Some of the press around the European Super League has been handled by former BBC sports journalist Richard Conway, who runs sports PR firm Paloma Global.
Conway, who has been linked to the 2022 Qatar World Cup, told openDemocracy that he had been hired in March “to advise the Super League”.
“Katie (Perrior) was running the press office operations on this. I have an advisory role. I don’t work for iNHouse, I don’t work for Katie. I had a separate role, advising them on media relations,” Conway told openDemocracy.
Professor Simon Chadwick, director of Eurasian Sport at France’s Emlyon Business School, said the ESL was a “tactical, not a strategic” move designed to show the power of European’s biggest clubs.
“There has been an awful lot of smoke and mirrors,” he said. “Given that we were on the cusp of UEFA’s new settlement, what the Super League clubs were doing was saying ‘look, we are still powerful, we can still threaten you’.”
Chadwick added that while the Super League might have been a “diversionary tactic”, it soon “spiraled out of control” as fans – and politicians – across Europe lined up against it.
As well as press operation for the proposed football Super League, Perrior’s PR and lobbying company, iNHouse, has also worked for Gupta’s business. It registered GFG Alliance as a lobbying client in late 2018, meaning iNHouse approached a minister or permanent secretary on its behalf.
Gupta’s firm is not listed as a client on iNHouse’s website today, but a cached version from last week does list GFG Alliance under ‘Our Clients’.
Perrior told openDemocracy that iNHouse resigned the Gupta account in 2018: “I was briefly an adviser to GFG Alliance for a few months in a personal capacity in 2017 but realised they needed a bigger media team so folded that work into iNHouse.
“The work involved media relations for the UK business including the opening of the Rotherham plant, which employed 650 staff. Our work lasted for a year and we resigned the account in 2018 as we decided the client was a poor fit for our business.”
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Tamasin Cave Peter Geoghegan | Radio Free (2021-04-21T16:22:20+00:00) European Super League hired former Tory spinner as PR just hours before launch. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/04/21/european-super-league-hired-former-tory-spinner-as-pr-just-hours-before-launch/
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