7 ANDREW GEORGIOU

Officially, Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Europe President and Managing Director, but you can call him the President of Sports at Discovery.

Georgiou is likely to be the highest-placed entry on this list whose name and face you don’t recognise, but his influence on your enjoyment of the game is vast. In 2018, US media giant Discovery signed a $2bn, 12-year deal for worldwide broadcast rights to all PGA Tour golf tournaments until 2030, ending a deal Sky Sports had held since 2010.

Discovery’s deal made them the ‘strategic partner’ of the PGA Tour and gave them multi-platform live rights to all PGA Tour media properties. In plain English, it bought them around 2,000 hours of content per year, giving them access to the six tours operating under the PGA Tour umbrella. That means around 150 tournaments annually, The Players Championship, the Fedex Cup Playoffs, the Presidents Cup, plus 40 DP World Tour events per year. That’s a lot of golf.

The deal covers 21 markets outside of the US, including Australia, South Korea, Canada and the UK, giving Discovery vast influence over when, where and how so many of the game’s top tier events are watched. Crucially, the deal also allowed Discovery to auction coverage on a territory-by-territory basis. So, when, last June, Sky Sports announced it had signed a new multi-year extension with Warner Bros Discovery to show a minimum of 36 PGA Tour events per year, the signature on the contract read ‘Andrew Georgiou’. He is one of the most important people in your life. Even if you don’t recognise his name or face.