Case studies
TRUSTED ADVISER ON OVER $300 BN OF MEDIA & SPORTS TRANSACTIONS
We have advised on more than US$300 billion of media and sports transactions, commercial and market due diligence for private equity and infrastructure funds, vendor due diligence for sellers, strategic reviews for trade buyers, and market opinions for lenders and boards.
Our clients include leading global private equity firms and funds, as well as broadcasters, platforms, producers and rights holders on the other side of the table. Working for both buyers and sellers, and for the regulators who set the rules, means we know where value is claimed and where it is real.
We are not deal generalists with a media page in the pack. Media, entertainment and sport are all we have done since 1995. When a management case rests on subscriber churn, rights inflation, terms of trade, content amortisation or the durability of a sponsorship market, we can tell you from the evidence whether it holds.
DEALS IN OVER 50 TERRITORIES AROUND THE WORLD
We have worked on transactions and strategy in over 50 territories, across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa.
That matters because the assumptions that make an asset attractive rarely travel. Pay-TV penetration, free-to-air obligations, listed events rules, production tax incentives, sports governance structures, distribution economics and consumer willingness to pay differ sharply between markets that look superficially similar. A model built on UK or US norms will mis-price an asset in Germany, Australia, India or Brazil – usually in the same optimistic direction.
We maintain market-level data and local networks so that our advice reflects how a territory actually works, including the regulatory and political conditions that will shape the asset over a typical hold period rather than just the next 12 months.
DEEP INDUSTRY EXPERTISE, ROBUST ANALYSIS, 30 YEARS OF PROPRIETARY DATA
O&O was founded in 1995. Since then we have built proprietary datasets covering sports rights values, media rights cycles, production spend and content investment, subscriber and advertising economics, and audience and fan behaviour.
Thirty years of consistent data lets us do something most advisers cannot: put a number in context. We can say whether a rights uplift is exceptional or simply the market, whether a margin is sustainable through a cycle, and how comparable businesses have performed after similar structural shifts.
Our analysis is built to be tested, it has been used in board papers, investment committees, regulatory submissions and parliamentary evidence, and it is published under our own name. That discipline is why clients bring us their most contested questions.
GLOBAL COMPETITION CLEARANCE
Competition clearance is where a lot of media and sports deals slow down or fall over. We have prepared successful submissions to competition authorities across multiple jurisdictions around the world, working alongside legal teams on market definition, competitive effects, counterfactuals and remedies.
Our advantage is sector knowledge. Authorities do not have the specialist industry economics of sports rights, collective selling, territorial exclusivity, content supply and platform distribution readily to hand, and a submission that explains how these markets genuinely work – rather than asserting it – is the one that lands. We also regularly work for regulators, which tells us what evidence is persuasive from the other side of the desk.
We aim to give clients an honest early read on clearance risk and timetable, so that deal structure and regulatory strategy are decided together rather than in sequence.
WE UNDERSTAND ALL STAKEHOLDERS
Audience, fan, subscriber, platform, consumer, regulator, owner, brand, player, participant. Value in media and sport is only realised when these groups line up, and the plans that fail are usually the ones that optimise for one of them.
We have worked for most of them, which means we can tell a client how a proposal will actually be received. A rights structure that maximises the cheque can shrink reach and damage the sponsorship market. A pricing move that lifts revenue per subscriber can accelerate churn. A format change that suits broadcasters can be unworkable for players and unpopular with fans. A strategy that ignores the regulator can be undone by it.
Testing a plan against every stakeholder in the system is not a diligence formality. It is the difference between a business case and a business.