How One Firm is Engineering a Sports Revolution

In sports, success is easy to quantify on the field — fans and analysts alike rely on everything from points per game to advanced metrics like effective field goal percentage to evaluate performance. But off the field, progress is often less obvious.

Sometimes, it’s as subtle as improving a marketing campaign by just 2%. That may sound minor, but over time, small gains can compound into a major impact.

In 2013, global sports IP revenue stood at $110 billion. Last year, it reached $170 billion. That growth reflects a massive opportunity for companies reimagining how sports organizations connect with fans through data.

One of those companies is Two Circles, led by Gareth Balch.

“We’re engineering sports to be more sophisticated with how they engage directly with fans,” Balch says. “And the compound value of that is 10s of billions of pounds.”

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Where fans meet revenue

The name Two Circles, fittingly, has a double meaning. It can be viewed as a reference to a Venn diagram in which one circle represents the audience and the other represents revenue. But in reality, Balch sees it as a tribute to his track and field career, where he ran the 800m, which consists of two laps around the track.

In simple terms, Two Circles is a sports marketing business that helps grow audiences and revenues for clients across the sports entertainment economy.

“We know fans best,” Balch says. “If you want to know about the consumption or the monetization of sports and entertainment consumers, we know more about that than anyone in the world.”

Two Circles has made it their business to understand how fans interact with the things they love. According to Balch, people spent over three trillion hours engaging with sports content last year, from attending games to watching highlights to reading articles.

Two Circles breaks this data down by market, sport, platform and type of fan and fan segment to understand who is consuming what, and how. They then take that intelligence and apply it to help their clients.

“Say you’re a travel company and you want to get closer to sports fans,” Balch says. “Or you’re the Dallas Cowboys, and you want to convert that fandom to sell more merch. Those are some of the things we can do.”

While Two Circles processes potentially more first-party transactional data than anyone in the industry, they don’t own any of it. It’s all collected on behalf of the customer.

“We’re essentially the living, breathing example of big data,” Balch says. “By analyzing large amounts of transactional data across the industry, we help identify the best next steps and uncover weak points in the business. We process first-party data to provide insights that lead to better fan experiences.”

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Sports as a direct-to-consumer model

Before launching Two Circles, Balch was working at City Football Group — the largest football ownership group in the world — when he started to notice a major shift in the sports industry.

“Sports have historically outsourced the fan and operated purely as a B2B business,” he says. “But it was evolving into a B2B2C model with direct-to-consumer characteristics.”

At the time, most revenue still came from media rights, sponsorships and brand deals. Even the fan-facing parts of the business — like ticketing or merchandise — were managed by third parties like Ticketmaster, which meant teams and leagues had no real visibility into who their fans were.

Balch saw an opportunity. He imagined a new kind of firm — part consultancy, part data company, part relationship builder — that could help sports organizations take ownership of their fan relationships and thrive in a more connected, data-driven world.

A bootstrapped beginning

The first lap of Two Circles’ journey started in 2011, when Balch and co took their bootstrapped business to its first client, the England and Wales Cricket Board, with whom they still work.

“They didn’t know who their fans were,” Balch says. “So we offered to help.” After securing that deal, Balch took the entrepreneurial leap and resigned from his job at City, which promptly became his second client.

Three years later, Two Circles was acquired by WPP, the world’s largest advertising services group, where the team learned how to professionalize and scale the business. In 2020, they took another leap, joining U.S.-based private equity firm Bruin and entering their next phase of growth.

They’ve since been sold to another PE firm, Charter House, and have acquired three different companies, Kore, Spring Media and Let it Fly Media, in the last three years.

“There are 24 entrepreneurs in Two Circles,” Balch says. “We’ve become a place that empowers entrepreneurs to join our ecosystem — working together as one team, one business, on one shared proposition — to build game-changing sports marketing ventures.”

Every fan has heard the conversation about how analytics have transformed the way sports are played. But according to Balch, they’ve had just as big an impact on how sports are sold.

“You’re at a distinct disadvantage if you’re a sports IP owner and you don’t understand the buying behavior of every fan who cares about you,” he says. “We’re living in a time when we can harness the processing power of billions of humans in seconds. We’ve built the models to do that more effectively than anyone else.”