My first one was a Performa 6100. I have never used anything else since.

I remember Steve Jobs leaving the first time. Then came Sculley, Spindler, Amelio. In 1997 Steve came back and led the company until his death. A year later I saw the iMac in a store in San Francisco. Not an Apple Store, those didn’t exist yet. Standing in front of it I knew Apple was saved and could only go up from here. That also led me to buy Apple stock. I sold it two years later because I needed money for furniture when my wife and I moved in together. Today I could probably buy the whole apartment with it 😊

Fifteen years ago Tim took over and grew annual revenue from 108 billion to 416 billion dollars. From tomorrow on, John Ternus runs Apple.

So who is he?

A mechanical engineer from the University of Pennsylvania, class of 1997. He swam for the university team. His senior project was a mechanical feeding arm for quadriplegics, controlled by head movement. Before Apple he built VR headsets at a small company called Virtual Research Systems, which is a funny detail now that Apple sells one.

He joined Apple in 2001 on the product design team and started out on the Cinema Display. VP of hardware engineering in 2013 under Dan Riccio (then head of hardware). His first time on an Apple stage was WWDC 2017 in San Jose, introducing the iMac Pro, back when keynotes were still live. iPhone hardware in 2020, Apple Watch in 2022, the design teams last year. By the time the board named him in April, he was already running the products behind roughly 80% of Apple’s revenue. Twenty-five years at one company, and one job before that.

What is his plan for the next years?

We won’t see major product changes overnight. But the leadership team will look different within months. Jeff Williams (COO until 2025), Luca Maestri (CFO until 2025) and Alan Dye (VP Human Interface Design) are already gone. Phil Schiller (Apple Fellow, App Store) and Kate Adams (General Counsel) are expected to follow. Johny Srouji (now Chief Hardware Officer) has taken over hardware, and Laura Legros (former VP Hardware Engineering) came back from retirement to report directly to Ternus. Building his own bench is exactly what Tim did in 2011. You will see Ternus in the products two or three years from now.

Every die-hard Apple fan is waiting for true innovation. I want that too. I also want the products to keep developing at the level they have reached over the past years.

Looking forward to his first keynote next week. And who knows, maybe Apple brings the in-person keynote back. There are rumours pointing that way. I would love it, including a “one more thing”.

Thanks, Tim.

PS: More on alker.io and don’t forget to follow me on LinkedIn.

Apple has put a 512GB machine on sale and said plainly what it's for: running large language models on your desk, with nothing leaving the room.

Not quite yet, though. The new Mac Studio ships September 22 with up to 256GB. The 512GB version follows in late October, at a price closer to €20,000, probably above.

You will not be running Claude or ChatGPT on this machine. Both live off subscriptions, so their best models are never going to be something you download. What runs locally are open-weight models: Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Mistral, Llama, Google's Gemma. You download them and they sit on your drive.

The bet is about being close enough. On coding and reasoning benchmarks these models are now within a few percentage points of GPT and Claude. On the hardest problems the closed models still win, and probably will for a while.
Going local means your data stays with you, you pay once instead of per request, and it works offline. The price is five figures up front and a bit less capability.

Does it make sense for me?
Not today. I work alone, my subscriptions cost a fraction of that machine, and writing and strategy is exactly the work where the closed models are still ahead. But it might become relevant. Privacy concerns keep growing, and I expect more and more companies to start requiring this.

Read strategically, Apple is staying out of the race for the best model and selling the hardware the winners will run on.

By the way, these are the final two product announcements under Tim Cook. John Ternus takes over next week, and Cook is leaving him the iPhone stage. Excited to see if the foldable iPhone will be something I'd actually want to use. Not too sure about it yet.

Thanks for reading! More on alker.io and don’t forget to follow me on LinkedIn.

Jürgen

Technics SL-1200 always meant so much more to me than a record player.

Jam Master Jay, Terminator X, DJ Jazzy Jeff. Those were the three I listened to over and over. All of them on 1200s.

It was so far out of reach. Too expensive. And I felt very far away from ever being a DJ myself.

One good friend had two of them. We went over to practice. I had my issues touching them. They felt too precious to me.

None of this was planned. Technics built the SL-1200 in 1972 as a hi-fi turntable. The pitch dial was there to correct rotation speed, not to match beats. DJs used it anyway. Technics engineers went to clubs in Chicago and watched what people did with the thing. The MK2 from 1979 was built around what they saw. Every model since has been a careful update of the same machine.

Now Technics has announced a 55th anniversary edition. Based on the MK7. Gold anodised tonearm, gold platter rim, gold knobs, an engraved serial number on every unit. 12,000 units worldwide in seven colours, shipping from September.

Today it would feel strange to start DJing. Maybe I still will. But probably with a cheap electronic setup. So the 1200 stays an object of desire for now.

I post the series on LinkedIn too. Follow me there so you don’t miss anything.

The nine parts laid out the how. Purpose and the second education to know what you are building and to learn fast enough to build it. The inventory, positioning, the network, and the platform to turn what you already own into something durable. Partnerships and capital to fund it and structure it. Tools for turning a playing career into a company that outlives it.

But the tools were never the point, and it would be a poor reading of this series to walk away with a spreadsheet and a content calendar and nothing else. Strip all of it back and one thing is left.

Football gave you something most people never find. A thing you would have done for nothing. A thing you gave everything to, that got you out of bed to train before anyone was watching, that hurt when it went badly because it mattered that much. That is not a job. That is passion, and you had it early, in full, and probably without ever having to search for it. It found you.

The quiet tragedy of most sporting careers is the belief that it only comes once. That football was the great love, and everything after is administration.

Protect the money, fill the calendar, show up to the odd panel, stay busy. A managed decline dressed up as a second act.

