Why are tennis players fixing matches?

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: Why are tennis players fixing matches?

[CLIP OF A TENNIS MATCH]

Lilah Raptopoulos
What you’re hearing is tape of a professional tennis player named Nicolás Kicker playing at a tournament in 2015. He’s playing on a clay court, and in the video, there’s just something off about it. Neither of the players are hustling toward the ball, and they keep making really easy mistakes. The game never hits a rhythm.

Can you tell me about that match? I mean, I watched it, and it’s so lacklustre. Like, it looks kind of like they both forgot how to play tennis.

William Ralston
Yeah, it’s comical. Yeah. I mean, I mean, when I spoke to Nicolás about this, I said, well, how did you feel after the match? And I think he said to me, look how obvious it is. You have to watch the video. And yeah, you can see Nicolás throughout the whole match looking at the umpire, because I think that he knows that it’s pretty obvious.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The video isn’t just comical. It’s weird. Two top tennis players playing what looks like an amateur game. Serves are going straight into the net. Easy volleys are getting hit out of bounds. Nicolás is playing a rival named Giovanni Lapentti.

William Ralston
But it was a situation where Lapentti could not have, with respect to him, be playing any worse. But Nicolás had to try and lose this match. So he took, he had to take extreme measures that were, that were, you know, very, very obvious.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s journalist William Ralston, who recently wrote a cover story about Nicolás for FT Weekend magazine. He spent a lot of time speaking with Nicolás about the experience.

William Ralston
Immediately after the match, he told me he was in his hotel room and he was, you know, he locked the door, (inaudible) police were gonna come and get him. He was, he was panicking at this point.

Lilah Raptopoulos
There was reason to panic. The match was suspicious. And in May of 2018, after three years of investigation, Nicolás was found guilty of match-fixing and suspended from professional tennis. And William says his story isn’t a one-off. It’s a crisis of corruption in a sport that many of us think of as very elite and very buttoned up.

William Ralston
The crazy thing is that if you’re 200 in the world in almost anything, that’s in most sports, I think you’re gonna make a fairly, you know, decent living. Whereas in tennis, players they really struggle to make ends meet. It’s partly because the prize money is paltry, for lack of a better word. If players can make more money from selling the match than playing the match, there’s always going to be the temptation to match fix.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, we look at the dark underbelly of tennis, where underpaid athletes are selling games just to break even. Then we talk about vice signalling in politics with FT columnist Stephen Bush. Vice signalling is a trend that works like virtue signalling. But instead of taking an empty stand for something altruistic, it’s about taking an empty stand for something hardlined and sometimes cruel. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Professional tennis has more suspicious betting than any other sport. In many ways, it’s a perfect hotbed for cheating. It’s terrible economically for players. It’s extremely lucrative for online gamblers. And as you’ll see, there’s no easy solution.

William, hi. Welcome to the show.

William Ralston
Hello. Nice to meet you. It’s a real pleasure to be on board, and I’m happy to talk about the story.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So as we record this, we are in the last days of Wimbledon, which is a very lush event like the royal family goes, and, you know, sun hats, white linen, people drinking Pimm’s. But in your FT Magazine piece, it was very clear that is not what the majority of tennis is like. And I’m curious if you can tell me a little bit about what tennis is like in the minor leagues or for sort of the vast majority of players?

