The 7 Pillars of a Sustainable Finish Line: Redefining 26.2 with Mike Laflin

Kamal Datta: Hey everyone, welcome back to What Runs Around podcast and the special series on sustainability in 26.2. Today, we are actually moving past the feel-good recycling stories to the hard, cold data. In today's episode, we deep dive into what are the impact metrics in measuring success in sustainability initiatives at a sporting event. Our guest today is Mike Laflin, and he has spent the last 30 years tracking the pulse of global sport, from the Olympics to the Premier League. As the founder of global sustainability sport, he's uncovered a research area, a startling gap. I think it's also published by the World Economic Forum. that while 76 % of sports or see a climate change as a risk, only 14 % actually trust their own data. Today, we are breaking down Mike's proprietary seven pillars of sustainable sport to see if the marathon world is truly on track for 2030. Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Laflin: Thanks very much, well great to join you and a nice opportunity to discuss some of the work we're doing particularly around the data space. We're probably about a month or so away from being able to kind of publish and share some of the research but yeah it's been a big big project and it's a complex area as you can imagine looking at sustainability.

Kamal Datta: Yeah, yeah. So I want to go back and start. think you have founded multiple companies. You've been in sustainability space for a long, long time. If you want to take us back and walk us through the journey to your founding, GSS, or Global Sustainability Support, that would be a good way to start our conversation.

Mike Laflin: Yeah, no problem. It goes back a long way. yeah, I mean, I was an athlete back in the sort of early to mid 80s. But I was also an IT specialist at the time. So I was working, ironically enough for a commodity trading company ⁓ back in the sort of early to mid 80s. ⁓ But I was also trying to become an Olympic athlete at the same time. So I was training quite hard and working, which is a pretty impossible thing to do, to be honest. And some friends of mine were working at what was then called the International Athletic Federation. And I ended up getting a job working, what I consider to be a kind of dream job at the time, working in world athletics. So it was while working there that... I began to kind of think about data and technology. I was building ranking systems and results systems for tennis, for the International Tennis Federation, for world sailing and for world athletics. But what I found was that most of them didn't know what the other one was doing. So I came up with this idea of a sports calendar. ⁓ I sold it for a hundred pounds ⁓ in 1991.

Kamal Datta: Hmm.

Mike Laflin: and a floppy disk, which I'm sure most people probably don't even know what a floppy disk is. And yeah, we used to post updates to people all over the world. Reuters, BBC, various other people took it. But it was then I really began to understand the value of data because what the calendar.

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: provided was an idea of when things were taking place. ⁓ And it was in 1993 that I discovered a sports TV conference in Monaco. And they said, we really like your calendar, actually we'd really like to know who owns the TV rights for this event or who's sponsoring this event. And so I then realized that actually it was the data that sat behind the sport that actually became important. ⁓ And then, so I then formed this company, Sportcal, and we started building a media database, which we sold to broadcasters around the world, ⁓ and certainly rights owners, and then a sponsorship database, which then sponsors wanted to access. And so you started to build this kind of big information data platform around. the business of sport actually. So the business of sport kind of started to evolve from sort of mid 80s. And so my business grew as the industry grew. But I was always really interested in the broader value that sport gives to society. So I started that question probably just before the Olympics in 2012, thinking about how do we value the Olympic games?

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: We were promising to get a million people active by 2012. So I was curious to see how we express the value of sport. And what I realized is that there was no standard way of doing it. Different consultancies had different ways of expressing value, but you couldn't compare one to the other. if a consultancy did the IOC and the consultancies did FIFA, you couldn't compare the two together. And so that was kind of the economic impact and actually the social impacts even more complicated and less comparable. And in those days, kind of 2014, 2015, no one was measuring environmental impact at all. And then of course the SDGs came out in 2015. And I left that company, Sportcal, in 2019 and we had spent kind of two, three years doing impact studies on major sports events around the world. And I had persuaded governments and rights owners that actually we should be looking at the social value as well as the environmental impact and looking at the sort of broader, what I call more holistic value of school. And then I left that company in 2019 just before COVID hit.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: And it then was kind of, do I do next? Cause I'm not working for scorecal anymore. ⁓ and I started to think about the word sustainability and how sport was starting to use this word. ⁓ and we were talking a lot about now ESG, environmental, social and governance. ⁓ but having worked on the impact of sport, I'd always argued that sport actually delivers a broader value than ESG.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: And so we were kind of stuck as an industry between the sustainable development goals, which are very broad and very general to the ESG, which is more kind of internal and more kind of governance sort of financial focus. So there wasn't really a product, I didn't think, that helped sport describe what it did. I thought...

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: that's what I'm going to do next. yes, I've been working on that for probably about three years now. So it's quite exciting actually, because we're coming to that fruition of that research, that work, and we're starting to see some really interesting results, which we'll hopefully be publishing quite soon.

Kamal Datta: Cool. Do you want to share a little bit what does ⁓ GSS or Global Sustainable Sport do?

Mike Laflin: Yeah, I mean essentially two things and really I suppose the the thing that struck me in 2022 when I kind of started this was There were quite a lot of people doing things in sustainability and school But I didn't know who they were. I had sort of anecdotal stories linked in I saw some people talking about it

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: but I didn't know who was doing what and I didn't know how they were doing it. So I started talking to people that I knew in the industry quite well. Having worked in sport for 30 years, I've got quite a good international network. And I came across somebody I knew reasonably well, Karee Karaki, who was working at the International Biathlon Union. And she is doing amazing things at the Biathlon Union. And she kept saying to me, I'm doing lots of things, but I don't know if I'm doing the right things and I'm struggling to kind of report on what I do. ⁓ And so she kind of inspired my first thinking was how do we express as an industry what we do? And actually I think the sports industry does do a lot, particularly at grassroots level.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: but I don't think we're very good at explaining that ⁓ in terms that perhaps people can understand. And the industry obviously has some very unique assets, one of which is fans, because the industry throughout the world attracts fans, whether you're a football fan or a tennis fan or a golf fan, and you either go to events or you watch it on television or you read about it or you... look at it on your phone. So you follow and like me, I follow lots of different sports. So you may not just be a fan of one thing, you might be a fan of a whole set of things, but probably as an industry, we can reach five, six billion people around the world probably. So we have a big reach, but we don't necessarily use that reach well. So I wanted to kind of create something that

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: enabled us to kind of show what we were doing as an industry and participation as an absolute essential part of sport, getting people active. But, you know, in marathon running, you have people participating who are not elite athletes. And the lovely thing about ⁓ marathon running or 5Ks or things like that is you can mix elite athletes with

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Right.

Mike Laflin: with semi-professional athletes or just people doing it for fun. So how do you value that asset? And so being a runner coming from that sort of sector, and I talk to a number of people about this, is what is the value? of mass participation, what is the value of community sport, what is the value of ⁓ international competitive sport. And it has different values and different propositions. So you need something built for purpose to express what the industry does. And I think trying to adapt to an SDG or an ESG framework means that the industry isn't capable of kind of expressing what it does. So I sat down and thought about it and I came up with this kind of motto, what do you look like to a fan or a brand? If I was a fan or a brand, would I think you were a purposeful organization? And what would that mean? And so I had kind of had in the past used a sort of framework which was very focused around sports events.

