Governments need clearer tests for whether investment in sport delivers lasting returns

At a time when global attention has been fixed on football, African governments are looking beyond on-pitch performance to the economic value that sport might generate off the field. Stadiums, hosting bids, federation funding and sports infrastructure are increasingly being framed not only as cultural assets, but as tools for tourism, job creation, urban regeneration and soft power.

One nation ahead of the curve is Morocco. With the country co-hosting the 2030 FIFA World Cup, alongside Portugal and Spain, there have been sizeable investments into sports infrastructure. Through a partnership between the prime minister’s office and the Deposit and Management Fund, the Moroccan government is said to have invested large-scale funds into upgrading six stadiums in preparation for last year’s African Cup of Nations. According to Ryad Mezzour, minister of industry and trade, the economic impact on the economy exceeded €1bn, with most of the uplift generated from tourism.

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Morocco sets the pace

Morocco’s experience can offer lessons for other African economies. Nigeria is one market where the case for sport infrastructure investment is particularly strong. With 70% of its population under the age of 30, the country has a large potential base of athletes, consumers and spectators. The federal government of Nigeria has set a target for sport to contribute 5% of gross domestic product by 2050, up from roughly 1.2% today, with the sector expected to support both direct and indirect job creation.

To support this ambition, the Nigerian government passed the 2026 Appropriation Act, which included over $150m for the development of the sports industry. In terms of stadium infrastructure, ₦18.8bn ($13m) was earmarked for rehabilitation of the 60,491-capacity seat Moshood Abiola National Stadium in the capital city of Abuja. The stadium initially cost over $300m in 2003.

Returns are still hard to measure

Despite the scale of the capital deployed, real economic returns are hard to measure. In the short term, construction and rehabilitation activity of sports infrastructure should generate on-the-ground employment, which will cut across the local supply value chain. Recent data from Shehu Dikko, chairman of the National Sports Commission, put the 2025 jobs created by the sports industry at 140,000. This points to the sector’s potential but also shows how far it has to go if it is to become a serious driver of broad-based employment.

For Morocco, it is too early to see what returns the investment in the African Cup of Nations will have on long term employment. But with the country set to co-host the FIFA World Cup in 2030, there is likely to be continued investment in transportation, tourism, hospitality and football-related infrastructure, which should see an uptick in labour for the Moroccan people. Nevertheless, the Moroccan government is still under pressure to show that sports-related investment delivers real economic returns for citizens. The 2025 protests led by younger Moroccans, who called for greater investment in healthcare and education, show why the opportunity cost of stadium spending matters.

This is where the question becomes less about sport and more about public investment discipline. Stadiums can be economic assets only if they sit within a wider economic strategy. For African economies with large infrastructure gaps, public money spent on stadiums are judged against competing demands in transport, energy, healthcare and education. Sport should not be dismissed as a development sector, but governments need clearer tests for whether stadium projects can deliver lasting returns, through regular commercial use, tourism, urban regeneration and benefits that extend beyond the tournament itself.

Financing sport infrastructure

The financing model is just as important as the construction itself. Public funding may be necessary for major national venues, but governments should avoid taking on costs that could be shared with private investors or development partners. To make that possible, projects need credible revenue plans, open procurement processes and governance standards that investors can trust.

Recent developments in African financial markets show that more sophisticated infrastructure financing is possible. OMFIF’s 2025 Absa Africa Financial Markets Index notes that Tanzania issued its first sovereign sukuk to fund infrastructure and social development projects, while its Samia infrastructure bond was heavily oversubscribed. Kenya has also approved an asset-backed security to help finance Talanta Sports Stadium, an early example of structured finance being applied directly to sports infrastructure.

These examples shift the debate from whether governments should fund sport to how sports infrastructure should be financed and governed. Direct public spending may still be necessary, especially for national facilities and major event preparation. But public capital should be used to attract wider investment where possible and not substitute it.

Linking stadiums to the wider economy

For both the Moroccan and Nigerian economies, the question now is how local and foreign investors can be incentivised to participate in these investments. One way is to have sports institutions go through a modernisation process. Another is for governance and transparency to take centre-stage across all sports-related economies. Investors want an environment that creates certainty, which creates a pathway to measurable returns.

Without a closer link between the investment in infrastructure and the local commercial sporting ecosystem, African nations may see that the impact of government spending will continue to remain limited. But with better project selection, clearer financing models and stronger governance, sport can become more than a source of national pride and a serious part of Africa’s infrastructure and investment story.

Yara Aziz is Senior Economist at OMFIF and Ibrahim Musa is Managing Director of Berlin Growth Advisory.

This article was first published by OMFIF

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DAZN has a genuine competitive moat, but an unusually fragile one, every Power it possesses flows from a single source, exclusive sports rights, so they stand or fall together. The position is defensible on a 1–3-year view, conditional at 3–5 years, and fragile at 5–10. The whole thesis reduces to one event on the calendar: the Serie A renewal in 2029.

What DAZN is

DAZN is the world’s largest dedicated sports streaming platform, the “Netflix of sport”, subscription first, live sport only, no legacy pay TV bundle. Founded in 2015 out of Perform Group and backed by Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries, it streamed over 90,000 live events across 200+ markets to 300m+ regular viewers in 2024 [O], and reported FY2024 revenue of US$3.19bn, up 11% year on year [A].

Unlike a broadcaster that treats sport as one channel among many, DAZN’s entire product is sport. That singular focus is both its strategic identity and its central vulnerability.

The thesis, in one question

DAZN’s competitive position rests on one primary Power, Cornered Resource (exclusive rights to marquee sport), which enables two secondary effects:Switching Costs where it dominates, and Counter Positioning against legacy broadcasters. All three flow from the same source: the rights. Lose them at renewal and the moat collapses simultaneously. There is no residual. The entire strategic case therefore reduces to one question: can DAZN retain exclusive rights at an economically sustainable cost?

The financial stakes of that question are now quantifiable. DAZN’s FY2024 pre-tax loss was £935.6m [A], narrowed from £1.37bn in FY2023. Cumulative losses since launch exceed US$10bn [E], funded by Access, whose total investment now tops £7bn [A/O]. The moat has cost more than $10bn to build, and must be re-purchased at auction every three-to-five years.

The scorecard

Strategic value and durability are scored separately on purpose: DAZN’s strongest Power is also among its least durable, a tension a single rating would hide.

The stakes, in three numbers

• $3.19bn: FY2024 revenue (+11%) [A]

• £935.6m: FY2024 pre-tax loss; equal to 29% of revenue [A]

• >$10bn: cumulative losses over the decade, against >£7bn of Access equity [E/A]

This is the right as cost paradox in a single line: DAZN’s primary competitive advantage is also its largest cost item, and it gets more expensive at every renewal. A company that cannot afford its moat cannot defend it.

1. The Italy breakeven model

The mainstream coverage of DAZN references a “minimum subscriber count needed to cover the rights”, but no one tries to compute it. Computing it is the single most clarifying thing you can do here, because it converts the strategic tension we are currently exploring into clear arithmetic. Italy is the right test case: DAZN’s most mature market, holding its most valuable single asset, Serie A.

The verifiable inputs: DAZN pays €700m per season for Serie A across 2024/25–2028/29 [O], Italian list pricing is Start €11.99 / Standard €34.99 / Plus €59.99 per month [O]. DAZN doesn’t disclose Italian ARPU, so our model runs a band. The output is the number of paying subscribers needed simply to cover the Serie A fee, before technology, production, marketing or overhead

Subscribers required to cover Serie A rights alone (€700m/yr):

Subscribers required to cover Serie A + allocated operating costs:

Italy is estimated at roughly 2m subscribers in 2026, and we estimate it was flat in 2024 [E]. On any realistic blended ARPU, that is at or below the breakeven line for Serie A on its own, and clearly below once technology, production and marketing are loaded in. This is the concrete, numerical reason DAZN’s single most mature market still does not reliably make money, and why the group loss persists. It also reframes 2029: DAZN must either materially grow Italian subscribers or accept that its flagship asset is structurally loss-making at the current price of the rights.

Note: If ARPU sits at the high end (€29+) and subscribers recover toward 2.5–3m, Italy crosses into rights-level profitability

2. Who can outbid DAZN & why their balance sheets make the moat Irrelevant

DAZN fights three rival types with fundamentally different economics. The decisive column below is the last one: for every player except DAZN, sport is a means; for DAZN it is the end. That asymmetry decides every auction.

Head-to-head: DAZN wins exactly one Power.

DAZN’s only unambiguous win is Cornered Resource, and even that is time limited. Against Sky, its specialist focus is a real edge. Against Amazon, every structural advantage evaporates or reverses: no bundle to cannibalise (Counter-Positioning is moot), deeper scale, a stronger brand, and the ability to treat a loss-making bid as a marketing line item.

Why DAZN hasn’t won globally

After a decade and > $10bn of losses, why is DAZN still loss making and dominant in only a handful of markets? Three structural reasons:

1. The moat doesn’t travel. Each market’s rights are bought and amortised separately. Winning Italy buys nothing in Germany. Unlike Netflix, which rides one global cost base, DAZN faces a fresh fixed-cost bet in every territory, scale never compounds across borders.

2. Aggregation needs prior dominance. Switching costs require being the single destination. In fragmented markets (Germany), DAZN is one subscription among several and cannot convert presence into pricing power. Dominance is a precondition for the moat, not a product of it.

3. In new markets, DAZN meets stronger rivals with none of its own Powers active. Without an anchor right, it competes against Sky’s brand-and-bundle or a tech giant’s balance sheet as just a smaller, loss-making challenger.

DAZN’s model works only where it can corner a nation defining sport and aggregate enough additional rights to raise switching costs. That is a small set of markets, which is why “200+ countries” is a vanity metric, and Italy is the single true test of the thesis.

3. Every rights expiry is a refinancing event & 2029 is the maturity wall

If the moat must be re-purchased at auction, the auction calendar is the risk schedule. Each expiry is an event at which a Power can be lost outright.

Serie A, 2029. DAZN’s most valuable asset, in its most mature market, expiring precisely when tech giants are most capable of bidding. Retain it on payable terms and the model is validated; lose it, or retain it at a cost that makes Italian profitability impossible, and no other Power can compensate.

4. The 7 Powers, assessed

Each Power gets a verdict, the benefit/barrier logic, and a quantified proof point. A Power is rated only where the evidence supports both a clear benefit and a clear barrier. The discipline to say “Absent” is where the framework earns its value.

4.1 Scale Economies

Does DAZN’s cost per subscriber fall meaningfully as it grows?
Verdict: Moderate, sharply market-specific.

Definition. Scale Economies exist when unit costs decline with volume, giving a larger competitor a structural cost advantage a smaller rival cannot overcome without matching its scale.

Benefit. Rights fees are fixed once contracted, DAZN pays €700m for Serie A whether it has 2m or 6m Italian subscribers, so marginal cost per added subscriber is near zero. In mature markets this leverage is real and improving.

Barrier and its limit. The decisive constraint is that rights are licensed market by market. A Brazilian subscriber contributes nothing to amortising the Serie A deal. A dominant position in Italy creates scale in Italy and nowhere else, DAZN’s scale advantage is capped at the market level.

Quantifying the ceiling. The contrast with a global streamer is stark and numerical. Netflix spent ~$17bn on content in 2024 across ~279m paid memberships, roughly $61 per subscriber per year for its entire library, and about $0.36 per subscriber for a single $100m title spread globally. DAZN pays €700m for Serie A amortised over ~2m Italian subscribers, roughly €350 per subscriber for one competition. DAZN’s content cost per subscriber on a single league is on the order of six times Netflix’s on its whole catalogue. That multiple is the territory-by-territory ceiling expressed as a number.

Quantifying proof point. The breakeven model is the proof: at €25 ARPU, Italy needs ~2.3m subscribers to cover Serie A alone, against ~2m actual. Scale economics exist but have not yet crossed breakeven even in the best market, and the £935.6m FY2024 group loss, confirms the benefit is real but unrealised at group level.

4.2 Network Economies

Does DAZN become more valuable as more people subscribe?
Verdict: Absent.

Definition. Network Economies exist when a product becomes more valuable to each user as total users grow.

Assessment. DAZN’s core product has no direct network effect. One subscriber watching Bundesliga creates no value for another. FanZone and watch party experiments have not matured into a product layer that creates genuine stickiness. DAZN’s CEO has publicly described an “incredible network effect, which is unique to DAZN”, but under 7 power framework definition this does not hold: viewing is independent, not networked.

The flywheel is not a network effect. There is an indirect loop, (more subscribers → more revenue → larger bids → better content) but it turns on 3–5-year rights cycles, not real-time feedback. A revenue advantage that may translate into a better auction outcome half a decade later is categorically different from a compounding network.

4.3 Counter-Positioning

Is DAZN doing something incumbents cannot copy without hurting themselves?
Verdict: Moderate & narrowing.

Definition. Counter-Positioning exists when a challenger adopts a superior model the incumbent cannot match without damaging its existing busines.

Benefit. DAZN’s sports only streaming model is structurally incompatible with the bundle economics of Sky, Canal+ and TNT Sports. Unburdened by satellite hardware or a blended content base, DAZN can price at sports only economics; the incumbents cannot match it without cannibalising the bundle that funds them.

The hard limit. This Power protects DAZN only from incumbents with conflicting models. Amazon and Apple have no legacy bundle, no satellite base, no incentive to avoid aggressive pricing. They can replicate DAZN’s model with zero structural disadvantage. Counter-Positioning offers DAZN no protection whatsoever against technology companies.

Counter-Positioning scores “Moderate” against Sky and is moot against Amazon. As Sky Glass, NOW TV and TNT’s streaming products mature, even the Sky facing benefit erodes, hence “narrowing.”

4.4 Switching Costs

How costly is it for a subscriber to leave DAZN?
Verdict: Moderate, market-dependent.

Definition. Switching Costs exist when a customer incurs meaningful loss by moving to a competitor.

The challenge and the source. Cancelling DAZN is a single click; technical lock in is zero. The Power can only be content driven. It comes from aggregation: where DAZN holds exclusive rights to multiple sports a fan cares about, cancelling means losing all of them at once. An Italian who watches Serie A, Matchroom boxing and Formula E has no single alternative provider.

The fragmentation collapse. Where rights are split across platforms, the Power evaporates. Germany illustrates this: football is divided between DAZN, Sky Deutschland and Amazon, so no platform is the indispensable aggregator. The Power is strong in Italy and weak in Germany, from the same company.

Estimating the differential. DAZN does not publish churn by sport count, but the mechanism is estimable, and a single such figure would do for DAZN what a 127% net-retention rate does for a data-infrastructure peer. Sports OTT monthly churn for single competition subscribers typically runs in the mid-single digits and falls materially for multi-sport bundles. A reasonable working estimate is that an Italian watching Serie A plus boxing plus a third sport churns at roughly half the rate of a single-sport subscriber. The figure is illustrative and flagged as such, but the direction is the point: switching costs here are a function of aggregation breadth, and are therefore something DAZN can deliberately engineer market by market.

The cleanest external proxy would be the churn differential between single-sport and multi-sport subscribers, which DAZN does not disclose. What is verifiable: despite raising Italian pricing to €34.99, DAZN held a paying base in its aggregated market while subscriber numbers were flat in 2024, retention consistent with aggregation-driven switching costs, but not strong enough to drive growth through a price rise.

4.5 Branding

Does the DAZN brand command a premium or trust advantage?
Verdict: Weak.

Definition. Branding as a Power exists when reputation creates durable preference beyond the product’s functional attributes.

The diagnostic. In sports streaming, the content is the brand. The test is simple: if Serie A moved to a rival, would Italian subscribers follow DAZN, or follow Serie A? Unambiguously the latter. DAZN’s base is held by content, not brand. Early brand building was even hampered by pronunciation confusion (“da zone” vs “dah-zone”) that absorbed marketing spend into awareness rather than equity.

Context, not failure. Compare Sky Sports’ thirty years of “Soccer Saturday” and “Monday Night Football” equity. DAZN has built nothing equivalent, appropriately, for a young platform prioritising rights over brand. But it means there is no brand cushion if a flagship right is lost.

Brand awareness tracks rights, not strategy: DAZN is strong in Italy (where Serie A drives saturation advertising), moderate in Germany and Japan, low elsewhere. The absence of pricing power, flat subscribers after a 75% Italian price climb to €34.99, is the empirical tell that brand is not yet a standalone moat.

4.6 Cornered Resource

Does DAZN control scarce assets that others cannot access?

Verdict: Strong, but structurally contingent.

Definition. A Cornered Resource is preferential access to a coveted, scarce asset rivals cannot obtain on equal terms.

Benefit. Sports rights are a textbook Cornered Resource: there is only one Serie A. While DAZN holds the exclusive licence, no competitor can replicate it by spending on product, engineers or UX. The Matchroom boxing deal deepens this, a promoter-level partnership, not a fixed-term licence, creating mutual dependency (Matchroom’s distribution is built around DAZN), which is more durable than a simple tender.

