Welcome to the Scoop: a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Vogue Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.
This week’s guest is Mary Bekhait. Mary is the global CEO of YMU, a talent management agency that lists Simon Cowell, TV presenter Graham Norton, and Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg among its clients.
During her time at the helm, YMU has transformed from a small UK-focused company (formerly known as the James Grant Group) into a global, social-first enterprise. Mary has also been instrumental in embracing gender parity at both the business and client levels. That last bit has to do with today’s scoop.
Hi Mary, what’s the scoop?
YMU is going to launch a female soccer division. We will capitalize on all the infrastructure that we have at YMU — and already put around male footballers — and apply that to female footballers, to really give them the accelerant that they deserve in their careers.
What brought on this decision?
I feel the timing is quite undeniable. Women’s soccer has always been seen as an add-on to men’s, but I think that’s now being contested. Obviously, we had a big moment with the Lionesses [England’s women’s soccer team], who won the hearts and minds of the UK, but beyond that, we feel there’s been a cultural shift and the commercial world has caught up with audiences, too. Women’s soccer is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world — the WSL is seeing record viewership and attendance.
What kind of people are you hiring for this new division?
We are looking for people who have the true interest of women’s soccer at heart, and who have a lot of commercial prowess — people who can do on-pitch deals and off-pitch deals, because we see a huge opportunity to create enormous ecosystems around these women. We want to build audiences around each player, and help them tell stories across platforms so people get to know them as human beings. That, for us, is incredibly exciting, and it taps into what we have at YMU, which is a much broader IP architecture.
I suppose that answers my next question, but how are you planning to partner with brands?
We’re not going to do it any differently than we do for any other client, which is to try to fundamentally understand what the North Star is for each client. So whatever this individual wants to achieve in five, 10, 15 years’ time — how do we help them get there? And how do we find the right brands that will be long-term creative partners rather than short-term transactional ones?
We have longstanding relationships with so many of the brands that operate in beauty, fashion, wellness, or lifestyle, so we can put a lot of these footballers sort of right in the center of that Venn diagram.
I’ve been thinking a lot myself about the conversation surrounding women at work. The world operates so differently from how it did 10 years ago.
It’s confusing because the expectations keep getting higher for women, while we are still operating in structures that were not built for us. The amount of societal pressure combined with the complete lack of support is stunning. Even with female footballers, few companies will take into account female anatomy, female hormones, all of the stuff that actually matters around how women show up on the field. We’re operating in frameworks that were never built for us, and refuse to change to accommodate us.
