Henry Tricks

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59 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 9 Sep

Henry Tricks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Chainsaw sputtering: Milei’s experiment falters · 9 Sep 2026 podcast

So we saw a recent example of this in football when a few big investors tried to buy a chunk of FIFA and take control of the World Cup.

And this was partly an attempt to weaken the dominance of Europe in world football.

And it was an abject failure and they retreated with their tails between their legs.

Something similar has happened in athletics.

Grand Slam Track, which was started by Michael Johnson, the former American sprinter.

Again, it was meant to create an alternative athletics league, but it filed for bankruptcy last December, less than a year after its first fixture.

Curiously, this is a time when there is actually a lot of investment in sports, especially from financial institutions who see it as a great long-term investment.

And a good example of this is the sale of the LA Lakers basketball team.

not long ago, which was sold by its former owner, Mark Walter, to the head of a New York venture capital firm, as well as to Bob Iger, the former boss of Disney, for $12.5 billion, which netted him $2.5 billion more than he'd paid a year earlier.

So there is interest, but

Time or timing is important, and therein lies the third lesson, if you like.

Building a winning sports franchise can take generations.

We've talked about the World Cup, and we had the World Cup in America and Mexico and Canada this summer.

It looked as though American soccer really started to come into its own this year.

And that's great, but it's 50 years after the great Brazilian footballer Pele went to play for the New York Cosmos for the first time.

So it takes really a long time for these kind of changes to embed themselves.

So perhaps the Saudis were not prepared to wait around for generations for their investments to pay off.

Thank you, Rosie.

Great talking to you.

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