 1.6 million viewers, with a further 180,000 live streams on iPlayer and BBC Sport online. 
 
Furthermore, along with the TV spectators, there was 7,395 fans in attendance at the Kia Oval, a record for largest ever attendance for a modern-day women’s domestic match. Even more amazingly, this record was smashed later in the same week as 13,537 attended London Spirit’s match at Lord’s.  
 
As summarised by Beth Barrett-Wild, Head of The Hundred Women’s Competition & Female Engagement at the ECB, “Give women’s sport a platform, present it properly, market it properly, broadcast it properly & great things will happen.”
 
Interestingly, a similar rhetoric was echoed this week by Miles Jacobson OBE, studio director of Sports Interactive, the developers behind Football Manager.

Explaining his plans to incorporate women’s football into the popular video game, he stated, “It’s something we should have done a few years ago. We’ve been wanting to do this for a little while and we’ve been sitting here waiting until it was financially viable, and we’ve realised it’s not going to be financially viable until someone like us gets of our bottoms and actually does this.” 
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK 
Photo Source: GIPHY/ Family Guy
Earlier this month it was reported that Apple is working on a new service that will let consumers pay for any Apple Pay purchase in instalments over time, rivalling the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) offerings popularised by services such as Klarna and Afterpay.

What's driving big tech activity in FinTech? Here's 5 key points, highlighted by Noble Binoy, Head of Direct-to-Consumer business at POPS, a leading digital entertainment company in Southeast Asia.
  1. As APIs (application programming interfaces) make it increasingly easy to embed banking services into any product, companies across all industries are taking steps to add new revenue lines from financial services.
  2. Tech giants already have incredible reach with their sheer quantity of active users, which can be leveraged to drive higher adoption for their financial services offerings.
  3. FinTech companies raised a record $23B in Q1 2021, +98% QoQ. Helps to grow the investor interest.
  4. Tech giants are sitting on a massive amount of consumer data, which can be analysed to create tailored financial products.
  5. It further strengthens the flywheel strategy.
What does this have to do with sport? Well, with Google on a 'cookie crackdown' and Apple updating it's privacy settings in its latest iOS reiteration, the special relationship fans have with their favourite teams, and the ability to extract data from this relationship, will become even more important and sought after moving forward.

What do you think? Let me know by replying to this email. 
IN THE MEDIA 
Inspired by a previous 'Thought for the Week' in this newsletter, I spoke with JohnWallStreet from Sportico to discuss Barstool Athletics Inc. and why (in my opinion) their built in audience could shake up talent agencies. Here's the full article.
WEEKLY ROUND UP 
Here's a few of the top articles that I've come across this week. I hope you enjoy!
Photo Source: True Faith
Governance and Finance
Photo Source: Formula E
Sponsorship and Marketing
Photo Source: Pure Xbox
Broadcast and Media
Photo Source: Getty Images/ Benjamin Cramel
Technology
SPORTS PUNDIT NETWORK

For the latest edition of the Sports Pundit Networking Series, I caught up with Adam Goodyer, CEO of Realife Tech, a company he founded after attending a Robbie Williams concert at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester.

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