Danny Sillman is CEO of Relevent Sports Group, a sports event company that established the International Champions Cup preseason tournament among the world’s biggest soccer clubs.

We’ve challenged our teams to [ask], if we were starting our business from scratch today, how would we build it? What are the investments we make? Everybody talks about strategic development and focusing on long-term planning, but I don’t think we would have really given our teams a blank slate to say, Hey, let’s go rebuild our business from scratch, had we not had the pandemic.

Obviously, there’s great financial harm to anybody who’s in the live events business. There’s no ignoring that. But on the positive side, we’ve tried to focus on what we can change. There was a focus of our organization to leverage our expertise in storytelling, marketing, sales, and event production, and build a well-regarded content development operation. That’s something we’ve worked on for the past two years but has been expedited by COVID.

We’ve actually built our own newsroom, based in Mexico, very similar to how we’ve run one for (Spanish soccer league) La Liga for their North American operation. It’s for our owned and operated channels (for brands) that Relevant owns like the International Champions Cup men’s, women’s, and Futures events. So we’ve shifted our focus from just events to content development.