As President of Tours, Experiences, and International at the World Surf League, Joe leads the organization’s events, athletes, and international business.

Joe joined the WSL from UFC, where he served as Senior Vice President, Head of International and Content, and was responsible for the company’s global strategy, operations, and content distribution, while managing more than 35 employees across six offices worldwide. Prior to the UFC, Joe began his career in private equity and real estate development.

Pancho joined FC Barcelona in 2015 as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). He is responsible for Financial Strategy, Corporate Governance and Strategic Relations (joint ventures).

Pancho transformed the finance function from a traditional domestic oriented football club into a comprehensive strategic support function and the largest Sports Institution in the world. Implementing foresting tools based on scenario management principles to anticipate Club’s resource requirements and ensure compliance with statuary financial stability rules. Leading the shift towards securing mid to long term financing resources to match the Club’s mid/long term goals.

In November 2018 ELEVEN SPORTS announced Anouk Mertens would become Chief Operating Officer (COO). Mertens has served as Managing Director of ELEVEN SPORTS in Belgium and Luxembourg since October 2015, turning the business profitable in under three years and achieving 100% household distribution across the market. In her role as Group COO, Mertens will amongst other things; manage budgets in all areas, review market performances and seek synergies and operational efficiencies across the group. Mertens will also continue in her role as Managing Director in Belgium and Luxembourg.

John is one of the founders of DAZN Group (formerly Perform Group), a digital leader in global sports media and one of the fastest growing media companies in the world.

Over the past 14 years, John has overseen all Commercial Partnerships and Rights Relationships that have fuelled its International expansion across the globe.

DAZN Group is home to DAZN, the world’s first pure-sport live and on-demand streaming service that is leading the charge to give fans a better and fairer way to watch. It’s now live in nine countries, including the U.S., Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain and Brazil.

John has over 25 years’ experience within the Sports, Entertainment and Music business having previously spent time at Sky Sports, EMI Records, Hutchison Whampoa and Sony Pictures.

Sean Bratches was named Managing Director of the Formula 1® Commercial Operations division in January 2017. With three decades of leadership, management and operating experience at multi-billion dollar scale in the media, entertainment, and sports business.  He spent 27 years at ESPN where for 10 years he served as Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Sean lead a sales and marketing team that provided national advertisers access to ESPN and its media, marketing and content platforms.  He was also responsible for the first unified sales organization that represents The Walt Disney Company’s premier collection of sports assets across all media platforms.

Sam Jones is the CEO of NFL Game Pass/OverTier, and is responsible for operating NFL Game Pass, the innovative subscription streaming service for the National Football League, across 61 European markets. Sam is a renowned executive who has built leading-edge, direct-to-consumer growth enterprises for world renowned tech, media and e-commerce companies including Bauer Media Group, Perform Group, Warner Music and Silicon Valley-based Kyte. Throughout his career, Jones has consistently delivered inspired innovation to connect millions to their passions via every screen, device, and platform; driving bottom-line revenue and user growth.

Olympic Gold Medalist and member of the Hockey Hall of Fame with leadership positions at the highest levels of sport, including the Executive Board of the International Olympic Committee, Angela guides the strategies of major sports organizations in her role as CEO and co-founder of the Sports Innovation Lab.

On Monday August 3, 2015, Canadian Keith Pelley became the fourth Chief Executive in the history of The European Tour. Prior to joining The European Tour, he was President of Rogers Media in Toronto where he was responsible for leading the overall operations of the company’s diverse portfolio, including Television, Radio, Publishing, Digital Media, The Shopping Channel, subscription-based content services, Toronto Blue Jays, and Rogers Centre. Before that, he was Executive Vice-President of Strategic Planning at CTVglobemedia, President of Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium – which won a record seven awards for its coverage of Vancouver 2010 – President and CEO of the Toronto Argonauts Football Club, and President of The Sports Network in Canada, a company he first joined as an Editorial Assistant in 1986. He is a graduate of Ryerson University with a BA in Radio and Television Arts, and also received an ATCL diploma from Trinity College in London.

Andreas Heyden has been CEO of a company that may not immediately stand out to you. Called DFL Digital Sport GmbH, it’s better known as the digital arm of the German Football League, the Bundesliga.

Now 2 years into his first role in sport, he’s been an integral part of the drive to develop an engaged community of fans of the league, and obviously its 36 teams who are all stakeholders in the business.  They’ve succeeded in bringing more production in-house as they look to control their destiny in an ever changing media landscape.

