In 1993, the best paid driver in Formula 1 was Ayrton Senna. He earned around $20m, and plenty of people thought the sport had gone mad.

That is about $45m in today’s money.

Today the best paid driver on the grid earns north of $100m a year.

If you want to measure how much a sport has grown, follow the money paid to the people that are most important to it. F1 driver contracts are one of the clearest signs of the “boom” the sport has been through in the last decade.

So today, we are looking at the evolution of the F1 contract. What a top driver used to earn, and the three reasons the number changed so much.

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Where the contracts sit today

Start with where things are now. Two of the biggest deals in the sport’s history were signed in the same week of this month

• Max Verstappen, Red Bull, through 2030: a reported base of anywhere from $70m to $107m a season

• Lando Norris, McLaren, through at least 2030: a reported £30m a season, around £120m in total

For reference, Lewis Hamilton, at Ferrari: a reported $60m base, and about $100m across everything in 2025

Verstappen’s numbers are the biggest, but it is important it’s hard to find an exact number for the contract.

GPFans, citing insider Marc Limacher, put his new base near €92m, roughly $107m a season, with bonuses that could push it past $130m and a total north of $500m across the four years. GrandPrix247 framed the same deal closer to $70m a year. Take your pick. Everyone agrees on one thing. It is the biggest contract in motorsport history.

Norris signed the following day, until at least the end of 2030 with an option beyond it. McLaren, as ever, put no numbers to it. The reporting, from the Sun, the Telegraph and F1 Oversteer, has it around £120m in total over 4 years, and roughly double what he was on before.

Then Hamilton. Sportico reckons he earned about $100m in 2025, across his salary and everything off the track. That is the most any F1 driver has ever made in a single year, and his fortune is estimated near $450m. Although it’s fair to say a lot of that also comes from the rest of his business portfolio.

Three drivers, comfortably over $100m a year at the top when you count everything. To see how new that is, you have to see what the same seats used to pay.

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What a top driver used to earn

Three eras, three different levels of pay.

Start in the 1990s. This is where the modern superstar wage really begins, and mostly through one man.

• Alain Prost, Williams, 1992: around $5m, about $11m in today’s money

• Michael Schumacher, Benetton, 1993: a $5m base early on

• Nelson Piquet, Benetton, 1991: a $5m base plus $100,000 a championship point, a reported $9.2m for the season, roughly $22m today

Then Senna. Around $20m at McLaren in 1993, plus a reported $6m from Brazilian bank Nacional for carrying its name, the only private sponsor Ron Dennis ever allowed on a driver. Add it up and adjust for inflation and Senna was on close to $58m in today’s money. He was the number everyone else was measured against.

Senna’s inflation-adjusted peak in the early 1990s is already in the same range as Hamilton’s Ferrari salary in 2026. The top of F1 pay did not come from nowhere, despite the aforementioned boom of the sport.

Then the 2000s, and Schumacher at Ferrari. He was the first driver to break into a class of his own. Reported at around £16m a year early on, rising to a reported £30m at his peak around the turn of the millennium, before sponsorship and bonuses. Adjust that £30m for inflation and it is worth roughly £60m today, about $75m. Already big money by any standard.

Now bring it to today. Verstappen is reported anywhere from $70m to over $100m a season, Hamilton around $60m base, Norris around £30m. The top of the grid has moved into a bracket that did not exist a generation ago.

Adjust for inflation and the very top has not really exploded. It has roughly doubled. Senna’s real peak was about $58m. The best paid driver today is on somewhere north of $100m. A big rise, but nothing like the twenty-fold jump the raw figures suggest.

What has exploded is everything around that top number. Far more drivers now earn tens of millions. The off-track money has ballooned. The whole shape of a driver’s income has changed. So what happened?

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Three reasons the contracts changed

1. Everything on the car is capped except the driver

In 2021, F1 brought in a spending cap to stop the richest teams simply buying their way to the front. For 2026 it sits at $215m. It covers the things that make the car quick, the aerodynamics, the research, the parts. Driver salaries are left out of it completely.

Look at the size of that gap. Verstappen’s reported pay is worth close to half of the entire $215m a team is allowed to spend on building the actual car. One driver, half a car’s budget, and none of it counts.

That changes the incentive. Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes can no longer outspend each other on the machinery. The driver’s seat is one of the only places left where a rich team can spend without limit and buy an edge. So the money went there, because the rules pushed it there.

2. The sport got much bigger

The wages did not inflate on their own. The whole business has changed over the years.

• F1 revenue: $3.9bn in 2025, up 14% in a year

• Average F1 team value: $3.42bn in 2025, up 48% in a single year and more than double two years earlier (Forbes, Sportico)

• Ferrari valued at $6.4bn, McLaren up 203% in two years

Only the NFL and NBA carry higher average team values than F1 now. Most people point to Drive to Survive and the Liberty Media era, which opened up the United States and a much younger audience that barely existed a decade ago. When the business gets several times bigger, so does the slice the driver takes. A $30m salary is small change against a $6bn team.

3. Teams pay for the audience as much as the results

A top driver now sells tickets, subscriptions and sponsorship whether or not he wins on Sunday. The clearest proof is the Hamilton figure we opened with. He made about $100m in 2025, and only around $60m of it was his Ferrari salary. The other $40m came from off the track. His worth to Ferrari is as much about being the most marketable driver alive as it is about race results.

Norris brings the same thing, an audience of millions the team is quietly paying for. That reach pulls in sponsors who help cover the wage. Drivers are marketing assets now, and the biggest ones move the needle for a whole team.

—

Put it together.

The car is capped, so the driver is where the money goes. The sport is worth several times what it was. The audience pays whether or not the driver wins. And the driver turns up with his own business attached.

That is why the contracts have exploded, and it is why they are worth watching. A driver’s salary is one of the simplest ways to read how big the sport has become. When Senna’s $20m looked like madness in 1993, F1 was a mostly European sport on far smaller money. Today a driver can earn several times that, because the business behind him is one of the biggest in world sport.

There is one thread we could not pull all the way, and it is the one to watch. A driver salary cap is now openly talked about in the paddock. The smaller teams want it. The big teams, and Verstappen, who has called the idea completely wrong, do not. If it ever arrives, it will be because the contracts have grown faster than the sport can comfortably carry.

See you Wednesday!

Tom

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Tomorrow, two American universities that most Irish sports fans have never watched will open their season at the Aviva. Texas Christian and North Carolina, a sold-out stadium, live on US television.

College football is the version of the game played by universities rather than the NFL. The players are students. Until last year most of them were unpaid. And it is one of the biggest commercial properties in world sport.

So before the game, here is the commercial logic of it. Why a student sport worth billions keeps crossing the Atlantic to start its season in Dublin, why Ireland keeps paying to host it, and what actually changes about that this year.

Start with the scale, because it is hard to believe until you see it.

• The College Football Playoff alone sells its US TV rights for about $1.3bn a year

• The Big Ten conference shared out $1.37bn to its 18 universities last year, roughly $76m each

• Georgia’s head coach became the sport’s first $13m-a-year coach in 2024

A student sport, paying a coach more than almost every manager in the Premier League. Keep that in mind, because North Carolina has just hired a six-time Super Bowl winner to do exactly that job, and he will be on the sideline tomorrow.

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American football in Ireland is older than you think

The game did not start with the Aer Lingus partnership. It goes back to 1988, when Boston College played Army at Lansdowne Road in front of 42,524 people, the first major American college game staged in Europe.

Notre Dame brought it back to Croke Park in 1996 and to the Aviva in 2012. Penn State and UCF drew 53,304 to Croke Park in 2014, still the record for one of these games. Then in 2016 Aer Lingus put its name to the fixture for the first time, Georgia Tech against Boston College.

Since then the format has settled, and since 2022 it has run every year at the Aviva. Northwestern and Nebraska in 2022, Notre Dame and Navy in 2023, Georgia Tech and Florida State in 2024, Iowa State and Kansas State in 2025.

It keeps coming back because it works for both sides. The universities get a marquee season opener, a week of exposure in a friendly market and an alumni event wrapped around it. Ireland gets something more measurable, which is where the next section comes in.

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What the games are worth, and what has changed this year

The commercial case sits in the visitor economics, not necessarily just the match itself. These are the organisers’ figures of what the games generate, verified by Grant Thornton, but treat them as estimates:

• 2023, Notre Dame v Navy: about €180m

• 2024, Georgia Tech v Florida State: over €115m, with 27,000 international visitors

• 2025, Iowa State v Kansas State: €132m, from a 47,266 sell-out

Across every game staged so far, the organisers put the running total at €514m (ThinkBusiness).

The number that explains it is seven. American visitors stay about seven nights on average (Irish Times). These are not matchday tourists. They come for a week, in late August, either side of peak season, and they spend across the whole trip. The game is also carried live on US network television, which peaked at 4.7m viewers in 2025.

Ireland gets several hours of tourism advertising into American living rooms on top of the direct spend.

Now, what is different this year.

Two things. First, there is no NFL game. In 2025 Ireland hosted both this and the NFL’s first ever regular-season game in Dublin, the Steelers and Vikings at Croke Park, which the government backed with just under €10m. The NFL confirmed it would not return in 2026, so this year the College Classic stands on its own.

Second, and this is the more interesting one, the projected US visitor number is down. Around 14,000 are expected this year, against roughly 23,000 last year and 26,000 in 2024 (Irish Times).

This may seem like bad news and a decline in demand for a fixture in Dublin. It isn’t, and the reason is the whole point. The money these games generate tracks which universities travel, not how famous the fixture is.

Notre Dame and the big midwestern state schools bring huge travelling supports, which is why 2023 was the biggest year. Texas Christian and North Carolina are strong programmes with smaller travelling fanbases.

What Ireland is actually selling here is access to a particular American university’s alumni and supporters. The football is the occasion, and the value changes every year depending on who turns up.

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This year’s game, and the business around it

What this year has instead of volume is profile.

North Carolina is now coached by Bill Belichick, who won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots and is a recognisable name in the sport. He is on a reported $10m a year at UNC. His first college season ended 4-8, and it included a heavy defeat to Texas Christian, the exact team he meets again tomorrow. It is a season opener and a rematch in one, and it puts the Aviva on American television with a real story attached.

Around the game sits the part the Irish should care about most, because it lasts longer than one weekend.

There is now a working pathway from Gaelic football to American football, built by brothers Tadhg and Darragh Leader through their company Leader Kicking. The idea is simple. The GAA skill of striking a ball cleanly off the ground transfers directly to kicking and punting. Charlie Smyth from Down went through it and signed for the NFL’s New Orleans Saints in 2024. Tomorrow, Adam McCann-Gibbs, an 18-year-old former Down minor from Newry, makes his debut as North Carolina’s punter at the Aviva, on a full scholarship, mentored by Smyth.

And the event has built that pathway into its own model. The Classic has partnered with Leader Kicking on a nationwide talent search, Ireland’s Kicking King, with ten free trials in GAA grounds around the country this year, from Nowlan Park to Galway’s Dexcom Stadium. The finalists kick at half-time tomorrow. The winner gets a route to a US Division I scholarship and a $10,000 name, image and likeness deal, the sort of money that has only recently become part of American college sport.

That is the commercial logic completing itself. The game brings American money in for a week. The pathway sends Irish talent the other way.

—

So tomorrow is worth watching for more than the result.

A student sport most people here cannot explain is one of Ireland’s most valuable annual events. This year it does it with fewer visitors, no NFL game alongside it, and the biggest name in American football coaching one of the teams. The tourism number will be smaller than last year, and that comes down to who is travelling, not whether the model works.

The model clearly works. Both sides get paid. The universities get a stage. Ireland gets a week of high-spending visitors and, more and more, a production line of its own players heading the other way.

Hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter and let me know what you think in the comments 👇

See you Monday!

Tom

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The Tour Championship starts tomorrow at East Lake in Atlanta, and it is the biggest payday in golf.

Thirty players, no cut, four rounds. A $40m purse and $10m to the winner.

It isn’t a major. It has no history to speak of at this level, the field is smaller than a club scramble, and half the sport couldn’t name last year’s winner without checking.

Okay that’s a slight over-exaggeration, maybe it was just me that completely forgot Tommy Fleetwood won last year. (Sorry Tommy!)

