Visionary: Whisper’s Sunil Patel talks relationships, sports meets entertainment and future growth

Looking objectively at the first 13 years in the life of Whisper Group, it is a story that few could have predicted. OK, so a highly successful BBC sports producer (Sunil Patel), a very popular presenter (Jake Humphrey) and a top-rated Formula 1 driver (David Coulthard) took the risk of setting up this brand new sports TV production company in 2010; with the credentials of those three, it that had a good chance to succeed to some degree. Yet it would have been a long-odds bet that just over a decade later, Whisper would consist of a multi-million-pound organisation across several genres – including a growing number of non-sport programmes – with 240 staff and five different offices.

All this from a company that initially adopted the role of the underdog.

“It was a day-to-day business at first,” says Patel, who admits that he had no definite contracts in place when the three newly-minted entrepreneurs started out. “I’d talk to an F1 team and they’d say, ‘We want this filming done with Lewis Hamilton or with Mark Webber, can you do it?’ and we built from that.”

Heavy leaning

Whisper at first leaned heavily into F1 relationships because that is where the three men worked closely together for the BBC. Their clients were the likes of Red Bull and the brands associated with the various team.

To some it might seem too dangerous to start a business in that way, but not to Patel. “Why not begin like that? We took a calculated risk and without risk, you’d never move forward. I’ve seen it time and again; people too afraid to make decisions or jump into the unknown. Whisper wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have a high-risk appetite and, yet we also had to understand the possible downside.”

Backgrounder: Sunil Patel 

A huge sports fan since he was a child, Patel realised he could combine this passion with working in television during his BA Arts degree in TV & Radio at Salford University. In 2003, he spent short periods at Sky and Perform, but soon settled at the BBC where he stayed for over seven years working on Formula 1, the NFL and also three Olympic Games, before being a co-founder of Whisper Films.

In the first five years of existence, F1 work was their backbone, while Whisper also made short films for the BBC, highlights programming for ITV, and even a one-off F1-topic documentary for BBC One, Racing With The Hamiltons.

Then, in 2015, Channel 4 took a risk itself by taking a minority share in Whisper as part of its Indie Growth Fund. “C4 CEO David Abraham’s people said don’t do it. Endemol had tried to get into sport and it didn’t work and they were the biggest production company in the world. But I promised that we could build a team and deliver; C4 had to want to try something new. I was very fortunate to find David.”

Patel says the C4 connection gave Whisper credibility, but it was a contract to redefine American football coverage on the BBC that was even more of a turning point that same year.

Sports meets entertainment

“We had never picked up a meaningful piece of broadcast work in our first five years, but I’d worked on NFL for the BBC and knew the tender was coming up. Then I was told the period for pitches had closed and we hadn’t been invited. My heart sank because this was our chance.”

Patel persuaded the NFL to allow Whisper to bid. The only problem was it was a Bank Holiday and the pitch had to be ready in about 48 hours. “I had no experience of writing a tender like this, but the NFL’s highlights shows in the UK had been done in quite a similar fashion for a long period of time and so we just went in openminded with our philosophy of ‘sport meets entertainment’ and we won the job from nowhere.”

Patel also struck gold with his two presenters – former NFL players Jason Bell and Osi Umenyiora – whose chemistry was undeniable from the start, something that Patel knew early on.

“I was exec producing on our first recording when Osi did a brilliant piece of touchscreen analysis with all his personality to the fore. The programme editor wanted to rerecord because he was 30 seconds over. But I said ‘no’ that’s just what we want.” The NFL Show regularly peaked at over one million viewers, a huge step up from the 100,000 who had watched on Channel 4 and C5.

When Bell appeared on Strictly Come Dancing in 2020, Patel knew his strategy had made NFL more mainstream. The sport-meets-entertainment thinking worked again in 2016 with a pitch to Channel 4 for its F1 highlights, a production contract reportedly valued at £30 million. Having Welsh presenter Steve Jones – known for programmes such as The X Factor USA rather than sport – as lead presenter was another calculated risk. “Innovation doesn’t have to be technology, it can be a new kind of presenter. We respected the sport flag to flag, but put things around it that positioned it as entertainment.”