That is the belief this whole series exists to break. The real work of the second career is not to replace the income. The income is solvable, and Part 9 showed how. The real work is to find the next thing you can chase with the same hunger. The task that earns your obsession and not merely your time. Most people never get one such thing in a life. You have had one already, which means you know exactly what it feels like, and you are one of the few people equipped to recognise it again.

Everything else in these ten parts serves that search. The network widens the number of worlds you can look in. The learning lets you understand them once you find them. The positioning, the platform, the partnerships, and the capital buy you the freedom to look without desperation, and the runway to build once you have found it. Money is the by-product of doing that well. Passion is the point. Get the order right and the forty years after football can matter more than the fifteen before.

So the instruction at the end is the same as the one at the start, only clearer. Do not ask how to stay relevant, or how to monetise your name, or how to fill the time. Ask what you would still play for if no one paid you and no one watched. Find that. Then use everything you built while the game still had you to build the company around it.

The whistle has gone. Ninety minutes was only ever the game. The next match is the one you choose for yourself.

That’s the series. Ten parts, start to finish.

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The job during the earning years is not only to protect what comes in. It is to route a deliberate share of it into the thing that keeps paying after football stops.

Build two buckets, and keep them separate on purpose.

The first is the base. Boring and safe by design. Diversified, dull, protected, the part that guarantees you never have to make a desperate decision later. This is the floor, and the point of a floor is not that it makes you rich. It is that it lets you take real risk on top of it without betting your family’s security. Most of the standard advice for athletes stops here, at building a solid, defensive base, and it is correct as far as it goes. It just is not the whole thing.

The second is the build. The new thing. The company around the purpose from Part 2, funded deliberately from the earning years rather than from whatever happens to be left over, which is usually nothing. This is the bucket almost no player fills. They build the base, protect it well, and step into retirement with a comfortable floor and no idea what to do while standing on it.

So decide the split on purpose. A fixed share of active earnings routed into the build every single year, treated as non-negotiable as a mortgage payment. Not the surplus, not the leftovers, an allocation made before the money can disappear into lifestyle. Most players invest zero of their active income into their own second career, and are then surprised when there is nothing there to step into. The base protects the past. The build is the only thing that funds the future, and it has to be paid for while the income still exists.

There is a well-trodden version of this that stops halfway. Allocate capital into other people’s companies. Become an angel investor, spread money across a stack of startups and a few funds, and call that the second career. It works, and it is a disciplined way to build the base. But it is still an investor’s path, and it leaves the harder half undone. This series argues for something adjacent and more demanding. Not only putting money into companies other people built, but building one of your own around a purpose that is yours. Allocation secures the floor. The build is the point, and the build is the part the standard playbook leaves you to figure out alone.

As the build grows, something changes in what you are. You are no longer one person with a side interest. You are a small company, and you should structure yourself like one. A team around the athlete, someone on capital, someone on content, someone on the build itself. A holding structure that separates the secure base from the risk-taking build, so a bet that goes wrong on one side never threatens the floor on the other. And above all of it, a single objective that everything points at.

That objective is where the whole series has been heading. One aim above the parts, that the positioning, the platform, the partnerships, and the capital all serve. Not a revenue target. The task worth the next forty years, the one from Part 2, now funded, staffed, and structured to survive the end of the career.

Ninety minutes is the game. But the game was never the whole point. It was the window. The most valuable capital you will ever hold, open for fifteen years if you are lucky, closing whether you use it or not. Spend it as a product and you get a good living and an empty afterwards. Invest it as a company and you get a task worth doing, people worth doing it with, and money as the thing that follows rather than the thing you chased.

The window is open now. Build.

Tomorrow, here on Substack: Part 10, what all of this was for.

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The other takes a smaller fee and a slice of equity. Ten years later one of them has a memory and the other has an asset. Same deal on the day it was signed. Opposite outcomes over time.

This is the shift the whole part is about. From a rate card to a cap table. From being paid to appear, to owning a piece of what you help build. Most players live their entire commercial life on the rate card, trading their name for a fee, campaign after campaign, and wonder at the end why none of it added up to anything they still own.

Start with how you choose deals, because that is where most of the value is won or lost. Choose by fit, not by cheque. A deal that fits the positioning from Part 5 compounds the position and makes the next deal easier and more valuable. A deal that pays more but muddies the position costs more than it pays, because it sets back the one asset you are trying to build. The biggest cheque is very often the most expensive deal you will ever sign, and learning to see that is most of the discipline.

There is a compounding loop here worth naming. A sharp position attracts better partners. A better partner is a better fit, so the work strengthens the position instead of blurring it, and a stronger position then draws the next partner up the ladder. Fee first breaks the loop, because the biggest cheque is usually the least aligned with what you are building. Fit first turns each deal into an investment in the next one, which is why the fee can never be the only number that matters.

Then structure. Equity over fee, wherever the company is one you would back anyway. The fee is spent and gone within the quarter. Equity is a bet on something you can move with your attention and your access, which means you are not a passive endorser hoping the company does well. You are a distribution asset the company would pay a fortune to acquire if it could, and the right structure prices that in as ownership rather than renting it from you one post at a time. You bring something most cap-table investors cannot, so you should be on the cap table.

Learning deals are the third category, and they matter most early. Sometimes the right structure is a smaller cheque and a seat close to people who are building something well. The access and the education from Part 3 are worth more at that stage than the fee, particularly before the positioning is paying its own way. Proximity to good builders is a form of compensation that does not show up on the invoice and outlasts anything that does.

All of this requires preparation, which is the part players skip. Treat partnerships the way a good investor treats deals. Understand the company, the founder, the category, before you sign anything. Say no to most of what comes in, because the ability to decline is where positioning is enforced. The deals you say yes to should each move the position forward and, wherever possible, hand you a piece of the upside rather than a one-time cheque.

Most players optimise the cheque and retire with a folder of old campaigns. The ones who took equity retire owning pieces of companies that keep working after the whistle. Same deals, same years. The only variable was the question they asked before they signed.

