There’s a very small group of people who have genuinely shaped what is today called the sports marketing industry. Patrick Nally is one of those, and is often bracketed together with Mark McCormack and Horst Dassler as the genuine architects of today’s sports business.

It’s hard to think of a major event or sport  that doesn’t bear Nally’s handprints, from the Olympics and FIFA World Cup through to Commonwealth Games, snooker, rugby, golf, cricket and more latterly match poker.

But that’s just a part of the story. This is a conversation that reveals the back room deals, the agency politics and sometimes vicious personal rivalries among people at the very top of sport over the last fifty years.

If you’ve ever wondered how we got here, you’ll enjoy the next hour.

As ever, if you enjoy our podcasts, you’d really like the Unofficial Partner weekly newsletter, which builds on the topics and themes we talk about in more depth. You can sign up to that via UnofficialPartner.com where you can also delve in to the back catalogue of conversations with people from every corner of sport.