William Ralston
Yeah, this is, it’s one of those funny sports that there is this real contrast between what you see on the television and on at the lower levels. And when I say the lower levels, I mean anything below the top 100-150. While prize money keep, continues to go up at the top levels, I think the winners take £2mn this year, you know, at the lower levels you’ve got thousands of players struggling to make a living. And it’s also because expense is so high. These are, they’re all self-employed and have to cover rackets, stringing . . . Once you come back from many of these tournaments, you know, they’re lucky to have broken even, and that’s if they win the tournament. I think that it’s very important to stress that the actual standard tennis at 200 in the world. If you were Nicolás Kicker was when it when he took the, when he took the money, you know, he was, it were around 200, if you put him next to Federer, Djokovic, the top players, you won’t spot that many things that are different. I mean, they’re hitting the ball exceptionally well. The backhand is smooth. The standard of tennis at 200 is exceptionally high. But there is a huge disparity in the pay. And that’s what seems so strange to me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is a problem that continues to plague tennis. But around nine years ago, the tennis association that runs the lower leagues tried to address this disparity by selling live match data to betting houses. They wanted to raise more money to give players as cash prizes, which is good. But doing so caused other issues because live data isn’t just the ultimate score of a match, like this person won, this person lost. It’s in-game, in-the-moment data straight from the umpire as it happens. It’s numbers on every serve, every fault, every set, which means that there are tons of different outcomes to bet on. After a player loses a set, you can bet that they win the next one. You can even bet on the number of games they’ll win within that set. That kind of data is a fixer’s dream, and because the lower leagues of tennis aren’t televised and there’s only one person per team, it’s harder to police. So when the league started selling that data, corruption ran rampant. Within four years, the number of suspicious match alerts at the futures level increased from three to 240.

William Ralston
The actual number of suspicious match alerts increased massively. As soon as they start selling this data. It’s the, it’s the live in-play betting that’s the problem here. That’s what it enables, the live in-play betting, the serves, the double faults, the, you know, all these, all these continuances. That’s the problem, and that’s what this live data selling enables.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Interesting. So the Tennis Federation does it because it helps them make money, but it actually ends up hurting the players in some ways because .

William Ralston
Well, yeah, it does. It does sort of hurt the players, but it also allows them to offer some prize money.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

William Ralston
But they’re also not generating, they’re not offering enough prize money to remove that temptation.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right . . . 

William Ralston
So . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
For corruption.

William Ralston
You either . . . Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There are two options. You either stop the data selling altogether, which is one possibility, which might remove the opportunity.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

William Ralston
And that has many flaws. Or, you offer more prize money, and you remove the temptation for players to sell a match. But at the moment, they’ve fallen in between this and that’s where the problem lies.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, wow. OK, that’s fascinating.

William Ralston
So if you can’t remove the temptation, can you remove the mechanism? And that’s where this live data sale comes in.

Lilah Raptopoulos
This kind of granularity is what made that game that Nicolás fixed so obvious. To make $15,000, he just needed to win the first set, then lose the following two. But to understand what made him do it, you need to know a little more about him. Nicolás’s story is the perfect illustration of this problem: a talented player who is struggling to make ends meet.

William Ralston
I remember that his dad told me when we were in Paris together that he was a, he was a warrior on the court. Where other players win the, win the point in one or two shots, Nicolás would use five. He was, he was a clay court warrior. But it was very clear that he had talent, and Nicolás would trouble his tournaments, which are in the middle of nowhere. You know, they are, they are pretty haunting places in the, you know, if you go to them. And he used to sit there with Bastian. His kid used to be sleeping, asleep in a pram by the, you know, by the side of the court.

Lilah Raptopoulos
In 2015, Nicolás was in debt. He was 22. He had a young child to support. Touring and coaching costs were so high that his father had remortgaged their family home three times and his mother had taken on extra work shifts to support him.

William Ralston
He’s travelling more frequently. Yeah, and he’s having good results, but still losing money. And I think that he, I think that there is obviously a frustration, a pressure on him to sort of pay something back. But I think there was also an anger, frustration, because this sport that essentially would not, would not pay him enough.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Around that time, a fixer contacted Nicolás on Facebook and offered him the deal. This deal was about double what he would have made by winning the tournament, and Nicolás was feeling desperate.

William Ralston
A fixer said to him that because you had lost to Lapentti early on in the season, nobody would suspect that you would sort that you’d fix this match. I think the line he used to me was, was that, you know, I felt like an angel and a devil on my back. You know, obviously, his moral compass is saying, I can’t do this. But obviously the other side of it is that, you know, I have, I have a family to provide for.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So Nicolás took the offer. That day, he played Lapentti, and he deliberately lost.