Tomorrow, here on Substack: Part 9, how to fund the company while the contracts still pay.

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It is a lease, and the landlord is an algorithm that can change the terms overnight, without notice, and without owing you anything. Most players have built their entire public presence on rented land and never noticed, because the rent has been cheap so far.

The distinction that matters is ownership. The follower relationship on any social platform belongs to the platform, not to you. The email address belongs to you. This sounds like a small technical point and it is the whole game. The single most valuable thing a public figure can build is a direct line to their audience with no algorithm sitting between them and the people who chose to follow. Everything else is borrowed.

Which means you have to stop measuring by follower count and start measuring by what each channel does. Follower count is the vanity number, the one that feels like progress and mostly is not. The useful question is what job each channel performs, because they are different tools and using them interchangeably is why most players’ output feels like noise.

Instagram is the brand surface. It is where the aesthetic lives, where the visual argument for who you are gets made. TikTok is reach and culture, where new people find you at all. YouTube is depth, the one place you can say something longer than a caption and let people get to know how you think. LinkedIn is business and network, where the founders, investors, and operators from Part 6 spend their time, and the channel almost every player ignores at exactly the moment it would serve them most. And the newsletter is ownership. It is the one relationship you keep if every platform disappears tomorrow.

The self-investment point from Part 5 returns here, because this is where it gets expensive. A platform run properly is a media operation, and media costs money to make well. The player who refuses to pay for an editor, a photographer, a writer, and still expects the output to look expensive for nothing, has the rental mindset from Part 5 pointed at his own channel. Owned media is a company line in the budget, not a hobby you fund with whatever attention is left over after training. The production quality is the positioning made visible. People read the craft as a signal of how seriously to take you.

The method follows the parts before it. Pick the channels that fit the positioning from Part 5, not all of them, only the ones that serve the category you chose. Own the endpoint, driving everything toward a channel you control, an email list above all others. Invest in the craft, because on a crowded feed the production quality is often the only thing separating you from ten thousand others saying similar things. And choose consistency over intensity, because a channel that shows up for three years quietly beats one that shows up brilliantly for three months and then goes silent.

Rented reach ends the moment you stop paying rent in relevance, and relevance is the one currency you are guaranteed to run short of eventually. Owned audience is yours after the career, which is precisely the moment you will need it most.

Tomorrow, here on Substack: Part 8, from a rate card to a cap table.

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Most players only notice the door exists on the day it shuts behind them.

Access is the fastest-depreciating asset you own. The money can be protected. The story can be built. The access has a clock on it that starts running the moment you are no longer relevant, and it runs quickly. Which means the work is simple to state and hard to do. Build the relationships while the door is open, long before you need to walk through it.

Start with the distinction that everything else depends on. A contact is a number in a phone. A relationship is someone who would take your call in five years, when you are no longer useful to them. Almost every player confuses the two. They have a phone full of contacts collected at events and dinners, and they mistake the volume for a network. Then the career ends, they start reaching out, and they discover that a contact who owed you nothing and heard from you only when you needed something is not a relationship at all.

You build the second kind by being useful first, when you need nothing in return. The transactional networker asks for something in the first meeting. The compounding networker gives for a year and asks in the second. An introduction between two people who should know each other. Attention on something someone is building. A connection made with no scoreboard attached. Founders in particular remember exactly who helped them before they were worth helping, and that memory pays out for decades.

This connects directly back to the second education. For you, the network is not only access and deals. It is the university. The room is where you learn, and the people in it are the faculty. So building the network does double duty in a way it does not for most people. Every relationship you build teaches you something now and compounds into access you will want later. That is a rate of return on relationships that few other paths offer, and it is available to you because of who you are while you play.

Build it around the right thing. Founders, operators, investors, creators, people outside sport, gathered around the purpose from Part 2 rather than around deals. This matters more than it sounds. A network assembled around deals dies the moment the deals stop, because it was never a network, only a series of transactions. A network assembled around an interest keeps producing for the rest of your life, because the interest does not expire when the contract does.

The method is short. Keep one list of people you would want to know in ten years, chosen for who you would want beside you later rather than who is useful now. Give first, consistently, with no scoreboard. Meet in person wherever you can, because both the signal you send and the learning you take are higher in a room than in a message. And tend the few relationships that connect you to everyone else deliberately, because a small number of people are the difference between a network that opens the whole world to you and a phone full of numbers that go nowhere.

Most players spend their access, one meeting at a time, until it runs out. The ones who last invest it, quietly, into people who will still pick up the phone years after they stop being useful. Build it before you need it, because it cannot be built after.

Tomorrow, here on Substack: Part 7, why your million followers are a lease, not an audience.

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A footballer with a following expects a fee for a single post and calls it a partnership. This is the reason so few of them ever build a brand that outlives the career.

Positioning costs before it pays. You fund it yourself first.

This is the part most players refuse to accept, because everything in their career until now has worked the other way around. They were paid to show up and perform, and the performance was the product. Positioning is not like that. It is a deposit you make into your own future, before anyone reimburses you, and whoever treats themselves as a rental never builds an asset. The rental gets paid per use and owns nothing at the end of the lease.

Understand what a position is, because most players get this wrong in a specific way. It is not “footballer who also likes fashion,” or design, or wine, or cars. That is a hobby with a follower count attached. A position is a category you can credibly own. Narrow, specific, defensible. The player who knows one domain, cares about it, and shows up in it consistently for three years owns something. The player who posts across ten interests to keep every option open owns nothing, because a position that is not narrow is not a position at all.

The narrowing is the hard part, and it is where the self-investment shows up most clearly. Positioning means spending your own money on your own brand before a single sponsor pays you for it. Paying for the photographer, the editor, the site, the writing, the time. Treating your own positioning as the first company you ever invest in, and funding it accordingly.

Most players will spend without hesitation on cars and watches and holidays, and nothing at all on the one asset that could carry the next forty years. They will pay for things that depreciate the moment they are bought and refuse to pay for the thing that compounds.

