Protean Sports is a sport and culture consultancy working globally across the business of sport. It concepts, designs, builds and programmes training centres and sports-authentic facilities inside hotels, campuses and members clubs, negotiates partnerships and commercial deals that connect athletes and brands, and brings that same knowledge of sport to governments and ministries in the Middle East.
Training centres and sports-authentic facilities inside hotels, campuses and clubs. Concept, design, build and programming, and the team to run it.
Sports marketing and partnerships for brands entering sport or going deeper into it, from where to play to which athletes to build around, shaped by years of negotiating athlete partnerships at Nike.
Representation, partnerships and commercial deals for athletes and for fitness and wellness practitioners, from first approach and valuation through to contract and the relationship that follows.
Sport strategy for ministries and national programmes in the Middle East, drawing on our founder's role as an official judge for the Sports Ministry in the Dubai Government Excellence Programme and a place on the panel at Riyadiya, Saudi Arabia's first women's sport conference.
Bespoke sporting journeys for high-value travellers, built on a deep and nuanced knowledge of the sport and the authentic sporting culture of each place. Protean Sports takes guests into the gyms, tracks and communities where a sport truly lives, removes the friction of local and national nuances that usually stands in the way, and smooths every step for destinations and partners who want to welcome the kind of visitor who stays longer and comes back. The format is the Home Turf Series, which began with a week in Accra's boxing gyms with Joshua Buatsi.
Protean Sports builds sport into the centre of the world's best hotels, for a guest who no longer leaves their training behind when they travel. Where a trip once meant putting a wellness routine on hold, today's high achievers expect it to take that routine further than they ever could in their daily lives, and we design the training, the coaching and the culture around the stay to do exactly that, rooted in the island or city the hotel sits in so it could not be lifted and repeated anywhere else.
Done well, the gym becomes part of what the hotel is known for. Guests book around it and stay longer, local members carry it through the quiet months, and the property earns coverage for reasons that have nothing to do with its bedrooms.
A guest's time is the most valuable thing they bring with them, and every hour they spend in our world is a chance to make the greatest impact, whether the stay is a long weekend or a month. Protean Sports takes the question of quality off the table, so whether they join one session or train every day of the visit, they can trust the programming without a second thought.
Every programme starts from where the hotel stands, its climate, its water and the sport the community around it already plays. In Grand Cayman that meant the sea, the sand and a public basketball court, which is how each property ends up with something only it can offer.
Individual training and care can only come from great coaching, the kind that makes a guest feel seen and properly attended to. Our coaches read how each person moves and adjust as they go, so the work stays true to human movement and to the health of that individual body, and fits into the life they are living.
What a guest remembers most is the person who coached them, so a large part of the work is finding and hiring the people. Protean Sports recruits top trainers, coaches and former athletes and places them at the property full time, where they become part of the character of the hotel and the reason guests and members keep coming back. At Palm Heights that team includes Olympic synchronised swimmer Eva Morris, who teaches Pilates on the property, and Amir, strength and conditioning coach to Belgium's Olympic boxing team.
We run the search, the vetting and the hiring, and then build the timetable and the development that keep good people in place, so the standard a guest meets on their first morning is the one they meet a year later.
Menus built with the kitchen around the training day, from recovery breakfasts to family style dinners with local chefs, so food carries the programme from the first session to the last.
Sessions scored by DJs and live sets, and evenings that bring athletes, guests and local artists into the same room.
Apparel and shoots developed with the property, from concept store collaborations to kit designed around a destination, which gives the hotel product to sell and pictures to publish.
Photographers, filmmakers and artists working alongside the athletes, with workshops, screenings and talks that guests are invited into.
Most luxury hotels have a gym that guests photograph on arrival and never go back to, and a wellness menu that could belong to any property in the world. It is one of the hardest things in hospitality to get right, and Protean Sports has solved it through a strategy built on authenticity, so the training becomes a reason to book and a reason to return.
Every resort knows the quiet months, when the rooms empty out and a floor full of equipment becomes a cost that is hard to justify. Most operators have learned to live with that, and our growth strategy was designed to change it, so the facility earns its place across the whole year.
Athletes, guests and the press can all tell when sport has been borrowed as decoration, and once a property is seen that way it is very difficult to win them back. Everything Protean Sports builds starts from inside the sport, which is why more than 200 professional athletes have chosen to train at Palm Heights.