William Ralston
And at the end, I think in the final game, I think he hits three, three returns into the net, and they’re all carbon copies of each other. And I don’t care how you are feeling in that day, a professional tennis player is not gonna do that. But he was just, I think it was just sheer desperation. I think that, you know, you’ve got this strange situation where Nicolás has to lose and yeah, he just cannot lose. I don’t know. I don’t want to speculate, but I think you have to wonder what would have happened to him, because, you know, whoever was paying him was, you know, there’s a lot of money on the line.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
In the months that followed, an investigation began against Nicolás. He continued to play throughout it. It’s kind of a tragic story, really, because three years later, in 2018, when he was found guilty, he was finally breaking out of the lower leagues.

William Ralston
Nicolás at this point was at the peak of his career. He’d gone to the Australian Open in January and it got to the third round, which was a fantastic result. And then he arrived in the, at the clay court Grand Slam of the year, the French Open. You know, essentially, this rising talent, so to speak, you know, everyone was excited about him. And then when he was travelling from Lyon to Paris for the French Open, he’d received a phone call from the Tennis Integrity News, it was, it was at the time, basically saying that, you know, you’ve been found guilty and said, listen, you’re thrown out of the tournament, you can’t play at all. So, you know, it is like somebody that fall off a cliff at this point.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Nicolás was given a six-year ban from tennis and a $25,000 fine.

William Ralston
It really polarises people whether you know, is he an offender who should be barred from the game full stop or should he, should he be treated with empathy, given that he’s, you know, a victim of, it appears, a broken system . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah . . . 

William Ralston
People desire to gamble.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well . . . 

William Ralston
It’s just this very funny thing. How do we treat criminals? Do we, should we give him a second chance because he’s a criminal, he’s an offender? But does he deserve a second chance? My feeling is that there is, there has to be a degree of empathy there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I felt very sympathetic to him.

William Ralston
So did I. Yeah. But it’s the same, it’s the same with money crimes, though. I mean, people don’t tend to become a criminal in many cases. They sort of fall into them by mechanisms, by circumstance. And that’s what Nicolás is. I would never, ever justify what he’s done. But I think that once you’ve provided some context, I think you’d probably see it from a very different lens.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Since Nicolás was banned, sports betting has boomed in the US. So if the system hasn’t changed, are there just gonna be more Nicolás Kickers?

You know, on the betting side, the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting in the US in 2018 and so the industry has been booming over here, and I think it’s expected to bring in $8bn annually soon.

William Ralston
Wow.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m curious, William, I guess what the solution is. You know, like will professional tennis ever be able to be sustainable for people who are under, you know, 100, top 100?

William Ralston
No. It’s definitely not pushing in the right direction. The big question I have in my mind, and I keep on going back and forth with is, is that live data sale. I mean, I don’t think you can remove the temptation enough to eradicate match-fixing. I think you can probably make it less of a temptation, but I don’t think you can eradicate it. As I said, the independent review, after analysing it carefully, they recommend that they should remove the data sale, that the actual damage that it causes the player actually outweighs actual benefits it gives in terms of income. When I put this to the ITF and also to Sportradar, they both came up with the same argument, which was essentially that if you don’t do it officially, then in essence you’ll have courtsides, which is people who go to matches and, you know, create the data themselves and sell it on.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

William Ralston
One of the key ways that you ask to catch players in match-fixing is by betting alerts, is you rely on the actual betting houses to actually alert you to . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

William Ralston
 . . . to strange movements and the odds. If you aren’t doing this officially, then you’re not gonna have those alerts, in which case all this match fixing might go underground. And that’s one of the cases that the Sportradar and the ITF did make. So the strategy is actually to essentially allow this betting to go on, to allow the data sale and then to use some of that income to essentially police it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. And their way being sort of to focus on the stick versus the carrot, right, like to focus on the fines and the bans?

William Ralston
Totally. That’s exactly, that’s a good way of putting it, yeah. It’s a very risky strategy because you are essentially saying, acknowledging that this is always gonna go on.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Nicolás was able to shorten his suspension to just three years. He returned to the sport in 2021. So, William, where is Nicolás Kicker now? What’s going on? Is his career kind of been ruined by this or is he still going?