Nevertheless, it still pays more than double what Augusta paid in April.

To be honest, that’s the bit most people find odd about it. Golf’s four biggest weeks of the year are the ones with the trophies everybody recognises, and none of them come close to this on money.

Today we are going through what makes this one week so lucrative. What is actually being paid out, where the money comes from, and why the headline number for the winner has been getting smaller while the tournament gets richer.

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What is actually being paid out this week

First, the tournament itself. Every figure here is disclosed by the Tour.

• $40m purse, the largest of the 2026 season

• $10m to the winner

• $355,000 to whoever finishes 30th

• Official money for the first time since 2018, so it counts on the season money list

Now put it beside the rest of the calendar:

• The Players: $25m, $4.5m

• Masters: $22.5m, $4.5m

• US Open: $22.5m, $4.5m

• PGA Championship: $20.5m, $3.69m

• The Open: $17.75m, $3.2m

• Signature events such as the Genesis, the Memorial and the Travelers: $20m, $3.6m to $4m

So the season finale pays its winner more than twice what any major pays, from a purse nearly double the biggest of them.

And that’s before the bonus money, which is separate and much bigger.

The FedExCup bonus pool is close to $100m, and in 2026 the whole thing was settled after the BMW Championship, before anybody arrived.

$23m to Scottie Scheffler for finishing top of the standings.

• $13m to Matt Fitzpatrick

• $8m to Wyndham Clark

• $460,000 to 30th

• Players ranked 51st to 125th get deferred retirement money only, from $195,000 down to $100,000

Add the two together and the most a player can earn out of the last month is $33m.

The reason the money is this size has nothing to do with prestige and everything to do with what the week is. The majors are run by four separate bodies, the Masters by Augusta National, the US Open by the USGA, the Open by the R&A and the PGA Championship by the PGA of America. None of them is the Tour, and none of them shares its money with the Tour.

The Tour Championship is the one week of the year the PGA Tour owns outright as its own showpiece. It is the end of its own season-long competition, on its own broadcast deal, with its own sponsors. Nobody else takes a cut.

So it spends accordingly.

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Where the money comes from

There are four areas feeding this, and television is by far the largest.

The PGA Tour’s central revenue was running at around $1.8bn to $1.9bn a year across 2022 and 2023, with media rights at $731m to $763m of it, sponsorship at $422m, royalties and licensing at $302m and tournament management fees above $200m (Economy Insights).

The current domestic deal with CBS, NBC and ESPN runs from 2022 to 2030 and is reported at more than $7bn in total, roughly $700m a year. CBS and NBC now rotate the playoffs and CBS has this year’s finale.

The audience is holding up. The 2025 final round averaged 4.491m viewers on NBC, up 34% on 2024, and was golf’s highest rated non-major final round of the year.

Outside the United States:

• Sky Sports extended with the PGA Tour to 2029 in December 2025, covering every tournament, the playoffs and the Tour Championship across the UK and Ireland. Value undisclosed.

• In Germany, MagentaTV took exclusive PGA Tour and DP World Tour rights off Sky Deutschland from January 2026, a four-year deal to 2029 covering roughly 300 days of live golf a year and the 2027 Ryder Cup at Adare Manor.

Then the sponsorship. FedEx is reported to pay $650m over ten years for the FedExCup name, a deal that expires after the 2027 season. FedEx has confirmed its Memphis event will not be part of the Tour’s new 2028 structure.

For a sense of what everything else costs, the reported benchmarks for a single PGA Tour title sponsorship are these:

• Truist: more than $200m across seven years for the Truist Championship, about $28.6m a year

• AT&T: at least $25m a year to keep its name on the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, a sponsorship it has held since 1986

Both figures come from industry sources reported by Sports Business Journal and picked up elsewhere, so treat them as reported rather than disclosed. The rule of thumb people in the industry use is that a title sponsor commits around 150% of the purse once you add prize money, host fees, Tour fees and activation. On a $20m event that is roughly $30m a year (Economy Insights).

The Tour Championship itself has no title sponsor. It is just the Tour Championship, sitting after the FedEx St. Jude and the BMW.

What it has instead is a stack of partners underneath the name. Confirmed for this week: Coca-Cola, Mastercard, Capital One Business, Southern Company, Accenture, PGA TOUR Superstore, Michelob ULTRA, Delta, Georgia Aquarium, Supergoop!, Stanley 1913 and Zyrtec.

Coca-Cola has a lounge at the fifth green and a café at the seventeenth. Southern Company has a cooling zone on the sixteenth fairway. Mastercard has a small business showcase at the third and preferred pricing on tickets. Accenture has the digital course map.

Nobody publishes what those cost. The nearest public comparison is the Masters, where Augusta’s sponsorship revenue went from $39m in 2023 to $60.45m in 2025 across seven partners, with Bank of America’s deal the largest at a reported $9.45m a year (SportsPro). That is the top of the market for a golf partnership with no title rights attached, so an official partner slot at a Tour event sits somewhere below it.

Ticketing is not really part of the model. Grounds tickets start at $35, dynamically priced, with two under-16s admitted free with every ticketed adult.

The charity return is the number the tournament actually promotes. The 2025 edition generated a record $7.3m for Atlanta non-profits, up from $7.2m in 2024, taking the total past $71m since 1998.

And there is one more area, which is the players themselves.

The tournament is the last time this year that thirty of the best players in the world are on American network television for four days, and the endorsement money attached to that is bigger than the purse. Forbes put Scottie Scheffler’s 2026 earnings at $79m, $49m of it on course and $30m off it, and Rory McIlroy’s at $77m, $27m on course and $50m off it.

McIlroy’s Nike deal is reported at $15m to $20m a year and expires at the end of 2027, with no renewal announced. His TaylorMade equipment deal is estimated at $10m to $12m a year. Tommy Fleetwood, the defending champion, lost his Nike contract and now carries Blackstone on his cap, the private equity firm’s first global brand ambassador deal.

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Why the winner’s cheque got smaller

Here is the part that personally surprised me upon further research. Two years ago the winner of this took $25m. This year it’s $10m.

But the revenue hasn’t gone anywhere.

In 2024 the FedExCup bonus was a single $25m payment to one player at the end. In 2025 the Tour cut that to $10m and pushed the rest across the whole playoff run. In 2026 the bonus pool is settled at the BMW Championship a week before the finale, and the Tour Championship stands on its own $40m purse.

Three other changes went in for 2026:

• Starting Strokes are gone, so all thirty players begin at level par rather than the leader starting on 10 under

• Winning either of the first two playoff events is now worth 750 FedExCup points instead of 2,000, the same as a major

• Bonus money reaches the top 125 players rather than the top 150, with the difference redirected to Pathways players and formerly exempt members

The structure was designed by a player business subcommittee of Maverick McNealy, Keith Mitchell, Brandt Snedeker and Kevin Kisner, working under Patrick Cantlay.

What sits behind it is a set of commitments the Tour now carries that didn’t exist a decade ago. It puts $47m a year into player retirement accounts, and 372 players had balances above $1m at the end of 2024. It has distributed over $1bn to nearly 200 players as equity since 2024. It paid $28.2m into the DP World Tour in 2024, up from $24.9m the year before.

Strategic Sports Group’s $1.5bn investment in January 2024 valued the Tour at a reported $12.9bn, with another $1.5bn available to invest before the end of January 2027.

There is a cautionary example running alongside all of this. Despite what some may think, running a financial sustainable golf tour isn’t easy. The PGA Tour and the Tour Championship is ending another successful year.

However, LIV Golf went the other way, with guaranteed contracts and $20m weekly purses. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund stopped funding it on 30 April 2026 after a reported $5bn to $8bn since 2022. The 2026 season ended two events early, the $40m team championship was cancelled and a London credit fund is in talks to take it on.

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Looking ahead

From 2028 the Tour splits into a Championship Series of around 23 to 24 events with fields of 120 and a minimum $20m purse, and a Challenger Series of at least 20 events with a $4m minimum, with promotion and relegation between them. The Tour Championship becomes two weeks of match play, thirty-two players in eight groups of four followed by a sixteen-player bracket, and it starts rotating between courses instead of living at East Lake.

Seven Championship Series events are confirmed so far, with 14 prospective partners in talks for the remaining slots. Tour chief executive Brian Rolapp on the demand: “It’s a high-class problem. We’re glad we have it.”

So Sunday is worth watching for the money and for the fact that this version of it has two years left.

Thirty players, no cut, $40m on the table, and the largest single payment of the whole postseason already banked.

Hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter and let me know what you think in the comments 👇

See you Friday!

Tom

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Paris FC opened their second Ligue 1 season on Saturday away at Troyes and drew 0-0.

It’s obviously not a game that determines the rest of their season.

But it is the first data point in a season that matters far more to this project than the one before it.

To be honest, last season Paris FC could do no wrong.

They came up after 46 years away, finished 11th with 44 points, knocked PSG out of the Coupe de France in January and beat them again on the final day while the champions were lifting the trophy.

After such a long time being away from the first division, every result was a bonus. Survival was the target and they cleared it by the middle of April.

This season there is different expectations. The owners have now had two full transfer windows, a training centre under construction, a new head coach and a sporting director hired from German giants, Bayern Munich. The excuses that come with promotion have expired.

Today we are going through what Paris FC have actually spent, what they have built, and why year two is the year the Arnault project starts getting marked properly.

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The rise and fall…then rise again of Paris FC

To understand why this season is such a test for the club, you need a bit of backstory.

Paris FC was created in 1969 by a French Football Federation initiative that wanted the capital to have a big club. It had no players, no stadium and no place in the league.

The shortcut was a merger.

In 1970 it fused with Stade Saint-Germain and the combined club was named Paris Saint-Germain.

Two years later they split. Paris FC kept the top-flight licence, the professional players and the Parc des Princes. PSG restarted in the third division. Within two seasons the whole thing had inverted, and PSG took the home ground with them.

What followed was not a slow decline, it was a collapse:

• 1978-79, Paris FC’s last top-flight season before the comeback, the start of a 46-year absence

• 1983, the first team merged into Racing Club, the remainder sent to the fourth division

• Late 1980s and 1990s, amateur football, at one point in the fifth tier

• 2000, relegated to the amateur championship

• 2005, the Paris Football Club name restored

Pierre Ferracci took majority control in 2012 with the club in the third division. By 2017 they were back in Ligue 2. In 2020, the Kingdom of Bahrain bought 20 per cent.

By the 2020s it’s also important to note how little the “Paris FC” brand was worth in the surrounding area.

In November 2023 Paris FC made 15,000 of the 17,000 seats at Stade Charléty free for every home game. Attendances doubled, more than 105,000 people attended free of charge in season one, and the Saint-Étienne fixture drew 17,358 for the club’s first sell-out at the ground.

Although a nice story, it’s a worrying indictment for those invested or those willing to invest. The club’s ticket price had found its market level and the level was zero. And as you can imagine, their accounts agreed with that sentiment: revenue of €15.1m in 2023, against €8.2m of debt (Sportico, 2024).

That is the asset (if you can call it that) the Arnault family bought on 29 November 2024, through their private holding company Agache, with Red Bull alongside them on 10.6%. Reported enterprise value was more than €90m, a record for a French second-tier club.

Six months later, Paris FC were promoted.

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—

What they have actually spent

OneFootball ran the numbers on this summer’s window earlier in August, and the totals are the clearest picture yet of how fast this club is moving.

Four signings, a reported €71.5m, as of August 2026:

• Patrick Zabi, 19, from Reims, a reported €25m

• Diego Coppola from Brighton, a reported €17.5m

• Pablo Pagis from Lorient, a reported €15m

• Luca Koleosho from Burnley, a reported €14m

Put it next to what came before it. The playing budget went from around €30m in Ligue 2 to a reported €120m to €130m for the first Ligue 1 season, which French reporting placed fourth in the country behind PSG, Marseille and Monaco.

More than half of that was shareholder contribution rather than football revenue. The first summer in the top flight brought a reported €60m to €70m of transfer spending, and January added Ciro Immobile, Marshall Munetsi and Diego Coppola on loan.

One stipulation on all of those figures. French club budgets are not disclosed documents, they are reported ones, and the figures move between different outlets reporting on them.