Kamal Datta: I see.

Mike Laflin: And I thought part of it kind of related to what I was doing, but I think it needed redesigning. So I literally spent the last three years kind of reformulating the concept of how do we express the value of sport. And I ended up coming up with seven pillars. I mean, it could have been eight, it could have been nine, but I kind of went with seven because I thought it kind of fitted.

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: with what I was doing. ⁓ And so pretty much since then, I've talked about this seven sustainable pillars of sport. ⁓ And it enables me to then talk about an organization in context. What is FIFA doing against what is UEFA doing? What is a tennis club doing against a golf club? ⁓ How do you look at cycling? How do you look at running?

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Right.

Mike Laflin: So it enabled me to kind of then give some comparative on what other people are doing, which has helped enormously. So I produce a weekly newsletter ⁓ and I often refer to what organizations are doing in the context of the seven pillars. And to make it easy, I decided to get them to start with a P. So... We start with partnerships, which is if you know your SDGs, SDG is about partnerships. ⁓ So, and I thought really the industry is all about partnerships, working with, you know, everybody, including your fans and your athletes, but also all your stakeholders. ⁓ So partnerships, then participation, which is a unique asset of the industry. People, which is community, diversity, volunteering.

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: sort of broader engagement. Then planet, which is obviously the environmental, the biodiversity aspect. Then you have power, which is governance. So how good an organization you are, how responsible you are as an organization. And then profile, which is the media. How are you engaging your fans and communicating what you're doing? And then the final thing is the economic.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. you

Mike Laflin: prosperity ⁓ aspect. So each pillar is seven Ps and actually it's quite easy to remember, whereas I know about you, I can never remember all the SCGs, even though they're kind of working in this space. ⁓ So yeah, so that's the thinking behind it.

Kamal Datta: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Thank you for sharing. And we are going to deep dive into the seven pillars and all the piece that you just outlined. I want to start off with, you referred a terminology called impact data versus ⁓ commercial data. ⁓ As an industry, if you take mass participation industry, how do they...

Mike Laflin: Mm-hmm.

Kamal Datta: interpret what is an impact data versus what is a commercial data.

Mike Laflin: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, what we talk about in the industry is a lot of focus on what we have adopted, if you like, as our commercial value. So when I started in sport in sort of the late 80s, we were discovering the value of television rights.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: and sponsorship deals. So if you kind of go back to the 70s, that's kind of when TV started to sort of get broadcast or broadcasted with a commercial frame around it. So if you kind of think back to, I don't know, sort of the early 70s, sport was not making much money, television wasn't around, and then of course you've got Sky coming on board.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: pay-per-view and we started to talk about broadcast and broadcast rights and television rights. what sponsors and broadcasters were interested in were how many people watch the broadcast, know, how much exposure was a sponsor getting on a broadcast. I always remember someone from ⁓ World Rowing saying

Kamal Datta: I see. Right.

Mike Laflin: just give me BBC with 2 million viewers for grandstand and I can get a sponsor. So in those days it was about ⁓ exposure of sponsors to an audience. And that is really how the industry grew up. So you were looking at commercial data built around what's the value of an exposure on a TV program.

Kamal Datta: I see.

Mike Laflin: And so it would be TV viewing figures, exposure during that time, the value of that exposure. And that would determine a how much broadcast rights or broadcast that was spent for its rights and depending on its audience. And then obviously the sponsor on how much is it going to cost me to have some exposure at your event, either on the pitch or.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: during the broadcast coverage and things like that. So the model, the commercial model has been built on what I call an entertainment product. We have become an entertainment industry. so the commercial view of us is driven by that. And if you're not somebody that can demand TV coverage, you're not gonna get as much money as somebody who does. And that's where...

Kamal Datta: I see. Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: we've seen this enormous gap appear between football and the other sports because football has become the kind of television product ⁓ and so obviously but you have things like the Olympics which obviously commands a huge amount of money but is only every four years although arguably every two years with winter and summer so

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: So yeah, it's an interesting one. Whereas the impact model is almost completely the opposite. It's what do you do around sports events? And so what's the impact of a London Marathon? So that is, there is a media impact to some degree about promoting London and promoting running and things like that. So there is some.

Kamal Datta: Right. right.

Mike Laflin: impact from that but ⁓ it's you know for me sports broader than just simply that particularly running or marathon running.

Kamal Datta: Yeah, I think you said before, that sport is essentially a health product that has failed to market its most important asset, which is the participants. I know you want to go deep into the seven pillars, but why do you think that Android sport is uniquely positioned to lead the sustainability chart if you want to take the health or the participation as a product?

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think marathon running ⁓ is absolutely a perfect example of that. ⁓ And we talk about things like mental health and physical health. And it could be somebody who's a kid, young kid. It could be somebody who's my age, sort of running in their 60s. ⁓ So I think what we have is ⁓ a social tool, essentially. It's something that young children learn so much from playing sport and we see lots of research around the value of exercise for children and particularly, you know, there's been a lot of research about how academically children improve if they do exercise and what is interesting. So I've just come from

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Right.

Mike Laflin: Cornwall, conference called Anthropy in Cornwall. And one of the sessions was talking about exactly this, you know, we've become so focused and so polarized on winning that we've perhaps lost the beauty of just enjoying something, you know. Now, actually, I think mass participation sport is a classic example of where...

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: winning doesn't necessarily mean you've got to be the first in the race. Marathon running, quite frankly, finishing a marathon is a hell of an achievement in itself, you so you win by simply finishing the thing. ⁓ So I think that ⁓ we don't really value that as much as I think we should do, and we don't express that value very well.

Kamal Datta: Right. Right. Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: which is why I think the mass participation industry is missing the fact that it's a health product that is marketing itself as an entertainment product. And I think that is perhaps the sort of the one of the missing equations. If you take this country, we spend in the UK, sorry, we spend 200 billion pounds.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: on the NHS to get people better who are sick, as opposed to spending more money preventing them getting sick by actually getting people to exercise or thinking about nutrition and health. And if you think about it, marathon running, as a marathon runner, you think an enormous amount about what you eat as well as the training that you do.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: I married to nutritionist, so we always have this constant debate as to whether it's what we eat or how much we exercise. the reality is it's course both. So if you kind of think about what you do as a marathon runner and the impact that may have on people around you, then there's kind of a cascade effect that you might start eating more heavily because you're exercising.