William Ralston
Nicolás is currently, he is trying to qualify for Roland-Garros. That’s why I visited him in the French Open. He played really well. I mean, he was, he was playing against a player who has much higher ranked than him. So, yeah, he’s is still floating on the top 200. I mean, he’s basically, he’s actually right where he was when he accepted the, you know, the money.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.

William Ralston
And the question is, can he get back to the top again? I mean, there’s no doubt he’s very talented, as you know, very driven. But it’s not very easy to find your way back to the top after taking three years out of the game.

Lilah Raptopoulos
William, thank you so much. This was really fascinating.

William Ralston
Thank you very much for your time.

[CLIP OF A TENNIS MATCH]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Boris Johnson
Hi, folks. Tonight, I’m here in Lydd in Kent, where I’m looking at a new operation to try to stop illegal people trafficking.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That is none other than Boris Johnson, the outgoing UK prime minister, speaking this past April, talking about the Conservative government’s current resettlement policy. The policy is very controversial.

Boris Johnson
Today, what we’re saying is if you come here illegally across the channel, if you’re one of these able-bodied young men under 40, which overwhelmingly who they are, then you will be relocated from Dover, from this country to Rwanda.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You heard that right. The resettlement plan is to deport refugees who land on UK shores to Rwanda. So far it hasn’t worked.

Stephen Bush
If they are found not to have a legitimate reason to seek asylum, they will be sent back to their home country. And if they are found to have a legitimate reason to do that, they will be told they have to stay in Rwanda. Now, the thing about this policy is that, it doesn’t work, right?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Stephen Bush
It doesn’t stop people making the journey. When Save Israel tried to do this in the ‘90s, people just started making the journey again from Rwanda. But the purpose of it is to, is to give conservative MPs something to say when their constituents say, I am angry about these boat crossings.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Stephen Bush. He is a political columnist at the Financial Times. And he’s talking to me about Boris Johnson, because this is a great example of something Stephen has been seeing a lot in politics these days: vice signalling. You’ve probably heard the term “virtue signalling”. That’s when someone makes a gesture or says something to seem virtuous but then doesn’t follow through on it. Vice signalling is the opposite. It’s when people just say they’ll implement an aggressive policy to look tough and to appeal to voters, even if they have no plans to do it.

Stephen Bush
I would say it’s an example of saying something outrageous to indicate to a group of voters that you are on their side.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Stephen recently wrote a magazine cover story about this for the FT. It’s in the shownotes, and I had questions. So I invited him on to talk through it. I should also say that this conversation was recorded as Boris Johnson’s government was falling apart, but just before he resigned.

Stephen, hi. Welcome to the show.

Stephen Bush
Hi. Thanks for having me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you recently wrote a piece about vice signalling for the Weekend magazine, which I loved. And I’m curious first, like, what motivated you to write this piece? Like, how did you start to notice “vice signalling” as a term and a thing?

Stephen Bush
So before I was at the FT, I was solely covering UK politics and I think the thing that I had started to notice is that there’s always an element in democratic politics and there’s sort of stuff you do and say that you don’t actually intend to implement. And then there’s the stuff that you try and implement. But the thing I had really someone to notice about the difference between Boris Johnson’s government and the two Conservative governments which preceded it, was that it has achieved essentially nothing in office.

Lilah Raptopoulos
There are a few things Boris Johnson has done in office. He led Britain out of the European Union. He made some choices about Ukraine that were positively received. But Stephen thinks that’s about it. And this may sound familiar. According to Stephen, another classic version of vice signalling was Donald Trump’s pledge to build a wall. During his presidential campaign, Trump said that he would erect a wall between the US and Mexico to keep migrants out, and he would get Mexico to pay for it. That also didn’t work.

Stephen Bush
In the end, he erected something like 80, 80m if that (laughter) of new wall, right. Yes. Yeah, Mexico did not pay for a single inch of that wall, but it was about signalling to a group of voters, look, I’m on your side. I’m anti-immigration, too.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Both Trump’s wall pledge and the Rwanda policy sound unusually cruel and very unrealistic. They both feed into people’s fears around immigration, and neither of them have actually happened. But the problem with vice signalling is not just that it can be cruel. It’s that ultimately, if you keep making promises and failing to deliver, your voters lose trust in the whole political system.