It’s becoming apparent that Paris FC is not a club buying experience to survive the top flight of French Football.

Rather it is a club buying assets that appreciate, which is the same logic behind the training ground. Paris FC rent Stade Jean-Bouin, 20,000 seats, on a deal running to at least 2029.

What they are building is the training campus, doubling the site with five new pitches to put the men’s team, the women’s team and the academy in one place.

Rent the ground you play your competitive matches in. But then own the factory producing the very assets you predict will appreciate.

—

Why year two in the top flight is the real test

Three things changed this summer, and each one raises the bar.

• The coach. Antoine Kombouaré, who steadied the side from February and delivered 11th, is gone. Liam Rosenior arrived on 7 July, out of work since a short and unsuccessful spell at Chelsea, with Strasbourg on his CV before that. Sporting director Marco Neppe, who came from Bayern Munich, said the club wanted a coach who could develop players and the collective, and that “it’s important for us not to rush things” while setting no limits. Hiring a coach with a point to prove is a choice with an edge on it. It works quickly or it does not work at all.

• The squad. Neppe publicly refused to sell this summer. Ilan Kebbal was linked with Everton and Brentford, Moustapha Mbow with Liverpool, and Neppe said none of Kebbal, Mbow or Adama Camara would leave. For a club whose model is meant to be develop and sell, turning down Premier League money in year two is a statement that the sporting plan comes first. It also means the wage bill goes up and the trading income does not.

• The league. This is the part most people miss. Ligue 1’s broadcast collapse has not reversed. Net broadcast money to be distributed to clubs in 2026-27 is projected at €184.1m across the division (SportBusiness, May 2026). It is an improvement on the roughly €142m of 2025-26, and it is still a fraction of what English clubs work with.

So the structural point from the takeover still holds. In a league where nobody can rely on television income, the club whose owners write their own cheques has an advantage that is hard to buy in England or Spain.

But the same fact cuts the other way in year two. When more than half your budget is shareholder money, every season that ends without European qualification is a season the owners fund again with less to show on the revenue line.

Last season the football justified the spending. That is a harder trick to repeat when expectations start at mid-table, or above even, rather than survival.

—

Looking ahead

Get French Football News’ writers previewed the season and landed roughly where the market is: one predicted a Conference League place, one called them “a risky bet for the top six”, one had them pushing Marseille for Europe and just missing.

Paris FC are now good enough that finishing 11th again would be a disappointment, and not yet good enough that finishing 6th is expected.

Three things to watch between now and Christmas.

• The window closes at the end of this month. Whether the reported €71.5m becomes €100m+ or stops where it is will tell you whether this is a consolidation year or an acceleration year.

• Rosenior’s start. He inherits a squad rebuilt around players aged 19 to 23, and young squads are slow in August and dangerous in March. Judging him on September would be a mistake, and it will happen anyway.

• The derbies. PSG at home to Paris FC on 12 December, the return at Jean-Bouin on the 3rd of April. Last season Paris FC took two wins from three meetings with the European champions. Doing it again is a trend, and it can be a clear signal of whether the gap is actually closing.

The wider point is that this is the first season where the Arnault ownership can be assessed. The money has been spent, the coach is theirs, the sporting director is theirs, the recruitment is theirs. Nothing left on the pitch this year belongs to the old club.

Antoine Arnault has been careful from the start about what this is not, saying it would be presumptuous to imagine rivalling PSG and that there is room for two clubs in Paris with two complementary narratives.

Their second season is where we find out if it was accurate.

We also covered this story on the Boardroom Sports YouTube channel.

It covers the parts we could only touch on here:

• The 1972 split, and how the club that won the divorce lost the next fifty years

• What LVMH has already spent across Formula 1, the Olympics and sailing, and what luxury money wants from sport that sovereign wealth does not

• Why Red Bull took a stake and then agreed not to Red Bull the club

• The full breakdown of the takeover, the cap table and where the investment is going

👉 Watch it here: The Insane Rise of Paris FC

See you Wednesday for a newsletter on the business behind the Tour Championship.

Tom

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One thing that does not happen very often in sport is a business handing back something that works.

Clubs do not walk away from sold-out stadiums. Promoters do not hand back events that sell out four months early. And yet that is exactly what is happening at Zandvoort this weekend.

The Dutch Grand Prix runs for the last time on Sunday. Saturday and Sunday sold out on the 2nd of April, four and a half months before the gates opened, with a waiting list behind it (NL Times). The promoter paid its shareholders a €20m dividend in 2024 Its own race director said in June that the event is still a healthy business case. (grandprix.com).

So why cancel it?

The stated reason is financial risk. That is true, and we will go through the accounts, because they are unusually revealing for a Grand Prix promoter. But risk is not a number on its own. Risk is a number attached to an assumption, and at Zandvoort the assumption had a name.

Today we are going through why a profitable, sold-out, award-winning Grand Prix is being shut down. And why the answer has less to do with hosting fees than it does with one driver, one team, and what happens to an event when the thing it was built on starts to fade.

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How we got here

It wasn’t that Zandvoort came back because Formula 1 wanted a Dutch race. It came back because Formula 1 had a Dutch superstar and nowhere in the Netherlands to put him.

The circuit had hosted its first Grand Prix in 1952 and its last, before the break, in 1985. Thirty-six years of nothing. Then:

• In 2016, Prince Bernhard van Oranje and Menno de Jong buy Circuit Zandvoort

• In 2021, F1 returns to Zandvoort after 36 years away

• 2021 to 2024. Verstappen wins four consecutive world championships

• 4th of December 2024. The promoter announces that 2026 will be the last Dutch Grand Prix

• 21st to 23rd of August 2026. The final race, with a sprint at Zandvoort for the first time

The timing of the return is the part worth sitting with. Verstappen took his first Red Bull win in 2016, the same year the circuit changed hands. By the time the race actually happened, after a Covid cancellation in 2020, he was on his way to a first title.

And the demand was extraordinary from the start. Over a million fans applied for tickets for the 2021 race, which ended up capped at 195,000 across the weekend because of COVID-19 restrictions.

After that, the weekend attendance figure barely moved:

• 2021: 195,000, capacity restricted

• 2022: 305,000

• 2023: 305,000

• 2024: 305,000

• 2025: 305,000

Four straight years at the same sold-out number.

Zandvoort is a small circuit in a small seaside town, squeezed between a nature reserve and the North Sea, and it cannot physically sell more than it sells.

Television told the same story. Dutch viewership hit roughly 12 million unique viewers in 2023, up 35% year on year (Sportcal). In a country of about 18 million people.

Domenicali called it a new benchmark for European Grands Prix.

The event won promoter of the year.

So, to be clear, nobody in this story is arguing that Zandvoort did it badly.

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Inside the accounts

Here is where it gets interesting, because Zandvoort’s numbers are more public than most.

The cost and structure:

• €70m to stage the 2024 Grand Prix

• €20m paid out to shareholders as a dividend in 2024

• €3.8m left in reserves at year end 2024 after that payout

• Estimated hosting fee of around $32m in 2025, the same bracket as Monaco, against around $55m for Jeddah and Losail

One stipulation on that hosting fee, and it matters. F1 does not disclose what promoters pay and neither do promoters. Every hosting fee figure in circulation is an estimate.

Then there is the bit that makes Zandvoort unusual. Race director Robert van Overdijk explains it succinctly:

“We, along with Silverstone, are the only Grand Prix that has to do without a single euro of subsidy.”

Two races on a 24-race calendar funded by the people who buy the tickets. Everything else has a government, a tourism board or a sovereign fund behind it.

And it was carried by three small private companies: Circuit Zandvoort, TIG Sports and SportVibes, staging what van Overdijk called “this mega-event at our own expense and risk”.

Which produces the sentence that explains the entire decision:

“Three sold-out houses in a row are essential for us to remain profitable. It’s a fine line.”

That quote is also really indicative of the GP’s business model.

Fixed costs of roughly €70m. A hosting fee that rises every year, because these contracts almost always carry annual escalators. And a revenue ceiling of 305,000 tickets that cannot grow, because the land will not allow it.

There is no version of that model where you grow your way out of trouble. You can only sell out, or fail. Three days, every year, or the year does not work.

So when the promoter says it is walking away from financial risk, it is not saying it lost money. It is saying it looked at the next contract, priced the chance of three sold-out days in every year of it, and probably did not like the odds.

The €20m dividend is the tell here, and it drew criticism at the time. The organisation’s defence was that it was proportionate to the risks involved, that it was the first such payout, and that it covered every edition through to 2024.

Both things can be true. It was a return on six years of private risk, and it left €3.8m of buffer against a €70m cost base.

That is an operator that knows exactly what its margin is. And an operator that precise does not stumble into an exit. It calculates one.

Van Overdijk again, in June 2026, once the decision was long made:

“We can still afford the event. It is still a healthy business case.”

—

So what’s changed?

Not the costs, not really. What changed is potentially the certainty that three days would sell.

The Dutch Grand Prix was, from the first conversation about reviving it, a Verstappen event. The Netherlands had produced seventeen F1 drivers since 1952 and exactly one race winner, one pole sitter and one world champion, all of them Max Verstappen. For context, his father Jos scored two podiums in 1994 and never won.

There is no succession plan in Dutch motorsport. There is no second Dutch driver on the 2026 grid. The orange in the grandstands was not a national tradition, it was for one driver.

And for four years the bet paid off extraordinarily:

• 2021: world champion, and wins at Zandvoort from pole

• 2022: world champion, wins at Zandvoort from pole

• 2023: world champion, wins at Zandvoort from pole. 19 wins from 22 races, 575 points, a 290-point margin, 1,003 laps led, 86% of races won

• 2024: world champion for a fourth time. Finishes second at Zandvoort, beaten by Lando Norris

• 2025: loses the title to Norris by two points at the Abu Dhabi decider. Finishes second at Zandvoort again, beaten by Oscar Piastri

He has never finished off the podium at Zandvoort since the race returned. But, he also has not won there since 2023.

Then comes 2026.

Where things stand going into this weekend:

• Verstappen is sixth in the drivers’ championship on 109 points

• Championship leader Kimi Antonelli is on 219, so Verstappen is 110 points back

• Red Bull is fourth in the constructors’ championship on 177 points, against Mercedes on 379

• Red Bull Powertrains built what the FIA’s rankings identify as the most powerful internal combustion engine on the 2026 grid, and the team is still fourth, because the advantage is being lost in chassis integration and energy management

That last point is important, because it is not a slump you fix with a good weekend. Red Bull won the engine war and is still losing the season. When your problem is integration rather than power, it may take years, not a few races.

And Verstappen has been unusually open about what that means to him. At Zandvoort, on the record:

“Maybe you will not win a championship again. That’s something that can happen, but it’s not really on my mind.”

He is also, by his own account, not especially attached to staying:

“My contract runs until 2028 but it will depend on the new rules in 2026, and if they are nice and fun. If they are not fun, then I don’t really see myself hanging around.”

“I can leave the sport easily tomorrow.”

“I don’t see myself stopping and coming back. Once I stop, I really stop.”

Now put those two things side by side, as a promoter would have had to in late 2024, when the decision was being made.

You are being asked to sign a multi-year contract, with an escalating fee, no public money behind you, for an event that needs three sold-out days a year. Your entire demand case rests on one driver. That driver is 28, has publicly said he could leave the sport tomorrow, has said his continued participation depends on whether he enjoys a set of regulations, and his team is heading into a period with everything to prove.

That is a clear concentration risk, and it is the same risk any rights holder carries when one asset drives the whole model.

Despite the fact he has now signed a contract until 2030 you can still understand their decision. In December 2024, when the decision had to be made, none of this was known. The 2026 regulations had not been raced. Verstappen's future was genuinely open, publicly, on the record, for most of the last two years.

—

So the Dutch Grand Prix is not ending because it failed, in the traditional sense. It is ending because of the model. Around €70m to stage, no subsidy, a fee that only goes up, and a ceiling of 305,000 tickets that cannot rise. That works only if three days sell out every year, and what guaranteed those three days was one driver.

Silverstone shows the funding was never the problem. It runs without public money too and has signed on to 2034. A key difference is the four home drivers instead of one, and a weekend that sells regardless of who wins. Zandvoort had six years and one driver.