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: which might affect your family because then your family are eating what you're eating. So they may be thinking more about what they're eating. ⁓ And so, you know, there is this kind of cascade effect ⁓ from people adopting and exercising. But, know, for me, particularly the running sort of health area ⁓ is something that if we could kind of bottle that up and provide that as something that the doctor gives you when you go in because you're not feeling very well as opposed to the prescription you get that right here's your here's your training diary off you go do some do some runs exercise ⁓ would we reduce the 200 billion to 100 billion and you you spend five billion on sport and suddenly you've got a much better product you know we spend less than 1.6 billion on sport and not a lot of that is focused on

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: on winning medals. I think governments need to understand the value of sport better. think perhaps private sector needs to understand it better. And at the moment, the industry doesn't have the framework or the tools to show and measure what they're doing effectively.

Kamal Datta: No, I was actually very fascinated with how do you do interpret because this is actually the ultimate outcome. In all the activity that goes on, taking an example of the running industry, I know it's probably applicable to other sporting industry as well, but I was really fascinated that, like, what are you marketing? Is it a health product? Is it an entertainment product? But I think you summarized very well in a sense that it's ultimately a health product. and you're bundling with all the other dimensions that you're packaging it to attract more people to participate in anyway.

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Yeah, because I think if you kind of look at some cities and countries now, park runs and others, know, it's seeing a huge wave of interest in mass participation running and particularly marathon running from a younger generation. And, you know, my sense is there's a huge opportunity here for the industry to kind of think about. ⁓

Kamal Datta: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: How do we retain these people? How do we kind of build on this momentum that we've got? ⁓ The focus enormously is on entry fees because marathon runners, marathons don't get so much money from media coverage. ⁓ But I think the industry hasn't got sort of kind of a joined up approach on it. And I think that as an industry, certainly marathon running and also running space could do a lot to think about what it does and what its outcomes are and how it drives engagement. And so that's primarily what we're trying to do. We're trying to help organizations evidence what they do and show the broader impact that they're creating.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: so that they can engage brands and sponsors. We published yesterday an article about UEFA, so not marathon running, but yeah, but what's really interesting is that they've signed this deal with the Schwartz Group, is Lidl and sort of other brands, because they recognize that football is a community product.

Kamal Datta: I read that. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Laflin: and actually allows the ability to connect into communities and little want to get into communities ⁓ and actually little want to kind of help with nutrition and health. So it's that combination of exercise and nutrition I was just mentioning. So they're combined that together and I think that may well be kind of the example we're gonna see more and more.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Laflin: people are coming in to kind of think about the impact that football could have by actually tackling inequality, inactivity, poor nutrition, by working with commercial partners to get at that. And I think if government woke up to that, then you'd see a very different metrics. And I'd love to see...

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: sport in this country and don't know how it is in the US but in this country we're in the department of culture, media and sports so we're seen as an entertainment product. We're not in the department of health and I think to be honest, thank goodness we're not but I'd love to see a proper department of sport and physical activity or something that would recognise that this is a sector that's vital for society.

Kamal Datta: Yeah. I see, I see. No, one of the areas I think you often talk about, especially when you think about the endurance world, you talk about that they're stuck in the gray data zone. And I'll be curious ⁓ as you deal with sports data, I've been dealing with sports data for long years from different aspects of it. What are the great data zones that you have noticed, especially if you talk about the mass participation as a sport industry?

Mike Laflin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, think what we're not clear on, if we take social impact, for instance, ⁓ we have a number of people now talking about social return on investment and things like that. So we quite often talk about numbers, but we often don't talk about kind of what those numbers mean.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: So, know, London Marathon would talk about, it's the biggest marathon. You know, it's generated 60,000 participants. And now I think they're talking even about going across two days over the weekend. So it's not just the Sunday, you know. And also they talk a lot about the money, the charity money that they've generated and everything else. But I think there's...

Kamal Datta: days. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Laflin: far more there than actually ⁓ is being captured, know. And so we really want to understand ⁓ does marathon running prevent you from going to the doctor to reduce your sort of requirements on the health industry? Is there a benefit that actually we can't kind of express at the moment? So I think what we've got is this kind of data which is kind of a bit grey, you know, it's not clear what the real benefit and outcome is. And I hear it so often people say, it's so complicated, it's too complicated, we can't work that out. And I go, hang on a minute, we're about to try and put a base on the moon.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: If we can do that, I'm sure we can work out what the social value of marathon running is. So, and actually I talk a lot to different academics and generally the consensus is that there hasn't been enough research done in this space. So there are clear models and I know I talked to, we've done a couple of articles about some research done around Swedish mass participation. So I know that there is research and there's work out there. ⁓

Kamal Datta: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: But there's no consensus and what we quite often see is someone publishes a report, UEFA did one in 2022, a social return of football done by an academic, no idea of the methodology behind it, but it sits as a kind of oasis, you know, it's got no context. And so I want to try and create something that we can relate to.

Kamal Datta: I see.

Mike Laflin: that is understandable, is clear and so we can then say well the London Marathon actually generated this in social impact. What an amazing event. By the way that's attracting another five sponsors because it's clear that they want to be associated with something that generates real tangible society value.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, yeah. I'm looking forward to run the London next month, end of next month on the 26th for sure. Yeah, I'm running. So looking forward to Tomorrow is my, I call it the longest long run. It's called the 20 plus miles. 22, 22 miles I'll go, yeah.

Mike Laflin: ⁓ are you? Okay. Fantastic. How far are going? How far? Yeah. So I did it in 1993, I think. I did, my longest run was 22 before the event as well. Yeah. Which is a long, like it's a long time to run.

Kamal Datta: I... It ⁓ is. It is. And I usually run around my house by myself because it just saves time to go to a running club and that but...

Mike Laflin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kamal Datta: Tomorrow I decided to join, there are a couple of races in Boston area that do, ⁓ just for people who are prepping for Boston or London, the longest long run. So we can sign up for a 20 mile or so run races, which is kind of uncommon. Yeah, looking forward to it. yeah, ⁓ and I think we're talking.

Mike Laflin: ⁓ okay. Yeah, yeah. ⁓ okay, that's nice. Right, right, yeah, yeah. And how long do you think that will take you? How long do you think that will take you?

Kamal Datta: So, obviously ⁓ I'm in the mid pack. ⁓ So I'm targeting around four hours for the whole marathon. So I'm hoping 20 miles probably I'll wrap around three, a over three hours, a little less than three hours around that ballpark. So yeah, yeah. Are you running London this year or no?

Mike Laflin: ⁓ okay. Yeah. Nice, nice, nice, nice. Very good. No, I do 5Ks to be honest. I find the long distance doesn't work very well. I used to be a steeplechaser and I smashed my knee up a couple of times on a steeplechase barrier and it doesn't like long runs. yeah, I've only done the one full marathon in 93. I do.

Kamal Datta: Okay. You

Mike Laflin: I used to run a lot of half marathons. And yeah, because I was competing a lot, never really did full marathons. So, yeah. Yeah.

Kamal Datta: I do, okay. I see, I see. Now you talked about London and I think ⁓ I have seen the economic impact report that they do publish every year, from times of monetary value, what is the impact on there? But to your point, I don't think there is any report or metrics on the social impact of that event. ⁓ To your point, what would be a ⁓ couple, one or two metrics that you think

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly right. Exactly right.