The method follows from the earlier parts. Take the thread from Part 2, because purpose gives the position its direction. Then narrow it until it is uncomfortable, down to one category rather than five, because the discomfort is the signal that you have committed to something real. Fund it before it pays, with a budget line for your own brand treated like a business investment rather than a vanity spend. And then show up consistently for years rather than months, because positioning is a deposit that only compounds if you keep making it.

A clear position also does something you cannot do alone. It attracts better partners, and the right partnership feeds back into the position instead of only into your account. That loop is the subject of Part 8, and it is the reason the size of the fee can never be the thing you optimise for.

Here is the trade the whole part turns on. The fee is the small money. It arrives now, it feels good, and it is spent and gone by the end of the quarter. The position is the large money, and it arrives later, and only if you paid in first. A player who chases fees for a decade retires with a stack of receipts. A player who funds a position for a decade retires with an asset that keeps paying long after the last whistle.

Monday, here on Substack: Part 6, the door that closes the day you stop playing.

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On the second, everything you own that could still be working for you at fifty. Most players have never written either list, which is exactly why they spend the depreciating assets and never build the durable ones.

Here is what belongs on the lists.

Attention. Your reach, your followers, the fact that media covers you at all. This depreciates with relevance. It is at its peak now and it will fade, slowly at first and then quickly, from the day you stop playing. The move is to convert it into something you own before it fades, which is the subject of Part 7. Right now, count it honestly. How many people can you reach, and on whose land do they live.

Access. Who picks up when you call. This is worth more than the money and almost nobody tracks it. Write the honest list. Not the people you have met once, the people who would take a meeting because you asked. That list is an asset with a market value most players never calculate, and it shrinks fast once you are no longer useful to the people on it.

Story. Your specific path. The place you came from, the setback you came back from, the particular shape of your career. Not the highlight reel, the story with the losses left in. This is the one asset that does not depreciate. Handled well, it gets more valuable with time, because a story with distance and reflection is worth more than one told in the moment. Almost no player treats their own story as an asset to be built rather than a thing that simply happened to them.

Time. This one is counterintuitive. During the season you feel time-poor, and in the daily sense you are. But step back. You have structured months, a real off-season, no second job, and a support system most founders would envy. Compared to someone building a company with a mortgage and three co-founders and no safety net, your time is far freer than it feels. The players who build during the career are not the ones with more time. They are the ones who saw the time they already had.

Capital. The money the contracts pay. This gets its own treatment in Part 9, because how you split it between securing a base and funding a build is the difference between two entirely different futures.

Now do the exercise, in writing, once. For each asset, three numbers. What is it worth now. What is it worth in ten years if you do nothing. What is it worth in ten years if you invest in it deliberately. The gap between the second number and the third is the entire argument of this series, made personal and specific to you.

The reason to count is that most of these assets are sitting idle. A player with four million followers and no owned channel, no email list, and no clear position on anything is a company with enormous distribution and no product. The distribution is worth a fortune and expensive to acquire, and he is letting it depreciate because he never counted it as an asset in the first place.

The parts that follow are all about conversion. Positioning turns attention into a category you own. The network turns access into relationships that last. The platform turns reach into an audience that is yours. Partnerships turn all of it into ownership. But conversion has a precondition. You cannot convert what you have not counted.

Tomorrow, here on Substack: Part 5, why footballers expect to be paid before they have built anything.

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The years at university, the apprenticeship, the first ordinary job where you slowly learn how the working world runs. The day school ended, you went pro.

This is the real education gap, and it is not about the classroom. Most players never study and never train for a trade, not because they could not, but because the moment school ends the career begins and there is no room left for anything else. Your peers spent the next five or ten years learning how organisations work, how money moves, how to be junior at something and get better at it. You spent them becoming excellent at one game. That is not a deficit of intelligence. It is a deficit of exposure, and exposure can be rebuilt.

Here is the reframe. Your second education starts now, and it does not look like school.

There is no syllabus, no exam, no certificate at the end. It runs on people, on rooms, and on questions. And unlike a degree, you cannot outsource it or shortcut it. You cannot buy back at thirty-five the years your peers spent studying and working while you played.

What you do have is an advantage no ordinary student has. Access. You can sit across a table from people who know things, people that other learners would spend a decade trying to reach. That access is the raw material of the fastest education available to anyone, and most players waste it on small talk.

So treat every room as a classroom. The founder, the investor, the operator across the table knows something you do not. Your job in that room is to extract it, not to impress them. Ask the question you are slightly embarrassed to ask. Ask how the thing works, where the money comes from, what they got wrong the first time. The player who asks the basic question in the meeting learns more in an hour than the one who nods along protecting his image.

Read, but understand that reading is the smaller part. The skill that compounds is not information. It is the capacity to learn quickly from people who are ahead of you. That is trainable. Curiosity is a muscle, not a temperament. You build it by keeping a running list of things you do not understand and deliberately hunting down the person who does.

The trap for athletes specifically is the instinct to project competence. In elite sport, showing weakness gets punished, so you learn to never look like you do not know. In learning, that exact instinct is fatal. The willingness to look like the least knowledgeable person in the room is the entire mechanism. The players who transition well are almost always the ones who got comfortable being the student again, at an age when their peers were still pretending to be the expert.

This is why the network part matters as much as it does. For most people a network is about access and deals. For you it is also the university you never attended.

The conversations are the curriculum. The people you build relationships with are the faculty. Build the network right and you are not only buying yourself future access. You are enrolling in the only school that will teach you what you need for the second career.

Tomorrow, here on Substack: Part 4, the assets you already own and keep leaving idle.

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What dies is not you. It is the role. For fifteen years the answer to the question of who you are was printed on the back of a shirt. The number, the position, the club. When that is taken away, most people discover they never built an identity underneath it.

They were the role, completely, and now the role is gone.