The equity-alignment question. The strongest rights moats are defended not only by contracts but by ownership: where a league holds equity in its distributor, every renewal converts from an auction into an aligned-interest relationship. DAZN has no such alignment with its flagship leagues, Lega Serie A is a counterparty, not a co-owner, and re-tenders every cycle. The Matchroom partnership is the closest analogue DAZN possesses, and the strategic question it raises is whether the model can be replicated beyond boxing: equity or revenue-share alignment with a federation, or anchor-investing in a league’s media vehicle, to turn at least one football renewal from a bidding war into a partnership. Today DAZN cannot point to a single such structure in football, which is exactly why Cornered Resource scores High value but only Medium durability.

The durability problem. Unlike a patent (fixed expiry, un-buyable before it lapses) or a brand (compounds with investment), sports rights must be re-won repeatedly, in open competition, at rising prices. The resource is cornered today and gone the moment DAZN loses a renewal.

The cost trajectory is the proof and the warning: Serie A was reported at ~€700m/season in the current deal, with a revenue-share that can lift Lega Serie A’s total above €960m [Official]. Holding the moat cost DAZN >£7bn of Access equity and >$10bn of cumulative losses. A company that cannot afford its moat cannot defend it.

4.7 Process Power

Verdict: Moderate and growing.

Definition. Process Power is embedded operational capability, in culture, workflows and institutional knowledge, that delivers sustained superior execution rivals cannot quickly copy.

The real candidate: production expertise. Over nine years DAZN has learned to present 20+ sports across 10+ markets with distinct cultural registers, how to stage boxing for a UK vs US audience, how to run 380 Serie A matches a season with differentiated studio shows. Sky took thirty years to build comparable depth; DAZN compressed the curve. This tacit knowledge is genuinely hard to replicate with capital alone.

Honest discount. DAZN’s streaming technology is competent but not class-leading, Amazon’s infrastructure is superior. Treat the tech layer as table stakes; the production and rights-structuring capability is the differentiated asset.

Sizing the B2B hedge. The monetisation opportunity is concrete, not hypothetical. The global sports outsourced-production and broadcast-services market runs into the low tens of billions of dollars annually, and specialist providers, IMG’s production arm, NEP Group, have built substantial businesses on precisely this capability. If DAZN converted even a fraction of its production and rights-structuring expertise into B2B revenue, production-as-a-service for federations, content licensing into markets where it holds no distribution, deal-architecture consulting, even a few hundred million dollars of auction-independent revenue would meaningfully offset rights inflation. And every such dollar is structurally worth more than a subscription dollar, because it does not evaporate when a renewal is lost.

Process Power is DAZN’s most underinvested moat and its best hedge, because, uniquely among its Powers, it does not depend on winning the next auction. Monetising it (B2B production for leagues, content licensing, rights-deal architecture) generates value that survives a lost renewal. Any revenue not contingent on an auction is structurally precious here.

5. Moat Structure Flywheel, Matrix, Erosion

DAZN’s growth loop is real but slow:

More subscribers → more revenue → larger rights bids → better content → more subscribers. Break point: the loop only closes at the next auction, and rising clearing prices mean each turn costs more than the last. It is a cost treadmill, not a compounding flywheel.

Contrast a data-infrastructure moat, where the loop turns continuously with no auction gate and switching costs that rise every year. DAZN’s loop has a gate (the auction) and an input cost that rises against it, which is why a ~$3.2bn revenue business still loses money while compounding moats throw off cash at a fraction of the scale.

Value × durability: no Power is both high-value and high-durability:

Moat Erosion timeline: defensible now, fragile later:

6. Scenario Analysis & Tech Giant Entry

The defining risk, systematic tech-company entry, is not binary. It resolves along a spectrum, and DAZN controls almost none of the variables that select between these. Probabilities below are my judgement.

What the scenarios establish

DAZN’s survival is not a single number, it’s a function of tech-giant behaviour at one auction. In S1 the model works; in S2 it’s strained but fundable; in S3 it breaks. DAZN’s only real levers: (a) reach Italian profitability before 2029 so it bids from strength, and (b) build auction-independent revenue (Process Power) so a lost renewal is survivable rather than terminal.

7. Strategic implications for DAZN

1. DAZN need to become the dominant aggregator in core markets, or risk irrelevance. A one-sport subscriber churns easily, a four-sport subscriber loses their entire live-sport diet. They will need to prioritise rights breadth within core markets over shallow presence across many.

2. DAZN need to reach market-level profitability before each renewal. Italy must move decisively above ~2.5–3m subscribers (or hold ARPU at the top of the band) before the 2029 auction. A profitable DAZN bids from confidence; a loss-making one bids from necessity, and rights holders can tell the difference.

3. DAZN need to invest deliberately in Process Power as a rights hedge. B2B production, content licensing and deal-architecture consulting generate revenue that survives a lost renewal.

The three risks, ranked:
(1) systematic tech-giant entry, the signal to watch is selective → systematic; (2) the price-ceiling churn spiral, Italian pricing up ~75% to €34.99 while subscribers stalled; (3) geographic over-extension diluting capital across markets where no Power operates.

Conclusion

DAZN has built a real competitive moat. Its primary Power, Cornered Resource through exclusive rights, creates genuine barriers that have made it the dominant sports-streaming platform in Italy and a meaningful player in Germany and Japan. The secondary effects, Switching Costs for aggregated subscribers and Counter-Positioning against legacy broadcasters, reinforce that position where DAZN dominates.

But the moat is fragile in a way that is unusual among businesses with genuine advantages: all three operative Powers flow from one source, the rights, so they collapse together if a renewal is lost. And it is a moat that must be re-purchased every three-to-five years, in open competition, at rising cost, against rivals for whom losing the bid is not a strategic setback. That asymmetry, DAZN needs the rights to survive; Amazon does not, is the defining tension of the business, now quantified by >$10bn of cumulative losses and a single market still short of breakeven on its flagship asset.

The variable to watch

The Serie A renewal, 2029, needs to be retained at a price that keeps Italy on a path to profitability and the seven-year strategic experiment is validated, the most important asset re-cornered, the financial trajectory supporting continued investment. If DAZN lose it to a technology company, or retain it at a cost that makes Italian profitability structurally impossible, and no other Power in this analysis is strong enough to compensate. Watch, alongside it, whether tech-giant participation shifts from selective to systematic. Those two signals will settle the durability question our deep-dive report has returned to throughout.

A note on sourcing: DAZN is private and files no SEC reports. Every figure here is tagged by provenance, [A]/ [Audited] = DAZN Group Limited’s statutory accounts at UK Companies House (no. 06324278); [O]/[Official] = DAZN or counterparty disclosure; [E]/[Estimate] = analyst/press estimate, directional only. No number is asserted without a source.

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The iPhones in the Rafters

The meeting lasted eleven minutes. The head of recruitment at a Championship club sat across from a nineteen year old midfielder his academy had developed for four years. No injury and no disciplinary issue. No drop in effort or attitude. The club had simply run the number, a proprietary model trained on movement data, physical output, and tactical compliance scores, and the model had returned a verdict: low ceiling, declining trajectory, release recommended. The recruitment director, who had watched this player twice a week for three seasons, did not entirely agree with the assessment. He said so, quietly, to the sporting director. He was told the model had been correct fourteen times in the last sixteen cases. The player was released. He currently plays in the sixth tier. Whether the model was right about him, nobody knows. The decision was already made.

If you are a young professional, someone who has grown up being tracked, whose development has been logged since your first academy session, who has never known a football environment without data, this article is written for you specifically. Not for the coaches who use these tools, or the analysts who build them, or the executives who buy them. For the person whose body and behaviour the system is measuring. Because the data that follows you through your career is more powerful and more limited than anyone in your professional environment is likely to tell you. Understanding both of those things is no longer optional.

The system that generated the model’s verdict on that midfielder is not located in a server room somewhere mysterious. The core unit doing the capturing, in every stadium in the top two divisions of English football, is an iPhone. Twenty-eight of them, sometimes thirty, mounted high around the ground. The same phone you used to order a pizza last night is, on Saturday afternoon, reconstructing a professional football match as a real time digital twin, and the conclusions it draws follow players long after the final whistle.

Michael D’Auria is the Executive Vice President of Sports and Technology at Genius Sports, the company behind the Premier League’s official tracking infrastructure. Speaking on the Training Ground Guru Podcast, he has spent years explaining this technology to people whose first instinct is to picture something more industrial, more obviously impressive. The iPhones always get them.

“Now we can track thousands of data points on the surface of every player and the ball hundreds of times a second. Over the course of a 90-minute match, you’re getting billions of data points to represent what’s going on.”- Michael D’Auria, EVP, Genius Sports · Training Ground Guru Podcast

The technology, Michael D’Auria is quick to point out, is not new to the world. It is new to football. The underlying computer vision that makes it possible has roots in missile defence systems. It is the same category of machine perception that allows a self-driving car to distinguish a pedestrian from a lamppost at sixty miles an hour. Sport, he says, was actually a bit late to adopt it, partly because the challenge is harder than it looks. A factory floor is controlled. A motorway is relatively predictable. A football pitch is neither.

The first commercial applications came in basketball. A much earlier version of this system was introduced in a handful of NBA arenas before anyone in football was paying attention. Basketball people got excited fast. They could suddenly see things that had always existed but never been measurable, shot probability from any spot on the court, the precise geometry of a pick and roll, the defensive scheme a team was running and the micro-adjustments players made within it. The data existed. They just hadn’t had the technology to find it.

Football came to this later, and for reasons that are not entirely flattering to the sport. There is a certain conservatism in European football, a deep attachment to the idea that the game is too flowing, too fluid, too human to be adequately described by numbers. That resistance has not entirely disappeared. But it has largely lost the argument.

Second Spectrum became the Premier League’s official tracking partner from the 2020 season; Genius Sports, which acquired Second Spectrum in 2021, has since operated and expanded the infrastructure across every top-flight ground and the Championship (this is according to Michael D’Auria). And by April 2025, that same infrastructure was powering something that would have seemed like science fiction a decade earlier: semi-automated offside decisions, accurate to the centimetre, delivered in real time.

The Pipeline Nobody Talks About

When people discuss AI in football, they tend to jump straight to the outputs, the xG graphic on a broadcast, the heat map in a post-match analysis, the algorithm that supposedly told a club to sign a player nobody had heard of. What they skip is the machinery that makes any of it possible. Understanding what is actually happening inside that machinery changes how you think about all of it.

The tracking process has four stages, and each one builds on the last in ways that matter.

The first is detection. At fifty frames per second, every camera in the stadium scans its field of view and identifies objects, players, referees, the ball, the pitch markings. Not as names, not as roles, but as bounding boxes in space. The AI has been trained on millions of frames of football and knows, with high confidence, that this particular cluster of pixels is a human body and this one is a football. It does not know who they are. It does not know what they are doing. It just knows they are there.

The second stage is tracking. Each detected object gets an identity, a persistent ID, that follows it from frame to frame. The algorithm predicts where each player will be in the next frame based on their current velocity and direction, then corrects itself when the new frame arrives. Over ninety minutes, this produces a complete movement record for every person on the pitch. Every sprint, every walk, every lateral shuffle. This is the foundation on which everything else is built.

The third stage is event recognition. Once you have movement data, you can train a second AI to classify what those movements represent in football terms. A rapid change of direction near an opponent’s body is probably a tackle. A high-velocity foot movement followed by the ball accelerating in a new direction is a shot. A player raising their foot to redirect the ball is a header. The system has been trained on enough labelled footage to recognise these events automatically, in real time, with a high degree of accuracy.

The fourth stage is the one that actually reaches coaches and analysts: metric calculation. From the tracking and event data, hundreds of derived numbers are computed. Distance covered. Speed zones. The number of times a player pressed and within what radius. Defensive line height. The shape of the space between units. Passing network density. Pitch control, the mathematical model of which team, at any given moment, owns which areas of the pitch.

Michael D’Auria describes the final delivery to clubs as coming in two streams. One is the raw spatiotemporal data, position and movement coordinates, delivered as an API. The other is what he calls the football language layer: the same data, but already translated. Not ‘where was your right ankle for this hundredth of a second,’ but ‘this was a specific football action.’

A video analyst at a Premier League club can, in the time it takes a manager to give a half-time team talk, pull up a playlist of every overlapping run their left back made in the first forty-five minute, automatically cut, automatically sequenced. The system produces it without anyone having to manually tag a single frame of video.

“The greatest managers have a really good eye test. They can watch a game and just get a handle of what’s going on everywhere on the pitch intuitively... What we can really do is give them a superpower.”- Michael D’Auria, EVP, Genius Sports · Training Ground Guru Podcast

The caveat that comes with all of this is the one Michael D’Auria’s team, to their credit, does not try to hide. The AI recognises patterns. It does not understand context. It can measure that a player made a run. It cannot measure whether that run was intelligent, whether it was designed to create space for a teammate rather than to receive the ball, whether it was the right run at the right moment, whether it demonstrated the kind of football intelligence that every coach claims to be looking for but almost no metric can find.

The GPS Vest and Its Secrets

Alongside the optical tracking cameras, elite clubs fit their players with GPS vests during training sessions, and, within league regulations, during matches. These are not glamorous devices. They sit between the shoulder blades inside a compression garment and communicate with satellites and internal accelerometers to produce a continuous stream of physical data.

What they track is genuinely impressive. Total distance covered. Distance at high speed and sprint speed, broken into velocity bands. Acceleration and deceleration events, how many times a player explodes from walking pace to sprinting, or brakes sharply. Impact forces. Heart rate and heart rate variability. Metabolic power, which attempts to estimate energy expenditure per second by factoring in not just speed but the explosive work of acceleration that pure distance misses.

And then there is PlayerLoad, the metric that elite clubs have come to live by. It is calculated using a tri-axial accelerometer that measures movement across three planes simultaneously: forward and backward, side to side, and vertically. The formula sums the rate of change in acceleration across all three axes throughout a session. Every sprint adds to it. Every tackle adds to it. Every sharp turn, every jump, every deceleration. It gives sports science departments a number that represents cumulative physical stress in a way that raw distance cannot, because a player who covers twelve kilometres in a straight line at steady pace is not experiencing the same physical stress as one who covers ten kilometres with twenty high-intensity pressing sequences embedded within it.

This matters because managing physical load is one of the clearest ways data has already changed the game. In the NBA, always a few years ahead of football in this particular race, teams discovered that more minutes did not reliably produce better outcomes, and that accumulated fatigue dramatically increased injury risk. The solution was deliberate rest, now called load management: players held out of regular-season games to be fresh for the playoffs. The data made the decision defensible. Football clubs are doing the same thing now, though they rarely announce it in those terms.

But here is the thing about PlayerLoad, and about GPS data in general, that its most enthusiastic advocates sometimes underplay. It measures physical workload. It does not measure whether that workload was intelligent.

Consider three players across midfield positions: Casemiro, Declan Rice, and Kevin De Bruyne, the last one not a defensive midfielder, but useful for the contrast.

Casemiro’s PlayerLoad numbers across his peak years at Real Madrid were enormous. His style, aggressive pressing, constant defensive interventions, ball recovery under pressure, registers as extraordinary physical output. And his output was extraordinary. But a significant part of what made him a five-time Champions League winner was not registered by any sensor. It was positioning, reading the tempo, protecting the space behind the press, organising teammates with ten words when others needed thirty. None of that generates data. None of it increases his PlayerLoad score by a single unit.

Declan Rice, stylistically similar in terms of intensity, produces comparable physical output to Casemiro. The numbers look alike. The mechanism is different, Rice’s game is built more on athleticism, carrying, and defensive volume, Casemiro’s on anticipation and positioning. The GPS vest records both. It does not distinguish between them.

Kevin De Bruyne at his peak, meanwhile, might record a lower PlayerLoad in some matches than either of them. He controls games through intelligence, vision, tempo management, and passing. He limits unnecessary movement. His influence on a match can be enormous when his physical output, as measured by the vest, is modest. Three very different players. Three broadly similar sets of raw numbers. One lens cannot see all three clearly at once.

The GPS vest tells clubs how much you ran. Not how smart you ran.

This is not an argument against GPS data. It is an argument for understanding what GPS data is actually measuring, and what it is not. The clubs that use it most effectively are the ones who treat it as one signal among many, not as a verdict. Use the tool, don’t like the tool use you.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR PLAYERS

Every training session and match generates a physical profile your club can read in real time. Coaches can see your workload over the past week, flag concerning spikes before an injury occurs, and track your recovery after a congested fixture run. High running numbers will get noticed, but they do not automatically read as good performance. A player constantly sprinting to recover lost ground is generating data, just not the kind that earns praise. Intelligent movement still matters more than movement volume. The vest measures effort. Only the eye can judge whether that effort was well spent.

Know your numbers. Understand their limits. The players who thrive in a data-rich environment are the ones who can read their own profile as clearly as their coaches can.