Kamal Datta: the mass participation events like London or say Boston or Chicago or New York, we start thinking towards that it would be good to get there or publish this kind of an economic, sorry, not economic, social impact metrics.

Mike Laflin: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And I think this is very much a kind of around what other aspects of things do London do. There's a volunteering aspect to what London does. What's the value of that volunteering concept? Have they run programs?

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: for children to get children active around the London Marathon. And indeed, if you kind of think about the London Marathon, there are, let's say, 60,000 people. I don't know what the number is nowadays, but let's say it's about 60,000. How many people actually apply for the marathon? I think it's over a million people.

Kamal Datta: Yeah. Right, I think it was more than a million on the lottery last year. Yeah.

Mike Laflin: So the point is the marathon is not 60,000 people, it's a million people who are all trying to run the marathon. How could we engage a million people in this discussion rather than 60,000? So the point I'm saying is that we're not recognizing actually there's all these kind of intangibles that are sitting there that actually we've got a broader reach than what

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: were actually acknowledging, you know, for me, actually the key figure is how many people wanted to run the London Marathon and does the London Marathon actually engage with those people and how do we measure that level of engagement because if there's a million people who prepared to run the London Marathon, then that's a big number, you know. And if you kind of think about New York and Boston and Chicago and Tokyo and around the world.

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: And then as you say, you've got all the feeder races that you're doing that run along those things. And as London Marathon, you know, point out to me, know Kate Chapman quite well at London Marathon. London Marathon events isn't London Marathon. It's just one of a series of things they do. So this isn't a kind of one thing in a year. This is a rolling sort of industry that, you know, that

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Mike Laflin: connects with people all the time. And what we don't do is assess the value of those people that are participating in these things. And so that is where the social value needs a lot more work. And to be honest, my kind of project that I'm running at the moment, which is called the GSS Impact Assessment Programme,

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: recognizes the fact that it's actually really hard to quantify impact at the moment, that we need a lot more work and a lot more research in that area. So my project is kind of broken into two phases. One is measuring purpose, and then moving to the sort of second phase, which is measuring impact. So the idea principally is that we're trying to identify

Kamal Datta: I see.

Mike Laflin: purposeful organizations, people who are really trying to push forward a broader, more holistic ⁓ way of running their organizations. The London Marathon is a classic case of that. That's a very purposeful organization. would say purpose sits right in the heart of the London Marathon. And I think that's the case for a number of the marathons. But...

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: That's not the case necessarily for all the Premier League clubs and all the rugby clubs and other organisations around the world. So our first step is to see how purposeful you are as an organisation and then we then look to see how impactful you are. So it's kind of a two-phase approach.

Kamal Datta: ⁓ huh. No, thanks for sharing them. This would be a good segue to dive a little bit into the seven pillars I think you outlined in the beginning of our conversation. Let's start with partnership. I think if you talk about ⁓ mass participation or races events, ⁓ How do races work with the city councils or say the local police or the corporate sponsor that there is an alignment of purpose or in another way to think about it is it's about moving from sponsorship for money to partnership for impact. I think that's what you are advocating that how do you have meaningful or sustainable partnership. So what is your take on there that how mass participation events can move until in that direction.

Mike Laflin: Thanks. Well, I think there's a couple of things in there. What we have as the sports industry is we have lots of segues into different groups. So we connect with governments, we connect with brands, we connect with cities, we connect with our fans, we connect with suppliers. So if you're going to have a meaningful and purposeful ⁓ event or organization,

Kamal Datta: Mm.

Mike Laflin: ⁓ You've got to be thinking about that interconnection between you and the people you're working with. When I was doing impact studies ⁓ back in the sort of 2017, 2018 time, ⁓ I would often say to event organizers, what are your sponsors doing and how are you recognizing what your sponsors are doing and how engaged are you with what your sponsors are doing? ⁓ In the good old days, we had this conversation actually down at Anthropy about how a CEO of a company would say, I want to sponsor a rugby event because I want pictures with one of the rugby players and I want some tickets and I want to take my kids to the event. That was the model. Or we want to get some exposure on TV ⁓ because we want our brand to be seen to be really good by being associated with football or something like this.

Kamal Datta: Yeah, yeah.

Mike Laflin: And that model is changing enormously ⁓ from eyeballs and sort of personal pursuit to actually something broader. so marathon running is a classic sort of case of, if you're going to have a purposeful partner, ⁓ what is that partner doing? ⁓ And so.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: For me, partnerships is no longer just simply something that is a contract to promote something. It's actually what does it mean? And that's what's, think, uniquely interesting about the UEFA deal coming through. Do we see London Marathon doing that today? And that's the journey they're on now. They're starting to look at what is the broader value, because, you know, Sports events and having sponsors means you want sponsors to activate, you want them doing things. And actually I used to be a judge on the European Sponsorship Awards program and it was really fascinating to see some of the activation programs that the sponsors would have. Very far reaching, but I would imagine that a number of the organizers of the events or even the owners of those events had no clue.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: what those brands were doing and how they were activating. So there's a disconnect between what is going on around you and what you're doing. So you need to have that kind of joined up approach, you what is the collective value that we are achieving? So that's why I think people need to look at their partnerships in a different way. You know, and I think there needs to be a sort of a broader value of what does partnership bring.

Kamal Datta: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: What is fascinating in the analysis we're running at the moment, so to say, we built a big AI platform. We've got 15 servers analyzing around 5,000 sports organizations around the world. And we're looking to see what you're doing with partnerships. And actually, the partnership piece is looking really good. Actually, there's a lot of people doing really good things with their partners.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: So that's really encouraging to see how many organizations talk about that. And I still see an awful lot of organizations that have a page saying partners and then doesn't tell you anything about what they're doing with their partners. It just simply says we've got a partner with this thing. So you're missing a trick if you're not talking about what you're doing with your partners and indeed thinking about how you engage in that bigger purpose.

Kamal Datta: I said. Right. Yeah. What does activate partner or partnership means, Mike? That's very powerful to my understanding. the event organizers are not leveraging that.

Mike Laflin: Yes, exactly. And you, you see this a lot, you know, when I was doing impact studies, we would often ask if the sponsor was activating around the event. So literally, if you've got a sponsor for your event, ⁓ the sponsor could literally get his tickets, turn up and entertain a few clients and then disappear, you know, and do nothing else. ⁓ whereas some sponsorships, the sponsor will be running.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah.

Mike Laflin: programs to engage fans around the event. They'll be giving maybe free products away or you know in the best case they're actually trying to do something good with that sponsorship and get people active or you know some form of engagement or they're doing something with children and education you know so there's so many things and so I see far too often sponsors who are literally just doing it for the tickets and the exposure and not actually for anything broader than that.