The instinct at that point is to reach for a new shirt as fast as possible. Entrepreneur. Investor. Founder. A new label to replace the old one, so the question of who you are has an answer again. This is positioning without purpose. It produces a brand with no spine, a confident answer to the wrong question. You can spot these people easily. They have a title and a deck and no idea what they are for.

Purpose is almost never a business category. It is a human thread that runs under the football and usually predates it. The place you came from. The community you belong to. A craft, a question, a kind of person you keep being drawn to. The thing you cared about before anyone paid you to play, that never fully went away even when football took up all the room.

You find it by subtraction, not addition. The wrong question is what you should add to football to build a second career. The right question is what is left when you remove football entirely. Take away the game and the money and the status, and see what you still care about when nothing depends on it. Whatever survives that subtraction is the thread. It is usually quieter and less impressive than the label you would have reached for, and it is the only thing worth building on.

This is why the work happens at twenty-three and not thirty-three. At twenty-three you can follow the thread slowly and cheaply, with no pressure for it to replace an income, and you can be wrong a few times without cost. At thirty-three you are choosing a second life in the emotional state of grief, under financial pressure, which is close to the worst possible condition for a clear decision. The players who transition well almost always started while it felt completely unnecessary.

The method for finding the thread is not a strategy offsite. It is curiosity about specific people, specific places, and specific problems.

Follow what you keep returning to when no one is watching and no one is paying.

The people who do this best never had a brand strategy. They were curious about particular people and places, and let the work follow the curiosity instead of chasing it. Football can be the entry point into that curiosity rather than the whole of it. The game gives you a reason to be in a room. The purpose is what you do once you are there.

Everything that comes later in this series depends on this part being right.

Positioning gives your purpose an edge. The network gives it people. The platform gives it a voice. Partnerships and capital give it fuel. All of it points somewhere, and this is where it points. Build the positioning before the purpose and you get a sharp answer to a question that was never yours. Get the purpose right and everything downstream finally has somewhere to go.

Tomorrow, here on Substack: Part 3, the education you never had time for, and how to build it now.

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Then the window closes. The question is not whether it closes. The question is what is still working for you on the other side.

Most of the advice aimed at athletes treats you as a product. Something to be marketed, rented, and sold while demand is high. Sell the shirt. Sell the boot deal, the appearance, the post. Maximise the rate while the rate is maximal. None of that is wrong. It is just small. A product gets consumed. A company compounds.

During your active years you generate four kinds of capital. Most players liquidate three of them the moment they arrive and never build the fourth.

Attention. People listen to you. Cameras point at you without being asked. Most players treat this as something to cash out one post at a time. It is a distribution asset, and it is worth the most on the day no one is obligated to point a camera at you anymore.

Access. You can get a meeting with almost anyone. Founders spend years trying to reach the people who would take your call tomorrow. That door is at its widest while you play, and it narrows quickly once you stop.

Capital. The money the contracts pay. This is the one most people do think about, usually defensively. Park it, protect it, do not lose it. That instinct is correct but incomplete. Money is also fuel.

Clarity. Knowing what you would build if football disappeared tomorrow. This is the one almost nobody builds during the career, and the one that takes the longest. It cannot be bought at thirty-four in a hurry.

There are two problems every athlete eventually has to answer. Money and identity. The money problem has known solutions. Advisors, family offices, diversified portfolios, an entire industry exists to help you solve it, and the good ones do.

The identity problem has no such industry. Almost no one builds you a system for working out who you are and what you would make when the game is gone. That is the gap this series is about. The money problem is handled. The identity problem is the one that decides whether the money ever means anything.

There is a reason to start now, while you are still playing, and not later. Everything here is easier to build while the career is live and nearly impossible to build well after it ends. Attention is highest while you are relevant. Access is widest while you are useful to other people. Capital is largest while the contracts run. And clarity takes years, which means the only sane time to begin is when it feels least urgent.

Most players get this backwards. They wait until the career is ending to think about what comes next, at exactly the moment every one of these assets has started to depreciate. The head start is the whole advantage, and almost no one takes it.

This is the first of ten parts. Each one stands alone. Together they describe how to build a company around an athlete, where the athlete is the founder and not the product.

• Part 2, Purpose before positioning. Who you are when the coach no longer picks you.

• Part 3, The second education. The years your peers spent studying, you spent going pro. This one runs on people, not classrooms.

• Part 4, The inventory. The assets you hold while you play, most of which you are not using.

• Part 5, Positioning. Not “footballer who also likes X,” but a real category. Why it costs before it pays.

• Part 6, The network. Building the graph outside sport. Give before you take.

• Part 7, The platform. Social as owned media, not vanity. Each channel a different tool.

• Part 8, Partnerships as capital, not fees. Moving from a rate card to a cap table.

• Part 9, Capital and the company. Securing the base and building the new thing on top of it.

• Part 10, Full Time. Why all of it exists to help you find the next thing you can chase like you chased the game.

One thing to be clear about from the start. The goal is not to extract the maximum amount of money from your purpose. That approach produces people who are rich and lost. The goal is to find a task worth doing for the next forty years. Money is the by-product of doing that well. It is not the reason to do it. Get the task right and the money follows. Get it backwards and no amount of money fixes it.

The window is open now. Ninety minutes is the game. This series is about everything after.

Tomorrow, here on Substack: Part 2, who you are when the coach stops picking you.

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Hypebeast, the streetwear and culture publisher, just wrapped a year-long touring project called the Hypebeast Cup. It started in Shanghai in March with a small-sided street tournament, three players a side, and a Nike Football exhibition in the middle of it. It ran through Singapore and finishes in New York with a month-long hub that puts football alongside retail, gaming and craft, open while the World Cup is on.

Nike and Jordan are in the room, the jerseys everywhere. The shift is who holds the space. A media company built it and decides what the game sits next to, a publisher whose audience came in through fashion and sneakers, now treating football as one more of those scenes.

