Octagon divides into eight sections

Octagon, the world’s second largest sports marketing company, has restructured into eight major divisions after Advantage and Alan Pascoe International (API) were merged and folded into the company.

The divisions will be: consulting, personality and athlete management, rights sales, event management, TV production, signage sales, licensing, and one other division which has yet to be announced.

John Perera and Mike Burton, who will jointly manage the new company, released a memo to staff yesterday morning. It sketched out the eight divisions and confirmed three heads of the sections.

Ian White, a director at Advantage, becomes head of the group’s event management.

Paul Vaughan, who was head of consulting at API takes over this role for the group. And Clifford Bloxham, from Advantage, and Geoff Irvine at API, will become joint heads of athlete and personality management.

Octagon represents the interests of personalities and sports stars such as Gareth Southgate, Michael Chang, Michael Aspel, and Darren Gough. It looks after the sports strategies of companies including McDonald’s, Allied Dunbar, and Lucozade.

Octagon employs over 700 people worldwide in 14 countries, and has annual billings of 500m.

In comparison, Mark McCormack’s International Management Group, the largest sports agency in the world, claims yearly billings of 1bn.