Which is what makes Sunday strange. Verstappen has just signed to 2030 and the race is closing anyway. Most promoters hang on until the market pushes them out. Zandvoort paid its shareholders, sold out its final two days in April, and left while people still wanted it.

Hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter and let me know what you think in the comments 👇

See you Monday!

Tom

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Yesterday The Athletic reported that the stake Fenway Sports Group have sold in Liverpool is not the 30% everybody wrote about on Friday.

It is closer to 38%.

That is the newest information we have, and it is the number to work from.

The rest is still reported rather than disclosed. Neither FSG nor Liverpool have published a price or a valuation.

What has been reported is a consideration of between £1.5bn and £1.65bn, implying a valuation of around £5.5bn, or $7bn to $7.4bn depending on which outlet you read. Those figures were all reported when everyone still thought the stake was 30%, and nobody has restated them against 38%, so treat them as a range rather than a number.

But the figure that decides this story is none of those. It is 85%.

That is the ceiling the Premier League’s new Squad Cost Ratio puts on what a club can spend on its squad, measured as a share of what that club earns. It came into full force this season, and it means a billionaire arriving at an English club in 2026 does not do what a billionaire arriving in 2003 did.

So the question is not whether Jeff Bezos is rich. It is what his money is allowed to do.

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FSG’s investment into Liverpool

But let’s go back a bit.

Fenway Sports Group are a Boston sports holding company. They own the Boston Red Sox, a NASCAR team and a stake in the Pittsburgh Penguins, and since October 2010 they have owned Liverpool. John Henry is the principal owner, Mike Gordon is the president who runs the Liverpool relationship day to day.

They bought the club for £300m, at a point where Liverpool’s CEO Billy Hogan has since described it as “literally on the brink of bankruptcy” (BBC Sport).

The previous owners had borrowed against the club itself, the banks were ready to call in the loans, and administration would have meant a points deduction.

The money they have put in directly is comparatively modest:

• £300m purchase price in 2010

• About £218m in intra-group loans since

• A total outlay of roughly £518m across sixteen years

What that has helped to fund:

• The Main Stand redevelopment, completed 2016

• The AXA Training Centre in Kirkby, opened 2020

• The repurchase of Melwood

• The Anfield Road End expansion, taking capacity past 61,000

And the result, in the club’s accounts:

• 2020/21: £487.4m revenue

• 2021/22: £594.3m

• 2022/23: £593.8m

• 2023/24: £613.8m

• 2024/25: £702.7m

Of that £702.7m, commercial income was £323.5m, broadcast £263.7m and matchday £115.6m. The club also posted a £15.2m pre-tax profit in 2024/25, against a £57.1m loss the year before.

It’s important to also note the success on the pitch across the same period: a sixth European Cup in 2019, a first league title in thirty years in 2019/20, and another in 2024/25.

The ownership structure going into this deal was also already not simple. RedBird Capital and Arctos Sports Partners both hold stakes in FSG, and Dynasty Equity bought a minority stake in Liverpool itself in September 2023, reported at around £164m.

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Who has actually bought in?

The buyer is a consortium called 1892 Holdings, led and managed by Amit Bhatia, a British businessman and Lakshmi Mittal’s son-in-law. Alongside him are the Mittal Family Trusts, EE Capital, the family office of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and his wife Elaine, and K5 Sports, a fund in which Jeff Bezos is the lead investor.

Bhatia becomes Liverpool’s vice-chairman. Elaine Saverin and Bryan Baum of K5 Sports join the board. FSG keep majority ownership and operational control, and closing is subject to regulatory approvals.

A few details some of the coverage has skipped:

• Bezos is not the buyer. He is the lead investor in a fund that is one of four parties in a consortium somebody else runs. As of yet , no board seat, no vote, no operational role.

• Bhatia spent eighteen years as a director and co-owner of QPR, relinquishing that stake on the 21st of July this year because FA rules bar a substantial interest in two clubs. QPR are also the club that agreed a £42m Financial Fair Play settlement with the EFL over their 2013/14 promotion season: a £17m fine, £3m in costs and £22m of shareholder loans written off. The Mittal family were shareholders at the time.

• There is an option, not a commitment. The Athletic reports a mechanism that could see the consortium buy a controlling stake within twelve months, and sources on both sides stress it is not binding. Sky Sports puts that option at around an $8bn valuation.

The money is real and Bezos is the largest single name attached to it. But the tag of “Bezos money” is doing a lot of work it has not earned.

—

What does the money actually change?

Almost nothing about how much Liverpool can spend.

Until this season, English clubs were governed by Profitability and Sustainability Rules, or PSR, which capped losses at £105m across three years. From this season that is replaced by the Squad Cost Ratio, voted through by Premier League clubs in November 2025.

SCR is a ratio rather than a loss limit:

• Squad costs capped at 85% of a club’s football revenue plus net profit on player sales

• Squad costs meaning player and head coach wages, agents’ fees, and transfer fees spread across a contract

• Clubs in European competition held to UEFA’s stricter 70%

• Go far enough past it and the penalty is a points deduction

The number that decides Liverpool’s spending power is Liverpool’s revenue. A shareholder’s personal fortune is not in the calculation and cannot be put into it directly.

Then there is where the money went. This is a share sale, so the proceeds go to FSG rather than to Liverpool. Sky Sports has confirmed as much, and it has been reported there will be no change to the transfer budget or policy.

Compare that with Dynasty Equity in 2023. When that money arrived, FSG published exactly what it was for: paying down pandemic bank debt, capital spending on Anfield, the AXA Training Centre, buying Melwood back, and the summer window. This time the statement says the partners will “evaluate opportunities.”

So what does it do? It moves the valuation, and that is the real story.

Forbes valued Liverpool at $6.2bn in May 2026, fourth in the world and second in England behind Manchester United at $7.2bn. A transaction reported at $7bn to $7.4bn puts Liverpool above that United figure on paper, and does it with an actual deal rather than an estimate. That sets the price for every Big Six minority sale that follows, it supports the borrowing side of the business rather than the spending side, and it potentially prices the rest of the club for whoever exercises that twelve-month option.

Which raises the fair question: if the consortium does take control, does that finally mean more money for the squad?

Only indirectly. New owners can fund infrastructure, commercial expansion and debt repayment, all of which grows revenue, which does raise the SCR ceiling. But it is slow, and it is the same route FSG have taken for sixteen years. There is no version of these rules where an owner hands the manager £300m.

There are also reasons for supporters to be careful. Bezos has never owned a sports team. Bhatia’s football record is QPR, a club that produced English football’s most expensive overspending penalty and has spent the decade since in the Championship. Neither is an obvious upgrade in sporting judgement on a group that has won two league titles.

And there is the fit. In March, Liverpool became the first Premier League club to lock in three consecutive years of ticket price rises. Spirit of Shankly campaigned against it, including “Not a Pound in the Ground”, which asked fans to spend at businesses around Anfield rather than inside it. On the 7th of May the club backed down: a 3% rise for 2026/27, then a freeze for 2027/28. Amazon, meanwhile, has spent years in dispute with UK unions.

—

So, is this much of a story?

It is, but not the one on the front pages.

Nobody has bought Liverpool. FSG have sold a large minority stake, taken a return of roughly fifteen times their 2010 purchase price, kept control, and put a price on the rest of the club that somebody can pick up inside a year.

What has not changed is the thing the headlines implied had. In 2003 a billionaire could walk into an English club, clear its debt and spend whatever they liked, because no rule existed to stop them. In 2026 the rule is a percentage of turnover, and the richest man ever associated with an English club has bought a position that cannot move it.

A billionaire buying in used to mean billions coming in. Now it mostly means a bigger number on the way out.

Hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter and let me know what you think in the comments 👇

See you Friday for our first F1 newsletter…on the death of the Dutch Grand Prix!

Tom

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One thing that always comes up when people talk about sponsorship in sport, is ROI.

It gets claimed as an intangible, or as something brands do just because they can, or just to be seen.

But is that really the case? Can it really be boiled down to something that simple?

Today we are going through why brands choose to sponsor stadiums at all. Is it just brand awareness, or is there a deeper metric/reason that satisfies the senior leaders in sports boardrooms.

You see, if your marketing has to produce qualified leads, you probably aren’t sponsoring a stadium. That is not what the asset does and it never has been. So the awareness answer cannot be the whole answer, because if it were, almost nobody would sign these deals.

On the surface it looks like an intangible. It is not. There are figures beyond the obvious that back up why brands pay this much to put their name on a building, and they are the point of this piece.

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But how did we end up here?

Sports stadiums did not start out as commercial assets. In time they became them.

And it started with American sport.

The milestones people cite:

• 1926, baseball. Chicago’s Cubs Park is renamed Wrigley Field. Worth a correction here, because the version that gets repeated is that William Wrigley Jr put his chewing gum company’s name on the ground. The Sporting News of 9 December 1926 reported it differently: the park would be known as Wrigley Field “in honor of the man who owns it.” Named after the owner, not the product. The gum company got the benefit anyway, which is arguably the first lesson in the whole story.

• 1973, American football. The Buffalo Bills sign a 25-year agreement with Rich Products to name their new venue Rich Stadium. This is the one widely cited as the first true commercial naming rights contract.

• 1980s and 1990s, expansion. The NFL and the other North American major leagues adopt the practice widely to offset the cost of building facilities. It stops being a novelty and becomes a business model.

• 2000s, European football. Bayern Munich and Arsenal do the two deals that make it normal in football. Both of those partnerships are still running in 2026.

What Rich Products actually paid is the number worth holding onto.

• 25 years, $1.5m in total

• Roughly $60,000 a year

• The deal ran to 1998, when Rich declined to renew rather than pay a fee that had moved in line with the rest of the NFL

Sixty thousand dollars a year for the name of an NFL stadium. Keep that figure. We’ll come back to it.

But it’s crossed over into other team sports outside of America.

For example, I was at a conference at the Kia Oval in London this past April, and it was only standing there that it registered properly. The Oval is one of the oldest grounds in world cricket and it has a car manufacturer’s name in front of it. Nobody blinks. Kia has been Surrey’s main sponsor since 2010 and extended again in January 2024, running to 2029, reported as worth significantly more than the previous £3.5m agreement.

Rugby did the same thing:

• Twickenham became Allianz Stadium from the 1st of September 2024, the ground’s first rebrand since it opened in 1909. Reported at over £100m across a decade, so north of £10m a year (SportsPro, August 2024)

• The RFU’s Bill Sweeney on the reaction: “I really don’t believe we’ve sold out. It’s an investment into the future with the sort of partner we need to go on that journey”

• Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium became the Principality Stadium in January 2016, on a 10-year deal worth £12.5m, so £1.25m a year (The Stadium Business, February 2026)

• Saracens have played at StoneX Stadium since 2020, extended again in August 2024. Value undisclosed

And in Ireland, the Aviva Stadium has carried an insurer’s name since it opened in 2010. In November 2025 the IRFU and FAI renewed it through to 2030, reported by the Irish Times at around €26m.

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What the deals were worth then, and what they are worth now

Every figure below carries its year, because these are not like-for-like and treating them as such is how you end up with a badly wrong number.

American football, then and now:

• Rich Stadium, 1973: $1.5m over 25 years, about $60,000 a year

• MetLife Stadium: $450m over 25 years, $18.5m a year as reported in 2026

• AT&T Stadium, agreed 2009: $400m over 20 years, around $20m a year

• SoFi Stadium, agreed September 2019: 20 years, reported at over $20m a year, the largest in NFL history at the time. Stan Kroenke had been targeting $30m a year

From $60,000 a year to over $20m a year in the same sport. Around a 330-fold increase in nominal terms across 46 years. Obviously that doesn’t account for inflation over the last 50 years, but still a very significant relative increase as sport continues to become more and more commercial.

Football, then and now:

• Arsenal and Emirates, 2004: £100m combined, covering 15 years of naming rights and eight years of shirt sponsorship, described at the time as by far the biggest deal in English football

• Bayern and Allianz, from the arena’s opening in 2005: 30 years of naming rights

• Bayern and Allianz extension, March 2023: €130m over 10 years, taking the name to 2033, so around €13m a year

• Arsenal and Emirates extension, August 2026: naming rights extended to 2033, on what is reported as a significant increase on the current £45m a year agreement

One stipulation on that Arsenal figure, and it is an important one. The £45m a year is the whole Emirates partnership: shirt, training kit and stadium name together. It is not a naming rights number and should not be compared against one. The Bayern €13m a year is naming rights alone.