For a long time the football “product” you could buy was made by the kit and boot brands. The culture around it, the music, the way a city dresses on a match day, mostly happened on its own, off to the side.

Hypebeast is building that off-to-the-side on purpose. The game becomes the anchor in a space that also holds gaming, design and a shop. For the reader who came to football through fashion rather than results, that’s the appeal: the game shares a room with the rest of their taste.

It’s early. One brand, three cities, a tour still finding its shape. Whether the New York hub draws the people it’s built for or just the people already holding tickets is still open. But the direction is clear: the most interesting football spaces this summer are being hosted by people who don’t sell the kit.

ALSO ON MY RADAR

New Balance is running rolling pop-ups through Boston, Los Angeles, Miami and New York, with live podcast recordings inside them, and a New Balance x Stone Island piece that reworks 90s football style rather than just reprinting it. Another brand building a room for the game instead of only selling the shirt.

Loewe’s design duo Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez dressed Spain’s men’s and women’s squads in their travel outfits, the clothes a team wears to and from the game. The wardrobe nobody used to look at is now a fashion-house brief.

KidSuper, the New York designer who shows at Paris Fashion Week, brought his label’s world to Miami for the World Cup, treating the tournament as a stage rather than a sponsorship slot. A fashion name walking onto football’s biggest week on its own terms.

Gareth Bale was named a partner in Juggernaut Diversified Sports, a private-equity platform going after control stakes in clubs, leagues, women’s sports and youth platforms across North America and Europe. The retired player is moving from endorsement income toward owning the assets.

The Kings League, Gerard Piqué’s small-sided, made-for-streaming football format, says its 2026 World Cup Nations event drew more than 120 million cumulative livestream views across 40 games, with a US launch lined up. The creator-led version keeps growing right next to the real thing.

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Jürgen

Puma’s World Cup didn’t lead with the shirt players actually play in. It arrived in chapters.

The federation kits landed in March. Then on 4 June came the part with a designer’s name on it: a collaboration with Salehe Bembury, the man behind some of the most chased sneaker collaborations of the last few years (New Balance, Crocs, his own label), covering travel wear and goalkeeper kits for the 11 national teams Puma sponsors, among them Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Portugal.

Travel wear is the clothing players wear arriving at the tournament and moving between matches. Bembury reworked Puma’s KING line, the brand’s old football tracksuit, plus lifestyle jerseys, tees and shorts, and grounded it with a shoe, the Velum 1, finished so it changes colour in sunlight. He drew a separate visual code for each country off its landscape and architecture, so the Swiss keeper gets a grey mountain on black and Portugal gets pink covered in his swirling lines. Puma threw a launch in downtown LA the day after.

The match-shirt conversation belongs to adidas and Nike. Of the 48 teams, adidas dresses 14 and Nike 12; Puma has 11. And on the shirt a player actually wears, there’s very little daylight between any of them on look or tech. So Puma made a deliberate choice. Instead of fighting on the shirt, it went after the parts of the kit nobody guards.

The goalkeeper shirt has always been football’s odd licence, the one place loud design is allowed, going back to Jorge Campos painting himself into the 90s in Mexico. And the travel wear, the fit a player wears walking off the team bus, has turned into its own genre, photographed and picked apart like a runway. Arrival outfits get their own posts now.

Puma turned both into product. It took the margins of the kit, the keeper and the commute, and made them the design story, then hired someone the sneaker world already trusts to sign it. SoccerBible made the case back in May for why football needed a designer like Bembury, someone whose instinct comes from outside kit design. This is Puma acting on it. The match shirt stays locked and federation-controlled. The clothes worth talking about moved to where the rules are loose.

Whether it sells is a separate question. Prices run from about $60 to $240, and a goalkeeper shirt is a narrow thing to hang a fashion line on. The logic still travels, though. When the headline product looks the same across all three brands, the design value leaks to the edges, and that’s where a brand without the biggest cheque can still say something.

I’d watch whether adidas and the federations start treating travel wear and keeper kits as a named-designer slot by default. Bembury’s name does something a media budget can’t, and Puma spent it on the parts of the kit everyone else leaves alone.

Also on my radar

• FIFA’s music move is a three limited-edition Rolling Stones vinyls and a remix on the official album. For a World Cup hosted across North America, where reggaeton and hip-hop own the host cities, the soundtrack’s headline act is a 60-year-old British rock band. Read that as a hedge.

• Sergio Ramos launched a clothing label, ONE, around mid-June, limited runs with New York designers. A late-career player building an owned brand instead of renting his face to one.

• Highsnobiety and Umbro UK dropped a limited collection reworking Umbro’s vintage football look, built around the debut boot of a new turf-boot line (boots made for artificial pitches) produced in Sheffield, Umbro’s first performance footwear made in England in years. A culture publisher designing the kit, and a heritage brand bringing manufacturing home.

• Eleven Premier League clubs carried betting brands on their shirt fronts last season, and a voluntary gambling ban lands this summer, so most are hunting replacements before August. Whoever they pick tells you which categories still think a shirt front is worth the money.

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The biggest football moment in US history is happening right now, and a set of much smaller leagues spent the last year getting ready for the same window. Baller League USA launched in Miami this spring, a six-a-side game (six players a side instead of the usual eleven) with short halves and “gamechanger” rules that flip mid-match, like 3v3 spells and double points for long-range goals. It’s run by streamers as much as footballers. IShowSpeed is league president and runs a team. Kai Cenat and xQc manage sides. Ronaldinho and Usain Bolt are in the mix, the games aired on CBS Sports, and the betting brand Kalshi is on the front of the shirts. The debut drew a sold-out room and a reported 3.5 million viewers.

The Kings League, Gerard Piqué’s version of the same idea, raised $63m in February for a US launch and is still circling it, while running leagues in Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Brazil and a new one for the Middle East and North Africa.

