Mark McCormack - the man who invented sports marketing.

In 1960, a 29 year old Cleveland lawyer called Mark McCormack noticed something that would go on to drastically change sport forever.

Having regularly watched Arnold Palmer play golf, McCormack thought companies would pay him to wear their branded clothing.

It sounds so obvious now, but back then that concept was radical.

Nothing like it had existed before. He proposed to Palmer the idea of representing him commercially. Palmer shook his hand, no contract, and the two of them took a punt on the business idea that would spawn an entire industry.

The first ever sports marketing deal McCormack negotiated was for Palmer with Wilson Sporting Goods. Around USD 5,000 a year. Not life-changing money, but crucially it was proof that the concept worked.

What followed within two years was extraordinary.

Ray-Ban. Hertz. Pennzoil. Rolex. Then the airlines. Palmer's off-course earnings reached around half a million dollars per year. In 1962 that was even more impressive than it sounds.

McCormack's next clients were Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player. With that trio he basically built the modern athlete economy. Endorsements, appearance fees, licensing, global exhibition tours, television packages. The entire early commercial strategy in sport came out of one man watching a golfer and thinking differently about what that golfer was worth.

His company, IMG , grew from that small Cleveland office into a global operation across golf, tennis, football, fashion, art, and culinary events. Offices opened in New York, Sydney, Tokyo, and London, where the headquarters was named McCormack House, on Burlington Lane in Chiswick.

Fast forward roughly fifty years...

I was 21 years old, starting a six-month internship at that very same IMG London headquarters. £15 a day. Sleeping on friends' sofas. Daunted by the place, but loving every second of being there.

I had no idea at the time that I was walking into the building that would shape my entire career.

Back then, almost everyone in the industry seemed to have passed through IMG. It was the training ground for an entire generation of operators, and I was lucky enough to spend six months inside the business.

After my internship ended at IMG, I moved into sports sponsorship and ad sales to sharpen my sales skills. Then to an Australian sports management company's London office, where I focused on securing commercial endorsements for players, but I also started signing my first players in the evenings and weekends. A few years later I joined Octagon, another of the big global agencies, and was tasked with growing their athlete representation arm. We built a strong football division, signed internationals and Premier League players.

At 27 I set up International Sports Consulting to bring everything I had learned under one roof. Since then we've broken Premier League club transfer records, represented internationals across football and rugby, Olympians and Paralympians, and negotiated commercial deals for brands and players around the world.

The industry has constantly been evolving and changing since 1960.

Coventry City became the first English club to wear a shirt sponsor in 1978, when Talbot put their logo on the front of the kit.

Nike signed Michael Jordan in 1984 and built the Air Jordan brand into a 3 billion dollar business.

The Premier League broke away from the Football League in 1992 and signed a broadcast deal with BSkyB that reshaped the economics of football worldwide.

Nike signed Tiger Woods in 1996 and turned golf into mainstream entertainment.

Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003 and accelerated the era of billionaire foreign ownership in global football.

The IPL launched in 2008, the first major league built from day one on the modern commercial playbook.

PSG paid 222 million for Neymar in 2017 and more than doubled the world transfer record overnight.

In 2021 Saudi Arabia's PIF became the single most disruptive new entrant the industry has seen, taking ownership stakes across LIV Golf, Newcastle United, Formula 1, and boxing. (Today there are reports of LIV Golf scaling back, another twist in a story that's been twisting and turning for years).

Every one of those moments is an iteration of what McCormack did back in 1960. Spotting where the value is sitting, and getting the stakeholder agreements to make it happen.

And that fundamental hasn't really changed. The best operators in this industry today are still hustling, every single week, trying to find the partnership, the deal, the angle that takes their client and their business forward.

The tools have changed: social media, data, AI. But the goal, the mindset and the perspective is itself essentially the same.

The industry is still great today, but it's a tough one to break into and difficult to accelerate within, but the years are worth it if you're willing to put them in.

That bottleneck is also why I built The Game Plan Sports Business Accelerator, distilling the knowledge from the best operators across the world into a 10-week course to fast-track your sports business career.

It's the mentor I wish I'd had at the beginning...

If you're interested in developing your sports business career, have a look at the website here and book a call with us to see whether it's right for you: