Kamran Khan
Central Coast Mariners’ A-League Championship Victory and Pureinsights’ Connection
We interrupt this professional blog for some exciting personal news.
Congratulations to our good friend Mike Charlesworth, Pureinsights shareholder and owner of the Central Coast Mariners, a professional football team in the A-League in Australia. The Mariners won the A-League Grand Final in Sydney on June 3rd with a 6-1 thrashing of Melbourne City. Going into the match, the Mariners were underdogs so it’s quite an achievement. It was well worth my 4-day trip from the DC area to Sydney and back!
That’s me next to Mike in the photo below with the championship trophy. But there’s more to this story, and it does relate to search – and the bit of kit that Mike and I are wearing.
Pureinsights Ties to the Football Club
The CC Mariners shirt that Mike is wearing dates back to 2015, soon after he became owner. At the time, Mike was an investor in Search Technologies, where many of the executives from Pureinsights hailed from before the company’s acquisition by Accenture in 2017.
In 2015, Search Technologies actually had an opportunity to be a sponsor of the Central Coast Mariners, including having our name on the kit. Here are some photos of the jersey and the players wearing the kit in 2015.
The Mariners have had mixed results over the last 10 years and even signed Usain Bolt in 2018. While that generated some great PR, it didn’t help much with results on the pitch.
Fast forward to 2023, and here we are, celebrating an A-League Championship with the Central Coast Mariners, with owner Mike Charlesworth wearing the blue away jersey with the Search Technologies logo. I suspect if Pureinsights wants to sponsor the Mariners in the future and have our logo on display, that might cost us just a bit more.
Hopefully the Mariners’ luck rubs off on Pureinsights, and we’ll be the champions of Search and AI.
– Kam
Congratulations to CC Mariners from Kamran | LinkedIn Post