Sport is where the money is now: ask Simon Fuller, the man behind the Murray mint

With his earnings heading towards £100 million everyone wants a piece of the Andy action — but they’ll have to get past Simon Fuller. We examine the man who made the Murray matrix
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9 July 2013

Pick a figure, any figure. When he won his emotionally cathartic first Wimbledon title on Sunday, Andy Murray also picked up a £1.6 million purse. This went into the pot alongside the £1.2 million he got when he won the US Open last year, plus a one-off bonus from his sponsors for a Grand Slam win. In 2011, accounts filed by Murray’s company, Parched Investments Ltd, showed he had earned £5.4 million in merchandising and just under another million in appearance fees. This year he is thought to be earning around £8 million from sponsors including Adidas, RBS, Highland Spring, Rado and Head, and his net worth is estimated at around £32 million. On Sunday night, Murray’s manager Simon Fuller was asked if his client could end up worth more than £100 million.

“I don’t think anything’s driven by finance,” Fuller replied, “but Andy now will hopefully get all the credit and achieve all the great things that come with success.” It was a blandly smooth way of saying: Murray = mint. The significance lay not in the words Fuller chose but that he spoke them at all. The 53-year-old made his name with raucous entertainment, managing the Spice Girls and creating Pop Idol and Brand Beckham but has a reputation for reticence. Producer Judy Craymer, who worked with him on the Spice Girls musical Viva Forever!, describes him as “the consummate professional, very calm, almost Zen-like”. He usually lets his actions, or his acts, speak for themselves. His company XIX Entertainment did not respond to requests for a comment on this article. Yet on Sunday, he was bubbling, comparing Murray’s win to an England World Cup victory and gushing: “Everyone’s in heaven.”

Fuller has been involved in sports as well as music management since the 1990s, and branched out into the fashion world in 2006 with both Victoria Beckham and Roland Mouret. His current company is a later incarnation of 19 Management, which he founded in 1985 and named after his first hit, Paul Hardcastle’s 19. He sold it in 2005 to CKX Inc in a $200 million deal that eventually gave him creative control of the parent company’s assets and allowed him to diversify.

XIX, formed in 2010, now has Murray, David Beckham and Lewis Hamilton on its books, alongside Annie Lennox, Jennifer Lopez, Will Young and the über-songwriter Cathy Dennis. Earlier this year, Fuller was rumoured to be courting Bradley Wiggins and Rory McIlroy. (Professionally, that is: he married long-term girlfriend Natalie Swanston in 2008 and they now have a daughter). Clearly, sport is where the excitement is these days. Not to mention the money.

“Simon’s a very astute bloke who keeps slightly under the radar and really has a very good eye for turning artists, performers, athletes into brands,” says Harvey Goldsmith, who knows and admires Fuller. These days, Goldsmith suggests, advertisers see a greater value in sportsmen than in musicians and actors, thanks in part to the success of the 2012 Olympics. “He [Fuller] clearly has a great sense of timing in terms of teaming up with these stars. Everything in the celebrity world is about timing, about being there and grabbing the opportunity.” And, Goldsmith adds, in knowing which opportunities to grab.

“What Fuller has successfully managed to do is to blend sport and entertainment into one,” says sports marketing expert Nigel Currie of Brand Rapport. He adds that the two disciplines have always been pretty much the same thing, but the forging of the Beckhams (whom Fuller introduced to each other) into a cohesive, multidisciplinary unit shifted everything up a gear. “They are the biggest celebrity couple around. If you take a footballer they are generally a bit one dimensional, but Beckham with his wife opened up these different media opportunities. This is what will happen to Andy Murray.” So Murray’s mother, Judy, his brother, Jamie, and his girlfriend, Kim Sears, are reportedly being advised by XIX. Sears wore a Victoria Beckham dress to watch her boyfriend in the final — Fuller synergy in action (last year she wore a Roland Mouret dress, another XIX client, to the final). The Beckhams are a key part of the Murray matrix: David texted Andy all through the tournament and called on Monday morning after his win. Since 2009 the pair have been supporters of charity Malaria No More UK.

Goldsmith points out that sportsmen tend to be less temperamental than performers, less worried about “selling out”, and can also stay at the top of their game longer than many flash-in-the-pan acts. Roger Federer, who has won 17 Grand Slam titles to Murray’s two, was said by Forbes magazine to have amassed a fortune of £152 million in the years between 2006 and 2012 alone.

“Even Tiger Woods has bounced back and is doing very well again, thank you very much,” says Currie. “The regularity of sport generates enormous amounts of media exposure, whereas entertainment is less consistent.

“Tennis and golf are pretty unique in that they reach every part of the globe. Football’s huge but not quite as strong in America, and the same for Formula One. If you are the number one golf or tennis player in the world, your face is known to just about everyone on the planet. Remember that ad Gillette did with Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Thierry Henry? That’s what Andy Murray can look forward to — that sort of global promotion that reaches every corner of the world.”

Clearly Fuller has world domination in mind: he has formed a partnership with Indian entrepreneur Mahesh Bhupathi to form XIX Globosport, a company that will focus on developing Murray’s interests in the Asia and Middle East markets.

Any discussion of Fuller inevitably involves mention of his sometime colleague and now great rival, Simon Cowell. The two men together revolutionised popular TV with Pop Idol but since falling out over ownership of the show have been intensely competitive rivals. “What Fuller does, even better than Cowell, is to assemble good teams around people,” says PR guru Mark Borkowski. “He has got an insight into what entertains people and how powerful the entertainment value of sport is.” He adds that Fuller promoted Murray through social media (“he was one of the original Tweeters”) as he did with Beckham. He also allowed the Scot to remain essentially true to himself — “he invested in Andy as a talent when he was a grubby, slightly punky Dunblane teenager” — while smoothing away some of his rough edges. Hiring former tabloid editor Stuart Higgins to act as “a bridge” between Murray and sports journalists was one example. The undeniably effective pre-Wimbledon BBC documentary Behind the Racquet is another.

Not everyone is convinced of Fuller’s golden touch, though. “Murray is not an easy man to sell because he’s not an easy personality, and it’s no thanks to Fuller that he won Wimbledon,” says writer Tom Bower, who examined the rivalry between the two Simons for his book on Cowell, Sweet Revenge. “He [Fuller] is hugely ambitious. He’s got the Beckhams and that has been a success, but he’s taken a gamble sending Hamilton from McLaren to Mercedes. His real test will be whether he can get Murray a lot of money.”

For Fuller, as for Murray, it may not be all about the money, of course. Fuller has a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame, has won an award for his environmental activities and has been praised by Ban Ki-moon and the Prince of Wales for his charitable activities. On the other hand, he also has a £375 million fortune, according to the 2013 Sunday Times Rich List, which places him at no 238 overall, and no 6 in the world of film and TV — comfortably above Cowell. Which sort of puts that £1.6 million Wimbledon prize in perspective.

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