Kamal Datta: I see, yeah. I think there's some work to be done in that space to move the needle towards activating the partnership that you outlined, for sure. Let's move to the next one, ⁓ participation. I know you talked a little bit about, you think about participation can be a health product, but the thing I think you mentioned earlier.

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Yeah.

Kamal Datta: If 50,000 or 60,000 people are running or a million plus people are applying for the London Marathon, there is an impact of those people being active on, say, give an example of the healthcare cost. Are there any ⁓ way or any framework that you have seen working to measure that impact?

Mike Laflin: say you know that there are isolated examples of research in these areas. There's nothing common and standard. There are companies who are doing things not in the school space who are looking at the broader value of projects. I actually met one in Anthropie this week. So there are I think there's a

Kamal Datta: I see.

Mike Laflin: increasing awareness of trying to calculate social value, but no one's really kind of got that so far. And I think that, you know, the uniqueness of the sports industry is we know that a healthy person ⁓ is not going to put so much stress on the NHS as an unhealthy person. So I think that's a...

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: fairly, although I must admit some elite athletes are pretty unhealthy in some respects because they push their bodies so hard. But I think generally being healthy and exercising means you're not so demanding on the NHS. we see the cost of diabetes, we see the cost of obesity. These are

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: things that are increasingly put on the area and certainly I see health and exercise as a sort of a natural thing that people could be doing to kind of reduce those costs.

Kamal Datta: No, I see. That's a very good point. And I'm sure at some day we should be able to quantify actual the impact on our infrastructure. If you talk about NHS, I think you talked about billions of dollars spent. And what is the impact of a London marathon event to the billions of dollars spent on say, by NHS, someone else?

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, I think there in sort of, we talk a lot about the engaged, the knee unengaged. And I think that what London Marathon and the sports industry is good at is engaging the engaged. So people, the million people who applied to run the marathon are engaged. They want to exercise and probably fairly healthy people. They want to do the London Marathon.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: So they're relatively engaged, but there's an enormous community that are unengaged in sport. And so, you know, how can we engage the unengaged? And I think that's one of the big societal challenges that we have, which is where sport has this unique asset that it's not just one thing, it's a variety of things.

Kamal Datta: Right, right.

Mike Laflin: So if you kind of think about running, know, running for me, I live by a park, so I'm in nature the whole time when I'm running, so I'm not running on roads. I'm not running in congested areas. There's not so much pollution. ⁓ So it's a pleasant experience, you know, if you're living in a sort of inner city area, ⁓ you know, it might not be so conducive. to doing that. So maybe running isn't the thing you'd want to do. Perhaps you'd want to do basketball or you want to do boxing or you want to do something else, maybe swimming indoors or if there is a swimming pool near you. So the thing is, and this is what I think is really missing, is we don't think about sport as a tool, a societal tool that you can use for different things. So you can engage different people with different products. we just see it as an entertainment thing, not as actually a sort of a tool we can use to actually break down and improve society. I met a guy this week who readily admitted he was on the edge of joining a gang in the Midlands and sport came along for him and kind of saved him and he's now running some fascinating

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: and programs about coaching people to coach other people ⁓ and get into communities and disadvantaged people and things like that because he's seen the power of sport for himself. ⁓ So he wants to kind of use that as a tool. So I think we kind of need to come away from it's marathon running or it's football or it's... It's a set of tools that we can use.

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: as society to say, okay, maybe you're not ⁓ gonna be a great marathon runner. Maybe you're not gonna be a great footballer, but maybe there are other things you're gonna be good at, and how do we engage you into finding those things? ⁓ We talked ⁓ about somebody I know whose son wasn't a good footballer, wasn't a good rugby player, wasn't a good cricketer, wasn't a really good sports person. but suddenly discovered cycling and suddenly discovered they were a good cyclist and won an event. we all have something where we've got an interest and an opportunity. And what I think is the education system at the moment that we have doesn't allow us to explore things enough. So we need to kind of think about how do we do that at a young age because at a young age...

Kamal Datta: Right. Right.

Mike Laflin: you'll pick these things and then like me it becomes a habit. My wife often says to me when it's pouring of rain why are you going for a run? For a run I go, because I go for a run. I don't even think about it. I'm sure you're probably the same. You just go for a run. You don't really think about it because it's so unbuilt.

Kamal Datta: Right? Right. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's become a lifestyle now. Like it's your daily routine. I have sleep routine, morning routine. It is a routine for you pretty much. Otherwise it's missing. It's become part of you. Yeah.

Mike Laflin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It becomes what they call a habit, you know, and I think the key is how do you instill good habits in people.

Kamal Datta: Yeah, yeah. Now let's move to the third pillar, which is the people. ⁓ think in the light of the marathon or the mass participation event, ⁓ I think it means that looking at accessibility ⁓ or is the start line as diverse as the city that people are running through? How are you using the race to reduce local inequality, if you do think that?

Mike Laflin: Exactly.

Kamal Datta: that kind of the problem is solving.

Mike Laflin: Yeah, and I think that's the point, it? You know, if you take a marathon, particularly someone like London, it's going through so many different parts of the city. And how does it engage with communities in that city? you've got 60,000 runners running through these boroughs. What if a kid sitting on the corner goes, ⁓

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: that looks really interesting, know, Dan, I'd love to do that. What happens to the he or she? So I think it's how you engage in that broader community aspect that creates a ripple effect from what you're doing. And that could be volunteering, getting people to come on board who perhaps would never experience something like that before. ⁓ to community programs, community projects ⁓ and outreach programs. So we hear a lot about that when you're in the events industry, outreach programs and things like that, school programs, educational programs, creating a more diverse, equal environment, particularly women in sport, as well as different ethnic minorities. ⁓ So how do you as an organisation value that? And that for me is the critical element that's really missing is that broader piece. For instance, I did an impact study on an event in Holland and it said, we engaged 20,000 kids. And that was it. That was the only piece of information they had. They engaged 20,000 kids. What does that mean?

Kamal Datta: Right. Okay.

Mike Laflin: You know, so I think one needs more, more tangible value than just simply re-engage 20,000 kids. So that's just a sticker. ⁓ It doesn't really have any meaning.

Kamal Datta: Right, right. That is true, that is true. Moving to the next one, the planet. ⁓ I think it's a very ⁓ important one. think all the seven pillars I think you outlined are very important. But for planet part, ⁓ this is kind one of the most visible pillars, right? If you look at a mass participation event. Mike, you often talk about clean air. How can races become advocates for the air quality the runners running through or breathing?

Mike Laflin: Yep. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, obviously, if you're doing marathons, you're typically doing it in a city quite often. And, and obviously, depending on the quality of air in that city, you're running in the middle of Beijing or something like that, ⁓ you know, the quality of air may not be that great. ⁓ And, you know, we've been working with a company called AirAware, ⁓ where they're trying to

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Laflin: provide an app that you can actually kind of predict quality of air in certain areas so you can perhaps improve your training program by not training in areas that are heavily polluted. ⁓ But I think this is ⁓ a critical factor for races. Are you putting your race through the best areas you can within the city and how much thinking goes into that? What I think is really interesting about that whole piece of research, and I'm sure any runner wants to run a bit faster. So if your body is impacted by the quality of the air you're breathing, you're not going to be running as effectively as if you were running in a better quality air environment. If you're running in the mountains and you've got lots of oxygen, you know that that's not the same if you're running in the middle of a...

