Rory Smith recently wrote a think piece in the New York Times titled What is Ronaldo at 40? The article posed some good questions about the nature of sporting celebrity in 2025 and beyond.

So we asked Rory on to the podcast to discuss, with two expert guests from the sports industry, Louise Johnson and Andy Meikle.

Rory Smith joined The Athletic from the New York Times, where he spent eight years as Chief Soccer Correspondent and then Global Sports Correspondent. He has previously worked for The Times of London, The Independent, the Daily Telegraph and ESPN. He is a regular contributor to BBC 5 Live. He is the author of two books on soccer: Mister and Expected Goals.

Louise Johnson is Global CEO of Fuse, Omnicom’s sport and entertainment agency whose clients include many of the biggest organisations in sport including PepsiCo, Google and Vodafone. Louise was chair of judges for the sport category at the Cannes Lions Festival and was named as one of the FT’s women of the year.

Andy Meikle is the founder and CEO of Recast, a fintech company that enables media owners to monetise digital content from £0.01, with payments via RecastPay, a wallet that distributes earnings in real time to multiple parties including affiliates, such as athletes. He was formerly one of the founders of Sportlobster, digital platform which had Cristiano Ronaldo as the company’s brand ambassador

Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartner

We publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday.

These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport.

Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here.

Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app.

If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.