None of that is this-week news on its own. The reason to look now is the calendar. The World Cup is the traditional game’s once-in-a-generation shot at the American audience, and the format leagues planted themselves right next to it on purpose.

The two products are chasing different people. The World Cup gets six weeks of enormous American attention and then has to hold whatever stayed. The streamer leagues are after the audience the tournament probably won’t keep: younger, online, watching football in clips and on Twitch rather than across a full 90 minutes. They’re building the watching habit year-round, through people who already have the audience, instead of hoping a summer converts anyone.

The format leagues understood early that distribution is the contest. A streamer with millions of daily viewers is a broadcast channel, a sponsor sales team and a youth-marketing department in one person. Putting IShowSpeed in charge buys the pipe to an audience the traditional broadcasters keep struggling to reach.

What’s still open is whether any of it sticks once the novelty wears off. Baller League USA had a loud first season. The honest test is the second one, and whether the numbers hold when the streamers move on to the next new thing. The World Cup will hand the US game a huge, brief crowd this summer. The quieter question is who’s set up to keep them watching in September, and the format leagues have a clearer answer to that than the sport’s incumbents do.

ALSO ON MY RADAR

The football shirt trade climbed into luxury this week. Bape and KidSuper did 48 country-themed Bape Sta sneakers, Stone Island and New Balance brought back a technical capsule built on 1990s football, and Loewe and Drake’s Nocta joined in. The jersey now sits in the luxury and high-end streetwear category rather than the team store.

Fashion houses are putting footballers at the centre of their campaigns. João Neves fronted Ami Paris, Lewandowski took the lead in a Mackage campaign, Lamine Yamal became a global ambassador for American Eagle, and Mbappé ran in Dior’s summer campaign. Brands are paying for the player’s audience, and the sharper players are starting to price that for themselves.

FIFA sold out its global sponsorship packages, with the cycle reported around $2.8bn against roughly $1.8bn in 2022. A 48-team tournament across three countries is the most valuable single ad slot going right now, which is why every culture play this summer aims at the same window.

The money isn’t only coming from kit makers. Visa launched “Tap In” with Jason Sudeikis, Lamine Yamal, Erling Haaland and Christian Pulisic, and by media mentions Adidas and Bank of America led the sponsor field, level at roughly 14,000 each, with Coca-Cola, Visa and Hisense each past 8,000. When a payments brand and a bank are as loud as the boot brands, a distinct cultural angle is worth more than budget.

Puma went big and a little wild. Reporting says it tripled its World Cup marketing spend versus 2024, took Portugal off Nike, and used AI in parts of its kit design, all under a “Go Wild” campaign aimed at Gen Z. Spend buys visibility, though owning a culture format tends to outlast a campaign.

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Jürgen

Chelsea signed a partnership with Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment company, to grow the club in the United States. The first visible piece was the 2026/27 kit launch, run more like a music release than a normal reveal: celebrity teasers in the run-up, and a one-off shirt co-branded with Roc Nation and signed by DJ Khaled.

The timing isn’t an accident. The World Cup is in the US this summer, and Chelsea wants more American attention before it arrives.

The deal itself is fairly simple. Chelsea wants more American fans, and Roc Nation is good at reaching them, so the club is leaning on a music and culture company to do the part it isn’t built for.

The interesting bit is the method. For years a club grew abroad by winning, getting on TV in more markets, and selling shirts off the back of it. That still works at home. In the US, a lot of sports attention runs through music, celebrity and social feeds, and that’s the room Roc Nation works in. The DJ Khaled shirt and the celebrity teasers are Chelsea borrowing those tools.

It’s easy to overstate this, so I won’t. Chelsea is still a football club. It’s renting some cultural reach for one market at one moment, with the World Cup about to put American eyes on the game. A few other clubs are circling the same idea.

The part to watch is whether it feels real or bolted on. Borrowed culture can land, or it can read as a logo dropped onto someone else’s moment.

ALSO ON MY RADAR

Five more moves this week:

• adidas and Nike both dropped their World Cup films this week. adidas, which paid to be the official sponsor, answered with a polished, star-packed film (”Backyard Legends”). Nike, on only 12 of the 48 teams and not a tournament sponsor, ran a looser campaign and drew more of the conversation. The brand paying least for official status is getting the most talked about.

• Japan put Hello Kitty on a World Cup collection, with a pop-up running 12 to 25 June. Character licensing is a steady money line in football, and Japan does it better than most.

• Just Women’s Sports raised a fresh round led by David Blitzer’s family office. Money’s moving into women’s sports media while the audience is still being priced in, which is usually the calmer time to move.

• Salesforce became an Official Tournament Supporter of the men’s 2026 and women’s 2027 World Cups, putting its AI tools and Slack behind tournament operations across the host cities and part of fan engagement. Worth noticing who runs the back-end of a World Cup now: the same enterprise software that runs big corporations.

• Pro:Direct and Nike turned 21 Mercer Street, the old NikeLab in New York, into House of Merc, a football space built around the Mercurial line with two months of product drops and community events through the World Cup. It’s a store used as a campaign that runs all summer, not a one-week stunt.

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Jürgen

Nike’s headline launch for this World Cup is a collection called X2, and it barely touches a match. It’s a fashion line, built to be worn off the pitch: seven countries at the tournament, each paired with a fashion label from that same country.

England with Palace. France with Jacquemus. The Netherlands with Patta, Canada with Drake’s NOCTA, Nigeria with the artist Slawn, South Korea with G-Dragon’s PEACEMINUSONE, the US with the Virgil Abloh archive.

The hero piece is a sneaker called the Cryoshot. Nike pulled famous boots from its archive (the Tiempo ‘94, the Mercurial Vapor R9) and sealed the studs inside a clear sole, so a real football boot turns into a street shoe you can actually walk in. $210 a pair, already reselling for four figures before it’s even out.