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: of a city with lots of cars around. So I think these are important aspects that not only affect people's performance, but we've not really, I don't think, and I think it's now becoming a little bit more apparent thought about sports impact on the environment and then what's the impact of climate on us, you know.

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: I was talking to an Australian race walker. He actually fainted in a race in Hungary, in Budapest during a world championship because of the heat. And he said he'd never experienced that before. And he said one of the reasons he's become involved in climate action is because he's seeing it firsthand, the races that he's attending. and places that he's going, ⁓ know, soon to be getting hotter and hotter, which obviously has a huge impact on performance. We see a lot of races being because of extreme weather conditions. So I think there, I think if you're a sports person, I have to say this year, I've never got so wet running during a winter. ⁓

Kamal Datta: Yeah, yeah.

Mike Laflin: absolutely got so soaked this winter. It's just been extraordinary and that's very unusual. It's not been that common in the last few years that I've had to run in the rain. But if you're going for a run on a Sunday, you tend to just go at the same sort of time. So I think a lot of sports people are really seeing this first hand, which is why I think

Kamal Datta: ⁓ wow. Right.

Mike Laflin: we have a story to tell about what we're experiencing ⁓ and therefore it's incumbent upon us to try and think about how can we, ⁓ what can we do to improve things. So ⁓ the sports industry is waking up to this ⁓ but obviously there are, there's a lot of governments and people like that who are going against that kind of thinking. But I think we're seeing it firsthand. So, you know, think that's why it's an important pillar and what's interesting about it is and funny enough its work I didn't design it this way, but Planet kind of sits in the middle of the whole thing So, you know whereas all I see I see in the industry planet is kind of pushed out to the side So in a way, I kind of see my seven pillars as as a

Kamal Datta: Yeah. Right? Number four. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Mike Laflin: there's a triangle and at the top of the triangle is the planet piece. Because as a lot of people say to me, we haven't got a planet to play on then, we haven't got any sport.

Kamal Datta: I see. ⁓ You know, this is an important question and I think I plan to do a full episode on this, Mike. It's not what you can do for the climate, but how the mass participation event should think about the impact of the climate on the event itself. I think that's that you are flipping the question here. Because I think there is a proposal and I don't if you probably have seen those proposals flying around. Do you really think the timing when you organize these races like they're asking move it a month before or after if it's a spring race earlier or if it's a fall race move it towards more to the end of the fall season? Because it's the impact that people are seeing but I wonder what are you seeing? Yeah.

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you've got things like... You've got things like the FIFA World Cup, which you had the Club World Cup in America last summer, and you can see heat exhaustion, extreme heat exhaustion for some of the players. So we have seen events where they're being put later and later to deal with the fact of extreme heat. So... But I think it's just one part of the equation. think that ⁓ we have such a huge natural problem in our world at the moment. I think biodiversity, think plastic pollution is just a huge issue. So I think there are so many areas where... You see your classic marathon and there's just plastic strewn all over the place. So I think there are so many messages. I was at Wimbledon, for instance, a couple of years ago and sitting in a sustainability workshop where, if you walk around Wimbledon, there was just plastic bottles everywhere because Ebbion is the sponsor of that and the guy running the workshop said,

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Hahaha

Mike Laflin: let's get the elephant in the room our plastic bottles. And as I wandered around Wimbledon, I was seeing plastic everywhere. Two years later, there were no plastic bottles in sight. So I think we have potential to do things ourselves, but it's important that we're kind of putting those messages out to the people who are running races or attending events.

Kamal Datta: Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Laflin: You know, we really need to think about pollution, waste, environmental impacts, and certainly biodiversity is for me a big issue. So it's how sport can use its powers and its strengths to communicate those messages, I think, and that's where athletes come in. And I think athletes are seeing climate more and more, and so we're seeing

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: more and more athletes getting involved, getting messages out there, which is the power that sport can have. So that's a critical part of this.

Kamal Datta: Yeah. Cool. Let's move to the pillar five, which is the power. ⁓ I think you talk lot about the transparency part, whoever is running the show. ⁓ Should a major race be required to disclose climate risk in their financial report? Especially if you look at this fifth pillar as a governance.

Mike Laflin: And yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's a really interesting point actually because there is something called the United Nations Sport for Climate Action, ⁓ which ⁓ a number of, and I'll just move away from the race bit for a second, but I'll come back to that. ⁓ And there are eight Premier League clubs who have signed up to the UN Sport for Climate Action. ⁓ But we did an analysis of

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: their annual reports and only three of them put climate as a risk. And I thought that was really interesting that whilst, you know, on the ground, there's a number of people working in the clubs that see climate as a risk and have signed up to reduce carbon emissions by 2030 or 2040. And yet, at the governance senior level, board level, they're not including that as something they're putting into that financial account. So I think there's a disconnect there. And I think this is a sort of critical piece about what I'm certainly doing. And I think this applies to pretty much everybody. Sustainability and purpose needs to sit right in the core of your business. It needs to be at board level. It needs to be at CEO level. ⁓ And what we're seeing far too often is, there's somebody in the organization who's, you know, the sustainability person rather than actually, it's something that every department should be doing. And that's also deliberately why we have the seven pillars because it connects with different departments within the business. So it's, it's something that's really fundamentally there. So when we talk about

Kamal Datta: I see.

Mike Laflin: power and governance, are saying, you know, sustainability isn't, and I think this is the thing, a lot of people see sustainability as an environmental thing, it's become quite synonymous. It's not, it's something, you know, if you kind of look at the SDGs, the SDGs are 17 different segments. sustainability is something that actually is right core and center in your business.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. Right.

Mike Laflin: And if you haven't got that embedded into your business and your governance and the way your business is run, then you're not looking at the opportunity that this affords you. And I do think this is a ⁓ fundamental thing that every event, every organization should be thinking about. And I don't see that in the marathon world. I don't see... that approach taken. So that is all about how transparent, how effective you are. For instance, do you have good code of conducts in place? Do you have safeguarding in place? We've seen so many times in the sports industry where abuse by coaches of

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: young athletes, particularly women ⁓ and girls, know, just simply because the safeguarding policies, the whistleblowing programs are just not there. You know, so, so I think good governance is fundamental for a business to understand what it should be doing and showing that it is doing it.

Kamal Datta: I see. Great. Thank you for sharing that. think that you highlight a couple of the important areas for sure that are gaps. Moving on to the sixth one, the profile, or I think you call it how individuals can use their voice, especially, know, media has been doing it to influence behavior. But if you take in the context of mass participation events. How can we use the 50,000 or 60,000 micro-influencers on the race day to drive a global sustainability message?

