Firm Friends
Between Law, Capital and Sport – Ciaran Fitzgerald-Morgan, SVP, TEAM Marketing
Sport was Ciarán Fitzgerald-Morgan’s first ambition, though it never quite behaved. His Steiner school banned football, dashing his Premier League dreams, so his childhood ambitions were rerouted into junior county cricket – an early reminder that careers rarely travel in straight lines. A year in Melbourne aged 19 provided the necessary reality check: “I bowled leg spin. Within minutes of competing with my Aussie peers it was clear I wasn’t a rarity or the new Shane Warne,” he says. That early brush with professional sport didn’t deliver a contract, but it left him with something that would shape the rest of his working life: a taste for competitive environments, international horizons and the quiet discipline of figuring out what comes next.
From accounting to law
In 2008, he began his BA in English Literature and History at the University of Leeds, graduating top of his year in 2011. The post-financial-crisis job market funnelled him into KPMG’s graduate programme. It was, he recalls, a “strictly pragmatic choice”, but one that gave him a grounding " in how businesses actually operate and the economic realities that sit behind them”. He soon realised he preferred to analyse, rather than audit. A two-week vacation scheme at Ashurst (discreetly disguised as a visit to his family in France) led to a training contract and a return to formal legal study in 2013 in preparation for life as an international lawyer.
Ciarán joined Ashurst in 2015. At first, he worked on the landmark Hinkley Point C transaction and soon worked across Corporate Transactions, Derivatives, before relocating to Tokyo to work on cross-border M&A deals in Asia. This was followed by a year in London, where he focused on private equity, ECM and M&A work – experience that would later be his stepping stone into the business of sport.
In 2018, he moved to Hogan Lovells in Singapore to broaden his international grounding and legal practice. Nine months later, he accepted a role at sports agency TEAM Marketing AG and moved to Switzerland. “People told me I was lucky to step into sport. There was good fortune, yes, but also, as with many things, there were several years of largely unseen preparation.”
Finding the intersection between law and sport
From early in his legal career, he was interested in using his transactional skills in the sports sector. He self-funded a postgraduate qualification in Sports Law while working at Ashurst, which he finished during his Tokyo secondment. Applications to London's boutique sports law firms at the time brought polite rejections: “wrong profile, over-indexed on corporate experience”. That verdict is now looking distinctly dated in the context of an increasingly commercial sector flooded with corporate transactions on sports teams, franchises and properties.
(Ciarán (second from the right) at the Football Law Conference 2023, Manchester)
In Singapore, he joined the LawInSport network and secured a place on its mentoring scheme, where he worked with Lewis Silkin’s Alex Kelham. Her guidance shaped his thinking, and LawInSport later published his article on geo-blocking.
By late 2018, a recruitment agency introduced him to TEAM Marketing. Several interview rounds and a marathon final session in Switzerland led to an offer.
Inside the commercial engine of European football
Ciarán moved to Lucerne in 2019. TEAM Marketing (the agency famed for creating the UEFA Champions League and turning it into one of the most commercially successful sports competitions on the planet) was negotiating multibillion-dollar media rights deals on behalf of UEFA. He joined as a media rights lawyer, navigating and structuring highly regulated and complex tender processes for UEFA while working closely with the sales teams. The logic and rhythm of the rights market drew him in, as did the strategic interplay between broadcasters, sponsors, leagues and clubs.
(Ciaran (right) during his cricketing days)
Within months, he was invited to support a sales pitch in Malta. The presentation went well, and his remit expanded. By 2022, he held a dual commercial-legal role, which saw him promoted to Senior Legal Counsel while also being responsible for striking UEFA media rights deals in countries around the world.
Then came 2025. In February, TEAM announced that it had lost the Champions League mandate for the first time in its 35-year history. Many colleagues moved on. Ciarán chose to stay. “An agency doesn’t often get the chance to reconsider itself in full,” he says. TEAM’s leadership shared his view that the company needed not only to adapt, but also to rethink its model. The result was TEAM Ventures, a new business arm whose aim is to create and own IP rather than rely solely on traditional service and commission revenue. Ciaran has been appointed to serve as SVP, Capital and Strategic Partnerships, with a mandate to help steer the agency in a new direction.
“Sport is now a multitrillion-dollar asset class. Capital is entering the ecosystem with unprecedented variety and velocity, and yet the asset class is still in the early stages of development, with inefficiencies throughout the system. My role sits somewhere between translation and orchestration: aligning the perspectives of investors – some of whom are not native to the business of sport – with the realities of sporting organisations and shaping that alignment into long-term value.”
Beyond work
Now based in Zürich, Ciarán travels frequently to New York, where his partner Anneliese works in Manhattan as Director of Marketing for fashion house Markarian. He runs in the mountains (and in Central Park when in New York) and goes to the theatre, which he describes as being not unlike sport "in that it totally absorbs you as an experience and allows you to fully disconnect from the digital world”. The parallel is a quiet one: both rely on immersion, rhythm and being in the grip of a shared moment. From time to time, he also appears on the Swiss bar scene as his DJ alter ego, Cousin Greg (see below).
Connect with Ciarán on LinkedIn
