The IOC was nearly bankrupt. FIFA had no sponsors. International federations were modest bodies running largely amateur sports out of small offices. Nobody knew what sponsorship was, let alone how to sell it.
Then everything changed.
Through his agency West Nally, founded with legendary BBC broadcaster Peter West, Patrick Nally conceived, negotiated and sold the first exclusive sponsorship packages for the FIFA World Cup, the Olympic Games, the World Athletics Championships and other major global sporting properties. He brought Coca-Cola into world football and created FIFA's worldwide development programme. He negotiated commercial rights with Argentina's military junta for the 1978 World Cup. He pitched the first global marketing blueprint to Soviet Olympic officials and their KGB minders, laying out the plan that became the IOC's multi-billion-dollar TOP programme. He helped create the London Marathon. He invented the first four-year global sponsorship package in sport.
The principles he established of exclusivity, limited partners, and category protection still underpin a $160 billion industry today.
Then, in 1982, it was taken from him.
His mentor and business partner was Horst Dassler, the head of Adidas, one of the most powerful figures in world sport. Nally trusted him like a father. Dassler, secretly backed by Japanese advertising giant Dentsu, seized control of the rights West Nally had created and transferred them to a new entity: ISL.
ISL. Does that ring a bell?
The presidents of FIFA and the IOC were instructed to sever contact with Nally. The history of how their commercial empires were built was quietly rewritten.
ISL collapsed in 2001 amid revelations - surfaced in court largely through the work of the late investigative journalist Andrew Jennings - that well over a hundred million Swiss francs had been paid in bribes to sports officials. In 2022, the Dentsu executive behind the original deal that displaced Nally in 1982 was arrested for corruption relating to the Tokyo Olympics.
Forty years. Same machinery. Same methods.
The man the industry calls the 'godfather of sports marketing' had become, in his own words, the forgotten man of FIFA and the lost man of the Olympic Games.
Game Changer: How Sport Became A Global Empire is Patrick Nally's account of all of it - told in full, for the first time, after more than forty years.
It is a memoir of ambition, innovation, trust and betrayal. A journey from a south London classroom to the boardrooms of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, the offices of Argentina's generals, the palaces of Soviet Moscow, and the corridors of power at FIFA and the IOC.
He worked closely with the Australian Soccer Federation, helping secure the 1981 FIFA World Youth Championship for Australia as part of West Nally's pioneering four-year global sponsorship package, and he stayed with ASA president Sir Arthur George as he helped lay the commercial foundations of the game here. For Australian football fans of a certain generation, that tournament was a landmark moment. Patrick Nally helped make it happen.
Game Changer is the origin story of an industry that now touches every major sporting event on earth.
It arrives at a moment when the questions it raises have never been more urgent. As football's biggest governance scandal in decades plays out, Nally's book explains, from the inside, how commercial control became the instrument of power in world sport.
As Patrick writes: "The governance questions confronting FIFA and the IOC today are not new problems requiring new explanations. They are the direct descendants of decisions made in hotel bars and boardrooms I sat in half a century ago, when a small network of men realised that whoever controlled the money controlled the sport.
"The past doesn't just inform today's debate. It explains it."