Rugby, now:

• Allianz Stadium, Twickenham, from September 2024: over £100m across a decade, so above £10m a year

• Principality Stadium, from January 2016: £12.5m over 10 years, £1.25m a year, extended in February 2026 to 2030 at an undisclosed but reportedly much higher annualised rate

And then there’s the independent view of what the market should be paying. The Sponsor published fair market sponsorship values for 75 European stadiums this year.

Their top ten (in euros)

• Santiago Bernabéu (Real Madrid): €21.1m FMV, no current deal

• Spotify Camp Nou (Barcelona): €18.5m FMV, €20m deal, €1.5m overvalued

• Allianz Arena (Bayern): €16.4m FMV, €13m deal, €3.4m undervalued

• Emirates Stadium (Arsenal): €14.4m FMV

• Wembley (England): €14.4m FMV

• Parc des Princes (PSG): €13.5m FMV

• Tottenham Hotspur Stadium: €12.8m FMV

• Etihad Stadium (Manchester City): €12.6m FMV

• Stade de France: €11.8m FMV

• Anfield (Liverpool): €11.7m FMV

Across all 75 stadiums the total sponsorship value came to €520m, with two thirds of venues having no naming partner at all. Only four of the top ten are sold.

Two findings in there are worth pulling out.

Germany is the mature market: 14 of 18 Bundesliga stadiums have a naming partner, and the average deal value sits close to the average fair market valuation of €8.5m. Price it at what it is worth and it sells.

And the most undersold deal in the entire data set was in rugby. The Sponsor put the WRU’s 10-year Principality agreement at €5.1m a year below fair market value, a €51m shortfall across the partnership.

—

So why would a brand actually bother?

One thing I’ve heard some people in the industry say: you do not sponsor a stadium to be remembered, you sponsor it never to be forgotten. But here are a few key reasons I felt needed to be expanded upon:

1. You are buying a word that other people say for you

Put an advert on a billboard and you pay for it every month. Put your name on a stadium and other people say it for free, for the length of the deal.

Commentators say it. Newsreaders say it. Fixture lists print it. Google Maps prints it. Your name stops being an advert and becomes the address.

We can now put a figure on that, because this summer we got to watch it be taken away.

At the 2026 World Cup, FIFA’s rules stripped commercial names off every US stadium hosting matches. Navigate measured what that cost the brands paying for those names, for Sports Business Journal:

• Up to $53.5m in lost US media value

• Up to $134.8m globally

• At least six brands lost roughly a full year’s worth of exposure

• MetLife Stadium, which hosted eight matches including the final, pays $18.5m a year and lost close to $20m in global exposure

• AT&T Stadium lost around $18m, again about what AT&T pays in a year

The detail that matters is where the loss came from. Navigate’s Kevin Kane: “The value loss is not driven by visible stadium signs.”

The signs were the cheap part. It was the commentators not saying the name, and the fixture listings not carrying it, that cost the money.

2. You are buying a position, not an audience

This is the part people miss. Reach and positioning are not the same purchase.

Reach is how many people see you. Positioning is what they assume about you once they do. A stadium mostly sells you the second one.

Principality Building Society has its name on the Welsh national stadium. It is not trying to reach Welsh people, it already reaches them. It is claiming to be the Welsh institution.

Its chief executive Iain Mansfield, on the extension announced in February 2026: “Having our name above one of the world’s most iconic entertainment and sporting venues is Principality’s statement of intent.”

Allianz is doing the same thing at a different scale. When Twickenham was renamed in August 2024 it became the eighth venue worldwide carrying the Allianz name. That is not eight audiences. That is one claim, made eight times, that Allianz is what a serious stadium is called.

It is worth saying which brands this works for. A challenger can buy a position it has not earned yet. SoFi was a fintech most Americans had never heard of before 2020 and is now filed next to the big banks. An established name buying the same asset is mostly defending ground it already holds, which is a much harder ROI case to write.

3. You are buying things that have nothing to do with direct marketing

Sometimes the name is the smallest part of the deal.

Manchester City’s Etihad agreement, announced in July 2011, is the clearest example:

• 10 years, reported at several hundred million pounds

• Manchester City Council took £20m over five years for the naming rights to a stadium it had built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games

• It came attached to the Etihad Campus and a regeneration commitment

Council leader Sir Richard Leese at the time: “We will be launching a consultation on a community programme which will not only look at sport facilities, but will also look at how we can improve educational access and how we can create more jobs.”

That is land, planning, political goodwill and a training complex. The name on the roof is what people notice. It is not what was bought.

Allianz says a version of the same thing in its own words, quoted by The Sponsor in March 2024: “We invest in stadiums because we are committed to supporting local communities by helping develop central hubs for global industry and tourism in key regions worldwide.”

—

So, the brand awareness answer is not wrong. It is just the shallowest true thing you can say about the asset, and it is the one that gets said because the alternative requires opening a model.

What the numbers actually show is a market that behaves like a market. Fair market valuations and completed deals in Europe track each other closely. Germany prices correctly and sells 14 of 18. Two thirds of European stadiums sit unsold, which is a pricing problem and an asset-quality problem rather than a demand problem.

And when the exposure is removed, as FIFA removed it this summer, the loss can be counted to the million. That is the closest thing to a controlled experiment this industry will ever get, and it says the intangible is not intangible at all. It is just hard to decode.

Rich Products paid $60,000 a year in 1973 and walked away in 1998 rather than pay the market rate. Twenty-eight years after that, the Bernabéu is sitting there with a €21.1m annual valuation and no partner on it.

Somebody is going to pay it. And they will not be paying to be “just remembered”.

Hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter and let me know what you think in the comments 👇

See you Wednesday!

Tom

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Rugby union has only been a professional sport since 1995. That was the day the IRB met in Paris and declared the game open, ending a century of amateurism.

Football legalised paying players technically in 1885.

That is a 110-year head start, and it explains a lot of what follows.

This is our first rugby newsletter, and we are starting with the question people actually ask. What do these players earn?

With football, F1 and golf, that question has a fairly clean answer. Contracts leak. Prize money is published. Rich lists get compiled every year and they are broadly right.

Rugby is not like that. There is no single answer, because there is no single system. England, Ireland, France and the southern hemisphere each pay their players in a completely different way, and only one of the four publishes real numbers.

So we went through all four.

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First, the sports you probably already know about

Start with the numbers you have probably seen.

F1, 2026 season, as reported by PlanetF1:

• Lewis Hamilton: $70m base at Ferrari

• Max Verstappen: $65m base, $76m with bonuses

• Lando Norris: $57.5m with bonuses

• Arvid Lindblad, rookie at Racing Bulls: $500,000 to $1m

Golf, twelve months to June 2026, per Forbes:

• Jon Rahm: $111m

• Scottie Scheffler: $79m

• Rory McIlroy: $77m

• Top ten combined: $536m, down 12% on the previous twelve months

One caveat before we go further. Obviously, both golf and F1 are individual sports. The money goes straight to the player from prize funds and personal sponsors, not out of a club’s wage bill. We will do a proper breakdown of how those deals are built in a later newsletter, because the mechanics are genuinely different.

Football is the slightly more “fair” comparison. Same shape of business, same kind of employer.

Deloitte’s Annual Review of Football Finance 2026, covering the 2024/25 season:

• Premier League total wage costs: £4.4bn, a record

• Up £381m on 2023/24

• Equal to 65% of the league’s £6.8bn revenue

Now the same season in English rugby. PREM Rugby’s salary cap report for 2024-25 shows the ten Premiership clubs spent an average of £7.0m each on players. Call it £70m for the whole division.

England’s entire top flight of rugby spends less than 2% of what Premier League clubs spend on wages.

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England: the only union that shows you the figures in totality

The PREM rugby is the only major rugby league in the world that publishes a detailed annual salary report. Everything in this section is disclosed data.

The cap itself:

• 2021-22 to 2023-24: £5m

• 2024-25: £6.4m

• 2026-27: cap unchanged, but a new salary floor of £5.4m applies. Clubs that spend under it get fined the difference

From the 2024-25 report, published May 2026:

• Average senior player income: £165,181, up 10% on 2023-24

• Best-paid position, fly-half: £259,602

• Worst-paid position, wing: £132,303

• Nine marquee players, who sit outside the cap entirely, averaged £533,000

• Average academy player: £19,851

• Peak earning age: 29 to 31

• Average squad size fell from 73 to 69

The 2023-24 season, reported by BBC Sport, looked different again:

• Fly-half average: £231,182

• Scrum-half average: £119,614

• Senior salaries fell 11.4% on 2022-23

• Players with 50 or more caps lost around £22,000 each on average

The academy floor, in place from 2025-26:

• Under-19s: £18,200 a year

• Under-20s: £20,200 a year

Worth putting next to football. English academy scholarship wages at 15 and 16 run £150 to £350 a week, with Arsenal at the top of that range. £350 a week is £18,200 a year.

An Arsenal academy player and a Premiership rugby academy player are on identical money.

Pay in English rugby moves when the rules move, not when the market does. The cap dropped to £5m, wages fell 11.4%. The cap went to £6.4m, wages went back up 10%.

And the newest rule points the other way. England has just introduced a minimum a club must spend on players. Newcastle were on roughly £3.5m before Red Bull arrived. The problem was not clubs spending too much.

—

Ireland: the union owns the best players

Ireland runs a model nobody else uses. The IRFU employs the country’s best players directly on central contracts, then makes them available to the provinces.

The current picture, as reported by The42 in April 2025:

• 14 centrally contracted players in total

• 11 at Leinster, 2 at Connacht, 1 at Munster, 0 at Ulster

How the cost is shared:

• Until 2024-25: provinces paid 0%

• From May 2024: provinces paid up to 30%

• From 1 August 2026: all provinces pay a flat 40%, applied to every contract in place on that date

On actual salaries, Ireland publishes nothing. What exists is reporting. Business Plus put Leinster’s total player wage bill at over €12m a year, with the 11 central contracts accounting for roughly €6m of it, around €3.6m of which the IRFU covers.

Their reported ranges, and these are estimates rather than confirmed figures:

• Caelan Doris, Dan Sheehan: €600,000 to €700,000

• Jamison Gibson-Park, Tadhg Furlong: €550,000 to €650,000

• Josh van der Flier: €500,000 to €600,000

• Andrew Porter, Hugo Keenan, James Ryan: €450,000 to €550,000

• RG Snyman: €400,000 base, up to €500,000 with incentives

The clearest Irish figure we have is thirteen years old, and it came from France. In August 2013, Le Journal du Dimanche reported Johnny Sexton’s Racing Metro salary at €52,000 a month, roughly €624,000 a year. That made him the second-best paid player in the Top 14 behind Jonny Wilkinson at Toulon on €56,000 a month.

Sexton had to leave Ireland to get a public number attached to him.

Brian O’Driscoll is the other useful case, and he shows where the real money sits. His company ODM & Promotions had accumulated profits of €4.4m by August 2015, his first full year retired, per the Irish Examiner. That is corporate work, punditry, sponsorship and investments, not a playing salary. Rugby’s biggest Irish earner seems to have made his money predominantly off the pitch. Which isn’t inherently unusual.

Then there is what a young player gets. Sam Prendergast signed a new Leinster deal in March 2025, aged 22, with eight caps. Terms were not disclosed. They never are.

The only Irish academy figure on record is from March 2016, when Irupa negotiated academy pay up from €4,000 to €8,000 a year. The union’s own chief executive conceded at the time that €8,000 was below minimum wage.

That number is now a decade old and will have moved. Nobody has published where it moved to.

Ireland has the most centralised system in world rugby and the least transparent. The IRFU carries the wage risk directly, and it is not a small risk. In the year to 31 July 2024, the union lost €18.4m on revenue of €79m, down from €92m the year before.

It also creates a problem the IRFU now openly acknowledges. Leinster hold 11 of the 14 central contracts and are about to start paying 40% of them. The union says the money raised goes back into pathways at Connacht, Munster and Ulster. Whether that closes the gap or simply pays for it is the argument in Irish rugby right now.