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think this is the key fundamental thing is, you know, communicating these messages is not just about the event itself doing it. It's about everybody that engages with the event. And, you know, we talk about the 60,000 participants, but what about, you know, probably a million, maybe 2 million people around the side of the race? So how does that messaging work? How do we engage not only participants but the fans? How is it presented on broadcast? Are you talking about things when you're broadcasting the event? Are you getting your stakeholders, your suppliers thinking about all these things? So the ripple effect from sport is enormous.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: absolutely enormous. And whilst I talk about half the world's population, suspect there's probably pretty much everybody in the world you can reach through some sort of sports events. So I think we don't do that very well. ⁓ In fact, it's really interesting the assessments we're doing at the moment, how poorly so many sports are scoring ⁓ in that space. ⁓

Kamal Datta: Yeah? Yeah?

Mike Laflin: Some people are afraid, I think, to put the messaging out there. And I think certainly we've seen that. And then some people are also putting messages out there where they're really not doing it. And that brings up the whole sort of greenwashing concept. And now we've got greenhushing, we've got greenwashing. I even heard green shouting the other day, which I'm still trying to work out what that is, but.

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm. I see.

Mike Laflin: You know, the answer is that I think, you know, as an industry, we have this unique asset, which is the ability to communicate what we do as a sector and as an industry. And that's probably our biggest value. It's great that if we become more sustainable, but it's more important that we actually encourage our fans and our athletes to become more sustainable.

Kamal Datta: Right. Listen, what is green hashing? I'm curious.

Mike Laflin: Green hushing is that you're actually doing something but you don't talk about it. And I think that has become quite prevalent in America. I'm sure you probably understand why. So yeah, so green hushing is essentially you not promoting the fact that you're doing it because of the consequences of doing that. And I suspect that's increased enormously in the last couple of years.

Kamal Datta: ⁓ this is the, okay. Okay. I see, I see. Let's move on to the last one, the prosperity. A marathon is a massive economic engine for a city. And how do you ensure that prosperity doesn't mean just a one-day spike in, say, hotel bookings or overall economic activity that it drives, but a long-term sustainable growth?

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Kamal Datta: for the host community.

Mike Laflin: Yeah, and I think that's absolutely critical is, ⁓ you know, are you doing something ⁓ where you're investing in what you're doing, you're innovating, ⁓ you're thinking about, you know, new opportunities. And this is one of the, I kind of think this is one of the problems I feel with the industry is that ⁓ it gets bogged down into its cycle and it doesn't necessarily step back and kind of take a look at itself. I think one of the advantages I've had in my working life is I've always been kind of not in the businesses, I've been kind of a consultant or outside the businesses, so I've always been able to kind of look from the outside and say, you know, this is what I think you should be thinking about. Whereas... if you've ever kind of worked closely with a major sports event, but you know, I certainly see this so many, you kind of become so insular and so kind of focused on your space that you're actually thinking about, or, you know, what are the opportunities, what are the things? And so, you know, in the sports industry, you become so focused on media rights, sponsorship deals. event delivery, but you don't have that kind of war. How do I make this into a long-term project? Thinking about innovation, thinking about technology, thinking about new revenue streams. And I think that's very, very prevalent in the mass participation space. We obviously saw a number of events ⁓ go. ⁓

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: after Covid, because obviously Covid had a huge impact on mass participation and obviously it has recovered now and we are seeing that, but you I used to do a duathlon in Richmond Park every year and that was a casualty of Covid because the company hadn't kind of prepared itself for ⁓ things like that. you know sitting at the root of all of this you've got to have a

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: a financially prosperous and sustainable business in order to be able to do all these other things. So if you haven't got that right, you know, the rest of it is kind of slightly irrelevant. the principle is, and you know, this is one of the kind of things, it's a balancing act. And I think the problem is that certain companies have become so obsessed by revenue, they've forgotten the rest of it. So.

Kamal Datta: Right. Right. Night. Night.

Mike Laflin: So we need to kind of get this balance between profit and profile and people and planet. We need to balance the equation.

Kamal Datta: Cool, thank you for sharing. ⁓ So Mike, we are the, I call it Mile 26. So ⁓ I have quite a few or five rapid fire questions. So I call it the rapid fire round. So I'll start with the first one. What is the biggest greenwashing trap marathon organizers fall into?

Mike Laflin: ⁓ So I think the idea of ⁓ attempting to say that you're doing something when actually you're probably not really doing that aspect. it could be ⁓ something like you're reducing your plastic pollution and in fact you're creating something far worse. ⁓

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: This is the of the area that I think a lot of businesses fall into is that there's this knee-jerk reaction. We've got to be seen to do something. And so you put out a piece of information. I'll give you an example of Qatar. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a sort of an obvious one ⁓ in marathons at the moment. But if you look at FIFA and the Qatar World Cup, or you... you look at FIS, which is the International Skiing Federation, they've put out these announcements that they are carbon neutral or even in the case of FIS, carbon positive, which is kind of new expression, is you're not only being neutral, you're not doing this. And obviously, ⁓ some events will go, ⁓ we're offsetting through...

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: through carbon offsets. ⁓ And, know, I'm ⁓ not a particularly big fan of carbon offsets. I kind of understand the thinking behind it, but you if you've got a race in central London and you're saying, we planted a few trees in Peru, ⁓ you know, how's that really reduce your carbon impact? ⁓ You know, ⁓ so that was the funny thing about Fees is that they were saying they were carbon positive by...

Kamal Datta: Yeah. Right. Right.

Mike Laflin: not cutting a forest down in Peru, which just amazed me. How does that possibly work? So I think it has to be very much about, you authentic? ⁓ Is what you're doing genuinely making a difference? Or are you just literally ticking a box? We've got a head of sustainability. We've reduced our carbon emissions, blah, blah, blah.

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: are. Whereas in fact all you've done is you've done an offset program. You've hired somebody and you've ticked a few boxes. yeah that's the problem we're seeing quite a bit.

Kamal Datta: Yeah, yeah. Next one. If an event organizer could only track one data point starting tomorrow, what would it be?

Mike Laflin: Well if it was possible I'd say what's your social impact of the event because for a marathon runner I think it's the social impact figure that will generate you more commercial opportunity than anything else.

Kamal Datta: Right, and I think we talked quite a bit about social impact and aspects of it that you'd consider in our conversation too. So, great one, thank you.

Mike Laflin: Yeah, yeah. So it's probably not one, it's not one thing, but it's certainly one aspect that you should definitely be looking at.

Kamal Datta: Yeah, can be a framework, but can be multiple metrics towards that, under that framework that we need to measure to assess the social impact. Next one. Will we see a net zero world major marathon by 2030, or is that a pipe dream?

Mike Laflin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sadly, I think it's a pipe dream to be honest, you know, because ⁓ the elephant in the room is always travel ⁓ and not only travel, but equipment. ⁓ And, you know, it's an interesting thing that I think the two biggest challenges we have as an industry ⁓ is particularly if you're...