Stephen Bush
Although voters tell pollsters they like the Rwanda policy, they still say they don’t trust the conservatives to deal with the problem as they see of boat crossings. And by making a big song and dance of it, all it really does is it goes, we’re not dealing with this problem. We’re not dealing with this problem. Politics doesn’t work, and that hasn’t really helped anyone. Part of politics is signalling to people that you’re on side and you share their values. But the bit which really matters is then getting stuff done. And I do think in particular in a UK context, we have entered this sort of slightly weird performance on stage where everything is done to signal positioning and in the end you go, wait, what have we done in office? Answer: Not very much.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Vice signalling isn’t just happening in politics.

I’m wondering if outside of politics, if there are places where you see vice signalling.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. There are . . . I think you can think about any number of, you know, corporations which, you know, perhaps they market themselves as sort of, you know, kind of well, we’re really hard-edged. We’re tough. We don’t, you know, we don’t respect any of these sort of modern liberal fads. And then if you look at, say, the HR policies of the average rightwing media outlet or somewhere which markets itself to, you know, socially conservative voters, then oh, you’re like, oh, this looks like a thoroughly modern corporation with the same (laughter) same set of behaviours as everyone else. It’s not like if you walked on around the set of Top Gun, you would be meeting a radically different set of people than you would on the, you know, the set of any other Hollywood blockbuster.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So vice signalling and virtue signalling are opposites, but they’re also sides of the same coin. They function in a very similar way. It seems like the thing that unites vice signalling and virtue signalling is that they’re both kind of empty gestures.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. And I think the other thing which unites them is, as well as being of them being empty gestures, that what . . . the mistake I think lots of commentators have made with virtue signalling is to dismiss the underlying political demand that leads to it, right. They go this is just virtue signalling. So. Well, OK. Yes, it may be virtue signalling when a big corporate company, which has a terrible record on, you know, equal pay for women or medical benefits for same-sex couples, puts a rainbow flag as its logo. But the political demand for equal pay and the quality of medical and workplace benefits is a real and tangible demand.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Take a recent controversy with the Disney Corporation. Earlier this year, Florida introduced legislation that opponents are calling the “don’t say gay” bill. It’s a law that tries to restrict talking about sexual orientation and gender identification in schools. And Disney, in an effort to placate everyone, totally botched its response. I put a good piece about this in the show notes. Can you describe for those who don’t know what happened with Disney?

Stephen Bush
Right. Yes. So with Disney, there is a, ironically it’s, (inaudible) say, of both virtue and vice signalling, which is that (laughter). In recent years, yeah, the criticism many people in the west have is that Disney has been willing to kind of gently hint that some characters might be gay or have prominently diverse casting. But then when they are marketing those overseas, you have scenes get, go missing or they’re right in the corner. So there’s a same-sex kiss in the . . . yeah, blink (inaudible) and you’ll miss it, same-sex kiss in one of the final scenes of The Rise of Skywalker, for example. You have black characters who aren’t on the magazine. And essentially Disney has ended up in a situation where many of its workers and creatives go, you keep cutting our LGBT content. You’re not a serious ally on this, and you’re not being sufficiently vocal in opposing what the Florida government is doing in our own neighbourhood, as it were, because that was one of the boxes and various other bits of the Disney Corporation. And Disney’s ended up in a situation where they have a large number of quite unhappy employees. But many Republicans in the state of Florida and elsewhere think that they are a socially liberal company that then won’t get its beak out of politics. And I think, you know, whether you think that characterisation of Disney is fair or unfair, I think it is a good example of how if you signal something about yourself and you do not deliver it to the people you’re signalling it to, they get cross. They make more demands of you and you end up instead of having the benefits of the signal, you just have a lot of people who don’t trust you, and a lot of very difficult to resolve dilemmas and conflicts.