World-class coaches command a premium price point, and guests pay it willingly when the quality of the programming is beyond question.
Culinary programming and events built around the training carry guests from the gym into the restaurants, bars and spaces of the hotel.
A curated membership for locals keeps the floor alive through every season and gives the property a following in its own city.
Partnerships that bolster local sporting facilities, and athletes who choose to train there, build the kind of standing no marketing budget can buy.
A line of merchandise and an online store turn guests and followers into a fandom, letting people feel part of the world at a more accessible price point wherever they are.
Travellers who train seriously want more from a trip than a hotel gym, and the places that could give it to them, the gyms, tracks and neighbourhoods where a sport was made, are hard to reach without local knowledge. Protean Sports designs bespoke sporting journeys that open those doors and builds a week of training and culture around them, for high-value travellers and for the hotels and destinations that want to host them. The format is the Home Turf Series, conceived by Protean Sports and launched with Palm Heights Athletics.
A warm weather training programme sited inside a luxury hotel and programmed so that elite preparation and a commercial guest offer could share one building. Fifteen athletes prepared there for Paris 2024.
From concept and design through build and programming, Protean Sports led the sports and wellness vertical for this cultural campus, changing the way people live and work in New York City.
WSA is the building downtown New York talks about, seventy-two floors across 161 Water Street and 180 Maiden Lane turned into a campus of studios, galleries, restaurants and creative offices, and the place fashion and art now come to after dark, from the AprèsMET party on Met Gala night to Rhizome World and the Free Arts NYC gala.
The gym and wellness team was curated as carefully as the space, bringing together a selection of New York's finest talent and its most accomplished movement experts across fitness, reformer Pilates, meditation and human movement, so members have the best of the city under one roof. The roster included trainer Marty Kelly, professional boxer Emmet Brennan, reformer Pilates teacher Stefani Bertoncini and meditation teacher Manoj Dias.
Protean Sports created and integrated an athlete programme for professionals who live in New York City or travel through it. This gives members a money-can't-buy, front-row seat to an exclusive training environment where standards are delivered at their highest, and where athletes feel safe to integrate throughout, knowing that every member brings the same level of excellence across the other cultural silos in the building.
The sport and fitness vertical of SAA, a private members club for the creative industry in Brooklyn. A gym and spa built around athlete recovery, inside a building designed for people who do not think of themselves as athletes.
Case study to follow
Six months of pre-production and filming on George Clooney's film for MGM Studios, from script review and period art direction to athlete sourcing, more than 30 period boats and 12 bespoke rowing boats handcrafted in Richmond.
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Partnership and commercial work for athletes and for fitness and wellness practitioners, with global sportswear, athleisure and wellness brands, is carried out under NDA and is not published. Discretion is part of what is being bought.
What can be described is the shape of it, which runs from first approach and valuation through term sheet and contract to the years of relationship afterwards.
As Head of Strategy and Cross Category Athletes for EMEA West, our founder negotiated and oversaw the partnerships that put Nike on the biggest clubs and athletes in the region, from the first six-year deal between Nike and the Premier League to signing emerging talent early, ahead of their breakout growth.
Led the negotiations for Nike's partnerships with three of the Premier League's biggest clubs.
The first-ever six-year deal between Nike and the Premier League, unlocking sustained investment in product innovation pipelines.
Nike's partnership with the Football Association, the governing body of English football.
Nike's partnership with the Lawn Tennis Association.
Nike's partnership with the national governing body for track and field.
370 individual athlete deals, covering 250 Premier League players, 90 track and field athletes and 30 cross-category athletes.
Our founder's Substack on the business of high performance across sport, hospitality and wellness, written from the side of the table where the deals are negotiated, the athletes are chosen and the buildings are run, so each piece reads the market from the inside.
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I spent my career on both sides of the table. I rowed and raced internationally for Ireland, competing at World Cup level in two sports, and then spent years at Nike as Head of Strategy and Cross Category Athletes for EMEA West, deciding which athletes a brand builds around and why. I founded Protean Sports in November 2021.
Both halves of that show up in the work. The athlete side is why the programming in our projects stands up to people who train for a living, and the brand side is why the commercial case for them stands up to the people paying for the floor.
Tell us about the building, the brand or the athlete, and we will reply personally.