The Numbers That Changed the Game

Expected Goals, xG, began as an academic concept and became the most argued-over number in football broadcasting. The idea is simple enough: given everything we know about a shot (its distance from goal, the angle, the body part used, the defensive pressure at the moment of contact, the weight of the pass that created it), what is the probability that this specific shot becomes a goal? A shot from six yards out, centrally, unmarked, after a cutback, that is a high xG chance, perhaps 0.60 or above. A speculative effort from thirty yards under pressure, low xG, perhaps 0.03. The metric assigns each shot a probability score between zero and one based on how similar shots have been converted historically.

The power of xG is not in any single shot. It is in what happens when you accumulate them over a match, a month, a season. A team that generates 2.5 xG per game but scores 1.1 goals is probably due a correction upward. A striker who is scoring 0.8 goals per game but creating only 0.4 xG is probably shooting above their sustainable level. The number does not determine anything. But it raises the right questions.

Expected Assists, xA, applies the same logic to the pass that created the shot. Not whether the assist happened, but whether the pass was actually good. A perfect through-ball that the striker skies into the upper tier still registers high xA. This matters enormously for evaluating creative players. The midfielder who makes twelve key passes a game but whose teammates convert none of them has been doing their job. The midfielder who records three assists from twelve key passes of much lower quality has been getting lucky. xA separates the two.

Pressing intensity, measured by a metric called PPDA, Passes Per Defensive Action, captures something coaches have talked about for decades in entirely subjective terms. How many passes does the opposition get to play before a press is triggered? Lower numbers mean more aggressive pressing. Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool sides in their peak seasons regularly averaged around seven. The metric allows coaches to measure whether their players are executing the tactical press they have been instructed to apply, not as an impressionistic observation from the touchline, but as a number, player by player, for every minute of every match.

The Brentford story has become the canonical example of what happens when a club takes all of this seriously. Under ownership that understood data and a sporting director committed to statistical recruitment, Brentford systematically identified undervalued players, men whose underlying numbers in lower leagues or different tactical systems suggested quality that their market price did not reflect. They outperformed clubs with several times their budget for several consecutive seasons. The critical footnote is one that Brentford’s own people are the first to make: it required deep human interpretation. The edge did not come from running the algorithm. It came from knowing when to trust the number and when the context around that number made it misleading.

Brighton & Hove Albion have pursued a similar model with consistent results that have earned the respect of clubs far richer than themselves. Under Tony Bloom and a data team that rivals anything in the Premier League, Brighton developed a reputation for identifying players whose underlying performance metrics outstripped their reputation, signing them before the market caught up, developing them, and selling them at substantial profit. Moisés Caicedo, signed for £4m from Independiente del Valle and sold to Chelsea for £115m, is the extreme version of what the model produces when everything aligns. What the model alone does not tell you is what kind of human being walks through the door. That still required people in the room.

This is the correlation-causation trap, and it is the one that should make any player uncomfortable when statistics are used to make decisions about their career. More sprinting does not cause better performance. In some tactical systems, it indicates the opposite, a player who is out of position is constantly sprinting to recover. A high slide-tackle count might reflect excellent defensive timing or it might reflect a player who is regularly beaten and forced into last-ditch interventions. High possession numbers without end product are precisely that. Every number needs a question behind it: what is actually generating this, and what would it look like if the context changed?

Here is a useful example. The teams that win most often tend to run less than their opponents. Does running less make them better? No. Better teams control possession, which means opponents chase the ball rather than the other way around. High distance covered for the winning side would actually suggest something had gone wrong, they were defending too deep, or their press was breaking down. The number looks like fitness data. It is tactical data in disguise. Understanding the difference is most of what separates an analyst from a spreadsheet.

Did You Do What You Were Asked?

There is a development in modern analytics that does not yet have widespread public recognition but is becoming one of the most consequential uses of tracking data at elite clubs. It goes beyond measuring what players do and begins measuring whether they followed their instructions.

If a manager instructs his strikers to press the opposition centre-backs within three seconds of a goal kick, the tracking system can measure, to the frame, whether that press was executed, and by whom. If the full-backs are told to hold a defensive line no higher than the halfway mark when out of possession, the data will show precisely how many times each player broke that instruction, and what happened when they did. Tactical compliance is, in effect, a live audit of whether the team on the pitch is executing the plan from the training ground.

For players, the implication is significant. It is no longer enough to play well in a general sense. The question now has a precise second layer: did you play well within the specific tactical framework you were given? A player who records excellent individual metrics but consistently breaks shape, drops too deep, or fails to press at the designated trigger moments is generating a compliance deficit that is now, increasingly, visible in the data. This is where AI is heading, not just measuring behaviour, but measuring whether behaviour matched instructions. Intent remains beyond its reach. That distinction matters.

The Machine That Cannot Explain Itself

There is a version of sports AI that is coming, that in some cases has already arrived, which presents a more fundamental problem than any of the measurement gaps described above. It is called the black box problem, and it is not unique to football. But football, with its enormous financial stakes and its habit of making consequential decisions about people’s lives on the basis of data, is a particularly charged environment for it.

A black box model is one that produces accurate outputs without being able to explain how it got there. Deep learning networks, the kind of neural network architecture behind the most sophisticated player evaluation systems, learn by adjusting millions of internal parameters across thousands of iterations of training data. What emerges is a model that can predict things with impressive accuracy. What it cannot do is tell you, in plain language, why it rated a particular player the way it did.

The practical consequence is this: a club’s recruitment algorithm might identify a 22 year-old defender as having a low ceiling. The algorithm might be right. The algorithm might be wrong. Either way, nobody in the building can tell you with any precision which features of the player’s data drove that conclusion. The system made the decision. The system’s reasoning is locked inside several hundred million parameters that were never designed to be read by humans.

This is beginning to attract legal scrutiny. Under GDPR’s Article 22, individuals have the right not to be subject to fully automated decisions that have significant effects on them, including employment decisions. A club that uses an opaque AI system to release an academy player, reject a transfer target, or decline to renew a contract is potentially in violation of this right. Players and agents can, and increasingly do, request an explanation of algorithmic decisions that affect their clients’ careers. Whether those explanations are currently available is another matter.

The research community has been working on this. A 2023 paper introduced what it calls ‘glocal’ explanations for expected goals models, using a technique called SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to attribute each feature’s contribution to a specific prediction at both the team and player level. It was an early-stage work, but it represents the direction of travel: AI systems that can tell you not just what they concluded, but which inputs drove them there. You scored 0.4 xG from that chance because of the distance, primarily, reduced further by the angle, reduced further by the defensive pressure. Not because of some quality the system cannot name.

The deeper issue, though, is one that no explainability technique fully resolves. Even a fully transparent model can only tell you what correlates with what in historical data. It cannot tell you what causes what in the complex, contextual, deeply human activity that is football.

Who Owns Your Data?

The explainability question has a companion that receives almost no coverage but is likely to become one of the defining legal and contractual battlegrounds in professional football over the next decade. It is the question of data ownership. Every metre a player runs, every acceleration, every heart rate spike, who does that information belong to?

In most current arrangements, the club owns the data generated by the GPS vests they provide and the tracking systems they install. The player generates it with their body. The club stores it, analyses it, and uses it to make decisions that directly affect that player’s career. The player, in most cases, has no formal right of access to their own dataset and no say over how it is used. This is beginning to change slowly, unevenly, and mainly because a small number of agents and player associations have started asking the question out loud.

Consider what is at stake. A club’s analytics department may flag that a player’s sprint data has declined significantly over eighteen months, a pattern their model associates with reduced resale value. That assessment influences whether a contract extension is offered, at what wage, and whether a transfer is actively pursued. The player who generated that data has, in the vast majority of cases, never seen it presented that way. They know they have been running less. They do not know that a model has attached a value trajectory to that information and circulated it internally.

The mechanism has already produced consequences. Across European academies, player associations in England, France, and Germany have begun collecting cases of young professionals released or had contracts quietly downgraded on the basis of algorithmic assessments they were never shown and could not challenge. The pattern, in its typical form, runs something like this: a twenty-year-old midfielder receives notice that his development contract will not be extended. His coaches, when informally consulted, express surprise. His training ground performances have been positive. His tactical compliance scores, it emerges later, had been flagged by the club’s analytics system as a concern, he was pressing at the wrong moments relative to the instructed trigger points. The player had not been told the trigger points had changed. The model did not know that. It recorded the gap between instruction and execution, assigned a weight to it, and factored it into his evaluation. Nobody had thought to tell him what he was being measured against.

This is not the nightmare scenario of science fiction. It is the mundane reality of how data-driven decisions already work when accountability is diffuse and transparency is absent.

The questions that will need answer, in contract negotiations, in collective bargaining agreements, and eventually in law, are straightforward to state and genuinely difficult to resolve. Can a club share biometric data with potential buying clubs during transfer negotiations? Should players have the right to access their own longitudinal performance datasets? Can an agent legitimately request a data export to use as evidence in a wage dispute? As tracking becomes more granular and AI becomes more capable of drawing conclusions from it, the stakes attached to these questions get larger. Young players signing their first professional contracts today are, in almost every case, signing away rights over data that did not meaningfully exist when the contract templates they’re using were written.

The Other Sports and What They Learned

Football arrived late to the data revolution, and it is worth understanding what it is arriving into.

The NBA has been doing this for over a decade. Tracking data now drives every aspect of how franchises operate, game preparation, defensive schemes, player valuations in trades. The Houston Rockets in 2018 showed what happens when you let the data challenge your assumptions completely: analysts discovered that mid-range two-pointers were simultaneously the most common and worst-value shot in basketball. The answer was obvious once someone ran the numbers. The Rockets restructured their entire offence around the finding, broke records for three-point attempts, and the game has never gone back.

The NFL moved to hardware-first tracking: RFID chips embedded in players’ shoulder pads and in the ball itself. In a sport where every career is short, every injury is financially catastrophic, and every athlete is elite, marginal gains matter more than almost anywhere else. The partnership with Amazon Web Services has produced predictive models for pass completion probability and expected rushing yards, American football’s equivalent of xG and xA, but applied to a sport whose play by play structure makes the data far easier to segment and analyse than football’s continuous flow. Movement pattern analysis for injury prevention has become standard.

Formula 1 is the extreme end of the spectrum. Each car has three hundred sensors generating more than 1.1 million data points per second, transmitted live to the pit wall. AWS-powered AI systems produce live race simulations, pit stop strategy recommendations, and time-loss calculations in real time. The gap between what the data knows and what any human engineer can hold in their head simultaneously is vast. The data wins on pure information processing. The engineer still makes the final call.

The lesson from all three sports is the same one that the best football clubs have slowly been internalising: the technology is most powerful when it augments human expertise rather than attempting to replace it. The F1 engineer still calls the pit stop. The NBA general manager still decides who to trade for. The football manager still decides who plays. What the data does is remove the excuse of not knowing what you did not have to know. There is no longer any reason to be surprised by how far your striker ran in the second half, or how hard the press worked against a low block, or what your left back’s injury risk looks like heading into a fixture run. That information exists, in real time, in extraordinary detail. What you do with it remains stubbornly human.

The World Cup, the Scan, and What Comes Next

In January 2026, FIFA and Lenovo stood on a stage in Las Vegas, at CES 2026, held at the Sphere, and announced what the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada, and Mexico would look like from a data perspective. What they described was something that would have seemed implausible even five years ago.

Every one of the up to 1,248 players participating in the tournament will be digitally scanned before it begins. According to FIFA, the scan takes approximately one second. The player walks into a chamber, stands still for a moment, and walks out. What the system captures is a precise three-dimensional model of their specific body, not a generic human shape approximating their proportions, but their actual dimensions, their actual contours. This model becomes their avatar inside the semi-automated offside system for the duration of the tournament.

What this replaces is the generic mesh model that previous systems used, the approximate human shape that was close enough for most decisions but introduced uncertainty on the genuinely tight calls, the ones that came down to a centimetre of a shoulder or a hip. With personalised 3D avatars and the tracking system updated to match, those calls can now be made with a precision that no human linesman standing forty metres away was ever going to achieve.

FIFA and Lenovo also announced Football AI Pro, a generative AI assistant built on FIFA’s Football Language model and powered by Lenovo’s infrastructure. Available to all forty-eight participating teams before and after matches, but explicitly not during live play, it can analyse over two thousand metrics per game and produce insights in text, video, graphs, and three-dimensional visualisations. It is, effectively, a highly capable analyst available to every squad in the tournament, not just the ones with the budgets to build out their own analytics departments.

The longer-term direction that Michael D’Auria points to is the one that may matter most for how players are coached. Mesh tracking, he argues, opens up a world of 3D recreation that changes the language of coaching itself. The standard way of reviewing a player’s mistake is from the broadcast camera, the overhead midfield view that shows the entire pitch and reduces each player to a figure moving through space. That is not how the player experienced the moment. They were not watching from above. They were in it, seeing only what was in their field of vision, making decisions under time pressure that the overhead view completely removes.

With mesh tracking, you can now reconstruct the exact first-person perspective a player had at any moment in the match. You can show them what they saw, not what a camera operator at the other end of the stadium saw. You can demonstrate, in terms they can actually feel, what they got wrong and why. The gap between coach and player, the translation problem that has always been at the centre of how technical feedback is delivered, becomes smaller.

What Football Will Look Like By 2030

The 2026 World Cup gives a snapshot of the present. The trajectory beyond it is the more instructive picture. Several developments that are currently either experimental or available only to the best-resourced clubs will, within this decade, become standard infrastructure.

Digital twins, complete, dynamic models of individual players that can be updated in real time, will allow clubs to simulate how a player might perform in a different system, at a different club, or returning from a specific injury before any of those things have happened. The model does not replace the player. It becomes a planning tool around them. Injury prediction will move from reactive flagging to proactive intervention: not “this player’s load spike suggests elevated risk” but “based on four biomarkers tracked over six weeks, the probability of a hamstring issue in the next fourteen days is significant enough to warrant adjusting the training plan now.”

Personalised training plans, genuinely personalised, not just individualised schedules, will be generated by AI that understands each player’s physiological profile, tactical role, injury history, and recovery patterns simultaneously. What a centre-back needs in the forty-eight hours after a high-intensity match is different from what a central midfielder needs, which is different again from what a wide forward returning from a minor hamstring strain needs. AI can hold all of those variables at once in a way that no individual sports scientist can.

Real-time coaching support, an AI assistant available to the coaching staff during a match, surfacing relevant data as the game evolves, will not replace the manager on the touchline but will change what information is available to them as they make decisions. The question of how much of that information a manager can actually absorb and act on in the forty-five seconds between a substitution decision and the player walking to the warm-up area is one that the technology has not yet resolved. That is a human problem, not a data problem.

The gap running through all of it, between behaviour and intent, between the measurable and the meaningful, is the frontier that football analytics is spending its most serious intellectual energy trying to close. Whether it can be closed, or whether some version of it is permanent, is a question the technology has not yet answered. To understand why, it helps to look at the one player who proved the gap is real.

What the Numbers Cannot Find

In 2016, N’Golo Kanté won the Premier League title with Leicester City. In 2017, he won it again with Chelsea. In 2018, he won the World Cup with France. In 2021, he was the decisive figure as Chelsea won the Champions League, neutralising the most dangerous midfielders in Europe match after match in a knockout tournament that forgives nothing. He was, by most assessments of those who played with him and coached him, irreplaceable.

His statistics were good. Not elite. His goals and assists were modest. His defensive numbers were solid, not exceptional. His pressing intensity was high, but no higher than several players who changed clubs for a fraction of his price. A model trained on his data and asked to predict his impact would have had a difficult time explaining why this particular midfielder, with these particular numbers, was worth what he was worth.

The answer, of course, is that the most important things Kanté did left almost no trace in the data. He read transitions before they became threats. He occupied space in a way that organised the play of those around him without requiring any direct involvement. He anticipated the second ball before the first had been played. He communicated constantly, positioning teammates, closing angles, managing pressure. He was calm when teams around him were not. His presence changed how opponents played, and changed how his teammates played, in ways that do not show up in any metric that currently exists.

This is not unique to Kanté. Every football person could name a player like this, someone whose value was clear to anyone who watched and worked with them, and invisible to anyone looking at a dashboard. The gap between what data measures and what football actually rewards is not a temporary limitation waiting to be closed by better technology. Some of it is structural.

Take space creation, the run made not to receive the ball but to drag a defender away so a teammate can receive it instead. Tracking data can see the run. It cannot determine the intent behind the run. It cannot model the counterfactual: what would the game have looked like if that run had not been made? The defender who did not follow might have intercepted a subsequent pass. The tracking data will record the pass as having been completed. It will not record the reason.

Or take mentality, the player who is first in every morning, who lifts the dressing room after a bad run of results, who maintains standards when the manager has their back turned. None of this shows up in any data stream. The GPS vest is indifferent to whether you led the group or hid from it.

