Sport and business have celebrated a successful union this week at the Marca Business Forum, an event that launches the Unidad Editorial sports newspaper into a new phase that will also position it as an economic benchmark in the sports industry.
This is a new event sponsored by CaixaBank, in which great sports figures have participated, such as Iker Casillas, Marc Gasol, Jorge Garbajosa and Almudena Cid, as well as numerous experts from the sports industry, including Dmitry Kirilenko. , CEO of Sakhtar Donetsk, and Alexandre Dreyfus,
On the institutional side, the president of the Higher Sports Council (CSD), José Manuel Franco, stressed that “Spain is the only country in Europe that has included sport as a driving force in the recovery process.” “Now, more than ever, the international projection of sport and of our country shows, beyond our borders, the energy to recover the common spaces that the pandemic took from us all.”
The director has asserted that technology and digital transformation must be the axes of the transformation of sport. The CSD is working on “a model that is a benchmark in management, medicine and organization of sporting events as well as, of course, as athletes and competitions”, as assured by Franco at the event, where, on behalf of Unidad Editorialn was attended by the director of Marca, Juan Ignacio Gallardo; the general director and director of the Group, Nicola Speroni, and Sergio Cobos, general director of Advertising. In welcoming him, Gallardo stressed that “sport, a fundamental part of the leisure and entertainment industry, must be at the forefront of development” and MARCA must be a meeting point.
The event, held at El Beatriz Madrid, has addressed the hottest points of interest in the sports industry, such as the main trends in sportainment, fan loyalty, monetization or NFTs and Tokens, as well as the analysis of success stories in the field of environmental and social sustainability in five discussion groups.
Iker Casillas, partner in Sportboost; Jorge Garbajosa, president of the Spanish Basketball Federation; Almudena Cid, athlete and actress, and Jennifer Pareja, executive adviser to the Cabinet of the President of the Higher Sports Council, participated in the table From the sports elite to the business and managerial elite: opportunities after finishing the degree.
In his speech, Casillas confessed that “you don’t choose how to leave” and that one of the good things about retiring has been meeting again “with an Iker I didn’t know”. For his part, Garbajosa stressed that having an open curiosity helps to have “less vertigo” at the time of retirement. “Reinventing oneself is hard, but it is a brutal life experience,” he added. For Almudena Cid, the withdrawal “so young” was an “identity crisis”, although continuing to work on television has allowed her to do it in a way in which she feels “comfortable”. In the debate Jennifer Pareja has also shared that with the withdrawal “you bury your sports self”, although they all have “something different” and it is “wanting to be better every day”.
During the event, Dmitry Kirilenko, commercial director of Shakhtar Donetsk, explained that the Russian invasion has interrupted all football processes in Ukraine. “We separated from our five-star stadium in Donetsk in 2014 due to the conflict that the Russians started. Until 2017 we played in Lviv, then we moved to Kharkov and from there we went to kyiv”, although the war conflict has currently left the stadiums deserts.
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