elizabeth shrier

Passions for baseball and Georgetown University were the immutable forces compelling Brendan Moynihan toward a career in sports. Both were legacies from his maternal grandfather, Dr. Thomas Stapleton, a Hoya athletic legend, who later served as vice president and acting president of the New York Penn League for decades.

During family visits, Moynihan would play in Stapleton’s basement baseball museum, with a diamond on the floor and an endless collection of memorabilia. So, just as there was no choice as to which college he would attend, Moynihan headed for a career in sports.

In 2000, a family connection helped lead Moynihan into the NFL’s PR department, where he later helped train fellow Forty Under 40 honoree Matt Hill. Another Forty Under 40 member, Kary Brock, (now at Endeavor) hired Moynihan at Octagon in 2004 as an account manager, where he worked on brands including Mastercard, Computer Associates, Monster and Fidelity.

In 2007, he joined Genesco, working on its account with Motorola, then a huge NFL sponsor. He helped convince the NFL to switch from Sprint to Verizon, which was then handled by Genesco. After Verizon defected to Momentum, Moynihan worked on a Genesco team that helped land the T-Mobile business. He followed that by helping piece together an extraordinarily complex sponsorship marrying the carrier to MLBAM and MLB.

Moynihan came to Lagardère in 2014 from Genesco. Under the new Lagardère Plus setup, domestic consulting has around 60 employees and 300 globally. So the challenge Moynihan now relishes is “building something and to really define our brand in America.”

As an homage to his grandfather, Moynihan made sure that his two boys’ first sporting events were at Falcon Park, in Auburn, N.Y., where their great grandfather is on the Wall of Fame. “He’d be proud,” Moynihan said.

— Terry Lefton