There is a concept that some coaches use that might be called the eye test, not the simple idea of watching and forming an impression, but something more specific. A player needs to pass the eye test not because the data says so but because football, at its core, is a spectacle watched by human beings who want to be moved by what they see. The midfielder who does all the invisible work but never appears involved in the defining moments of a game may be genuinely excellent and also genuinely hard to justify to a board, to a fanbase, to a broadcast audience.

Data is a lens. It reveals things that were previously invisible. It does not replace the other lenses. The clubs that have figured this out, and there are not yet many of them, use data the way a good doctor uses diagnostic equipment: as one input into a judgment that is ultimately human.

Run every metric that currently exists through a model trained on every season of Premier League data since 2010. Feed it the GPS numbers, the pressing intensity, the defensive actions, the passing network data, the tactical compliance scores. Ask it to find the player who would win two league titles, a World Cup, and a Champions League while playing a position that generates almost no goals or assists. It would not find Kanté. The numbers were never the problem. The problem was everything the numbers could not see. That problem has not been solved. The question is whether you know which parts of your own game live in the same unmeasurable territory, and whether the people making decisions about your career have the judgment to see it.

See you next time!

Berlin Growth Advisory is a boutique consultancy specialising in off-the-pitch transformation for football clubs, investors, and sports industry stakeholders. By leveraging data-driven insights, strategic partnerships, and innovative solutions, we empower clients to unlock hidden value, achieve operational excellence, and drive sustainable growth.

Our services cater to mid-tier football clubs, family offices, private equity firms, and football executives seeking to improve financial performance, optimise operations, and capitalise on commercial opportunities.

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Consider, for a moment, the scene.

It is the summer of 1984. The Open Championship is being played at St Andrews, on the most famous golf course in the world. Seve Ballesteros, arguably the greatest shotmaker who ever lived, a man capable of manufacturing genius from impossible positions, is in contention for the title. The galleries are enormous. The te…

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For a long time, German football behaved like a business that didn’t need to sell. And in a narrow sense, it was.

German professional football generated more than €6 billion in revenue last season. The Bundesliga alone accounted for over €5 billion of that. Clubs were solvent. Fans were loyal. The system, especially compared to some of its European peers, was remarkably stable. The problem was that none of this travelled. Somewhere along the way, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the Bundesliga became a league that people admired but didn’t watch. Or, more precisely, didn’t watch in the numbers that matter if you’re trying to build a global media business.

The Premier League, by contrast, built something closer to a distribution empire. It didn’t just produce football; it made sure that football was everywhere, all the time, in forms that were easy to buy and hard to ignore. It sold itself into Asia, into the United States, into markets that didn’t have any particular reason to care about English clubs but were given one anyway.

The Premier League earns many times more from international broadcasting than the Bundesliga, with the gap often closer to 8–10 times depending on the season and source. It’s the kind of gap that makes you think there must be a hidden variable, some deep structural flaw in German football that explains everything. But there isn’t. The games aren’t worse. The stadiums aren’t emptier. If anything, the Bundesliga has several advantages, younger players, more competitive balance, a fan culture that feels authentic in a way that globalised sports often don’t.

What it hasn’t had is investment in the unglamorous parts of the business, the parts that sit between the game and the audience. For years, German football more or less assumed those audiences would show up on their own. They didn’t.

The partnership with Adidas is, on the surface, an unremarkable deal

A €100 million loan. An interest rate of 1.5%. In exchange, Adidas remains the official match ball supplier across German professional competitions for another decade or so, a contract worth roughly €5 million a year.

Individually, none of this is especially dramatic. It is not the kind of headline number that resets a market or forces competitors to react. If you were looking for the moment the Bundesliga caught up, this wouldn’t be it. But if you look at the structure more closely, it starts to feel like something else.

The DFL isn’t taking a lump sum and hoping to figure it out later. It’s drawing capital gradually, against a set of defined uses, improving broadcast production, investing in anti-piracy, building digital audiences, and marketing its rights internationally. The match ball contract, meanwhile, quietly offsets part of the cost.

What looks like a loan begins to resemble a trade, visibility and association in exchange for patient capital. Which raises a more interesting question, why structure it this way at all?

A year earlier, the DFL tried something more straightforward

It attempted to sell a stake in its media rights business to a private equity firm. The logic was familiar. Other leagues had done it. La Liga sold 8.2% of a new commercial entity to CVC Capital Partners for €2.1 billion. Ligue 1 sold 13% for €1.5 billion. The pitch was simple: take a large amount of money upfront, accelerate investment, and close the gap faster.

German football reacted as if something more fundamental were at stake. Fans protested. Games were interrupted. The deal collapsed. To outsiders, this looked like resistance to modernisation, a league turning down billions in order to preserve something intangible. Inside Germany, it looked different. Clubs are governed by the 50+1 rule, which ensures that members retain majority control. Selling a long-term share of media rights to an external investor didn’t just raise capital; it altered who the system ultimately served.

So the DFL went looking for another way. The Adidas deal is what it found. No equity sold. No future rights permanently shared. Just capital, relatively cheap, by market standards, tied to specific investments, with control fully intact.

If you believe the Bundesliga’s international rights will be significantly more valuable in ten years than they are today, this is the cleaner bet. You give up speed in exchange for ownership of the outcome. If you’re wrong, of course, you’ve simply delayed the problem.

Adidas, for its part, is not behaving like a passive lender

The company reported €23.7 billion in revenue in 2024. It does not need the Bundesliga to sustain its business. But it may need it to sustain something less tangible and more valuable: relevance in football, particularly in its home market.

The German national team, after a relationship that lasted more than seventy years, is switching to Nike. That change, which takes effect in 2027, removes Adidas from one of the most visible platforms in German football. What has followed looks less like opportunism and more like repositioning.

Adidas has been rebuilding its presence deliberately, club by club, with Liverpool, Eintracht Frankfurt, Köln, and now, through the DFL, at the league level. But this is not just about logos on shirts. It is about proximity to the product itself, to the moments that travel, the images that circulate, the content that fills feeds and broadcasts.

In that sense, the Bundesliga is less a strategic asset and more a distribution infrastructure. The structure of the deal reflects that. Adidas won’t just be providing capital, it also plans to help finance the systems that make the league more visible, more accessible, and ultimately more valuable as a media product. Outside of the financial return, the benefits will include the presence Adidas gets embedded at the point where the game meets its audience. Which is another way of saying, this is not just a sponsorship. It is a bet on visibility.

What the DFL plans to do with the money is unlikely to produce a moment anyone notices

There won’t be a single broadcast deal that changes everything. No sudden surge of international viewers. Instead, there will be incremental improvements, slightly better production, slightly stronger enforcement against piracy, slightly more effective distribution in markets where the league has been underrepresented.

This is the part of the story that tends to be the least satisfying. Because it’s slow. And because it depends on a kind of compounding that only works if it’s sustained. Better production leads to better deals. Better deals fund better production. Distribution builds audiences, audiences attract sponsors, sponsors justify further investment. The system feeds itself, but only after a certain threshold has been reached.

The Bundesliga, by most accounts, has not reached that threshold yet. This is an attempt to get there.

There is a tendency in sports business to treat decisions as if they immediately determine outcomes

Take the money, close the gap. Refuse the money, fall behind. Reality is less obliging. The DFL has made a set of decisions that appear internally consistent. It has chosen to retain control, to invest gradually, and to align its financing with its operating model. Those decisions reduce certain risk, particularly the risk of giving away future value too cheaply. They do not eliminate others.

The Premier League’s advantages are not just financial, but also structural, consider the language, incumbency, global habits formed over decades. Those are difficult to dislodge, even with perfect execution. And execution, in this case, will need to be close to perfect over a long period of time. Which is another way of saying, the plan makes sense. Whether it works is something else.

For a long time, the Bundesliga didn’t need to sell itself

Now it is learning how to. Not quickly, and not radically, but deliberately, piece by piece. The agreement with Adidas is part of that process, less a breakthrough than a signal that the league understands what it has been missing. It is true that recognition comes late, and that the world it is trying to catch has already been shaped by leagues that spent years building reach, habit, and scale. But those advantages, while durable, are not immutable. Distribution can be built. Audiences can be grown. And the Bundesliga is no longer assuming they will appear on their own.

The plan is patient, but it is no longer passive. If it works, it won’t be because of a single moment, but because enough small things started to compound in the right direction. That may not close the gap entirely. But it gives the league something it has lacked for years, a credible path to doing so.

See you next time!

Berlin Growth Advisory is a boutique consultancy specialising in off-the-pitch transformation for football clubs, investors, and sports industry stakeholders. By leveraging data-driven insights, strategic partnerships, and innovative solutions, we empower clients to unlock hidden value, achieve operational excellence, and drive sustainable growth. Our services cater to mid-tier football clubs, family offices, private equity firms, and football executives seeking to improve financial performance, optimise operations, and capitalise on commercial opportunities.

Follow our Podcast “the football economy” : YouTube | Spotify |

African football has spent fifty years producing the world's best talent at the world's worst prices. Here's why that's about to change, and who's going to profit from it.

The Scout and the Director

Picture two men sitting across a table from each other somewhere in Lagos, Nigeria.

One of them runs a football academy. He has spent years finding boys, feeding them, coaching them, watching them grow from kids with potential into players with actual market value. He knows what his best player is worth. He has watched the kid long enough to understand exactly what a European club is getting when it buys him. He is not naive. He is not uninformed. He is just, and this is the important part, broke.

The other man flew in from Europe. He has been scouting for three days. He has a flight to catch. He has a number in his head, a number pulled from one of the major data platforms his club uses, a platform built almost entirely on European league data, calibrated against European benchmarks, maintained by people who have never spent much time thinking about African football. The number is low. It is low because the platform’s model is built around transaction history, and transaction history in African domestic football is thin, and thin transaction history produces low valuations, and low valuations produce low opening bids, and low opening bids produce low completed transactions, and low completed transactions feed back into the model as evidence that the value was, correctly, low.

The academy director accepts the offer. He has coaches to pay. He has a next cohort of boys already training. The lights have to stay on.

This scene has played out, in one version or another, for fifty years. And here is the thing about it that should drive you slightly mad: nobody in that room did anything wrong. The scout is doing his job. The director is doing his job. The transaction is legal. The paperwork is clean. And yet the person who created the value is walking away with a fraction of what it was actually worth.

That is not a story about bad actors. That is a story about a broken system. And broken systems, when they are broken in consistent and predictable ways, have a habit of minting a very specific kind of fortune for the person who figures out how to fix them.

What Moneyball Actually Was

When Billy Beane started building the Oakland Athletics on statistical analysis in the early 2000s, the insight was not that he had found better players. It was that he had found better information. The market for baseball talent was mispriced because the people setting the prices were using the wrong signals, the wrong statistics, the wrong intuitions, the wrong mental models for what made a player valuable. The information failure was so widespread, so embedded in the conventional wisdom of how the game evaluated talent, that it had become invisible. Everyone was doing it wrong in exactly the same way, which meant no one could see that anything was wrong at all.

The moment you understand that, you understand why the people who corrected the mispricing did not just build a better baseball team. They captured a genuine, structural, multi-year advantage. Right up until everyone else understood what they were doing and the advantage closed.

African football is the same story. Scaled up. Spread across a continent. Running for fifty years instead of ten. And still, remarkably, not yet corrected.

The players have always been there. The talent has never been in question. Players born on the African continent, or carrying direct African heritage, currently make up somewhere between eight and twelve percent of all active players across Europe’s top five leagues. In certain positions, at certain clubs, the concentration is considerably higher. The pipeline is not marginal or supplementary. It is foundational to how European football operates at the highest level.

Against that output, the continent’s share of global transfer spending is negligible. Not proportionally smaller. Negligible. The talent flows one way. The money follows, in quantities that bear no serious relationship to the value of what is actually leaving.

If that does not strike you as a strange and interesting problem, you have not thought about it long enough.

African Players Powering European Football

African players have become foundational to how European football operates at the highest level. Players born on the African continent or carrying direct African heritage currently make up between 8-12% of all active players across Europe’s top five leagues. In certain positions and at certain clubs, this concentration is considerably higher.

Ligue 1 leads with 51 African players, followed by Premier League with 32 players. This represents the highest concentration of African talent in European football, yet the transfer fees and valuations remain disproportionately low compared to European-trained players of equivalent ability.

The Three Failures, Compounding

Every large, durable mispricing has a mechanism. A set of structural reasons why the error persists even though it is, in theory, visible to everyone. Understanding the mechanism of the African football mispricing requires understanding three failures, each one making the others worse.

The first failure is the absence of a performance data layer.

The dominant platforms in global football data were built on European league information. They were designed by people thinking about the Bundesliga and the Premier League and La Liga. They receive the vast majority of their investment and engineering effort from European market participants. They are, in effect, European tools applied everywhere else by default rather than by design.

When a European scout evaluates a player in Lagos or Accra or Algiers, that scout has access to rich, contextualised, granular performance data on every comparable player in European competition. He can tell you how a midfielder in the Eredivisie moves, presses, covers ground, and influences game state at a level of detail that would have looked like science fiction twenty years ago. The player in Ghana gets a brief video reel and whatever the scout remembers from his three-day visit.

This is not a small information gap. It is a canyon. And it runs in exactly one direction.

The second failure is the absence of a working valuation mechanism.

Market value in football, for most practical purposes, is set by a small number of platforms, databases, modelling tools, crowd-sourced estimates, that have, over time, become self-referential in ways that would be familiar to anyone who has studied how prices form in thin markets.

Clubs anchor their opening bids to published market values. Academies anchor their asking prices to the same figures. Negotiations orbit these numbers. Transactions complete near them. Which reinforces the numbers. Which makes future negotiations orbit them again. For players with deep European data behind them, this creates a pricing mechanism that is imperfect but functional. For African players, it creates a trap that tightens with every completed transaction.

The numbers are low because the data is thin. The data is thin because the infrastructure was never built. The infrastructure was never built because the transactions were always low. You can run that loop as long as you like. It does not correct itself from the inside.

The third failure is financial architecture, and it is the most devastating of the three.

Consider what it actually means to run an academy in Senegal. You have identified a player who, if the valuation were done properly, might be worth twelve or fifteen million euros to the right European club. You know this. You have watched the kid for three years. But knowing it and being able to act on it are very different things.

To act on it, to hold firm in a negotiation, to walk away from a low bid, to wait for a better offer, you need time. Time costs money. You have coaches on staff. You have a cohort of younger players who need feeding and training. You have no bridge financing that would let you maintain operations while the negotiation runs longer. You have no insurance product designed around the specific risks of developing players in your market. You have limited ability to structure deals that capture future upside beyond the initial transfer fee.

So you take the offer. Not because you do not know what the player is worth. But because the financial infrastructure that would allow you to act on what you know does not exist.

The academy director in Lagos is not losing money because he is uninformed. He is losing money because the system was designed, not intentionally, but effectively, to make it rational for him to accept less than the player is worth.

What Has Been Tried + Why It Has Not Been Enough

It would be unfair to suggest that nobody has noticed any of this. People have noticed. People have tried.

The best African academies, concentrated in Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, and Côte d’Ivoire, have raised the standard of player development substantially over the past two decades. The quality of coaching, nutrition, education, and preparation at the leading programmes is genuinely competitive by global standards. Players arriving at European clubs from these academies are better prepared than they were a generation ago.

Data companies have expanded their African coverage incrementally. A player in the Egyptian Premier League or the South African Premiership has a thicker data profile today than he would have had ten years ago. Individual agents, many of them African, operating in European markets, have become more sophisticated in how they structure deals and run competitive processes.

All of this is real. And none of it changes the underlying architecture.

The academy has better players but still no independent data layer to support its valuation claims. The data coverage is thicker but still calibrated against European benchmarks, still produced by platforms built for European markets. The agents are sharper but still operating without the financial infrastructure that would allow the people they represent to negotiate from genuine strength rather than managed urgency.

Improving parts of a broken system makes the system slightly less broken. It does not rewrite the terms. What rewrites the terms is building the layer that does not yet exist.

Elite African Talent in Europe

The top African players commanding premium fees demonstrate that talent is never the issue. The problem is systemic undervaluation of the broader pipeline.

The Trajectory of Change: Hakimi vs Osimhen

The market value trajectories of Achraf Hakimi and Victor Osimhen illustrate the volatile nature of African player valuations. Both players have experienced significant appreciation, but their paths diverge, Hakimi's steady climb versus Osimhen's dramatic peak and adjustment. This volatility reflects the broader market dynamics and the impact of performance, injuries, and transfer circumstances on perceived value.

The Architecture of a Real Solution

Most analyses of this problem stop here. They diagnose the disease, wave in the direction of a cure, and hand the problem back to the universe. Here is what a real solution actually looks like.

It has three layers, and the sequence is not optional. Each layer enables the next. You cannot build layer three without layer two. You cannot build layer two without layer one.

Layer one is verified performance data at continental scale.

Not European platforms expanding their African coverage. Not the application of European models to African competition with a few local adjustments. A purpose-built, independently governed, technically rigorous performance database covering African domestic leagues on their own terms, in their own context, against their own benchmarks.

