When we introduce Batman, we tell you a scared kid lost his parents and swore he'd protect his city. When we introduce an athlete, we tell you their ranking. One of those makes you care. Guess which.

Think about how you meet Batman. Before he ever puts on the suit or throws a punch, you already know what drives him. You know why he does it, and what he stands for. You're on his side before he's done anything at all.

Now think about how a property introduces an athlete in a pitch. World number four. Two finals last season. A million followers, most of them 18 to 34.

Same kind of person. Completely different treatment. One we turn into someone you'd follow anywhere. The other we flatten into a stat line.

And I know what some of you are thinking. Batman's made up, of course his story is good. Fair. So take a real person. Nobody introduces Steve Irwin with a number. You know the man. The mad, genuine love for animals, the energy, the way he made you care about a crocodile. That's what you remember, because that's who he was. And here's the proof it was real, his son carries the exact same spirit now, and you spotted it instantly. You can't pass down a stat. You pass down who someone is.

Now go and read how an athlete gets introduced in a partnership deck. Ranking, reach, followers, age split. That kind of human story was sitting right there, and we led with the stat line instead.

And here's the thing. It's not that those numbers are wrong. It's that we reach for them first, and then we never get past them. We introduce the people our whole business runs on the way you'd list items on a receipt.

The room full of "we"

Most properties do the same thing to themselves. Sit through a pitch and it's slide after slide of we. We're the biggest. We're the fastest growing. We're premium. We're the future. Slide after slide, and not one word about the fans in the stands or the athletes who are the only reason anyone is watching in the first place.

We make ourselves the hero of the story. And it feels natural, because we're the ones in the room trying to close the deal. But it's the wrong way round.

The fans, the athletes, and the brand's own customers are the entire reason any of this exists. No fans, no rights worth selling. No athletes, no sport. No customers, no partner sitting across the table. They are the whole business. They're the heroes of this. And they're the first group we drop the moment we start selling.

Why we do it

Here's the real reason it happens. You make yourself the hero when you don't know your fans well enough to make it about them.

If you actually knew who they were, what they believe, what they're chasing, who they're quietly trying to become in front of everyone, you'd lead with them every time. It would be the obvious move. You reach for your own greatness instead because, when you don't really know the people, your own stats are all you've got to talk about.

Now, a lot of people reading this are already pushing back. "We do know our audience. We've got the data." And this is the bit I want to be really clear about, because it comes up every single time.

This isn't me saying data is bad. It isn't. It's useful and you'll need it. But knowing that your fan is 24 and lives in a city and spends a certain amount is not the same as knowing them. That's the shape of a crowd. It tells you nothing about what they care about or why they show up. Data describes people. It doesn't introduce you to them. And it definitely can't do it first.

That's the whole trap. We swap knowing the person for describing the crowd, and we don't notice we've done it, because the data feels like enough.

What the job actually is

So if we're not the hero, what are we?

We're the platform. The team, the league, the property, our job is to give the fans and the athletes a way to express who they are and show the world what they stand for. Not to stand in the middle of the story waving. To hand them the stage and let them shine.

I'll leave it there for now, because there's a proper way to do this and I don't want to cram it into one post. But that's the shift. Stop casting yourself as the hero. Start being the platform that puts them at the centre.

None of this means the numbers don't matter. They do. They just can't do the one thing that makes someone care, and caring is the entire job.

And I want to be fair about how the job really works. Targets are real. Volume is real. Not every deal can be a deep one, and I'm not pretending it can. But maybe a third of them don't have to be so rushed. Some of them could start with a person instead of a stat, and be all the better for it.

Because here's what happens when nobody makes it about the people. Every pitch starts to look exactly the same.

That's the next one.