Banijay Entertainment unveils sports division

Banijay Entertainment has formed a sports division offering a “one-stop shop” for programming, live production and events, spearheaded by Workerbee chief executive Rick Murray, Broadcast can reveal. 

Banijay Sports is designed to broaden the super-indie’s efforts in ‘sportainment’, documentary, digital, live events, live hosting, creator economy, and scripted. It will seek out new partnerships and explore opportunities for content investments and M&A. 

In practice, Banijay Sports will pitch directly to major sports federations and organisations, such as Fifa, Formula 1 or the International Olympics Committee to be official content partner providing a wide range of content. Those options would encompass live production of ceremonies, “venue experiences”, short-form and social content production, podcasts and long-form programming, such as documentaries.  In terms of the latter, Four Kings, A Beautiful Obsession and Beat Luke Littler indie Workerbee or other Banijay production labels could produce. 

There may also be opportunities around gaming and Banijay Rights could also be involved to monetise organisations content archives.  

As a senior advisor for sport, Murray is heading the division’s efforts, in addition to his steering of Workerbee Group. He will lead the pitching, working closely with chief business officer Frédéric Balmary and the production-distribution giant’s complementary siblings to accelerate the division’s growth.  

Murray chairs the board of Banijay Sports, which brings together the heads of various companies within the group.  

These include Balich Wonder Studio, which produces live events, Aurora Media Worldwide, which produces the Formula E world championships, and digital specialist Little Dot Studios, which has worked with Fifa on its YouTube content, following the mega-merger with All3Media.  

Speaking to Broadcast at Mipcom, Murray said the idea is to “turn the ‘moment on the pitch’ into a whole ecosystem of content”. 

“We’ve already brough together a group of people from the labels who are attacking big sports opportunities,” he said. “Marco’s [Bassetti] dream is that at the next men’s World Cup, for example, we could provide every single service – a content service and event service around a sport. From putting on opening and closing ceremonies to doing all of their content. 

“Take any sport, Formula 1, football or whatever, Banijay could provide everything around that sport – come to us and we’ll do the whole lot. We want to communicate to them [rights holders] that we can make their sports more culturally impactful.” 

The division is looking to the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 for opportunities. Though UK/ US company Done+Dusted is producing the opening and closing ceremonies, Murray believes there is scope for Balich Wonder Studio, which has opened up in the US, to win some business and opportunties for “any given number of American companies” who could be doing docuseries around athletes or podcasts. 

Banijay and Workerbee Group has quietly been building up its presence in this space by extending into vodcasting with digital sports brand Players Network – powered by Banijay Entertainment, which has launched Jamie Vardy’s Having a Party visualised podcast. The latter also struck a deal with the Bundesliga for live streaming rights on Vardy’s YouTube channel. 

Murray said he hopes Workerbee will be involved in winning productions or co-producing with siblings, but he is focused on bringing in business for the wider Banijay Entertainment group primarily. 

“Scale now, especially in sport, is the most important thing,” Murray added. “If you’re the CEO of a sports federation and you don’t want to hire 100 companies, you can go to one big company that can do it all. 

“There hasn’t really been a global shop window for it - now we’re in a position to change that.”