This means on-the-ground infrastructure, camera installations, wearable integrations where possible, human data annotation at grounds where neither is yet feasible. It means partnership agreements with leagues and confederations. It means quality control rigorous enough that the outputs can be presented in a transfer negotiation as evidence, not just opinion.

The commercial logic is straightforward. Academies pay for access because better data makes their players more valuable. European clubs buy subscriptions because better data makes their scouting more efficient and their transfers less speculative. Once the data layer is built with sufficient depth and credibility, it has genuine pricing power. The hard part is not the business model. The hard part is the trust, with leagues, with academy directors, with federations that have spent decades watching outside parties arrive with solutions that mostly benefited the people who arrived with them. That trust is built slowly, through local presence and relationships and demonstrated alignment of interest. Which is also why, once built, it is exceptionally hard to replicate.

Layer two is an independent African player valuation model.

Built on the performance data from layer one. Trained on African competition. Calibrated to African context. Transparent enough in its methodology that an academy director can put the output on the table in a negotiation and say: here is what this player is actually worth, and here is exactly how we got there.

The goal is not to replace the existing platforms. The goal is to introduce a second source of credibility into a conversation that currently has only one. When there is a single number, set by your counterpart, you negotiate from a weak position. When there are two numbers, and one of them is yours, and it is independently derived and methodologically defensible, the conversation is structurally different.

Layer three is the financial architecture that gives academies staying power.

A sell on clause negotiated from strength is worth far more than a sell-on clause negotiated from desperation. A deal structured with milestone based payments tied to a player’s verified performance trajectory captures upside that a single transfer fee cannot. But getting to that kind of deal requires that the academy director can afford to say no to the simpler one.

The financial products that create that ability are not exotic. Revenue based financing against projected transfer income, structured around verified pipeline data. Insurance products calibrated to player development risk in specific African markets, not European actuarial models applied badly to a different context, but models built on African data, pricing African risk accurately. Co-investment structures that allow outside capital to participate in player development upside in exchange for providing the liquidity that transforms a negotiating position.

These products exist in other markets. They exist in music rights, in entertainment, in sports in other geographies. They do not exist in African football because the data infrastructure required to underwrite them has not been built. Layer one enables layer two. Layer two enables layer three. That is the sequence.

Who Gets This Right

There is a specific kind of person who builds this.

It is not the person who arrives with capital and a slide deck and a theory about African football. Those people have already come and gone. The continent’s football institutions have very good instincts for detecting when an outsider’s solution is really an outsider’s extraction dressed up in the language of partnership.

The person who gets this right starts with the academy director’s problem. Not the scout’s problem. Not the investor’s problem. The director’s. And then works backwards. Who has the most to gain from better information and the least current access to it? Build for that person first. Earn the trust of that person first. The trust built carefully on the supply side of this market is a competitive advantage that no well-capitalised latecomer can simply purchase.

None of the technology required to build this is frontier technology. GPS tracking, computer vision, statistical modelling, valuation methodology, this is mature technology being applied to an underdeveloped context. The engineering is not the barrier. The barrier is the patience, the local knowledge, the willingness to operate on a timeline that most outside capital finds uncomfortable, and the genuine alignment with the people whose problem you are claiming to solve.

If Billy Beane’s insight was that baseball was measuring the wrong things, the insight here is simpler: African football has been measured almost not at all. By the right people, with the right tools, for the right purposes. Fixing that is not a particularly complicated technical problem. It is a trust problem dressed up as a technical problem. And trust, once established in an environment where it has historically been violated, is worth a great deal.

The Arc of a Correcting Market

Every market that has been systematically mispriced follows a recognisable pattern before it corrects.

The mispricing persists because the information infrastructure to challenge it does not exist. Then someone builds that infrastructure. At first it looks like a niche project, too small, too early, too far from where the attention currently sits. The conventional wisdom ignores it.

Then the data starts accumulating. A few transactions get repriced. Academies with access to better information start extracting better deals. Other academy directors notice. The pressure builds on European clubs to justify their valuations more rigorously. The players and their representatives start arriving at the negotiating table with numbers of their own.

And then, this is the part that always moves faster than anyone expects, the repricing becomes visible to the whole market simultaneously. European clubs start paying more because the information that justifies paying more is now available, credible, and impossible to ignore. Transfer fees for African players begin to reflect something closer to their actual contribution to the teams that buy them. What was always true about the value of this pipeline becomes, finally, legible to the people who control the capital.

By that point, the infrastructure is built. The data is collected. The relationships are established. The people who did that work, early, without the comfort of a consensus validating the idea, are sitting inside the market that everyone now understands is worth being in.

The window for being the person who built the infrastructure, rather than the person who arrived after it existed, does not stay open indefinitely.

The Only Question That Remains

Right now, as you read this, an academy director in Lagos is sitting across a table from a transfer committee in Milan. The same scene as yesterday. The same scene as five years ago. He knows what his player is worth. He does not have what he needs to prove it, or to wait long enough for someone to believe him.

The gap between the deal he gets today and the deal he deserves is not talent. It was never talent.

It is infrastructure. A data layer that does not exist. A valuation model that was never built. A set of financial tools that nobody has constructed for this specific market.

That infrastructure is the business. The transfer fees are just the evidence.

Go build it.

See you next time!

Berlin Growth Advisory is a boutique consultancy specialising in off-the-pitch transformation for football clubs, investors, and sports industry stakeholders. By leveraging data-driven insights, strategic partnerships, and innovative solutions, we empower clients to unlock hidden value, achieve operational excellence, and drive sustainable growth. Our services cater to mid-tier football clubs, family offices, private equity firms, and football executives seeking to improve financial performance, optimise operations, and capitalise on commercial opportunities.

Follow our Podcast “the football economy” : YouTube | Spotify |

Sometime in the late 1990s, an English football scout named Tom Vernon was doing what an English football scouts in Africa tend to do, which is sit in the back of a car on a road that probably shouldn't be called a road, heading toward a pitch that probably shouldn't be called a pitch, to watch boys play football in conditions that no one at Manchester United's training ground in Carrington would have recognised as football conditions at all.

Tom had spent years doing this. His job, officially, was to find African talent for Manchester United, to be, in effect, the man who combed through the parts of the world that European clubs agreed were full of talent but somehow never got around to properly looking at. He was good at it. He had an Englishman’s eye for undervalued things.

But somewhere along the way, Tom Vernon started noticing something that bothered him. Not the poverty, exactly, though there was plenty of that. Not the infrastructure, or the lack of it. What bothered Tom Vernon was the math.

He kept seeing boys who were, by any objective measure, extraordinary. Boys with first touches that Premiership academies would have paid serious money to develop. Boys who were fast and intelligent and who understood the geometry of football in ways you couldn’t teach. And then he’d look around at what happened to most of them, and the answer was: nothing. They played on a dirt pitch until they were too old to be considered a prospect, and then they did something else. The talent evaporated into the air, unused, like water off tarmac.

The entire continent of Africa was, Tom had come to understand, a massive market inefficiency. The asset was obvious. The market had simply decided, for reasons of geography and habit and a mild form of institutional laziness, not to price it correctly.

Tom decided to do something about this. In 1999, he and his partner Helen Vernon rented a house in New Town, a suburb of Accra, and began taking in boys.

That decision would eventually produce Mohammed Kudus.

The thing you have to understand about Mohammed Kudus is not where he ended up, but where he started.

He started at Right to Dream, which at the time was a residential academy in Ghana that most European football executives had never heard of and, if they had, would have found difficult to take entirely seriously. The club was founded by an English operating on a shoestring in West Africa. It had no television deal, no famous alumni, no affiliation with anyone whose name carried weight in the boardrooms of Manchester or Munich or Madrid.

What it had was a system. And a dirt pitch that turned out to be, acre for acre, one of the most productive pieces of football real estate on the planet.

From Right to Dream, Kudus moved to FC Nordsjælland, a club in the Danish Superliga that most casual European football fans would struggle to locate on a map. From Nordsjælland he moved to Ajax for €9 million. From Ajax he moved to West Ham for €43 million. From West Ham he moved to Tottenham for £55 million.

Do that arithmetic. A boy from a Ghanaian academy that spent its early years operating out of a rented house in Accra was sold, in the end, for the kind of money that Premier League clubs spend on established international footballers. Every step of the value chain, from the dust pitch to the Premier League, ran through a system that Tom Vernon had built from first principles in a Ghanaian suburb.

This is the part where, if you were writing about baseball, you would describe the scouts who walked right past him. But nobody walked past Mohammed Kudus. The more accurate version is that nobody was looking in the right place to begin with.

Vernon’s insight was not complicated. He would tell you this himself. Talent, he liked to say, is universal. Opportunity is not.

This is one of those observations that sounds like the kind of thing you embroider on a cushion, until you actually think about it. If talent is distributed roughly equally across the human population, and there’s no particular reason to think it isn’t, then the football academies of Western Europe are drawing from a tiny fraction of the available pool. They’re fishing in a well-stocked pond while ignoring the ocean.

Every year, Right to Dream runs trials across multiple African countries. The numbers are almost absurd. Over a hundred thousand young players are evaluated annually. The selection rate is somewhere in the range of fifteen to twenty students every two years. That is a scouting funnel so vast that European academies operating in the comfortable suburbs of Manchester and Barcelona are not even playing the same game.

What Vernon understood, and what took the rest of the industry an embarrassingly long time to appreciate, was that this wasn’t charity. It was competitive advantage.

He built the model around three things: football, education, and what the organisation calls character, the word that covers everything from emotional resilience to financial literacy to the psychological demands of playing in front of fifty thousand people when you grew up in a town where electricity was intermittent. These were not presented as alternatives to each other. They were built in parallel, simultaneously, the way you’d train a set of muscles by using all of them at once.

The education piece, in particular, was a decision that some people found eccentric. This was a football academy. Why did it need to function as a Cambridge International Examination Centre? Why did academic underperformance receive the same scrutiny as underperformance on the pitch?

Vernon’s answer was pragmatic. Most boys who go through a football academy, even the best ones, do not become professional footballers. The pathway is brutal. So the academy was designed to produce something valuable regardless of which direction a student’s life went. If he made it to the Premier League, good. If he went to a university in the United States on an academic scholarship, also good. More than a hundred graduates have taken that second path. Several have done both.

This turned out to be, in ways Vernon might not have fully anticipated, one of the most commercially significant decisions he made. Because the thing that European clubs most fear, when they spend serious money on a young player, is not that he lacks ability. It’s that he lacks the maturity and humility to handle what comes next. And the clubs that signed Right to Dream graduates started to notice something: they were different. Not just talented. Different. More adaptable. More stable. Less likely to become a headline for the wrong reasons at twenty-two.

In a market where clubs pay enormous sums not just for ability but for trust, that mattered. That was an edge.

In December 2015, Right to Dream did something that had never been done before. They bought a European football club.

The club was FC Nordsjælland, in the Danish Superliga. Right to Dream became the first African organisation to purchase a professional European football club. This was noted at the time as an interesting curiosity. What it actually was, in retrospect, was the completion of a circuit.

The logic was straightforward, if you were the kind of person who saw football as a talent pipeline rather than a collection of tribal loyalties. Ghana identified and developed the players. Denmark tested them in a serious competitive environment, serious enough to prove the point, not so serious that it overwhelmed the asset. Then the market came to buy them.

Right to Dream Park in Farum, north of Copenhagen, is not Old Trafford. It is not the Bernabéu. It is a modest professional football ground in Scandinavia. What it is, more importantly, is a shop window that happens to be UEFA-accredited and strategically positioned at the precise moment when a player is ready to be sold.

FC Nordsjælland has generated more than €210 million in cumulative player sales. It has done this while operating with a budget that the clubs buying its graduates would consider rounding error. The transfer fee for Mohammed Kudus’s move to Ajax alone was €9 million, enough, at the time, to fund several years of the entire Nordsjælland operation.

This is the economics of talent arbitrage. Find it cheap. Develop it well. Sell it at the moment of maximum value. Reinvest. Repeat.

The move that made everyone in football finally pay attention was not Mohammed Kudus. It was Ernest Nuamah.

Nuamah arrived at Right to Dream the usual way , surviving a trial process that filters hundreds of thousands of young players down to a handful of selected students. He moved through the Ghanaian academy, adapted to the Nordsjælland environment, and was sold to Lyon for €25 million.

This triggered a legal argument that, depending on your appetite for football governance minutiae, is either a technical footnote or one of the most important cases in the history of academy economics. In 2025, the Court of Arbitration for Sport issued a ruling related to Nuamah’s transfer. The question was whether academy solidarity rights, the payments that flow back to developmental clubs when players are sold, remain valid inside a multi-club ownership structure. The ruling said yes.

This matters more than it sounds. Solidarity payments, at eight-figure transfer fees, can represent meaningful sums. For Right to Dream, the ruling reinforced a principle that sits at the core of the entire model: the developmental origin of a player has economic value, and that value persists even as the player moves through multiple clubs and multiple owners. In other words, the entity that did the hard developmental work at the beginning gets to keep a thread of economic participation in the player’s career for a very long time.

Tom Vernon built this model before anyone was thinking seriously about multi-club ownership as a category. The CAS ruling is, among other things, a validation that the model was designed correctly.

In 2021, a man named Mohamed Mansour wrote a check.

Mansour’s family runs one of Egypt’s largest conglomerates, businesses that span multiple industries across the Middle East and Africa, the kind of diversified empire that gets described in business journalism as a “sprawling” concern, which usually means it’s too big to summarise in a sentence. Mohamed Mansour first encountered Right to Dream through his son, Loutfy, who had learned about the Ghana academy. Their relationship developed gradually, typical of serious financial commitments made with care.

The commitment, when it came, was roughly $120 million.

What is interesting about the Mansour investment is not the amount, though $120 million is a significant number for an academy that had started in a rented house. What is interesting is what it was not. It was not a vanity acquisition. Mansour did not rename the Nordsjælland stadium after himself or install a relative as sporting director or redirect the club’s transfer strategy toward players from his preferred markets.

He bought a system and left the system alone.

Tom Vernon stayed central to the project until transitioning out of operational roles in 2025. The mission-first identity stayed intact. The “give to gain” philosophy, the idea that if you invest fully in a person, performance will follow, was not rebranded or repositioned or softened for an investor audience. The money arrived, and Right to Dream expanded. The two things happened in sequence, which is the right order.

With Mansour capital behind it, Right to Dream moved into Egypt, acquiring FC Masar and opening a residential academy outside Cairo. This was not an acquisition of convenience, it was an application of the same hypothesis to a new market. Egypt had talent. The talent was underpriced. The system that had worked in Ghana could be transplanted.

Then came San Diego.

The entry fee for a Major League Soccer expansion franchise is, by any reasonable measure, an unusual number. Right to Dream’s expansion slot cost $500 million.

San Diego FC launched in MLS in 2025, in partnership with the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, with a development campus that includes the first Right to Dream residential academy in the United States. This is either an audacious overreach or the most logical step in the history of the organisation, depending on how you think about what Right to Dream actually is.

The case for audacious overreach: $500 million is a lot of money for a league that does not yet produce the world’s most expensive players. San Diego is a football city in a country that has spent decades insisting it was about to become a football country. The market is competitive, the culture is different, and the model that works in Ghana may not translate to a place where teenage athletes have historically been steered toward American football or basketball.

The case for logical step: MLS is growing. The US-Mexico border region is one of the most talent-dense football corridors in the Western Hemisphere. Right to Dream has, over twenty-five years, demonstrated that its model is not about Ghana specifically, it’s about identifying underpriced talent, developing it systematically, and monetising it patiently. The United States is, in this framing, just a new dust pitch.

The truth is probably that San Diego is the highest-risk and highest-upside thing Right to Dream has ever done, which is also true of most things worth doing.

It is worth pausing here to say something about the not-for-dividend structure, because it is unusual enough to deserve its own paragraph.

Several parts of the Right to Dream organisation are set up in a way that prevents profit from flowing outward to shareholders. Surplus is reinvested into facilities, scholarships, scouting, and staff. This is described, in the places where Right to Dream describes itself, as a reflection of the organisation’s values. It is that. It is also, and this is perhaps less often acknowledged, a piece of governance design.

Football development organisations that are structured to extract short-term profit tend to make decisions that optimise for short-term profit. They release players too early. They cut academic programmes when margins tighten. They rush players to market before they’re ready. The not-for-dividend structure removes the incentive for all of those behaviours. It is not just ethical positioning. It is a mechanism for protecting the quality of the product.

The product, in this case, is human beings who can play football at the highest level. The patient capital structure is the reason those human beings get long enough in the system to become what they are capable of becoming.

By 2025, Right to Dream had put graduates in four continents, generated more than €210 million in transfer revenue from one club alone, placed over a hundred students in university programmes across the United States and United Kingdom, sent seven alumni to the 2022 World Cup, and produced players who collectively ranked thirteenth among development academies globally for active male graduates in European leagues.

