Underwritten Weekly

I know nothing about football; and for once I promise this isn’t misdirection.

I mean this sincerely. I know it involves a ball. I know there are two teams. I know someone blows a whistle at some point and then everyone either celebrates or argues, sometimes simultaneously.

Beyond that, I am at sea.

I know so little about football that when I sat down to write this week’s Nonsense, I had to look up whether Peter Shilton was still playing.

He is not. He retired in 1997. He is 76.

I mention Peter Shilton specifically because at the World Cup in Mexico, he was the least insured player in the England squad.

£250,000. The lowest figure on the slip.

Peter Reid and Mark Hateley were covered for £2,000,000 each. Against terror attacks. Kidnap. Hijacking. Injury. Illness.

Which means that before the Mexican World Cup, the Lloyd’s market sat in the room, looked at the entire England squad, and decided that Peter Shilton – the goalkeeper, which I understand is an important position – was worth the least.

I don’t know if that tells us more about Peter Shilton or about underwriting.

Anyway. The World Cup started this week.

104 matches. 48 teams. 16 venues across the United States, Canada and Mexico. Billions of dollars in broadcast rights. Hundreds of millions in sponsorship. The GDP of a small nation in merchandise alone. Tens of thousands of people in a stadium, repeated, for a month.

That all sounds very tedious to me, but don’t worry. There’s an insurance angle to save the day, and make this event interesting after all.

None of it – not one match, not one player, not one corner flag – moves without it.

The stadiums are insured. The players are insured. The broadcast equipment is insured. The transportation logistics, the merchandise supply chains, the ticketing platforms, the sponsor hospitality structures. If someone builds it, ships it, broadcasts it, wears it or sells it, someone in our market priced it first.

But let me tell you about Diego.

In 1984, Diego Maradona played in a charity match organised to raise money for a child who needed an operation. The game was to be held in one of the poorest suburbs of Naples, on what eyewitnesses described as a potato field.

Napoli had just signed Maradona from Barcelona. They were understandably nervous about their new investment playing football on a potato field for free. And so there was a clause in his insurance contract. A release clause. If he wanted to play in an unsanctioned match, he had to pay it himself.

Before he walked out onto that potato field, he literally said:

“F*** Lloyd’s of London.”

You all dislike him because he cost us a World Cup. I dislike him because he insulted our market.

We don’t need to concern ourselves with who is right, dear reader, karma immediately got him. He swore about our market, and was forced to pay us anyway. Truly the beautiful game.

The entire apparatus of professional football – the transfers, the contracts, the tournaments, the charity matches on potato fields in Naples – runs on the market he was swearing at. You can love football, or hate insurance, and it doesn’t matter. The market is already there, underneath it all, making the whole thing possible.

The World Cup he played in two years later – the one where he apparently scored with his hand, which even I know is against the rules, and then scored what people who understand these things describe as one of the greatest goals ever – was underwritten by the market he’d just sworn at. By 2010 in South Africa, that tournament was being insured at Lloyd’s for £6.2 billion.

He couldn’t escape us if he tried.

Which brings me, with a subtlety I have entirely abandoned, to where we work.

This quarter, our company, launched its sports and entertainment class of business. The market veteran brought in to lead it. Sports, media, entertainment – the events, the players, the contracts, the moments that the world stops to watch. We are now, formally and deliberately, in the business of making those moments possible.

The World Cup happens because someone priced it. Someone looked at 48 teams, 16 venues, a month of organised chaos and said: yes. I’ll cover that.

That someone is increasingly going to be us.

Have a good week.

Rob

P.S. Geoff Hurst scored a hat-trick in England’s triumphant 1966 World Cup final. He was insured at Lloyd’s against career-ending injury. After he retired, he went to work selling insurance. The hat-trick hero became a man of the market. He is one of us. Of course he’s retired again now, but some of the best people in this market aren’t in the building anymore. Doesn’t make them any less part of it.