—

France: the money is real, the ceiling is harder

The Top 14 is the richest league in the sport, and it is also the most tightly policed. Both things are true at once, and that is what makes it interesting.

The LNR salary cap:

• 2025-26: €10.7m

• 2026-27: €11m

• Rising €100,000 a year to €11.3m by 2029-30

Remember, for comparison, England’s cap in 2024-25 was £6.4m, roughly €7.5m.

France also runs a credit system that compensates clubs for losing players to the national team:

• €210,000 for one international

• €202,500 each for two

• €195,000 each for three

• Capped at €1.575m for clubs with 14 or more

And a rule change that matters more than it sounds. Image rights currently count inside the cap. From 2026-27 they sit outside it.

The LNR publishes average pay by position, audited by the firm Nexia S&A. For 2024-25:

• Fly-half: €343,000

• Second row: €290,000 to €302,000

• Number 8: €296,000

• Centre: €274,000

• Scrum-half: €261,000

• Loosehead prop: €260,000

• Full-back: €251,000

• Hooker: €247,000

• Tighthead prop: €245,000

• Blindside flanker: €242,000

• Wing: €223,000

Put those beside England, and keep the seasons straight. Both sets below are 2024-25:

• Fly-half: €343,000 in France, £259,602 in England

• Wing: €223,000 in France, £132,303 in England

The gap is wider at the bottom of the squad than at the top. France does not just pay stars better. It pays ordinary squad players a great deal better.

Club budgets for 2025-26, as reported by Rugbyrama:

• Stade Toulousain: €55.8m, up €6m

• Lyon: €44.8m

• Stade Français: €42.4m

• Toulon: €39.1m

• Union Bordeaux-Bègles: €39.1m, up €9m

• La Rochelle: €38.3m

• Racing 92: €25.8m, down €1.5m

• Montauban: €14.1m

Bordeaux are the story here. Their budget rose €9m in one season, the biggest jump in the league, after becoming European champions. It has bought them almost nothing. Club president Laurent Marti has said publicly that UBB are completely stopped on the salary cap and cannot recruit, with effectively no margin left.

Toulouse are the other half. Biggest budget in Europe, and a €2.88m fine for breaching the cap. In August 2026, Midi Olympique reported that the club had asked Thomas Ramos to take a pay cut of around 25% to extend. Toulouse run a standing policy of asking players over 30 to accept reductions. It has previously applied to Joe Tekori, Charlie Faumuina, Maxime Médard and Pita Ahki.

Ramos’ actual salary has never been published, so we are not going to guess at it.

Antoine Dupont’s contract runs to 2027. In October 2025, Dicodusport reported that Toulouse were working on an extension through 2031 or 2032, past his 35th birthday, including a clause letting him spend time abroad or take on another challenge mid-deal. He owns a stake in Major League Rugby side RFCLA and the Los Angeles Olympics fall inside that window.

Dupont has also been the loudest critic of the French cap, on the basis that it counts his personal sponsorship deals against his club’s spending limit. From 2026-27 he wins that argument.

What we know about the top of the market comes from the same Nexia audit, reported by Midi Olympique in December 2024: around ten Top 14 players gross €600,000 or more. Named among them were Dupont, Owen Farrell, Grégory Alldritt, Will Skelton and Matthieu Jalibert.

France proves the ceiling is a choice. The clubs have far more revenue than their English counterparts, and the league still caps what they can pay. Toulouse have €55.8m of budget and are asking star full-backs to take a quarter off their wages.

—

The southern hemisphere: paid in permission

New Zealand cannot compete on money, so it competes on something else.

Under the NZR and NZRPA collective agreement announced in February 2026, covering 2026 to 2028:

• Players take 36.56% of NZR Player Generated Revenue across the three years

• Super Rugby Aupiki: NZ$25,000 hub-based, NZ$20,000 campaign-only

• Scholarship fund: NZ$500,000 in 2026, NZ$1m in each of 2027 and 2028

• Test selection fees and service bonuses exist, but the amounts are not published

RNZ has reported Beauden Barrett and Ardie Savea on base salaries of over NZ$1m a year, and made the more important point alongside it: a short stint in the Japanese league can effectively double an All Black’s salary in a matter of months. Savea’s Kobe Steelers arrangement releases him back to New Zealand in July.

That is NZR’s actual competitive tool. Not the wage. The permission to go and earn elsewhere, then come back for the Tests.

South Africa publishes more than anyone outside England. Under SA Rugby’s 2024 to 2027 player agreement:

• Springbok match-day squad: R118,197.93 per match

• Springbok non-playing squad: R59,539 per week

• Minimum monthly salary at a URC or European franchise: R39,575

• Players of National Interest minimum: R11,985 a month

• Semi-professional minimum: R6,790 a month

• Currie Cup Premier Division: R3,394 a match

• Currie Cup First Division: R2,268 a match

Same country, same sport, same weekend. A Springbok earns roughly 52 times per match what a Currie Cup First Division player does.

Japan pays the most and publishes the least. There is no salary cap, and the clubs are owned by Toyota, Suntory, Canon, Kubota and Panasonic. Every Japanese figure in circulation is an estimate, which is why we are not listing them as facts.

The southern hemisphere is not really a market. It is a holding operation. New Zealand shares revenue because it cannot match a wage bill. South Africa pays match fees because it cannot pay retainers. Both export their best players and try to schedule around it.

—

The not so final verdict

Everything below is converted to euros so it can be compared properly, using the ECB rate on 13 August 2026 of €1 to R18.59, and £1 to €1.17. The year attached to each figure is different, and that matters.

The floor, annualised:

• South African semi-professional minimum: R6,790 a month, about €4,400 a year (2024-27 agreement)

• South African Players of National Interest minimum: R11,985 a month, about €7,700 a year (2024-27 agreement)

• Irish academy: €8,000 a year (2016, the last published figure)

• English academy minimums: £18,200 to £20,200, about €21,300 to €23,600 (2025-26)

• Minimum at a South African URC or European franchise: R39,575 a month, about €25,500 a year (2024-27 agreement)

Where most professionals actually sit:

• Top 14 average, worst-paid position to best: €223,000 to €343,000 (2024-25)

• Premiership average senior income: £165,181, about €193,000 (2024-25)

• Premiership worst-paid position, wing: £132,303, about €155,000 (2024-25)

The lowest-paid position in France still pays more than the average across every position in England.

The top:

• Premiership marquee players: £533,000 average across nine players, about €624,000 (2024-25)

• Around ten Top 14 players on €600,000 or more (reported December 2024)

• Leinster’s best paid: €600,000 to €700,000 (reported 2026, estimates)

Three different countries, three different systems.

One caveat on the conversions. A euro does not buy the same life in Durban that it buys in Dublin, and the South African figures look worse in euros than they feel on the ground. The point is not that South African players are poor. It is that South African rugby cannot compete with European rugby for a player who is willing to move, which is exactly why so many of them do.

And then the very top, where nobody publishes anything and every figure is an informed guess. The best estimates put the single highest-paid player in world rugby a little over the £1m mark. Nobody can confirm it.

Sponsorship is the missing piece, and it is missing for a reason. Rugby does not disclose it. The only two things we can say with any confidence are that it matters and that it is concentrated. Dupont fought a public battle over the French cap counting his personal sponsors, which tells you those deals are worth arguing about. And O’Driscoll’s post-career company had built €4.4m in accumulated profits by 2015, which tells you the commercial side outlasts the playing side.

Which brings us back to 1995. Rugby went professional with football’s example sitting right there and chose not to copy it. Football spent a century learning that unrestrained wages break clubs, and it is still learning. Rugby skipped to the conclusion and capped itself from the start. Wasps, Worcester and London Irish went under anyway.

So when someone asks what a rugby player earns, the accurate answer is a question back. Which country, which position, and which year.

We will keep going with this one and try to dive into the clubs/unions and the rumours and speculation surrounding their more precise finances.

See you next Monday!

Tom

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Thank you for being part of the Boardroom Sports community.

And if you did not know already, we have expanded what was Boardroom Ball into what is now Boardroom Sports.

We are still obsessed with the same thing: the money, power and decisions that shape sport.

Boardroom Sports will predominantly cover the business of football, golf, F1 and rugby, alongside sport’s biggest events and the stories moving the wider sporting world.

Golf is one of the biggest additions, and we plan to publish on it at least once a week. There is no better place to start than the story taking over the sport right now.

So here is where LIV Golf actually stands, and why it matters far beyond golf.

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• Help us keep producing independent analysis on sports ownership, finance, sponsorship, governance, media and the commercial side of the game.

Membership is €7/month or €60/year (best value).

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How LIV got here, and why Saudi Arabia walked away

When LIV Golf launched in 2022, it did not really try to compete with the PGA Tour. It tried to buy its way past it and its legacy.

Bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the breakaway league pulled some of the sport’s biggest names off the PGA Tour with guaranteed contracts golf had never seen.

The numbers, reported by Forbes, show the scale of the bet. Across its first five years (2022 to 2026), LIV outspent anything golf had seen:

• Reported 2022 signing bonuses of around $300M for Jon Rahm, $200M for Phil Mickelson and $100M for Brooks Koepka

• More than $3 billion paid to players in winnings, salaries and bonuses from 2022 to 2026

• A reported $6 billion spent in total across those five years (2022 to 2026)

The losses piled up just as fast:

• Around $1.4 billion lost across LIV’s first three and a half years (2022 to mid-2025), per The Athletic

• $590 million of that lost by the UK arm in 2024 alone

And the business underneath never caught up with the spending. Ticket sales were up 129% year on year heading into 2026 and a genuine international audience was forming, but US television, the one market LIV most needed, never broke through. CEO Scott O’Neil himself admitted the league could be a decade away from turning a serious profit.

Then, in April, things changed again. The Wall Street Journal reported, and Forbes confirmed, that the PIF would stop funding LIV after the 2026 season, years before the backing was expected to run to (some reports had it committed through 2032). The fund, sources said, no longer saw LIV as aligned with its strategy.

For a league built almost entirely on one sovereign backer, that was close to an extinction event.

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The turmoil: cancelled events, layoffs and players heading for the exit

Losing the money was one thing. The months that followed showed how quickly a league unravels when the promise of the money stops.

Events started falling off the calendar:

• LIV New Orleans, scheduled for June, was postponed with no return date, and $1 million was returned to the state of Louisiana

• The $40 million season finale, the Team Championship at The Cardinal in Plymouth, Michigan, is now cancelled, with the venue never having built out tournament infrastructure.

• That leaves just two events on the 2026 calendar: LIV New York at Trump Bedminster and LIV Indianapolis

Behind the scenes, the picture was worse:

• The Asian Tour, which had served as a feeder and a route to world ranking points, walked away and partnered back up with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour, a move that reportedly blindsided LIV

• LIV’s streaming partner Mobii fell into dispute with the league

• Multiple lawsuits landed, including one alleging LIV stole the very idea for the league

• Most staff and contractors were handed 30-day termination notices, and LIV reportedly laid the groundwork for a possible US bankruptcy

The players read it too. Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton, Joaquin Niemann and Ian Poulter have all taken up DP World Tour memberships. In plain terms, they are securing somewhere else to play, an insurance policy in case LIV does not survive. Graeme McDowell has also openly started looking elsewhere.

Amid all of it, Bryson DeChambeau led a players-only meeting at Trump Bedminster, first reported by The Athletic’s Gabby Herzig. Few players said much afterwards. Richard Bland’s read was that the next two to three weeks would decide everything, and that the group was “fully backing” O’Neil.

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The lifeline: a mystery investor, and players as owners

Then, at Bedminster on 6 August, the story turned.

O’Neil announced that LIV had reached agreement with a new lead investor, signed and approved by the board, to fund the league’s next era, a scaled down version already being called “LIV 2.0”. After months of looking like it would fold, LIV suddenly had a path forward.