Lilah Raptopoulos
As of now, Disney has self-corrected by taking a stand. It’s decided to keep the same-sex kiss in its new film Lightyear. And in turn, it’s been banned in 14 Middle Eastern countries, and it’s unlikely to play in China.

Do you think that virtue signalling is not as bad? Like, my sense is that, I mean, at least in virtue signalling, it’s taking a stand for good (laughter)? Yeah, what’s your thought on using virtue signalling and vice signalling comparing them to each other?

Stephen Bush
Well, so I guess I think they’re equally bad. The problem with sort of the politics of signalling full stop is that it is making a promise that you either don’t intend to keep or you’re not willing to exert any actual energy to keep. And I think that is, that is bad in of itself, because it leads to both unreasonable expectations, delusion with the political process, delusion with corporate processes. It’s just bad because it increases the number of people who are anti-system. And as we’ve seen throughout the world, the growing number of anti-system voters is deeply destabilising and sometimes has really catastrophic consequences for the ability to achieve this stuff. I also think actually the added thing about virtue signalling is it often becomes a substitute for arguing for virtue in and of itself.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. To go back to the rainbow logo, it goes from a, look, we have this logo and that’s a substitute for arguing for, you know, the right to love and indeed not even just a love to, you know, sleep with wants and never call whoever you like. (Laughter) And it’s actually pretty important that people argue for virtues in of themselves and don’t just signal to them.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. You know, we spoke, Stephen, to the author Dan Brooks a few months ago. He’d written this piece for FT Weekend about morality in the Twitter era. And it was about how it’s like hard to live an entirely moral life. And we’ve gotten very good at giving moral instruction on Twitter for how not to be. But in turn, we’ve kind of forgotten how to be good people, that it’s easier for us to point out what’s wrong than to do what’s right. And there seems to be something similar happening here.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. I think that is exactly right. And there’s . . . there is something about social media that makes it A, easy to say something is bad and also makes it easier to hold people to a standard we know that they can’t ever meet. All social change does broadly start with people being able to, I was about to say, admitting they’re wrong. Actually, a lot of the time it involves allowing them to change their mind without ever actually having to use the words “I was wrong” and just be reintegrated into the new consensus because the killer app of democracy is its ability to error correct, right? And if you make it really fraught for people to error correct, really fraught for people to go, I did that and I shouldn’t have. At a personal level, that’s not a nice way to live. But at the societal level, I think it’s only if you allow people to kind of make amends and not feel they’re going to be kind of hauled over the coals, well, you, broadly, you’re gonna be a tolerant society.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I agree. Stephen, thank you so much. This was fascinating.

Stephen Bush
Thanks for having me.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. Next week we are looking at a new obesity drug coming to market and the questions it raises with global pharma correspondent Hannah Kuchler. And we’re answering all the questions that you sent me on fashion, personal style and how to build a wardrobe you don’t have to think about with fashion editor Lauren Indvik. Please keep in touch with us. We love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. On social Media, the show is on Twitter @FTWeekendPod, and I’m on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. I am always asking questions and posting stuff that feeds into the show on my Instagram. Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes alongside a link to the best offers available on a subscription to the FT. That includes 50 per cent off a digital subscription, which is quite good and a very good deal on FT Weekend in print. Those offers are at FT.com/WeekendPodcast. Make sure to use that link. Another thing to let you know about, we are gearing up for the annual FT Weekend Festival in London, which is gonna be on Saturday, September 3rd. As usual, it is at Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath. We have Nadiya Hussain, The Great British Bake Off winner. We have novelist Ali Smith and Monica Ali. We have therapist and friend of the podcast, Esther Perel. I will be there interviewing Jamaica Kincaid, as will so many of my colleagues that have been on the show. You can buy a ticket at FT.com/FTWF for FT Weekend Festival. I’ve got the details and a discount code in the show notes. I am Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my world-class team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our assistant producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Niamh Rowe is our intern. Zoe Sullivan is our contributing producer. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer with Cheryl Brumley as our stand-in executive producer this week. And special thanks to Renée Kaplan. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.

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