Harrogate’s Neil Tunnicliffe feels fortunate to have spent his career in sport.
From the London 2012 Olympic Games to women’s football, he has been involved.
Not as a player; rather, he has spent more than 20 years behind the scenes helping to put mechanisms in place for elite sportsmen and women to thrive.
Originally from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, Neil has spent the majority of his life north of the county after his parents moved to Goldsborough while he was studying at Oxford University.
His younger years were spent playing rugby until he suffered a dislocated shoulder.
Despite the setback, he remained involved in student rugby league and was offered a job at the Rugby Football League in 1992. He says:
“It was a role without portfolio. So I sort of floated across the business and spent time working in pretty much every department.”
Six years later, he was appointed chief executive after Maurice Lindsay left to work for the newly created Super League.
His new role gave him a grounding in elite sport as he became involved in negotiating a £26.9 million broadcast deal for rugby league with Sky and BBC.
For Neil, the negotiations with television executives were very different compared to today.
“The landscape nowadays has changed beyond recognition where you have any number of different outlets who want to broadcast sport, including online.
“Back in those days, it was relatively straight forward. You had Sky who were the new kid on the block who had the dedicated sports channel that they needed to fill with content. They were competing with three or at the most four channels in the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.
“The BBC were the longest standing partner of the game and had a real commitment to rugby league. There was a sort of ‘nice chap’ element to negotiations around that. Whereas Sky had a much more commercial approach and were much more hard headed about what they wanted from the game.”
Aiming for the Olympics
As he looked to consultancy and life after rugby league, Neil quickly realised that specialising in media was becoming a competitive market.
Instead, he looked to the National Lottery – which had not long been introduced by John Major’s government after the 1996 Olympics.
In the early 2000s, lottery funding required sports to have strategic plans in place in order to be distributed money.
Neil saw this as an opportunity to help not only sports, but also quangos such as UK Sport and Sport England.
The scheme was “relatively new”, says Neil, and sport councils were trying to figure out what to do with the funding.
“It was trial and error to a large extent across the landscape as a whole.
“But what provided a real focal point was in 2005 when London won the Olympic Games.”
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The 2012 Olympics and Paralympics in the UK capital provided an opportunity for Neil to help sports win funding in order to professionalise and put strategies in place to compete at the biggest sporting event on the planet.
Both UK Sport and Sport England saw the Olympics as an opportunity.
For Neil, much of the next seven years was spent trying to help 13 different sports, such as handball, netball and basketball, to reach the landmark event.
“They had not previously been represented at an Olympic Games because they had not qualified.
“But when you have a home Olympic games you automatically get a place there. So, we knew that there were going to be Great Britain teams in each of those sports. But you had seven years to get a team assembled and ready to compete against the best in the world.”
Neil described the process as building some of the sports from the ground up including putting strategies in place to employ coaches, sport scientists and training athletes.
The reward for the hard work was a successful Olympics for Great Britain and strategies remaining in place for those sports some 12 years later.
Women’s sport
Among Neil’s biggest achievements is his work in women’s sport.
In 2016, the FA commissioned him to carry out a review of the Women’s Super League amid concern over a lack of interest in the sport.
Harrogate’s Rachel Daly playing for Aston Villa in the Women’s Super League.
The work played into a well trodden path for Neil, who had already helped to set up the women’s netball super league as well as other reviews into participation in women and girls sport.
“We looked at the Women’s Super League and realised that a lot of its problem was that it wasn’t being taken seriously by the clubs involved in it.”
Neil’s review found that players were training four hours a week – which was the same as Harrogate Rugby Club second team schedule at the time.
He told the FA that players had to be training up to 15 and 16 hours a week, which would amount to half-time, or in some cases, full time professionals.
The result has seen the competition catapult into the public’s conscience since then, with Harrogate’s own Rachel Daly among those to thrive from the increase in interest.
‘No stone left unturned’
These days, Neil’s workload includes helping the England and Wales Cricket Board with its academy system across the 18 county championship sides.
His career has spanned multiple sports across different levels and standards. But does he feel he still has more to do?
“I think I’ve been incredibly lucky, really. I’ve been a sports fan all my life.
“When I was young, I was fascinated by the way that sport worked. To be able to have a career playing with that has been an enormous blessing.
“Looking back, I’ve worked with sports that range from large to small. I’ve worked with some of the biggest governing bodies that we’ve got and then I’ve worked with sports like Boccia and British Equestrian Vaulting and things that only a handful of people nationally do.
“I’ve worked in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland. I don’t feel there is any stone left unturned.”
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