The headline terms, reported across Yahoo Sports, CNN, Sportico and Front Office Sports:

• Players will become the majority equity holders, described as a first for a major global sports league

• More than a dozen further parties are said to be interested as minority investors, pointing to a multi-partner model

• The reimagined league is targeting a schedule of around 10 events and projects profitability within roughly three years

• The deal is targeted to formally close in September

But statements surrounding the incidental details are ambiguous, and deliberately so. O’Neil said the league is “keeping the details of the deal, the investor, and much of what you might want to know out of the media.” The identity of the backer, the amount, how much players are owed against their equity, and how governance and voting will work were all left unanswered.

Forbes had earlier reported the rescue package was worth somewhere between $250 million and $350 million, with bankruptcy still on the table as a way to restructure LIV’s debts. Players owed money from those enormous original contracts would, in effect, swap some of what they are owed for a stake in the new league.

—

So LIV Golf survives, for now. But it is worth being clear about what just happened.

A sovereign wealth fund spent a reported $6 billion in five years. It signed the biggest names in the sport, built enormous events on multiple continents, and grew ticket demand fast. And it still arrived at a point where the finale gets cancelled, staff get 30-day notices, and the biggest stars quietly register to play elsewhere on Saturdays.

Money bought attention. It did not build a business that could stand on its own.

That is the real lesson, and it runs deeper than golf:

• Growth is not the same as sustainability. LIV grew fast and lost money faster.

• A league that depends on a single backer does not control its own future. When the PIF’s strategy changed, everything downstream changed with it.

• Foundations matter more than firepower. Infrastructure, media that actually lands, and a real route to profitability are the boring parts LIV skipped, and it paid for it.

There is a fair counterpoint. Traditional golf, and the PGA Tour in particular, has been accused for years of being slow, conservative and, frankly, a bit boring. LIV was meant to be the correction, the disruptor with the chequebook. But if the old model was too cautious, LIV is what happens when you sprint too far the other way, with no foundations under the spending.

The most telling part of LIV 2.0 is that it quietly admits this. Handing majority ownership to the players, chasing profitability in three years, cutting the schedule down: that is a league trying, belatedly, to build the foundations it never had. Whether it works depends on whether the sums finally add up, and on who the mystery investor turns out to be.

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For the first time it could cost him the FIFA presidency.

Last week, Charlie Stebbings, on the Business of Sport podcast, put it neatly: Gianni Infantino has found his Achilles heel. It is worth dwelling on how strange that sentence would have sounded twelve months ago.

This is a man who took over a governing body that had just been raided by Swiss police, promised to clean it up, and then won two further elections without anybody bothering to stand against him. He survived an ethics investigation into his own flights and contract. He survived the fallout from secret meetings with the Swiss attorney general. He survived Qatar, and then went to Doha and lectured Europe about its hypocrisy. He survived handing Donald Trump a FIFA Peace Prize.

Then, in the space of about ten days, he tried to bring private investors into a not-for-profit, and the coalition that had carried him for a decade started coming apart.

He has not lost yet of course. But the FIFA presidential election on 18 March 2027, which until July looked like a coronation, is now an actual contest.

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How he became untouchable

Infantino was never an outsider. He joined UEFA in 2000 as a lawyer, ran legal affairs and club licensing, and by 2009 was general secretary, the man doing the day-to-day work of European football while Michel Platini did the politics. Financial Fair Play, the Euros expanding to 24 teams, the Nations League: he had his hands on all of it.

When the 2015 corruption crisis took down Blatter and then swallowed Platini, the deputy became the candidate. He won the February 2016 election 115 to 88 against Sheikh Salman, and he won it as the reformer. Transparency, governance, democracy, a new FIFA.

What he actually built was something else. He worked out early that the FIFA presidency is not decided in Europe. There are 211 member associations and each one has a vote, and the vote of a federation with a two-thousand-seat national stadium counts exactly the same as England’s. So he expanded FIFA Forward development funding dramatically, sent money to associations that had never seen much of it, and made himself the most important man in the professional lives of a few hundred federation presidents. His critics call that clientelism. His supporters call it redistribution. Both are describing the same machine.

It worked. Unopposed in 2019. Unopposed in 2023. Revenues through the roof, a 32-team Club World Cup, a 48-team World Cup, and a growing comfort with heads of state that culminated in Trump phoning him about Folarin Balogun’s red card in July. The suspension was subsequently overturned. Infantino insists he did not interfere.

The controversies were constant. None of them ever cost him anything.

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The $4.2bn plan that broke the spell

On 28 July, the Times reported that FIFA had been quietly working on something called FIFA Forward Enterprise. The idea was to move the commercial and operational rights of FIFA’s biggest events, the World Cup and the Club World Cup among them, into a new subsidiary, value it at roughly $20bn, and sell about 20% of it to private investors for around $4.2bn. The proposed lead investor was Thrive Eternal, a vehicle launched in April by Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared. The reporting also suggested Infantino could become the entity’s commissioner once his presidency ends, on money comparable to what the NFL pays Roger Goodell.

FIFA is a not-for-profit association under Swiss law. It exists, on paper, to hold the game in trust for its members. The FFE proposal asked those members to accept that a fifth of the commercial upside of their own tournament would sit with outside capital, structured by people they had not been consulted about, with a possible landing job for the president attached.

UEFA’s response was not a statement of concern. It was a threat to leave. “This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” UEFA said. “The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade.” Its 55 associations voted to boycott FIFA competitions if the proposal was not withdrawn. Concacaf and the AFC rejected it too.

On 1 August, FIFA announced the plan would not proceed, conceding it had “created divisions”. Infantino apologised for how it had been handled.

The most powerful administrator in world sport put forward the largest commercial restructuring in FIFA’s history, and abandoned it inside a week because Europe threatened to walk. Nothing in the previous decade had produced that outcome.

—

What the retreat unleashed

Withdrawing the proposal did not end it. It started the second phase, because the members had discovered they could win.

Wales became the first association to withdraw support for Infantino’s re-election on 3 August, citing governance, transparency and decision-making. Serbia and Sweden followed within days. England’s FA formally withdrew on 6 August and confirmed that Infantino’s apology, and FIFA’s public reaffirmation of support for him, had changed nothing. By the end of that week the list had grown to include Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Greece, Croatia and Albania. Norway has gone furthest and called for him to resign.

UEFA has said it has lost confidence in his leadership, and its lawyers have gone further than a statement. A legal letter served on FIFA warned that UEFA is “actively considering legal action”, arbitration or regulatory complaints over the FFE proposal, and served a preservation notice on eighteen named FIFA executives, Infantino and chief financial officer Thomas Peyer among them, along with Arsène Wenger. Destroying or altering relevant material after receiving it, the letter warned, could be treated as destruction of evidence. This is no longer only a political row.

Then came Jordan. Prince Ali bin Hussein, who stood against Infantino in 2016, said his federation had been told during the World Cup that endorsing the president “would go a long way to helping our FA out”, while prize money owed from the 2025 Arab Cup went unpaid. He called it blackmail. The money arrived two days later. He said it made no difference: Jordan will not endorse Infantino or vote for him. FIFA has not addressed the allegation.

And on 7 August the Telegraph reported that UEFA had paid a six-figure exit package to a female employee who worked under Infantino when he was general secretary, and funded a business school course costing around £45,000 a year, amid claims of a relationship. UEFA has confirmed the payments and says both were permitted under the staff rules in force at the time. Infantino strongly denies the allegations. FIFA calls them categorically untrue. Nothing here is established, and it should be reported carefully. But the timing is brutal.

FIFA’s response, on 8 August, was to warn of a “concerted and ongoing effort” to undermine its president and to insist that any challenge to his leadership follow FIFA’s statutes and democratic procedures. That is the language of an incumbent defending a position, not one enjoying it.

The map is genuinely split. CAF has backed him unanimously. Mexico and Argentina have broken ranks with their own confederations to support him. Concacaf has called for a “comprehensive reckoning” of his presidency. Conmebol has expressed concern about “unilateral actions”. UEFA is in open revolt.

—

Infantino is not finished, and it would be lazy to write this as though he is. His defence is strong and it is mostly numerical. FIFA has never been richer. Development money reaches more associations than ever. The 2026 World Cup was delivered. FIFA’s management has publicly backed him. Africa is solid. And there is still no obvious successor. Victor Montagliani’s name circulates, but nobody has declared.

There is also a warning worth putting in front of readers who would enjoy watching him fall. As the Financial Times and others have pointed out, Infantino was well regarded at UEFA. He arrived as the clean-hands reformer. Whoever replaces him will also arrive as the clean-hands reformer, elected by the same 211 associations, inheriting the same incentives and the same money. The problem at FIFA has never really been the man. It is that the job hands one person control of a redistribution machine that decides who can afford to disagree with him.

Which is why the FFE story matters more than any of the individual scandals. Balogun alone would have blown over. The Trump friendship alone would have blown over. What did the damage was Infantino colliding with the one thing his presidency was built on, the members’ belief that the money was theirs, held in trust. When he appeared to put a fifth of it up for sale without asking, he broke the arrangement that made him untouchable.

The question is not whether Infantino resigns. He will not. It is whether UEFA can turn a revolt into a candidate. If it can, March 2027 is a real election for the first time since 2016. If it can’t, he consolidates what is left, wins a fourth term, and every association that broke ranks this month will spend the next four years explaining itself to a man with the power and money of FIFA at his unfortunate disposal.

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Morocco didn’t quite match what they did in 2022 at this year’s World Cup.

Three years ago they reached the semi-finals. This time they went out in the quarters.

But look a bit closer at how they got there, because it tells you plenty.

They came through a tough group on seven points, level with Brazil, and only missed top spot on goal difference.

Then they beat the Netherlands on penalties, saw off Canada 3-0, and only went out to France, the tournament favourites, in the quarter-final.

There was a record ten African teams at this World Cup, and Morocco were the only one to get that far.

Getting knocked out by France is nothing to be ashamed of. Reaching back-to-back quarter-finals as an African side is something that hasn’t been done before.

Which is the part worth talking about.

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Africa’s World Cup history

Africa has been going to World Cups since 1934, and in all that time only three teams had ever reached a quarter-final before Morocco came along. Cameroon did it in 1990, Senegal in 2002, and Ghana in 2010. One semi-final, which was Morocco’s own in 2022, and not a single final in ninety years.

Back in 1977, Pelé said an African nation would be world champions by the year 2000. He was pretty confident about it. It didn’t happen, and it still hasn’t.

The strange thing is that the talent was never the problem. At the last proper count from CIES, more than 500 African players were on the books at clubs across Europe. Nigeria alone has won the U-17 World Cup a record five times. The players have always been there.

What was missing was a system to turn all of that into a team that actually goes deep. That is the gap Morocco set out to fill, and they started a long time ago.

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How Morocco actually did it

In 2008, King Mohammed VI told the country’s national sports conference to stop waiting around for talent to appear and start building the setup that would produce it. The BBC covered the shift at the time.

A year later the Mohammed VI academy opened, built for around $14 million. And here is a detail worth holding onto: the King didn’t pay for it on his own. The telecoms company Maroc Télécom and the bank Attijariwafa helped fund it, according to Niya Maghribia. That is private national money going into a football project years before anyone knew it would work.

It paid off. Nayef Aguerd, Azzedine Ounahi and Youssef En-Nesyri all came through that academy, and all three were central to the 2022 run.

Then the federation caught up. When Fouzi Lekjaa took over in 2014, Morocco built a proper diaspora scouting network, with people stationed across France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and beyond, as Morocco World News reported. At the same time they laid something like 7,000 amateur pitches at home and put real effort into developing their own coaches.

So one side of the operation grows players at home. The other finds Moroccan talent wherever in Europe it happens to be born. Running both at once is basically the whole idea.

You can see it in the numbers. Morocco’s 1998 squad had two foreign-born players. By 2022 it was fourteen out of twenty-six, and this summer they put out the first entirely foreign-born starting eleven in their history, drawing on research from Oxford’s COMPAS.

None of this is a brand new concept, by the way. Plenty of teams have leaned on diaspora players before. Some of Morocco’s own, like Hakim Ziyech and Sofyan Amrabat, came through the Dutch youth setup and then chose Morocco. What is different is that Morocco paired that recruitment with the academy and the federation work, instead of relying on it on its own.

—

🎥 New on the Boardroom Ball YouTube channel: we dug into why no African nation has ever won a World Cup, despite all the talent. Watch here👇

—

So could anyone else do this?

