Global Head of Sport & Entertainment at WPP — on trading the football pitch for boardrooms, negotiating over $1 billion in sports investments, building authentic partnerships with the NFL, UEFA, F1, NBA and IOC, and what it really takes to turn passion into purpose in a billion-dollar industry
Misha Sher did not start his career behind a desk. He started it on the pitch — as a professional footballer in America during the pre-Beckham era, when Major League Soccer had only eight teams and making a roster as a non-national player was nearly impossible. He played in the division below, looked around the locker room one day, and knew with quiet certainty that it was not the life he had in mind. That moment of clarity — not knowing what he wanted, but knowing exactly what he did not — turned out to be one of the most important realizations of his career.
From there, Misha spent five years in banking in Boston, once again learning by elimination. A chance phone call while driving home changed everything: a former teammate was in Liverpool completing an MBA in football industries. At a time when the business of sport was just beginning to take shape, Misha quit his job, packed two suitcases, and moved halfway across the world on nothing but instinct and conviction. Twenty years later, he runs the global sport and entertainment marketing division of WPP — the world's largest advertising group — having negotiated over one billion dollars in sports investments and built partnerships with the NFL, UEFA, F1, NBA, and IOC.
In this episode, Misha talks candidly about courage and curiosity as career tools, why passion without alignment to your actual strengths is not enough, the rise of athlete-owned media empires like LeBron's Uninterrupted, and the sobering statistic that 70 percent of NBA players go broke within five years of retirement. He also gives his most honest advice yet — to take it easy on yourself, because success is not a straight line, and the only comparison that matters is with where you were yesterday.
Misha Sher is the Global Head of Sport & Entertainment at WPP, the world's largest advertising and communications group. His career is a study in knowing when to leave — first the football pitch, then the world of finance — and having the courage to follow conviction even when the destination is unclear. He began as a professional footballer in America during the late 1990s and early 2000s, then spent five years in banking before enrolling in one of the first MBA programmes focused specifically on the football industry, at a time when the commercial side of sport was only just beginning to take shape.
Over the past twenty years, Misha has built and scaled multi-million dollar sports marketing businesses across North America and Europe, negotiating over one billion dollars in sports investments and developing high-impact partnerships with some of the most powerful organisations in global sport: the NFL, UEFA, F1, the NBA, and the IOC. He is also an author, an investor, and one of the most respected voices in women's football and athlete marketing — a space he has been championing long before it became mainstream.
His philosophy is grounded in something he learned early: working out what you do not want is often as important as discovering what you do. And when you find the right environment — one where your skills meet your passion and where you show up in the right way — everything else follows. That is the lesson behind twenty years at the intersection of sport, business, and human ambition.
We've never lived in a better time for an athlete other than LeBron and Rich Paul or Maverick Carter, these guys that he has, you know, he has around him or Kevin Durant with Rich Kimman or Steph Curry or Serena Williams. What you see is that the most forward-thinking, innovative athletes are creating a small ecosystem around themselves. They're not part of a big roster of talent. What they want is the best business, media, marketing people around them. And the reality is if they do that well, they can become and they are billion-dollar businesses in their own right.
I think it's much more important to really lean into your strength because all of us — I believe that all of us have something that is unique to us, particular skill sets or particular characteristics um that are let's just call it your sort of your superpower right when you are doing that thing you are better at that than most of the other people that you're around.
My biggest advice is take it easy on yourself. Our success and our journey is really determined by our frame of mind and how we think. Don't get too high about the highs. Don't get too low about the lows and just, you know, put one foot in front of the other.