It drops 11 June, the same day the tournament kicks off.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENS

Everyone’s going to write about the designers and the resale prices. That’s the easy half. The part that matters is the charities.

Each of the seven countries is tied to a real youth sports charity: England with Football Beyond Borders, France with Sport dans la Ville, Canada with Canadian Women & Sport. And the deal goes further than a donation. The charity’s logo goes on the warm-up shirts the national teams actually wear on the pitch before kickoff, and Nike says it’s a long-term commitment, not a one-off cheque.

That matters because Nike is selling a hyped fashion launch off a tournament it doesn’t own, in the loudest brand summer of the year. The charities are how it does that without looking like it’s just cashing in.

For thirty years a brand bought its way into football by sticking a logo on a board. That still gets you seen. It doesn’t get you trusted, and trust is what makes a kid save up for the shoe and a parent feel fine about it. Tying the launch to local youth clubs is Nike trying to buy that trust.

Whether it works comes down to one thing: did they put the years in. The brands that pull this off build with these communities long before they sell anything off them. Carhartt sat inside workwear and skate culture for decades before anyone called it fashion. The ones that bolt a charity on in June, grab the quick lift and vanish in August, get found out fast. My read: this one’s mostly real, with a thin layer of World Cup opportunism on top.

ALSO ON MY RADAR

Five more moves this week, one line of read each.

• adidas leaned on grief, launching the F50 “El Ultimo Tango,” a Messi signature framed as his last World Cup boot. When the products converge (the Nike and adidas packs look almost identical this year), the story carries the gap: adidas is selling the end of an era while Nike sells the start of a trend.

• Kith, adidas and Messi built a whole capsule around his career, reissuing the 2006 F50 and the COPA Mundial as collectibles. Messi licensed his whole timeline here, the career as a catalogue, and every tier-one player’s agent just took a note.

• Stephen Curry signed a reported 10-year, $400m deal with China’s Li-Ning that lets him sign his own athletes under Curry Brand. The athlete as a sub-brand that recruits other athletes is the model footballers keep circling. Watch for the first European player to ask for roster rights, not just a signature shoe.

• Ampere projects FIFA’s 2026 sponsorship haul near $2.4bn, up about 37% on 2022. The finance desks will all quote the number. The thing under it: $2.4bn still only buys logos, which is exactly why the smart brands are paying extra for the charity layer and the culture collab on top.

• FIFA and Lenovo handed all 48 teams the same generative analytics tool, plus AI avatars and sensor balls. When everyone gets the same brain, the edge moves to whoever owns data nobody else has. The next moat in football is proprietary data, the stuff you collect yourself.

That’s it for today.

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Jürgen

Friends, clients, hosts when they introduce me at events. “Jürgen knows everyone.” Every time I feel a bit awkward. I just know the people I know, and I stay in touch with the ones I like and whose work I’m curious about.

That doesn’t seem like a special skill to me. If you want to be successful in business, don’t you just need a lot of good and trusted relationships?

But it keeps coming up, and I still try to figure out what’s supposed to be so special about it. So here’s my attempt to unwind what I think good networking actually is.

A lot of what gets called networking is just selling with extra steps. Someone you’ve met for ten minutes asks for a call. The call begins with small talk and ends with a pitch. The relationship has a function from the start. That isn’t networking. It’s selling.

I never worked that way. My driver has always been curiosity about the person. Their interests, what they’re working on, what’s keeping them busy.

What I think I’m actually good at is seeing connections. I keep noticing two people I know who should know each other, because something useful would happen if they did. So I make the introduction. I’m the enabler.

I also often see something the other person doesn’t see yet. Once in a while I’ll send a link that fits what they were working on. Or I’ll point them to someone else I know who once dealt with the same thing.

The idea is to share ideas and to give for a long time before ever asking for a favor. I don’t expect anything to come back.

If you do that for years, you eventually get recognized as the person who builds bridges, the person around whom things happen that wouldn’t have happened without those bridges.

My biggest reward is when something actually happens after bringing two people together. Honestly, when it works, that on its own makes me happy.

I think I learned this without noticing. My father ran a restaurant in a big hotel. He gave as a host, every night, for decades. By the end he knew most of his guests well. When I worked there during school holidays, I was surprised that he just knew everyone who walked in.

I’ll dive deeper into this over the next weeks. If there’s anything around networking you’d like me to take a closer look at, let me know.

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Jürgen

These shoes aren’t here to improve your body. They are here to unlock your brain.

Targeted at elite athletes, the goal is to reach the next level of focus. The promise is strange but simple. This shoe forces you into the “now” by distracting your feet so intensely that your brain has to zone in.

How It Works: A Circuit Breaker for Your Brain

The innovation is in the sole. It is built with 22 independent foam nodes instead of a flat rubber slab.

As you walk, these nodes move independently like piano keys. This instability creates a flood of sensory data from your feet to your brain. To process this “noise,” your brain is forced to switch off the “Default Mode Network” (anxiety and distraction) and switch on the “present moment.”

It acts as a circuit breaker for your internal chatter. It grounds you by making the act of walking just complicated enough that your subconscious cannot ignore it.

The Bigger Picture: Halo Innovation

Does Nike expect to sell millions of these? Probably not.

This is a classic “Halo Product.” Critics have argued Nike became boring and relied too much on retro releases. The Mind 001 proves they are still building the future. They even started a “Mind Science Department” to do it.

The fact that we are discussing their innovation rather than earnings means the strategy is already working.

Nike knows science alone does not sell.

Streetwear legend Hiroshi Fujiwara recently teased a Fragment Design version of the Mind 001. This ensures the shoe is viewed as futuristic industrial design, not just a medical device.

If he designs something, you can bet sneakerheads around the globe will wear it. No matter if it actually helps their brains.

Is it a medical breakthrough or a marketing masterclass? It is likely both. But for the first time in a long time, Nike is making us think.

Link to the officlal Nike press release

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Jürgen