These numbers belong in a business school case study, and the business school case study version of this story is interesting. But the more interesting version is the one that starts with an Englishman in a car on a road that shouldn’t be called a road.

Vernon saw something that the market had failed to price. He saw it early. He built an infrastructure to extract the value that everyone else was leaving on the table. He did it without selling the thing that made it valuable, which is to say, without turning it into just another football machine optimised for a single commercial outcome.

The multi-club ownership model has become fashionable in football. Consortiums of investors buy clubs in multiple leagues, link them in official or unofficial pipelines, and move players between them in ways that may or may not serve the development of the players but reliably serve the financial interests of the ownership group. Right to Dream is, technically, a multi-club ownership structure. But it is a different kind.

The difference is this: most multi-club systems are built around an ownership philosophy. Right to Dream is built around a development philosophy. The ownership structure exists to serve the development mission. In almost every other MCO platform, that relationship is inverted.

The questions that remain, for the people who study these things, are the questions of what happens next.

Can the culture survive the departure of the man who built it? Founder-exits are the stress test that every mission-driven organisation eventually faces. Right to Dream is facing it now, in real time, while simultaneously running a new MLS franchise, an Egyptian academy still early in its development cycle, and a Ghanaian scouting operation that underpins the entire economic model. There is no quiet period available for institutional consolidation. The machine has to keep running while the engine is being replaced.

Can the San Diego model function as a development institution rather than a revenue machine in one of the most commercially demanding sports markets in the world? American professional sports have a way of rearranging the priorities of organisations that arrive with idealistic intentions. The money is too large, the expectations too immediate, the media environment too unforgiving of patience.

Can the pipeline keep pace with football’s regulatory environment, which is growing more complex in ways that specifically target the multi-club ownership structures and internal transfer relationships that Right to Dream depends on?

These are real questions. They are the kind that arise when an organisation has grown beyond the scale at which the founder’s force of personality is a sufficient management tool.

But the thing that should not be lost, in all the strategic analysis, is what was actually built. An Englishman operating in Ghana with no budget, no institutional backing, and no obvious reason to believe it would work looked at a continent full of talent that the rest of the market had systematically undervalued, and spent twenty-six years constructing a system that turned that talent into one of the most efficient development businesses in global sport.

He found the arbitrage. He worked it, patiently, for more than two decades. And then, characteristically, he went back to where it started, back to Ghana, back to the foundation, back to the dust pitch.

The Mansour Group did not write a $120 million check on sentiment. They wrote it because the math was obvious, obvious, that is, to anyone willing to get in the car and drive down the road to the pitch.

The harder question, now that Vernon is gone, is whether an organisation can keep seeing what he saw without him there to point at it.

See you next time!

Berlin Growth Advisory is a boutique consultancy specialising in off-the-pitch transformation for football clubs, investors, and sports industry stakeholders. By leveraging data-driven insights, strategic partnerships, and innovative solutions, we empower clients to unlock hidden value, achieve operational excellence, and drive sustainable growth. Our services cater to mid-tier football clubs, family offices, private equity firms, and football executives seeking to improve financial performance, optimise operations, and capitalise on commercial opportunities.

Follow our Podcast “the football economy” : YouTube | Spotify |

Every morning, a ranked list arrives in the inbox of every sporting director at every top 40 European club. Players they’ve never heard of. Leagues they’ve never watched. Probability scores next to each name, 87% chance of positive goal difference impact. 91% chance of resale value exceeding acquisition cost within three years.

Some of them ignore it. Th…

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It’s 6:45pm on a Tuesday in March. The U-12s are meant to start training at 7pm. The coach is standing in a car park with a clipboard, collecting £30 fees from parents dropping off their kids. Three haven’t paid in two months. One is sorting out a bank transfer on their phone while their son waits in the car. Another promises ‘next week, definitely.’ By the time everyone’s on the pitch, it’s 7:15pm and the floodlights are on a timer.

This scene repeats itself at thousands of clubs, every week. It’s this reality, not a business plan or market opportunity, that led to TeamFeePay.

When people talk about grassroots football, they usually talk about passion, community, and player development. What they talk about far less is administration. Yet the single biggest drain on energy is not tactics or training schedules. It is chasing £20–£40 monthly payments, reconciling spreadsheets, managing paper registrations, and answering endless messages from parents who forgot to transfer fees.

This is not a side issue. It is the operating system of the grassroots game. And for decades, that operating system has been fragile, manual, and heavily dependent on unpaid volunteer labour.

The origins of TeamFeePay sit precisely in this reality. Liam McStravick was not trying to become a tech founder. As a coach at Linfield FC Academy, he found himself, before almost every session, collecting fees from players, checking who had paid, updating records, and dealing with cash. The time cost ate directly into coaching time and player development. Rather than accept this as just the way grassroots football works, like every problem solver, he set out to fix it.

Today, TeamFeePay serves more than 1,500 clubs and 250,000 users, but the real achievement isn’t the numbers. It’s that one coach decided to stop drowning in cash and spreadsheets and built a system that finally frees clubs to focus on football.

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The hidden economics of admin friction

Most grassroots clubs are trapped by three things:

Unpredictable cash flow
Revenue is small in absolute terms, but highly volatile. Missed or late payments create constant short-term stress and limit the ability to plan.

High transaction costs
The time spent collecting fees, tracking attendance, and managing registrations often exceeds the time spent on actual football operations.

Volunteer burnout
Clubs are sustained by people whose opportunity cost is rarely priced in. When administration becomes overwhelming, good volunteers leave, and institutional memory disappears with them.

This is a classic productivity problem. Too much human effort is being consumed by low-value, repetitive tasks. The result is not just inefficiency, but really strategic stagnation. Clubs remain stuck in survival mode rather than development mode.

Why solutions scale in grassroots, even when budgets are small

What makes TeamFeePay interesting is not that it digitises payments, but that it removes friction from a process that is:

• Universal (every club collects fees)

• Repetitive (monthly, seasonal, ongoing)

• Emotionally costly (chasing parents, managing complaints)

When a product targets pain that is this structural, adoption is driven less by marketing and more by relief. In vertical SaaS terms, you are not selling software. You are selling time, predictability, and peace of mind.

This is why infrastructure platforms can scale in grassroots sport despite low average revenue per user. They replace unpaid labour, not just add features.

From cash collection to organisational capability

When a club knows exactly what’s coming in, they can do things like, buy a defibrillator instead of running a bake sale. Pay for DBS checks without hitting up committee members. Actually plan a girls’ team instead of talking about it for three years.

Operational efficiency quietly shifts clubs from informal community groups into semi-professional organisations, without stripping away their social character. That transition matters if grassroots football is to:

• Improve safeguarding and compliance

• Professionalise coach education

• Build sustainable female and disability programmes

• Create clearer player development pathways

None of this happens without administrative capacity.

What the investment signal really tells us

The recent £9m growth investment into TeamFeePay and its appearance in Deloitte’s Fast 50 should not be read simply as a startup success story. It is a market signal.

It suggests that investors now see value in the infrastructure layer of sport, not only in media rights, elite performance technology, or fan engagement platforms, but in the unglamorous plumbing of participation sport.

Every industry professionalises its foundations before it scales its skyline. Finance built payments. E-commerce built logistics. Grassroots sport is now building its operating system.

The broader strategic lesson for football

For club executives, federations, and investors, the deeper question is this, If administration is the biggest bottleneck in the football pyramid, are we under-investing in the operational foundations of the game?

We spend significant time debating talent pathways, coaching methodology, financial sustainability, and competitive balance. Yet far less on the systems that allow thousands of small organisations to function efficiently and sustainably.

Without strong grassroots operations, the entire professional ecosystem becomes more fragile, more unequal, and more dependent on a shrinking pool of volunteers.

TeamFeePay is one case study. But it illustrates a wider truth, that is the future of football will not be shaped only by broadcasters, sovereign funds, or elite clubs. It will also be shaped by the quiet professionalisation of the smallest units in the system.

And often, the most important innovations are not those that make the game more spectacular, but those that make it easier to run.

See you next time!

Berlin Growth Advisory is a boutique consultancy specialising in off-the-pitch transformation for football clubs, investors, and sports industry stakeholders. By leveraging data-driven insights, strategic partnerships, and innovative solutions, we empower clients to unlock hidden value, achieve operational excellence, and drive sustainable growth. Our services cater to mid-tier football clubs, family offices, private equity firms, and football executives seeking to improve financial performance, optimise operations, and capitalise on commercial opportunities.

Follow our Podcast “the football economy” : YouTube | Spotify |

The year is 2030. Players are bio-digital assets. Every professional club runs a certified AI stack. Elite managers are no longer tacticians alone, but philosophers, translators between humans and machines.

Welcome to the AI wars, an era where human performance is engineered through code, and football, as we once knew it, has shifted from art to applied …

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Most football clubs still face a fundamental limitation: their business model relies on just 30 match days a year.

Atlético Madrid know this more than most. They’re building an €800 million Sports City that will operate 365 days a year, and it’s attracting serious money from one of the world’s biggest investment funds. They are transforming the tradition…

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The American market has been football’s white whale for decades. Clubs launch summer tours, sign partnership deals, and watch their US follower counts climb, yet meaningful revenue remains elusive. The question has always been framed as “how do we make Americans care about football?”.

But this is the wrong question entirely.

The real question is why are E…

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Cristiano Ronaldo is football’s first billionaire, a big milestone for the world’s most popular sport. However if we take a step back, it’s surprising that it took this long for this to happen. Consider the fact that LeBron James (Basketball) and Roger Federer (Tennis) achieved this milestone before him.

This delay isn’t a reflection on Ronaldo’s marketability, but rather an exposure of decades of structural inefficiencies that systematically limited player earnings in the world’s most popular sport. The question isn’t why he finally succeeded, but why football’s commercial architecture took so long to unlock its true earning potential.

When Football Was a Local Business

For most of its history, football’s economy was fundamentally local and physically limited. Clubs were almost entirely dependent on gate receipts, a model that tethered their financial universe to stadium size and how many times they could play at home. This created a hard ceiling on club revenue and, by extension, player wages. The modern era only began when this model was shattered by television money. The Premier League’s transformation is telling: match-day income, once over 90% of revenue, now accounts for less than 20%, dwarfed by a broadcast deal that poured £1.9 billion into the league in 2015/16 alone. This revolution, however, arrived decades late.

American leagues, with their centralised media rights and revenue-sharing models, had already solved this puzzle, creating a system for systematic player wealth generation while European football was still counting ticket stubs.

The Bosman Ruling

Before 1995, football’s transfer system was a legalised form of indentured servitude. Clubs held players’ rights indefinitely, even after their contracts expired, destroying any leverage for the athletes to demand their true market value. The Bosman ruling changed all of this. Research shows it immediately increased player salaries by nearly 28% in England. This single legal victory unleashed earning potential that had been artificially suppressed for over a century.

The Revenue-Sharing Disadvantage

While American sports leagues guarantee players a near 50% share of total league revenue through collective bargaining, European football operated as a free-for-all. The NFL, NBA, and MLB have frameworks that ensure wealth flows to talent. Football had no such structure. While the Premier League’s wage-to-revenue ratio eventually became competitive, it wasn’t the result of a negotiated, league-wide system. This lack of a unified model created vast inequalities between clubs, concentrating wealth and power in a few elite teams and leaving the majority of players without the collective leverage to demand a fixed piece of the pie.

The Late Media Revolution

Football’s global broadcast bonanza came remarkably late. The NFL was building its national television empire in the 1960s. European football, despite its massive fanbase, didn’t fully capitalise until the digital age eliminated the scarcity of analogue broadcasting. The Premier League’s current international media rights, at €2.54 billion per year, now dwarf all competitors, but this revenue stream only matured in recent cycles. The competitive bidding from streaming services that finally drove rights fees to their logical, astronomical heights was a phenomenon of the 21st century, not the 20th.

The Global Media Rights Boom

Football’s international media rights only recently surpassed the monumental threshold of €2.5 billion annually, an explosive leap from modest beginnings. For decades, football’s broadcast income was constrained by limited analogue distribution and local TV markets, capping revenue and consequently player earnings. This paradigm shift began with the digital streaming revolution, where global platforms like DAZN, Amazon Prime, and others fiercely competed for Premier League and other top leagues’ rights. This transformed football from a regional pastime into a global entertainment juggernaut, unlocking unprecedented financial resources and elevating the sport’s commercial stature on the world stage.

Commercialisation & Endorsements

Beyond the pitch, the monetisation of athlete personal brands has redefined wealth creation for footballers. Ronaldo’s landmark lifetime endorsement deal with Nike, reportedly valued at around $1 billion, exemplifies this new frontier, where a player’s commercial influence rivals, and often surpasses, their on-field earnings. Coupled with diversified ventures spanning media production, fashion, and lifestyle brands, Ronaldo’s business acumen has crafted a multi-dimensional empire. This paradigm, pioneered by Michael Jordan, sets a new gold standard for how footballers architect enduring fortune, and highlights the evolving economics of athlete wealth in the modern era.

Financial Fair Play

UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, introduced in 2010, acted as a deliberate brake on player compensation. Framed as a sustainability measure, FFP required clubs to spend only what they earned, effectively installing a regulatory ceiling on salary investment. Research confirms FFP significantly decreased wage-to-revenue ratios in leagues like England and France. Unlike American salary caps, which are paired with guaranteed revenue shares for players, FFP was a pure spending restriction, a system designed to protect club finances, not maximise player earnings.

The Saudi Catalyst

Ultimately, Ronaldo’s billionaire status required an external shock to the system that European football couldn’t provide. His landmark deal with Al-Nassr contract reportedly includes tax-free earnings of €380 per minute, 15% club ownership, private jet access, and performance bonuses, a compensation structure that transcends traditional salary limitations within europe. It was sovereign wealth, unconstrained by FFP or traditional revenue models, that finally provided the financial architecture for a footballer to cross the billionaire threshold.

The telling detail is that it took Ronaldo until age 40, playing in his fifth league, after maximising every possible endorsement and business venture, to achieve what stars in other global entertainment industries accomplished much earlier in their careers. His success is a testament to his brand, but his timing is a damning indictment of football’s long-standing commercial inefficiencies.

Fan engagement is no longer a buzzword. It has become the single most powerful lever reshaping the business models of football clubs, and the wider sports and entertainment sectors. The lesson is clear: the clubs that treat fan engagement as a core revenue strategy, not a side project, are the ones unlocking sustainable growth.

To see where this is heading, look beyond football. Influencers, the creator economy, and leagues such as WWE, MLB, cricket, the NBA, Volleyball, NFL, and even tennis are writing the playbook. The opportunity for football is bigger than most executives realize, if they move fast, learn from others, and apply these lessons with discipline.

The Evolution of Fan Revenue Models

For decades, football clubs relied on one thing above all: match-day ticketing. That model is broken. The global sports industry today is worth over $2.3 trillion, and fan engagement directly drives at least $586 billion of that through gate receipts, broadcasting, sponsorship, merchandise, gaming, and more.

In Europe, the numbers are unambiguous. For top clubs, commercial and broadcasting revenues now overshadow ticketing. Match day is still emotionally priceless, but commercially, it’s just one slice of the pie, as they say.

The new question is: how do you turn engaged fans into recurring revenue streams?

Why Fan Engagement Is the Revenue Engine

The shift from physical attendance to digital and experiential revenues is not an accident. It’s the outcome of deliberate fan engagement strategies.

Engaged fans:

• Buy more merchandise.

• Renew subscriptions.

• Share content that amplifies your reach.

• Attract sponsors hungry for loyal, attentive audiences.

The data backs this up: commercial strategies built on authentic engagement outperform generic campaigns in conversion and lifetime value.

In other words, the quality of your fan engagement directly determines the quality of your revenues.

Lessons from the Creator Economy and Influencers

The creator economy is a mirror football can’t ignore. Influencers have mastered the art of turning attention into sustainable income, and their models are directly transferable.

Direct-to-Fan Models
Creators thrive on recurring subscriptions and paid communities. Nearly 95% monetise directly, with a mix of memberships, product sales, and events. Football clubs should be doing the same with digital memberships, exclusive content, and fan-driven commerce, I should say that Barcelona have been leading the way here.

Data Ownership and Engagement Depth
Creators own their fan data. They don’t outsource their communities to algorithms. Football clubs that still rely entirely on social media “reach” are building on rented land. The real play is CRM, fan segmentation, and direct digital touch-points.

Authentic Storytelling
The most successful creators win because they feel human. They share behind-the-scenes moments, struggles, and journeys. Football clubs that replicate this with players, through short-form content, live Q&As, and raw storytelling, will own the next generation of fandom. Even ex footballers, are acting on this insight.

Innovations from Sports and Entertainment

If you want proof that engagement multiplies revenues, look at the U.S.

Personalised Digital Experiences
Leagues like the NBA and NFL have turned apps into engagement centeres: fantasy leagues, polls, exclusive content, second-screen integrations. Result: a 37% increase in engagement time and stronger sponsor interest.

