Is there anyone Andrew Croker doesn’t know?
He’s long had a reputation as one of the best connected people in sport but his network extends well beyond its boundaries.
So it should have been no surprise that I arrived for our meeting at a central London hotel to find him already deep in conversation with Kelvin MacKenzie, whose years as the feared editor of Murdoch-owned UK tabloid The Sun made him one of the true legends of the newspaper industry.
Croker’s bulging contacts book lists everybody from World Cup-winning rugby players to the owners of major media operations and many in between. In fact, when Mark McCormack died in 2003 it was Croker who led the team organising a dinner in London to mark ‘the end of an era.’ It was attended by some 250 people with two things in common: each was an influential and successful figure in the business of sport and each was a mate, collaborator or former colleague of Croker.
And each would have received an email last month informing them that he was changing his role at digital media company PERFORM, which was the result of a Croker-brokered merger between Premium TV and Inform in 2007.
Croker was architect of the deal which brought the two together, unleashing a creative, commercial and technological force which saw it reinvent the digital media rulebook in a number of areas.
Last month PERFORM announced its intention to float some 25 per cent equity on the London Stock Exchange, in a move which could see it valued at around £500 million, and Croker has stepped away from his role as executive chairman to allow the appointment of Paul Walker, formerly of the Sage Group, as non-executive chair. Croker will remain an advisor to the board, a role in which he intends to concentrate on business development.
Those who know him well say that his sign-off was typical: “See you soon in the corridors of power, the stands, or the pub” - three areas in which he is equally comfortable and where he is inevitably at the centre of conversation.
Croker is, as you might expect, passionate about sport and waxes lyrical about the beauty of ‘being there’: the unbeatable experience of seeing sport played and history made live.
But much of his career has been spent finding new and better ways of making sport accessible from way beyond the stadium. From Cheerleader Productions, which famously brought the National Football League to British audiences with the launch of Channel 4, through setting up British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB)’s sport channel at the onset of the pay-TV revolution - Croker has been at or close to the centre of the action.
The last five years, however, have been focused largely - but not exclusively - on PERFORM and setting the company on the road to success. An IPO would be remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of them their scarcity in recent years.
There was a time when sports businesses were hot prospects for an IPO. In the UK and elsewhere every self-respecting football club at least looked at the prospect of going to market. Many gave it a go and most ultimately ended up back in private hands. Elsewhere sports media companies and even major properties such as Championship Auto Racing in the United States, took the IPO route.
These deals were signs of their times and rode a wave of optimism which many contemporary sages said would ultimately and inevitably fade and die along with the availability of venture capital funding. Yet the world of sport, media and commerce has moved on since then and if there was a company which ticked all the boxes for flotation, it was probably going to be PERFORM.
In many respects PERFORM is the ideal sports business for the 21st century, combining a range of revenue streams including the provision of services to bookmakers, a stream which is pressing to become a torrent as gaming legislation is relaxed around the world.
For the full interview see the latest edition of SportBusiness International published April 1.
