Not scared to take risks and with a real sense of adventure... she’ll need it!
Choppy waters ahead for new PL chief Dinnage
SUSANNA DINNAGE is not a woman likely to sink under the pressure of life as the new chief executive of the Premier League. The 51-year-old global president of the Animal Planet channel has shown an ability to keep afloat in difficult waters many times, most notably as a key member of an eight-person rowing crew that competed in a 28km ‘Ocean to City’ race in the Irish Sea a few years ago.
Her endeavours on that occasion were rewarded with blistered hands and muscles so sore she struggled to sit down for weeks.
But her team excelled and she raised thousands for Childline. ‘My oar is nearly three times bigger than me and I’m the shortest in the crew but intense training is paying off,’ she wrote at the time.
Those who have worked alongside her describe her sense of adventure. She once agreed to leave British presenter Ed Stafford stranded on a desert island for 60 days without clothes in Naked and Marooned. ‘It’s the sort of thing that many execs would be too scared to do,’ said an insider.
Now she faces a new challenge, in choppier waters, as she becomes the most senior woman in British football.
Dinnage comes to the role with no previous experience of working in the game, though she has demonstrated an interest in it by holding a season ticket at Fulham.
Her most prominent foray into sport was buying the European rights to the Olympics for Eurosport for 2018 to 2024.
Away from work, little is known about her. Called ‘Susie’ by her friends, she has a degree in French and has been a Coronation Street fan since she was 12.
She’s a regular gym goer, with a personal trainer, and lives in Putney. Dinnage has reached the top while keeping her personal life private. Her new role may not allow her such luxury.
THOSE who know Dinnage do not think she will be floored by this, nor by having to work in such a maledominated environment. They attest to her ‘quiet determination’ and a drive to succeed against the odds. When you consider how stale and complacent Britain’s most fabulously successful sporting export is increasingly perceived by foreign broadcasters, Dinnage may be the breath of fresh air the organisation needs. She has a track record of industry ‘disruption’ — or to put that in laymen’s terms, ignoring convention to give viewers (and now fans) what they want.
Complacency is arguably the most damaging problem the PL face. The cash from rights sales around the world underpins the clubs’ ability to buy and pay the cosmopolitan cast of talent — players and managers — that attract the worldwide audience from whence the cash comes.
Under the league’s outgoing boss Richard Scudamore, TV money from home and abroad combined has grown from about £200million a year in 1999 when he arrived to £3billion a year now. It has risen on a virtuous cyclical tide of moneytalent-multinational entertainmentmore money-repeat.
In the crudest terms, if you do not have billions rolling in then you do not have Pep Guardiola, Kevin De Bruyne, Jose Mourinho, Paul Pogba, Jurgen Klopp, Mo Salah.
So it is vital the pursuit of that income remains a priority. But the league need someone who can tick that box while simultaneously becoming more supporterfriendly.
Also on Dinnage’s to-do list: lowering the average age of matchgoing fans, acting on ticket prices, progressing the safe standing agenda and tackling the game’s horrible addiction to gambling advertising.
And tackling parasitic agents. And implementing VAR. And dealing with Brexit. And healing the PL’s fractured relationship with grass roots. Her in-tray is spilling over months before she arrives.
Dinnage has to deal with all of this while never taking her eye off those TV revenues and ways of increasing them, and keeping at arm’s length the greediest big clubs who want more and more of that cash for themselves and threaten a Super League if they do not get it.
Peter Hutton, a former head of Eurosport who is now the head of Facebook’s sporting portfolio, believes she has what it takes.
‘[Dinnage] showed on both our Olympic acquisition and on the battle with Sky for carriage of the Discovery channels a calmness under pressure, a grasp of issues involving the perspectives of multiple stake-holders and a clear long-term view,’ he said.
THE Sky row came when Dinnage threatened to remove Discovery’s channels from their platform, saying: ‘Pay television needs to be about more than just films and football … the consumer can’t be expected to fund all of Sky’s investments and get less and less choice in return.’
Sources say Dinnage has consistently succeeded while still being a ‘team player’ who is pleasant to those she does business with.
‘Every interaction you have with Susanna is positive,’ says a former colleague from Discovery. ‘She’s always positive and extremely well respected in the company.’
Given the greedy and selfinterested environment Dinnage will inhabit the new year, all of that will come in handy. Can she do it? Her CV is sufficiently unspectacular that some in the television business were ‘a bit gobsmacked’ when her appointment was announced.
If there is any doubt Dinnage will be the right fit, it arises almost solely around whether her experience in the specific area of sports rights is extensive enough.
‘Discovery is a huge international company, and Susanna clearly has a profile in the UK media industry but she wouldn’t be most obviously in the top rank of names you’d have expected,’ said a source who works for one of her former employers.
‘Her background is primarily in production and content, not commercial… but she has a great understanding of rights models and maximising revenues across platforms and territories. And while documentaries and factual TV aren’t sport, a lot of the same principles apply. And she had oversight at Eurosport.’
Dinnage is known for stressing the importance of building and maintaining close relationships between brands and those who market and consume them. The Premier League’s successful foreign TV rights model is far from ailing. But as an industry insider notes: ‘It’s based on a couple of their guys travelling around the world saying “What can you pay us?” and then not seeing them again until three years later.
‘The relationship building has been lacking. There’s been a reliance on the product itself, and not the relationship between the product and consumer, which needs to be nurtured for growth.’
Dinnage herself has said likewise, arguing that reliance on patterns in customer data and past behaviour can hamper your prospects.
‘Algorithms often decrease serendipity,’ she has said. ‘Because they assume what you like is what you’ll always like. [You need] to leverage people, not algorithms.’
Other snappy soundbites include ‘If you want your brand to thrive, understand technology a) as an enabler b) as an enhancer of experiences’ and ‘Strong, confident brands need to be nimble and take risks in this competitive media market.’
The Premier League have certainly been strong as a brand under Scudamore, and confident, perhaps overly so. Dinnage now needs to keep the tills ringing… but with less of the arrogance.