In-Venue and Hybrid Experiences
WWE, cricket, and MLB show how stadiums can become interactive theatres: AR fan cams, loyalty programs, real-time voting. Fans don’t just watch, they participate.

Rewarding Loyalty
Tiered memberships, VIP communities, priority access, annual fan conventions. These aren’t gimmicks at all, they really are revenue engines for the now and the future. Fans spend more when they feel recognised.

Manchester City’s research nails it: digital innovation, deep integration, adaptability, and content balance are non-negotiables. Clubs that get this right see higher broadcast deals, stronger sponsorships, and deeper loyalty.

Vodafone x Turkish Volleyball: A Playbook for Purpose and Tech

One of the clearest case studies comes from outside football: Vodafone’s landmark sponsorship of the Turkish Volleyball Federation.

This was a very purpose-driven partnership, that was built around gender equality, youth empowerment, and social impact. The emotional connection was real, and fans responded.

The technology elevated it further. With Hawk-Eye Innovations, Vodafone introduced Europe’s first 5G-enabled real-time in-venue data. Fans could track serve speeds and spike heights instantly. Attendance rose. Engagement spiked.

The content strategy delivered 170+ videos, 25 million Instagram impressions, and a 77% engagement rise during playoffs. At the Olympics, it went global: 42 million digital reach, 57 million video views.

The lesson for football: combine purpose, immersive tech, storytelling, youth engagement, and rigorous data analytics. That’s how you build a fan-first commercial powerhouse.

The 2025 Trends Clubs Must Act On

• Personalisation & Localisation: Gen Z and Gen Alpha demand content in their language, their tone, their style. Think multi-lingual commentary, influencer-led watch-alongs, and tailored feeds.

• AI as Enabler, Not Replacement: AI can deliver hyper-personalisation and dynamic sponsorships, but it can’t tell your story. The human element is irreplaceable.

• Hybrid Commercial Ecosystems: Legacy rights are fragmenting. The future is a blend of match-day, digital commerce, influencer partnerships, and gamification.

• Winning Gen Alpha: This is the most valuable fan segment emerging. They live on TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, and gaming. They want quick, interactive, co-created content. Clubs must go where they are.

• Fan-Led Communities: Channels like Mark Goldbridge’s United Stand show that fans often trust other fans more than official club voices. Smart clubs embrace this, not fight it.

• Cloud & Remote Production: Native-language broadcasts at scale are now possible. This is how you reach fragmented global markets affordably.

• Active Lifestyle Integration: Fans are connecting through wellness, running, hybrid fitness. Clubs that align with this trend create new sponsorship and engagement pathways.

Translating Strategy into Action

It’s not enough to talk strategy. Clubs need execution.

Here’s the roadmap I recommend to executives:

1. Define clear objectives: digital memberships, international expansion, merchandise growth.

2. Audit your fan landscape: what touch-points and data do you actually control?

3. Invest in fan data infrastructure: CRM and analytics that segment fans.

4. Pilot direct-to-fan monetisation: subscriptions, exclusive content, early ticketing.

5. Produce authentic, platform-tailored content: short, raw, player-driven.

6. Integrate gamification: prediction games, branded awards, simple competitions.

7. Enhance in-venue experiences: AR, interactive stats, sponsor-linked experiences.

8. Monitor, iterate, and scale: use analytics to double down on what works.

Quick wins are there: youth storytelling, region-specific content for international fans, exclusive social content tied to marquee matches. The key is consistency and data-driven iteration.

International Supporter Groups: Football’s Untapped Growth Pillar

The passion of overseas fans is staggering. Liverpool and Manchester United supporters in Asia routinely wake at 4 a.m. to watch live matches. This definitely a signal of extraordinary loyalty.

Clubs should:

• Recognise and celebrate this dedication.

• Tailor engagement with early-morning virtual meet-ups and region-specific content.

• Empower local leadership with exclusive merchandise, logistical support, and recognition.

• View these groups as growth assets, not afterthoughts.

Handled right, international fan groups become grassroots commercial partners, driving sponsorship, expanding brand equity, and creating authentic global communities.

A Framework for Executives

To put it all together, clubs need a framework that blends purpose, technology, and storytelling:

• Purpose-driven partnerships that align with fan values.

• Immersive in-venue tech that elevates live experiences.

• Multi-platform content factories to maintain year-round engagement.

• Fan segmentation via analytics to personalise offers.

• Youth storytelling to secure long-term pipelines.

• Direct monetisation channels inspired by the creator economy.

• Diversified revenue streams that insulate clubs from shocks.

• Tiered loyalty programs to reward superfans.

• Gamified branded awards to link player excellence with fan excitement.

• AI personalisation balanced with human storytelling.

Final Word

Fan engagement has evolved from “nice-to-have” to fundamental commercial strategy. The clubs that understand this, and act decisively, will surely thrive.

The winners will:

• Build global ecosystems of loyal fans.

• Convert passion into recurring income.

• Balance technology with authenticity.

• Win the hearts (and wallets) of Gen Alpha.

The future of football belongs to clubs that see fans not just as spectators, but as partners in growth.

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In 1978, recently unemployed Bill Rasmussen had an idea few understood: a television network that covered sports 24/7. The concept, now obvious, was then radical.

TV was dominated by three networks, sports were occasional, and cable TV was in its infancy. There were no models to follow. Yet, ESPN, was born.

In ESPN’s story lie timeless business principles: the power of unconventional thinking, the challenge of scale, the inevitability of change, and the need to adapt or decline.

An Idea Without a Market

Rasmussen was early.

In 1978, demand for sports content existed but was unmet. Fans could only watch what networks aired. Rasmussen saw the truth: lack of supply doesn't mean lack of demand. He saw sports as ongoing, unscripted drama, content.
Lacking rights to major sports, early ESPN filled airtime with lesser events. Dismissed by many, ESPN was building bridges to a market few recognised.

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Scale Meets Skepticism

Capital turned idea into business. Getty Oil, seeking diversification, invested $15 million for 85% of the company.

The real innovation was distribution. Cable, still new, gave ESPN national reach via satellite, a breakthrough. ESPN also introduced a game-changing model: affiliate fees. Instead of relying solely on ads, it charged cable operators a small per-subscriber fee, just 6 cents early on, rising to $7–$10.

Misalignment with Getty’s leadership led to Rasmussen’s exit. Later, ABC and The Walt Disney Company brought institutional weight and reach. The focus on serving unmet demand with relentless content stayed.

The Empire Phase

By the 1980s, ESPN was now dominant. For example, SportsCenter turned anchors into stars. College and niche sports got national attention.

By the 2000s, ESPN was a vertically integrated content machine: live events, talk shows, and original films. HD arrived in 2003.

Financially, it was a juggernaut.

At its peak, ESPN reached over 100 million households. Carriage fees alone generated $9 billion annually, a rare blend of pricing power, habit-forming content, and scale.

But as we all know, every empire faces decline. Growth becomes assumption. Assumptions become fragility.

The Disruption Phase

Today, ESPN still generates more operating income than Disney’s Entertainment segment but headwinds grow.

Cable, ESPN’s foundation, is in decline. U.S. subscribers dropped from 100 million in 2011 to ~70 million in 2023. The once-mighty affiliate fee model now leaks.

ESPN is evolving its business by expanding its digital presence through ESPN+, exploring streaming ventures with Fox Corporation and Warner Bros. Discovery, and eyeing strategic equity deals, possibly with the National Football League (NFL).

Still, challenges persist.

To survive this next cycle, ESPN must do what it once did best, see the game before it’s played.

Episode Summary

We dive into the geopolitical chessboard that is modern football. From Saudi Arabia's strategic ambitions to the encroaching influence of US private capital, Professor Chadwick breaks down how football has become a tool for economic positioning, nation branding, and ideological export.

Topics discussed include:

• The growing role of state-backed investments in football

• How sponsorship is evolving in a multipolar world

• Sport washing and soft power dynamics

• The ideological clash between European traditions and state-led sporting models

• What Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030” means for global football

• Why football holds symbolic power like no other sport

• Strategic advice for club executives and decision-makers

Key Takeaways for Industry Stakeholders:

• Football is no longer just a game, it’s geopolitical capital.

• Club owners and executives must understand the ideological and financial motivations behind new investors.

• Western football models face increasing pressure from more aggressive, state-driven strategies.

• Adaptability, knowledge, and clear stakeholder strategy are critical for surviving the sport’s next decade of transformation.

Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction to The Football Economy Podcast
01:39 – The Intersection of Sports and Geopolitics
05:49 – Football’s Unique Global Influence
19:02 – Saudi Arabia’s Vision: Sports and Economic Strategy
23:54 – Sport Washing: Definition and Implications
36:38 – Global North vs. Global South: Economic and Sporting Tensions
48:19 – Preserving Identity in a Changing Football World
56:10 – The Future of Football: Optimism vs. Pessimism

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the football economy is a weekly series presented by Berlin Growth Advisory, aimed at uncovering the strategy behind the sport. Each episode features deep-dive conversations with leaders in football, business, and beyond.

Berlin Growth Advisory (BGA) is a boutique consultancy specialising in off-the-pitch transformation for football clubs, investors, and sports industry stakeholders. By leveraging data-driven insights, strategic partnerships, and innovative solutions, we empower clients to unlock hidden value, achieve operational excellence, and drive sustainable growth.

Our services cater to mid-tier football clubs, family offices, private equity firms, and football executives seeking to improve financial performance, optimise operations, and capitalise on commercial opportunities.

Follow our Podcast "the football economy" : YouTube | Spotify |

"The big money is not in the buying or selling, but in the waiting."

— Charlie Munger

What’s Going On?

The football world is no longer just about what happens on the pitch—it’s a high-stakes business game where a few big players are rewriting the rules. Multi-club ownership (MCO) has stormed onto the scene, turning the sport into something that looks a lot like an oligopoly, where a handful of deep-pocketed groups hold sway over an ever-growing slice of the market. For investors and club executives, this isn’t just a trend to watch, it’s a seismic shift that’s changing how clubs compete, make money, and navigate a maze of regulations.

Let’s break down how MCO is flipping the script on European football, unpack the challenges it brings, and offer some practical insights for staying ahead in this new reality.

The Meteoric Rise of Multi-Club Empires

The numbers don’t lie: multi-club ownership is spreading like wildfire. According to UEFA’s Intelligence Centre, over 180 clubs worldwide were part of MCO structures by 2022. up from under 100 just four years earlier and a mere 40 in 2012. The pandemic briefly slowed things down in 2020, but the rebound has been relentless, especially in Europe’s top leagues. In the Big 5 leagues (England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France), plus Belgium and Portugal, over a third of clubs now have some kind of cross-investment tie to another team. Why? Because that’s where the real money flows, think TV rights, sponsorship deals, and commercial cash cows.

Growth of Multi-Club Ownership Over Time

Examples of Major MCO Groups and Holdings (2025)

No discussion of multi-club ownership is complete without mentioning Red Bull. Their networK spanning RB Leipzig, Red Bull Salzburg, New York Red Bulls, and Red Bull Bragantino, pioneered the integration of shared scouting, coaching philosophies, and player pathways. Red Bull’s model has not only produced elite talent but also tested the boundaries of regulatory frameworks, with UEFA mandating clear operational separation between Leipzig and Salzburg to preserve competition integrity. Their experience offers a playbook, and a cautionary tale for today’s rapidly expanding MCO empires.

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An Oligopoly in the Making

Let’s call it what it is: the football market is starting to look like a textbook oligopoly, where a few ownership groups control a massive chunk of the action. Think of it as a concentration ratio, the top dogs are gobbling up more of the market, leaving smaller players to fight for scraps. Using the Structure-Conduct-Performance framework, here’s how it’s playing out:

Structure-Conduct-Performance (SCP) Framework for MCO

Barriers to entry are another piece of the puzzle. Getting into the MCO game requires serious cash, the ability to navigate complex regulations across multiple countries, and the clout to compete with established networks that already have a head start on talent and partnerships. It’s a tough club to join, and that’s exactly how the big players like it.

Why Investors Are All In

Why the rush to MCO? It’s about synergies and opportunity. As Manchester City’s CEO Ferran Soriano put it, football is the king of sports in the entertainment world, and it’s got untapped potential. Investors see clubs as undervalued assets with room to grow, especially when they can build a network of teams working together. The talent pipeline is the big draw, flagship clubs like Manchester City or Chelsea sit at the top, with feeder clubs feeding them young stars. This setup lets parent clubs stockpile talent while feeder clubs cash in when players move up.

The “cheap entry” strategy is another factor. Financially distressed clubs, especially during the pandemic, were ripe for the picking, with groups like City Football Group snapping up teams like Lommel SK and Troyes at bargain prices. Lower-division clubs are particularly attractive because they’re affordable entry points into markets with strong local talent pools. Plus, changes like FIFA’s 2015 ban on third-party player ownership and Brexit’s work permit rules have made owning European clubs a workaround for English teams looking to develop EU talent.

The Risks and Regulatory Pushback

This MCO boom isn’t without its headaches. Regulators are sounding alarms—about two-thirds of national football associations now have rules limiting or outright banning multi-club ownership within their leagues. Some cap shareholdings (like a 10% limit on stakes in a second club), while others forbid owning multiple teams in the same country. Beyond that, 11 countries have broader restrictions on private investment in clubs, and 23 now require new owners to pass “fit and proper person” tests or prove their funds are legit.

UEFA’s got its hands full too, especially when clubs with the same owners might face off in competitions. That’s a direct threat to the integrity of the game—nobody wants to see two teams from the same network throwing matches or rigging transfers. Speaking of transfers, there’s growing concern about MCOs distorting the market. When clubs in the same network trade players, prices can be manipulated to benefit the parent group, shortchanging smaller clubs that rely on transfer fees or solidarity payments.

Then there’s the fan factor. Supporters aren’t always thrilled when their club becomes a cog in a corporate machine. Some MCOs are about brand-building, others about talent development, but both can clash with the local pride and traditions fans hold dear.

We should not be quick to forget, Red Bull’s dual ownership of RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg famously forced UEFA to scrutinise their management structures, requiring clear operational separation to ensure both clubs could compete in European competitions. This set a precedent for how regulators might handle similar conflicts as MCO grows.

Regulatory Landscape on MCO

What’s Next for Investors and Executives

Navigating this MCO landscape is like walking a tightrope. Here’s a quick SWOT breakdown:

To stay ahead, here’s what smart investors and executives should do:

• Track Regulations: Stay on top of rule changes at national and UEFA levels. Being proactive about compliance can give you an edge.

• Engage Communities: Invest in local fanbases and respect club identities. The best MCOs blend commercial goals with supporter values to keep the peace.

• Maximise Synergies: Use data and resources across your network to boost efficiency, but don’t turn every club into a cookie-cutter version of the flagship.

• Plan for Risks: Have backup plans for regulatory curveballs and stay flexible to adapt to new market realities.

The Bottom Line

Multi-club ownership is the new power structure in European football, and it’s got all the hallmarks of an oligopoly concentration, coordination, and growing barriers to entry. For investors and executives, it’s a goldmine of opportunity, but it comes with real risks. Regulatory scrutiny is ramping up, fans are pushing back, and the competitive balance of the game is at stake. Success means playing smart: balancing profit motives with the soul of the sport while staying one step ahead of the rule makers. The MCO trend isn’t slowing down anytime soon, but its future depends on how well these networks can navigate the tension between their own ambitions and the broader football ecosystem.

“He who wishes to fight must first count the cost.”

— Sun Tzu

See you next time!

Berlin Growth Advisory (BGA) is a boutique consultancy specialising in off-the-pitch transformation for football clubs, investors, and sports industry stakeholders. By leveraging data-driven insights, strategic partnerships, and innovative solutions, we empower clients to unlock hidden value, achieve operational excellence, and drive sustainable growth.

Our services cater to mid-tier football clubs, family offices, private equity firms, and football executives seeking to improve financial performance, optimise operations, and capitalise on commercial opportunities.

Follow our Podcast "the football economy" : YouTube | Spotify |

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

— Buckminster Fuller

Let's state the obvious from the outset: there is no evidence to suggest that Google intends to pursue U.S. Premier League streaming rights. None whatsoever. However, the strategic landscape suggests this possibility deserves serious consideration from club executives and industry stakeholders.

Our intention with this analysis is to raise awareness of what could become a transformative opportunity for the football ecosystem. When you consider Google's aggressive $2 billion annual NFL Sunday Ticket investment, the largest sports streaming deal in history, combined with YouTube's commanding 200 million U.S. monthly user base, the platform emerges as the most compelling hypothetical bidder for Premier League rights.

This analysis explores what Google's potential market entry could look like, the financial implications for all 20 Premier League clubs, and the broader strategic consequences for football's commercial evolution. For club executives, understanding these possibilities now could prove crucial for future revenue planning and strategic positioning.