Time to be brave

For Patel, Whisper has to be braver than companies like IMG and Sunset+Vine who were the only sports TV production companies around for many years in the UK. “No one had taken them on and gone with a different angle. They controlled the market and did superbly well and now we’re right up there with them. To be honest, everyone working in a sports production company can do the sport, but Whisper is about what do we do around the action.”

Whisper is committed to bringing in people from different TV genres. “My first hire for the NFL show, my production exec, came from The Voice and that signalled our mindset; we want to know the heroes behind the helmets. There are no silos at Whisper, it’s a flat structure. Ideas can come from anyone. For example, the idea for our F1 opening show this season came from one of our runners.”

But no business can always be plain sailing. “One time, we wanted to expand our digital content and asked our TV people to go off and do that. We made the mistake of thinking one set of people can do everything and we quickly realised that wasn’t going to work. So, our digital team is now led by digital experts. It’s the same for our global TV commercial campaigns and our two ITV quiz shows that are fronted by someone with that background,” he says.

Any bumps in Whisper’s journey are now mitigated by having Sony as its latest business partner, replacing C4 in 2020. Also, Whisper Group consists of seven offices which together produce live and highlights sports shows, unscripted content and branded material for major brands.

More growth

Still, Patel is forever looking at the next area of growth. “We approach our company like a top sports team – we look for marginal games and being a team, not focused on individual goals. We’ve been in plenty of situations where people have said we’d never win that piece of business, but our attitude is ‘why wouldn’t we?’”

Examples include a recent Sailing Grand Prix contract when Whisper had no background in the sport and also cricket in New Zealand. “We were rank outsiders to win the sailing work, but our passion and the people we brought in did the trick. And we set up an Auckland office first for cricket but also with a plan to work with the All Blacks within five years; our team there managed it in two.”

Yet, opening an office is a risk; every new one is another large fixed cost and that has to be balanced by extra income. For instance, Whisper’s new quiz show on ITV, Jeopardy!, comes out of its Manchester office. “Jeopardy! and also Riddiculous, were the missing pieces for us – intellectual properties that can be sold around the world. That income is now alongside our branded content, the TV commercials which are high margin and our sports productions which are long-running with fixed contracts for a period of time.”

It is clear that Whisper is not the underdog anymore. The company partnered with the BBC in 2020 to deliver all 31 live matches of the Women’s Euros and now has a large track record in other women’s sports like rugby and motor racing. It also picked up the contract for every piece of UEFA’s non-live programming, digital content, preview and review shows, partner content and official films.

“We’re happy that UEFA was confident enough to move from IMG after nine years to us. That was a feather in our cap because competition is healthy in our industry right now.”

Taking Sony as a new partner also opens more horizons, says Patel. “Our TV productions need to keep making material where the output stands for itself, whether it’s sport or not, and Sony will help with that. We’re not a sausage factory and our strategy is not scattergun. Good luck to people who want to stay in their same lanes.”

And despite new commercial partners, the original three co-founders are still all central to Whisper. “For example, David Coulthard keeps saying to us all ‘shake the tree’ and Jake and I agree. You can be overcome by finance and legal and people running numbers. But where’s the next opportunity? What’s exciting, what can we be most proud of and how do we use our last piece of content to get the next piece? For me in those situations, creativity and being brave wins out.”

Whisper Group timeline

• Whisper began life in the autumn of 2010 in London by Sunil Patel, Jake Humphrey and David Coulthard. Five years later, Channel 4 became a minority shareholder in Whisper, but was replaced by Sony in 2020.
• Whisper’s recent awards include a BAFTA for its coverage of the UEFA Women’s Euros on the BBC last year and Best Multi-Camera – Sport in 2019 at the RTS Craft and Design Awards and Best Use of Remote Production at the Broadcast Tech Awards in 2020, both for Sail GP.
• The NFL Show was voted Best TV Show at the British Sports Journalism Awards in 2020 and the company’s F1 highlights programme took the Best Entertainment Show prize in the Broadcast Sport Awards in 2022.