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: you know, say the London Marathon, how many people are flying in from around the world to run in the race and how many people are flying in to watch the race. So you've always got transport and travel issues. ⁓ If you're measuring your impact properly, that's going to be one of your major aspects of impact. We are not going to have green travel.

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: by 2030 for everybody. It's impossible. can't see how flying is going to change that dramatically in that short period of time. And the take up of electric vehicles, if indeed electric vehicles is the answer, that's not gonna be there by 2030 either. So clean energy,

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: and all of those aspects why I think we've got a massive problem to get to net zero by 2030 added to the fact that the unseen aspect is obviously kit and equipment. We were talking a lot about that this week, the whole circular economy of clothing and you know.

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: what we've got in the industry is a lack of recycling and circular reuse. So I don't know how that works with trainers, but I probably get through at least a pair, if not two pairs of trainers a year. What happens to those? How do we recycle those and equipment and clothing? So I think that's a massive challenge. I haven't seen any sports organisation who's really certain that they're going to hit their targets by 2030 or even by 2040 to be honest. So I think that's a really, really big challenge.

Kamal Datta: Right. think it's a pipe dream. All right. ⁓ The next one and I can give you little con yeah yeah the next one I think I'll give you a context I think I was talking to Kate Chapman I think you mentioned earlier that you know her as well for London Marathon on my pod ⁓

Mike Laflin: I think it's a very difficult one to... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kamal Datta: I think ⁓ London Marathon is one of the event organizations who charge a carbon levy on runners, especially if you're participating internationally or into London Marathon. And I know I'm participating, so I've seen that. So the question for you is, should participants pay sustainability fee on top of their entry, or it should be the responsibility of the brand?

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting one, isn't it? And I think I quite like the fact she's doing it because I think the idea of this whole thing is to make people more aware of these things. So by doing it, if the brand was paying for it, you might be aware of it, you might not be aware of it, but because it's putting you in front of it.

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: It's actually sort of, to me, as I said to you before, I think the power we've got as an industry is how it communicates to the participants and the broader public. So I think ideally you've got the brand contributing, but you've also got each individual. So it's more about an education piece. What I noticed in Oslo and the Bishlet games, for instance, is your

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: Ticket and nowadays maybe everything's electronic so you don't get a physical ticket but they ⁓ They give you a physical ticket when you go to the event and it tells you that they've actually paid for your offset through These programs and what they've done with the money ⁓ So they've embedded it in the ticket price ⁓ And then explain to you why they've done that what they've done with it so

Kamal Datta: I see.

Mike Laflin: So think it is part of an education piece and so I applaud Kate for doing it because I think it's all part of that education. Except that the prices are going up for these events. The cost of marathon running is getting more more expensive.

Kamal Datta: Hahaha That is true. That is true. All right, the last one. ⁓ Mike. What is the one sports event in the world currently setting the gold standard for the seven pillars that we have seen?

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we see this is this is where the data we're publishing at the moment ⁓ will come out. we are, as I say, producing ⁓ analysis of over 5000 sports organizations around the world at the moment. And there's only one organization that's actually obtained a sort of a B certification with us at the moment. ⁓ And that's UEFA. ⁓ But I think what's really interesting is to see what organizations are kind of in a similar area to them. ⁓ And the International Biathlon Union that I mentioned earlier ⁓ is in there. So they're in the sort of top 10. We've got a few football clubs up there, Arsenal ⁓ and Liverpool. ⁓ We've also got one or two national federations.

Kamal Datta: Yeah. ⁓ cool.

Mike Laflin: So, Triathlon, British Triathlon and the Lawn Tennis Association are right up there. French Football Federation. So, there's some quite strong organisations and I think as our data comes out, you'll start to see kind of who the purposeful organisations are. And I think that's a really important thing for us is trying to communicate that. Kate isn't quite up at the top yet, but there's certainly the leading marathon at the moment. you know, which is, which is really interesting to see. And I think this is all about us assessing what data you're publishing in and putting in the public domain. So we, as I say, we've kind of developed this AI technology where We go and look at your website. We gather the content from your pages and from your documents, and then we pass it to an AI, and we let the AI kind of do an assessment of it, ⁓ which enables us to do this kind of volume of data. And it's really fascinating what's coming back from it. So yeah, I'm looking forward to be able to kind of present that, but I say it's probably about a month or so away from doing that at the moment.

Kamal Datta: Yeah.

Mike Laflin: initial indications are that people have got a long way to go but there are people who are really pushing the industry out there so yeah so it's encouraging to see but obviously you know I must have nearly a third of the organizations who aren't registering a score at all so that tells you there's a long way to go.

Kamal Datta: ⁓ wow. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Mike, for the pros or maybe the event organizers who are listening to this conversation, ⁓ you do offer a pillar impact assessment. Tell us where people can find about that.

Mike Laflin: Yeah. Yes, so we, as I say, we're kind of just coming to the final stages of this program. And whilst we talk a little bit about it on the website, which is globalsustainablesport.com, you can't actually register for that program just yet. ⁓ But ⁓ in about a month's time, you will be able to do that. And the idea is that we will offer different levels of assessment. So the simplest is that we simply look at your website and we analyze what's there and we give you a sort of rating and sort of a summary report of what you've done. Or you can go into really much more in-depth piece of work. Basically we produce a kind of 500 page assessment of what you look like, which is...

Kamal Datta: Mm-hmm.

Mike Laflin: much more detailed. You spend some time with one of our consultants talking about what your priority areas could be ⁓ and then you kind of go on a programme. So the idea is that we want to get people to come in and do annual assessments ⁓ and what we're hoping Kamal is that by 2030

Kamal Datta: I see.

Mike Laflin: you know, we can see a significant increase in the number of organizations thinking and acting more sustainably in the sports industry, but also then being able to demonstrate the impact that these organizations are having in society. And that's our big goal, if you like, is to have a one day turnaround to you come on and say, this is the value that sport creates. And that will be, you know,

Kamal Datta: Right.

Mike Laflin: quite something when we get to that point.

Kamal Datta: No, I'm hoping you will get there sooner or may not be 2030 or earlier. But Mike, thank you very much for joining me on this pod, on this conversation, and especially actually showing why impact data is important than the commercial data along with that, and then bridging the gap between the marketing and impact. So thank you so much.

Mike Laflin: Sorry. the camera. Yeah, yeah. And it would be great to, ⁓ you know, if you're over in London for the marathon, meet up for a cup of tea or a coffee or even a beer. So, yeah, let me know when you're over and hopefully we'll sort some more.

Kamal Datta: Yeah, I'd love to. ⁓ Yeah, I'm there for a week, so let's see. I'll pause the recording mic now.

Mike Laflin: Yeah, that would be great. That would be great. Very good. Thanks very much, Kamal. Nice to see you.

Kamal Datta: ⁓ Mike, no, yeah, Mike, I'll hold on for a second till it up.