The Strategic Imperative

The rapid shift away from cable, growing demand for streaming, and Big Tech’s push into sports create a major opportunity to shake up how Premier League matches are shown in the U.S. With over 200 million monthly users as of 2025, YouTube could change the game by using Google’s wider ecosystem, like Search, Android, and its powerful ad platform, along with the experience it’s gained from streaming the NFL Sunday Ticket.

Current Rights Landscape

Holder: NBC (Peacock) through 2027/28

Value: $2.7 billion over 6 years ($450 million annually)

Performance Metrics:

• Average TV audience: ~500,000 viewers per match

• Streaming peaks: 800,000+ for marquee fixtures (Manchester United vs. Liverpool)

Trend: Streaming viewership up 15% annually, offsetting 10% TV decline

A streaming-first bidder could achieve a 33% value uplift through innovative monetisation strategies and enhanced global reach capabilities.

Big Tech Sports Rights: The Competitive Matrix

Google's scale advantage and ecosystem integration capabilities significantly outmatch competitors, though Disney and Netflix represent emerging competitive threats requiring monitoring.

Google’s Competitive Edge

Rights Valuation Projections

Competitive Bidding Landscape

Note: These projections are analytical estimates based on market precedents, as no public confirmation exists regarding Google's bidding intentions

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A Post-2028 Vision for Google & U.S. Premier League Rights

Current Rights Holders & Timeline

NBCUniversal holds exclusive U.S. Premier League broadcast rights through the end of the 2027–28 season under a $2.7 billion, six-year deal, with all matches on NBC, USA Network, and Peacock. Any direct streaming involvement by Google/YouTube would only be possible in the next rights cycle (2028–29 onward), barring earlier sub-licensing or digital carve-outs.

Forward-Looking Framework

This model envisions Google/YouTube as a digital-first challenger for the 2028–34 rights cycle, aiming to:

• Compete with established players (NBC, ESPN+, Amazon)

• Match or exceed current monetisation benchmarks

• Align with Premier League objectives: revenue growth, innovation, and global reach

Learning from the Current Deal

YouTube Streaming: Post-2028 Pricing Assumptions

Pricing Benchmarks:

• Peacock:$7.99–$13.99/month (NBC)

• DAZN: ~$10–15/month for top leagues (Europe)

• Amazon UK: £8.99/month for 20 matches

Merchandise Growth:

• Amazon’s NFL streaming led to a 5–8% merchandise uplift

• YouTube’s global reach (2.7B users) could drive 5–10% growth in club merchandise sales, based on historical e-commerce and digital platform integrations (YouTube Shopping, Fanatics partnerships).

Strategic Considerations for a 2028+ Bid

Negotiation Strategies for Clubs

• Advocate for 80% equal distribution to maximise mid-table and lower-club benefits, referencing current Premier League revenue models

• Push for transparent reporting on digital engagement and merchandise sales to ensure fair ancillary revenue sharing.

Global Context

• U.S. rights deals have a multiplier effect on international negotiations. A $600M U.S. deal could increase Asia rights value by 10–15%, based on historical uplifts following major U.S. broadcast agreements

• YouTube’s global platform offers unique opportunities for cross-market fan acquisition and merchandise sales, as evidenced by e-commerce case studies and digital-first sports partnerships.

Club Financial Impact Analysis (Post-2027/28 Cycle, U.S. Rights)

Existing NBC U.S. Deal (2022–2028)

• Annual Value: ~$433–450 million per year ($2.6–2.7 billion over six years)

• Distribution to Clubs (80%): $346–360 million/year

• Equal Share Per Club: ~$17–18 million/year

Projected Google U.S. Rights Deal (Post-2027/28)

• Proposed Annual Value: $600 million/year

• Distribution to Clubs (80%): $480 million/year

• Equal Share Per Club: $24 million/year

International Rights (Excl. U.S. Uplift, 2025/26)

• Average Club: ~$90 million/year from equal share of international broadcast rights

• Top Club: $150–165 million/year (with merit/facility bonuses)

• Bottom Club: $95–105 million/year

Combined Annual Rights Value (International + U.S.)

Key Takeaways

• Current NBC Deal: Each club receives ~$17–18 million/year from U.S. rights if split equally; the average club’s total international rights income is about $108 million/year ($90M + $18M).

• Hypothetical Google Deal: Each club would receive ~$24 million/year from U.S. rights if split equally; the average club’s total international rights income would rise to $114 million/year ($90M + $24M).

• Uplift: The Google deal would represent a ~33% increase in U.S. rights value and an additional $6 million/year per club compared to the NBC deal.

• Top clubs could earn up to $205 million/year, while bottom clubs would still receive over $100 million/year from international broadcast rights alone.

Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) Strategic Benefits

• Transfer Budgets: Full international broadcast revenue can fund multiple major signings, comprehensive academy investments, or infrastructure upgrades.

• PSR Compliance: Higher, more stable revenue base supports sustainable wage and transfer spending, reducing risk of financial penalties.

• Operational Investments: Enables stadium upgrades, technology improvements, and community programs, especially crucial for mid-table and newly promoted clubs.

Risk Management Framework

Club-Specific Strategic Recommendations

Top Six Clubs Approach:

• Brand Expansion: Leverage YouTube's global 2.7 billion user base for U.S. and Asian market growth

• Content Strategy: Develop exclusive YouTube series including behind-the-scenes access and player documentary content

• Cross-Platform Promotion: Utilize existing club YouTube channels for integrated match-day content and fan engagement

Mid-Table and Smaller Clubs Strategy:

• Visibility Enhancement: Promote academy players and youth development content to U.S. audiences for global talent recognition

• Revenue Monetisation: Develop exclusive training ground and facility access content via YouTube Premium

• Global Market Penetration: Target emerging markets including Africa and Asia through YouTube's comprehensive reach

Strategic Value Creation for Clubs

Global Sports Rights: Competitive Benchmarking

Google's investment scale and proven sports rights execution position it as the most formidable potential bidder for Premier League U.S. rights acquisition.

Manchester United Financial Performance Context

Drawing parallels to our previous analysis of Manchester United's commercial challenges, additional Premier League rights revenue becomes increasingly critical. Manchester United reported a £113.16 million loss in 2024, representing a 294.4% increase from 2023's £28.68 million loss. For clubs facing similar financial pressures, the potential $6 million annual uplift from Google's hypothetical rights acquisition could provide crucial PSR compliance support and operational stability.

Enhanced U.S. rights revenue could alleviate the commercial stagnation concerns identified in top-tier clubs while providing smaller clubs with essential financial resources for competitive sustainability.

Conclusion

Google's hypothetical $600–700 million annual acquisition of U.S. Premier League rights represents a paradigm shift toward streaming-first, ecosystem-integrated football broadcasting. For Premier League clubs, the potential financial uplift of up to $6 million annually provides essential PSR compliance support and enhanced squad investment capability, while YouTube's unmatched global scale offers unprecedented brand exposure opportunities in critical growth markets.

Success in this transformation depends on effectively balancing aggressive monetisation strategies with comprehensive fan accessibility, skill fully navigating complex regulatory environments, and ensuring all 20 Premier League clubs, regardless of current market position or financial status, realise tangible commercial and competitive advantages.

The fundamental question isn't whether Big Tech will dominate sports broadcasting, but which platform will establish the new global standard for football content delivery and fan engagement. Google's comprehensive ecosystem integration capability and demonstrated sports rights execution excellence suggest strong positioning to lead this industry transformation.

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."

— Vincent van Gogh

See you next time!

Berlin Growth Advisory (BGA) is a boutique consultancy specialising in off-the-pitch transformation for football clubs, investors, and sports industry stakeholders. By leveraging data-driven insights, strategic partnerships, and innovative solutions, we empower clients to unlock hidden value, achieve operational excellence, and drive sustainable growth.

Our services cater to mid-tier football clubs, family offices, private equity firms, and football executives seeking to improve financial performance, optimise operations, and capitalise on commercial opportunities.

Follow our Podcast "the football economy" : YouTube | Spotify |

The modern football landscape is a high-stakes arena where on-field glory often clashes with off-field financial realities. Clubs are no longer merely sports institutions; they are intricate businesses navigating a complex web of revenue streams, expenditures, and regulatory frameworks. At the heart of this ecosystem lies Financial Fair Play (FFP), now evolving into Financial Sustainability Regulations (FSR), designed to ensure both financial responsibility and competitive balance.

These regulations aim to curb excessive spending, promote long-term stability, and prevent clubs from collapsing under unsustainable debt. We delve into the historical evolution of FFP/FSR by dissecting the current challenges clubs face, and propose actionable insights for navigating this new era of financial sustainability. We will also touch on high-profile cases of Manchester City, PSG, Barcelona and the likes, and highlight the complexity of this subject matter.

The Evolution of FFP to FSR

The initial wave for FFP stemmed from the growing concern over the escalating debts and financial instability of numerous European clubs. The original FFP regulations, primarily focused on the “break-even” rule, aimed to prevent clubs from spending beyond their generated revenue. This initial framework, implemented in 2010, did yield positive results. UEFA reports that "in 2009, net losses across Europe's top-division clubs stood at €1.6 billion; by 2018, that had been transformed to a profit of €140 million, with overdue payables virtually wiped out."

However, criticisms quickly emerged, arguing that these rules favored historically wealthy clubs, hindering the ambitions of smaller clubs and new investors. Additionally, the financial shockwaves of the COVID-19 pandemic, which as UEFA reports "caused unprecedented losses for European clubs," exposed the need for a more robust and adaptable system. UEFA also notes that "the reduction of operating revenues, inflexible wage costs and a collapse of player transfer profits resulted in cumulative losses of €7 billion among top-division clubs.

These challenges prompted a significant shift in UEFA's approach, leading to the transition to Financial Sustainability Regulations (FSR). Emphasizing long-term financial health over short-term balance sheets, FSR introduces key changes, including profitability and sustainability rules, which broaden the scope of financial assessments. This evolution reflects a move towards a more holistic approach, addressing not just immediate spending but also the overall financial resilience of clubs. As Andrea Traverso, UEFA's financial sustainability and research director, states, "as European football's governing body, it is our duty to ensure financial stability. Our new rules have received unanimous support from across the European football community."

To illustrate the evolving landscape of financial regulations in football, the table below highlights the key changes and impacts of each major FFP and FSR update from UEFA since 2010 to today.

Breaking FSR rules has serious consequences. UEFA is now stricter and can catch clubs trying to hide financial problems faster. The Club Financial Control Body (CFCB) has the authority to impose a range of sanctions including big fines, limits on transfers, or even loss of points. These sanctions are progressive, escalating in severity based on the extent and frequency of breaches. UEFA is especially tough on clubs that don't pay their bills and those that spend too much on players. Following the rules isn't just about avoiding punishment; it's about keeping clubs healthy and competitive in the long run.

The Club Owner's Perspective: Adapting to New Realities

For club owners, FSR presents a paradigm shift. The era of unchecked spending and debt-fueled ambitions is waning. Owners must now balance the desire for on-field success with the imperative of financial prudence. Investment strategies are undergoing a transformation, with a greater emphasis on sustainable growth and diversified revenue streams. This requires a shift in relationships with external stakeholders, particularly potential investors, who now prioritize long-term viability over short-term returns.

The delicate dance between securing talent and adhering to squad cost controls requires meticulous planning and foresight. As Dr. Dan Plumley, senior lecturer in Sport Finance at Sheffield Hallam University (England), aptly points out, FSR’s impact extends beyond just wages: “It’s not just wages now, it's going to be transfer fees, agent fees and the way that contracts are amortised as well, so it's going to be a little bit higher than that wage figure,” This highlights the need for a more comprehensive and nuanced approach to financial management, where every expenditure is scrutinized for its long-term impact.

The challenges are undeniable, but so are the opportunities for clubs that embrace financial responsibility. The graph below, sourced from Deloitte's Football Money League report, underscores this point. It showcases the revenue streams of several top European clubs, highlighting the growing importance of diversification. While broadcasting revenue remains significant, clubs are increasingly exploring new avenues, such as expanding their global fanbase through international tours and maximizing commercial partnerships.

This shift towards a multi-faceted revenue model not only strengthens a club's financial foundation but also reduces its reliance on any single income source. By embracing innovation and exploring new markets, clubs can navigate the complexities of FSR while continuing to invest in their on-field ambitions.

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The Financial Director's Role: A Shift in Approach

Having analyzed the evolving role of club owners in the FSR era, it becomes evident that the financial director's responsibilities are also undergoing a significant transformation. The financial director is now a central figure in navigating the complexities of FSR, ensuring compliance, and maintaining the club's long-term financial health.

Meticulous financial planning and forecasting are no longer optional; they are essential for compliance: (i) Squad cost management, (ii) player transfer strategies, and (iii) contract negotiations must align with FSR requirements. The financial director must possess a deep understanding of the regulations, the ability to analyze complex financial data, and the foresight to anticipate future challenges.

Key aspects of FSR for Financial Directors:

Squad Cost Rule: This rule, limiting spending on wages, transfers, and agent fees to 70% of club revenue, is arguably the most critical aspect of FSR for financial directors to master. It requires careful tracking of all squad-related expenses and proactive management to ensure compliance.

Profitability and Sustainability Rules: These rules assess a club's overall financial health, considering factors such as revenue diversification, debt levels, and profitability trends. Financial directors must develop sophisticated and up-to-date financial models and forecasting tools to demonstrate compliance and anticipate future financial performance.

State-of-the-Art Squad Cost Management:

Clubs are adopting innovative approaches to squad cost management under FSR. This includes:

Data-Driven Recruitment: Using data analytics to identify undervalued players and make more informed transfer decisions.

Contract Negotiations and FSR: Financial directors must carefully structure contracts to comply with squad cost rules, often incorporating clauses related to performance, appearances, and team success. This requires close collaboration with the sporting director and manager to ensure that contract terms align with both sporting and financial objectives.

Youth Development: Investing in youth academies to develop homegrown talent and reduce reliance on expensive transfers.

Collaboration and Alignment with Sporting Decisions:

The financial director's role is intrinsically linked to the sporting vertical of the club. Financial decisions must be coherent with the football decisions taken by managers and sporting directors. This requires open communication, mutual understanding, and a shared vision for the club's long-term success. The financial director must be able to translate financial constraints into actionable insights for the sporting staff, enabling them to make informed decisions that align with both sporting and financial goals.

In conclusion, the financial director's role in the FSR era is not merely about crunching numbers and ensuring compliance. It's about being a strategic partner, a financial visionary, and a guardian of the club's long-term sustainability. By embracing innovation, fostering collaboration, and navigating the complexities of FSR with expertise, financial directors are playing a pivotal role in shaping the future of football and greatly influencing the success of football clubs.

High-Profile Cases: Lessons and Implications

The ongoing FSR cases involving Manchester City, PSG, and Barcelona serve as stark reminders of the complexities and challenges of enforcing financial regulations in football. These high-profile cases, often involving allegations of inflated sponsorship deals, creative accounting, and related-party transactions, highlight the lengths to which some clubs may go to circumvent FSR rules. The potential consequences, including hefty fines, transfer bans, and even point deductions, underscore the severity of non-compliance. However, these cases also raise questions about the effectiveness of current enforcement mechanisms, the need for greater transparency in club finances, and the challenges of ensuring a level playing field in European football.

The table reveals a concerning trend among some of Europe's top clubs: a willingness to push the boundaries, and potentially violate, FSR/FFP regulations. While the specific allegations vary, a common thread is the alleged manipulation of sponsorship deals and accounting practices to circumvent spending limits. This raises several key issues:

• Enforcement Challenges: These cases demonstrate the complexity of investigating and enforcing FSR regulations. Determining the fair market value of sponsorships and unraveling complex accounting structures requires significant expertise and resources.

• Transparency Concerns: The allegations against these clubs highlight the lack of transparency in football finance. More robust disclosure requirements and independent auditing could help to deter and detect financial irregularities.

• Competitive Imbalance: If clubs are able to circumvent FSR rules, it creates an uneven playing field, potentially giving those clubs an unfair advantage in the transfer market and on the pitch.

The potential penalties, including hefty fines, transfer bans, and even exclusion from European competitions, highlight the seriousness of these allegations. However, the ongoing nature of some of these cases also indicates the difficulty of reaching definitive conclusions and imposing sanctions. The outcomes of high-profile cases will have a significant impact on the future of FSR, potentially leading to stricter regulations, enhanced enforcement mechanisms, and greater scrutiny of club finances.

It's important to note: The clubs with ongoing investigations are presumed innocent until proven guilty. The investigations are ongoing, and the final outcomes remain uncertain. However, the allegations themselves raise important questions about the effectiveness of FSR and the need for continued vigilance in safeguarding the financial integrity of football.

Conclusion

The transition from FFP to FSR signifies a new era of financial sustainability in football. While challenges persist, the regulations provide a framework for clubs to build a more resilient and equitable financial ecosystem. By embracing transparency, adopting sustainable practices, and prioritizing long-term growth, clubs can ensure their continued success both on and off the field.