🗞️🌍🌎0️⃣5️⃣4️⃣ Bruno Lalande

Meet Bruno Lalande, a sports businessman and publisher who has helped bridge transatlantic divides between France, the United States, and Africa thanks to the sporting realm.

Lalande’s passion and commitment to sports began during a childhood spent in central France. Although he grew up in the countryside, there was an auto racing circuit nearby. Bruno’s father, who loved auto sports, often took him to the track to watch the races. “That certainly contributed to my love for auto sports,” he said. “I was always interested in race cars and their sponsors. I really enjoyed those environments, which were part of my childhood immersion.” That’s how Lalande developed an early understanding of and interest in the ways that the sports world was sponsored and run, which led to a career in global sports business.

Bruno’s Story

The famed Paris-Dakar auto rally, first run in 1978, was one of Lalande’s first sports loves. “I used to watch cars on the side of the road when I was 12 years old, it was great,” he recalled of the cars, their sponsors, and the glitz that went along with the romanticism of the sport. It inspired him to design a car for the race when he was in business school. He tried to convince sponsors to buy into it, unsuccessfully. Instead, Lalande completed an internship with a company that did sports marketing for the International Olympic Committee and Formula 3000, a high-speed boat-racing championship, which launched him into the business of sports.

Over the years, the United States has positively inspired and influenced Lalande’s understanding of sports business, the visions that can drive it, and how to develop business within the sports industry–insights he passed along to clients. It began in 2001, when Lalande started work for the NBA in efficiency studies, his specialty, and was impressed with the league’s business approach.

“As a Frenchman in France focused on sponsorship and sports business, it was very impactful for me to see how everything was organized by the NBA. In my opinion, the league is the absolute example of what should be done in the sports business world on the planet, on entertainment issues, on TV rights issues, on forward-looking visions by taking players from different countries to develop revenues. This is really something that impressed me a lot about the United States.”

He learned from their approaches, strategies, and practices. It was also during this period when Lalande first visited the United States, to attend an NBA All Star Game. During that spectacle, he was exposed to the league’s entertainment blitz, from the showtime lighting that built anticipation to Elton John playing piano and more. Lalande marveled how the city transformed to embrace the overall experience for 15 days, changing its face and rhythm to accommodate the show. “That left an impression and brought a lot into my understanding of sports business culture,” he recalled.

Lalande later worked for Nielsen Sport, which in early 2015 released a white paper on investments in women’s sports. It was a pivotal moment. “In the sports business universe, I’ve often observed how the United States is often more advanced and then things arrive in Europe four or five years later,” he noted.

“This analysis of women's sports in the United States was a trigger in my certainty of starting activities with a media company focused on women and sports.”

The next year, he launched Women Sports, a media company dedicated to platforming the stories of female athletes.

The Sports Diplomacy Connection

Over the years, through his transatlantic work, Lalande has engaged in different types of informal sports diplomacy. Often, his U.S. colleagues and friends asked him about France and its sports scene. Sometimes it was difficult for them to understand French culture, such as when the French went on strike or took the long summer holiday. So, he explained and translated these proclivities and helped them better comprehend the situation.

One of Lalande’s key takeaways from these experiences is on the importance of active listening, to really understand local contexts and cultures and to respect them. “You have to know how to listen to others,” he said. “You have to know how to observe,

“I think it is good to respect others, to try to understand them in order to adapt models. I think there is a lot to learn from each other, a lot to look at intelligently at American business models to develop them in European or African territories, because these are real strong actions and great lessons in business efficiency.”

These are necessary skills for business leaders, too, he noted. “This is true for Americans towards the French, as well as the French towards Americans,” Lalande noted. But the recipe can be successful. “You then manage to build beautiful things together.”

In his experience, one of sport’s virtues is that it can bring people together and work towards a more peaceful world.

“It is something great when you have countries during the Olympic Games that can meet, that can compete and respect each other while they are at war. It can bring joy and fraternity. I find that magical, it is exceptional. Only sport can do that.”

For Lalande, each and every day is immersed in different types of sports diplomacy. “I run a global network of 250 people in 41 different countries on the theme of sport, the influence of businesses and the French-speaking world,” he stated. “ I am in a job that is 100% sports diplomacy.”

Moreover, sports-related knowledge, technical, and cultural know-how is exchanged and transmitted through his 10 different media titles, including Women Sport Africa. This title in particular is a tool of influence, as well as sports diplomacy. It platforms influential women in governance who work at the IOC, who work at the CAF, African football, and high-level athletes. His media outlets are also places where clients [who are countries] communicate in order to influence communication and therefore diplomacy.

“Diplomacy is a formidable tool in sport to serve strategic issues,” Lalande said.

“That is fascinating and I love it. It always works quite well when it is executed with a vision, a strategy, time, because diplomacy is something, it is a tool that is long term, but which allows us to respond to strategic objectives that are addressed very effectively in sports diplomacy, in any case.