Who invented modern sports marketing?
Before Patrick Nally, sport had no money. The IOC was nearly bankrupt. FIFA had no sponsors. Nobody even knew what sponsorship was.
Through his agency West Nally - founded with legendary BBC broadcaster Peter West - Nally conceived, negotiated, and sold the first exclusive sponsorship packages for the FIFA World Cup, the Olympic Games, the World Athletics Championships, and other major global sporting properties. He brought Coca-Cola into world football and created FIFA's worldwide development programme. He negotiated commercial rights with Argentina's military junta for the 1978 World Cup. He pitched the first global marketing plan to Soviet Olympic officials and their KGB minders, laying out the blueprint that would become the IOC's multi-billion-dollar TOP programme. He helped create the London Marathon, the World Athletics Championships, and the first four-year global sponsorship package in sport.
At the centre of it all was his relationship with Horst Dassler, the head of Adidas - mentor, business partner, father figure. Then, in 1982, the partnership that had built it all fell apart. The rights Nally had created were transferred to a new entity, ISL, which went on to generate billions before collapsing in one of the biggest corruption scandals in sporting history. The man the industry calls the 'godfather of sports marketing' became the forgotten man of FIFA and the lost man of the Olympic Games - quietly erased from the record.
Game Changer is his story, told in full for the first time, after more than forty years. It is a memoir of ambition, innovation, trust, and betrayal; a journey from a south London classroom to the boardrooms of Coca-Cola, the palaces of Soviet Moscow, and the generals' offices of Buenos Aires, set against the birth of a $160 billion global industry.
For readers of sports business, corporate history, and anyone who has ever wondered how the World Cup and the Olympics became the commercial giants they are today.