He’s passionate about taking down the silo’s we see in production, where you have separate TV, digital, partner and social teams. Stating that, “The more you break the structure up the more you can re-use and re-utilise content to create interesting, compelling and highly engaging content either for B2B or for B2C”.

Before he ended up in football, Andreas built up almost 20 years of experience with internet businesses. Starting out with I-D Media and Microsoft before spending 6 years at German broadcaster RTL. Rising up to become a leader of people at a young age.

Olympic Gold Medalist and member of the Hockey Hall of Fame with leadership positions at the highest levels of sport, including the Executive Board of the International Olympic Committee, Angela guides the strategies of major sports organizations in her role as CEO and co-founder of the Sports Innovation Lab.

Bruna has over eight years of experience across media, advertising and most recently sport. Prior to joining Twitter in 2015, Bruna worked at Ogilvy London & São Paulo, and Publicis Brazil. She now leads content partnerships efforts at Twitter UK with a range of different sports partners including football clubs & leagues, broadcasters and key motorsports leagues. Her goal is helping sports partners to get closer to their followers in the one social platform conversations happen in real-time – through Live content, video, Twitter emojis or other innovation formats.

Danna Rabin is a global business and technology executive, who most recently served as Chief Operating Officer at HEED (joint venture between AGT International and WME/IMG), AGT International (a pioneer in proprietary IoT, IoT Analytics, Deep Web Analysis, Machine Learning, Social Data Management, Big Data integration and advanced analytics), and the media-technology venture, Vocativ (www.vocativ.com – which utilizes proprietary technology to explore the deep web for original news, stories and video production).

George started his career at DDB Worldwide, New York where he gained valuable marketing and advertising experience.

During his fourteen years at the ATP, George has played a vital role in strategic planning for ATP’s Brave New World (the biggest strategic change process in the organisation’s history), the introduction of the new ATP branding in 2009, creation of the new categories of tournaments (Masters 1000, 500 and 250) and the relocation of the Nitto ATP Finals to London.

George is currently responsible for driving ATP’s business development and marketing, production of the weekly ATP World Tour Uncovered TV show, editorial management of ATP digital & social channels as well as marketing and show production at the Nitto ATP Finals, the world’s biggest indoor tennis tournament. Most recently George co-led the launch of inaugural Next Gen ATP Finals in Milan last November, a pioneering new event that trialled numerous innovations in the game as well as serving as a global platform to promote the future stars of the sport.

Jason is Chief Executive Officer of 23 Capital, leading the business strategy and playing a fundamental role in structuring transactions and setting 23’s culture and values.

23 is a capital and solutions company focused exclusively on the sports, music and entertainment sectors. Since inception in 2014, 23 has deployed and advised on over $2.7bn of transactions. As a specialty finance platform, 23 Capital participates in transactions across the capital structure and employs multiple financing strategies ranging from passive IP lending and project finance transactions, to highly structured corporate facilities. 23 has committed and partnership capital of over $2bn to invest across the SM&E sectors and has recently played a pivotal role in the creation and evolution of OTRO via its funding partnerships.

Prior to founding 23 with Stephen Duval, Jason previously worked within the structured credit team at Investec Bank for over 13 years, during which time he built and headed up the successful sports, media, entertainment offering at the bank. He has structured $1bn of transactions in this space.

Jonathan has 25 years-experience in blue chip and private equity organisations across banking, mobile, retail and sports. Holding senior positions at Telefonica O2 where he ran the consumer mobile P&L and also led the strategy and transformation of the business to Dixons Carphone Warehouse where he was Commercial Marketing Director, the largest mobile and electrical retailer in the UK. He is now Customer Director at Sportradar – a private equity backed company obsessed with understanding fan engagement and creating products & propositions based on customer insight.

Michael was appointed CTO for the PGA European Tour in Nov2017, with responsibility for Digital, Scoring, Infrastructure and Data Management including Official World Golf Rankings. Formerly, Michael was the London 2012 Marketing and Communications Director for BT Global Services, and responsible for activating BT Global Services’ highly successful London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games marketing campaign worldwide, as well as being responsible for operational and crisis communications across BT’s highly acclaimed London 2012 Delivery programme. Michael then went on to form TrueGold Communications, a sports marketing agency specialising in technology-based global sport sponsorship.

Bio coming soon…