That is the interesting question, because the blueprint is right there for everyone to see.

The lesson from the teams who haven’t managed it is pretty clear. Nigeria has produced more young talent than almost anyone and still missed the last two World Cups, which tells you talent on its own isn’t enough. Algeria has recruited its French-born players for years but never built the institutions around them, and The Conversation’s read is that diaspora talent without that structure eventually hits a ceiling. Morocco is the only one that built both halves.

Senegal is the obvious team to look at next. They have the quality, they won the Africa Cup of Nations in 2021, and they reached the final again in 2025. If any African side has the raw material to build the same kind of system, it is them.

The frustrating thing, if you are anyone other than Morocco, is that there is no secret here. The academy, the scouting, the pitches, the recruitment, all of it has been done in the open. Anyone can copy it.

Seventeen years on, nobody has really.

See you next Wednesday.

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Welcome back to World Cup Wednesday. A day late, one final time.

This is the last edition of this series, and it ends where the tournament does: with the final itself.

The World Cup final is usually the most intense, competitive fixture in world football. As ever, our interest is in the version of it that plays out off the pitch.

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Right. Back to this week’s topic.

—

Start with the viewing figures.

FIFA’s audit of the 2022 final found that more than 1.4 billion people watched at least one minute of Argentina against France, with an average live audience of 571 million.

(The 1.5 billion figure quoted everywhere is FIFA’s total reach across television, streaming and public viewing, not simultaneous viewers. The distinction is worth noting.)

To put that in context: this year’s Super Bowl averaged 125.6 million viewers (Nielsen), and that was the second most-watched in its history.

The World Cup final’s average audience is more than four times that. No single fixture in any sport comes close.

Those are the headline figures. Now follow what they convert into.

Fox paid $485 million for the US English-language rights to this tournament. Together with Telemundo’s Spanish-language deal, the American market alone is reported to be worth around $1.25 billion to FIFA.

And here’s the detail most people don’t know: Fox never had to bid for it. When FIFA moved Qatar 2022 to November, straight into the NFL season, it handed Fox and Telemundo the 2026 rights without a tender, widely reported at the time as compensation to head off a legal fight.

The advertising market shows what those rights are now worth. Fox’s top sponsorship packages for this tournament have reportedly ranged from $15 million to $50 million, with Telemundo’s biggest deals at $20 million to $30 million (Adweek). Thirty-second spots for the biggest matches have been projected north of $1-2 million (Front Office Sports).

Regular readers will remember our piece on hydration breaks earlier this summer. That’s this same story: when the audience is this large, broadcasters will invent new inventory inside the match itself to sell against it.

—

Sponsorship

FIFA’s sponsorship revenue for this cycle is projected at $2.4 billion+, roughly 37% up on Qatar 2022 (SportsPro).

But the more interesting shift is in who is paying.

In 2022, the newest names on FIFA’s sponsor board were Crypto.com, the edtech firm Byju’s, and QatarEnergy. Byju’s has since collapsed into insolvency. The crypto gold rush cooled. That slate reflected who had money to spend in 2021, and how loosely it was being spent.

Look at the 2026 board. Bank of America, FIFA’s first global banking partner, in what is reportedly the largest sports investment the bank has ever made. Verizon, covering network operations across all 11 US host cities. Lenovo. And Saudi Aramco, a worldwide partner in a deal reported at $100 million per year (Fossil Free Football).

American corporates and Saudi state oil, replacing crypto and edtech.

Sponsor boards are a map of who football’s biggest event is being staged for. This one reads: the US market and Gulf capital. Which, not coincidentally, is also the story of where the next few World Cups are likely to be played.

And, the World Cup final and the level of attention and endorsement it draws in is exactly the type of logic applied when these companies choose to back these tournaments in the first place.

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Prize Money

The prize money is the smallest part.

Against those numbers, the money on the pitch looks modest.

The 2026 champion earns up to $51 million from FIFA’s record $871 million prize pool, with the runner-up taking $34 million.

That pool has nearly doubled from $440 million in Qatar. But the result on Sunday still only swings $17 million, small change next to what the fixture generates for FIFA.

And that money doesn’t go to the players. It goes to the federations, and every country negotiates its own player bonuses from there, which is why winning the World Cup pays a player very differently depending on their country.

The players’ clubs, meanwhile, get their own cut. Under FIFA’s Club Benefits Programme, clubs are paid at least $5,000 per player per day for releasing them to the tournament, from a fund of $355 million, up 70% on 2022 (FIFA).

Every player on the pitch on Sunday is earning money for their employer simply by being there. That is how thoroughly this event has been financed.

—

🎥 New on the channel: How FIFA actually makes money from the World Cup.

We break down the other side of this exact story. How FIFA’s business model works during a competition cycle and how they turn such a profit.

Watch here👇

—

The difference for the 2026 World Cup Final

Everything above would be true of any recent World Cup final. Four things are true only of this one.

1. FIFA runs the whole show. For the first time in the tournament’s history, there is no local organising committee. FIFA is staging the World Cup itself and dealing directly with its host cities, and the revenue from the final, the tickets, the hospitality, the sponsorship, flows straight to Zurich. Fortune estimates the tournament will bring FIFA around $8.9 billion.

2. There is a halftime show. Ninety-six years of World Cup finals, and this is the first with one. Curated by Coldplay’s Chris Martin, with a reported line-up including Justin Bieber, Madonna, Shakira, BTS and Burna Boy.

3. The tickets were priced like airline seats. We covered FIFA’s move to dynamic pricing earlier in this series, and the final is where it lands. Category 1 tickets launched at $6,730 and were later revised to close to $11,000 as demand data came in. FIFA also takes a 15% commission on its own resale platform, a practice now under subpoena from the New York and New Jersey attorneys general. This is the most expensive final in World Cup history, by a distance

4. It is being played in an NFL stadium, and FIFA is selling the pitch. No Maracanã, no Wembley, no purpose-built national stadium. The biggest match in football belongs, for one afternoon, to the home of the New York Jets and Giants, on a temporary grass surface that cost around $13 million to install (The Athletic). When the tournament ends, that surface comes up, and FIFA is selling it by the piece at $450 as official merchandise (NJ1015, ABC7). No World Cup final pitch has been sold off square by square before.

—

Put those four together and the pattern is difficult to miss.

An event run entirely by the rights holder. A halftime spectacle. Market-priced tickets. An NFL venue. Merchandise cut from the playing surface itself.

FIFA has not simply brought the World Cup to America. It has remade the final in the format of America’s biggest sporting products.

And commercially, it is hard to argue with. The Super Bowl is one of the most efficient revenue machine in sport, and FIFA now controls its own version of it end to end, with no host committee taking a share.

Every story we covered this summer was, in the end, the same story. Dynamic pricing. Host cities carrying costs for a tournament they no longer share in. Sponsor categories locked up before local businesses could move. And now a final where even the turf carries a price tag.

The World Cup used to be a football tournament that made money.

In 2026, it is a money machine that stages football.

That’s the last World Cup Wednesday. Thank you for following the tournament with us.

Regardless, we will see you next Wednesday.

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Quick bit of housekeeping before this week’s piece.

From now on, we’re going from three newsletters a week to one.

One deeper, better-researched piece each week, tied into what we’re covering across the channel that week: the YouTube video, the shorts, all of it.

For the next two weeks, while the tournament is on, that means a World Cup edition every Wednesday.

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Right. Back to this week’s question.

—

“This will put your city on the map”

When the American host cities were negotiating with FIFA, the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission asked a fair question: what exactly do the cities get out of this?

FIFA’s executives had an answer ready.

“Hosting this tournament will put your city on the map.”

That’s Los Angeles. Host of the 1984 Olympics. Host of the 1994 World Cup. Host of the 2028 Olympics.

The Athletic’s Adam Crafton reported that exchange, and it tells you almost everything about the business of this World Cup.

Because FIFA was selling cities the one thing they didn’t need, while quietly keeping the thing they did.

—

The city hosting the final is budgeting for a loss

Start with New York.

The World Cup final is being played at MetLife Stadium. The kind of fixture cities supposedly dream about.

New York City’s own comptroller ran the numbers this spring.

Even if FIFA’s forecast of 1.2 million visitors fully shows up, the extra tax revenue flowing to the city tops out at about $55 million.

The city’s added costs, for the NYPD, emergency management and small-business support, are on track to hit roughly $70 million.

That’s a loss in the optimistic scenario. If fewer visitors turn up, the gap widens.

And the visitors are wobbling. By May, 80% of hoteliers across the 11 US host markets reported bookings below forecast (Fortune). New York’s World Cup weeks were tracking behind the same dates in 2025, a year with no tournament at all.

So the host of the final loses money on paper. Sit with that for a second.

—

Hosts have always lost money. Here’s why they didn’t mind.

None of this is new, by the way.

Research from the University of Toronto found that 12 of the last 14 World Cups produced net economic losses for their host regions.

Brazil spent around $11.5 billion on the 2014 tournament, roughly 85% of it public money, and was left with stadiums nobody needed.

Russia spent somewhere between $11.8 billion and $14.2 billion for 2018.

And, obliterating previous records, Qatar spent an estimated $220 billion for 2022, more than every previous World Cup combined.

And here’s the thing: they were fine with it.

Because they weren’t buying an economic return. They were buying prestige.

Russia wanted to look like a global power again. Qatar wanted to introduce itself to the world of football. Crafton calls both tournaments what they were: nation-building projects.

Losing money was the price of the billboard. Everyone understood the trade.

—

So why don’t hosts make money?

Sports economist Victor Matheson has studied these events for nearly three decades, and he gives three reasons (Fortune).

Substitution. A local fan hasn’t grown their entertainment budget because the World Cup is in town. The $410 they spend on a ticket is $410 they don’t spend on the Red Sox, the museum, or the restaurant down the road.

Crowding out. The tournament displaces the tourists a city would have had anyway. During the Paris Olympics the hotels were full, but Paris hotels are always full in summer, and attendance at the Louvre fell by about 25%.

Leakage. And this is the killer. When a fan spends $400 on a World Cup ticket, that money goes to FIFA. It doesn’t touch a local business, and it never recirculates through the local economy.

As Matheson puts it: that $400 would have done more for the city if the fan had spent it on basically anything else.

—

🎥 New on the channel: How FIFA actually makes money from the World Cup.

We break down the other side of this exact story. How FIFA’s business model works during a competition cycle and how they turn such a profit.

Watch here👇

—

What makes 2026 different

Here’s the part that matters.

For most of the tournament’s history, a World Cup was run by a local organising committee. The host absorbed the costs, but it also shared in the upside.

Not this time. For the first time ever, FIFA is running the tournament itself, dealing directly with the 16 host cities across the US, Mexico and Canada.

Under that structure, FIFA controls essentially all of the revenue: tickets, media rights, sponsorship, hospitality, merchandise. The cities control the costs.

Fortune put it in plain business terms: a franchise model where the franchisees pay to run the business and the franchisor keeps the receipts.

Look at the numbers on each side of that ledger.

FIFA is set to collect an estimated $8.9 billion from this World Cup. Gianni Infantino promised to quadruple FIFA’s income when he ran for president in 2016, and this is how he gets there.

The 11 US host cities, meanwhile, face a collective shortfall of up to $250 million, with each expected to shoulder $100 million to $200 million in security, transport, stadium retrofits and fan zones.

And the costs hide everywhere once you start looking. The Athletic found a $25.8 million temporary jail in Kansas City. A $15 million broadcast centre in Dallas that gets torn down when the tournament ends. A $13 million pitch injection at MetLife so the final has grass worthy of it.

Then there’s the tax. FIFA made sales-tax exemptions on tickets a condition of hosting. Georgia alone expects to lose up to $25 million on Atlanta’s matches, and Missouri, Georgia and Florida are waiving a combined $57.8 million.

Cities were told they could sell local sponsorships to cover their costs. Then FIFA locked up the categories for its own partners, so cities couldn’t even sign a convenience-store chain, because its food sales clashed with McDonald’s.

The old deal was: lose money, share the upside, buy prestige.

The new deal is: lose money.

—

The takeaway

None of this means the World Cup is worthless to a host.

The 1994 tournament fell billions short of its economic projections, and it still gave America Major League Soccer. Some legacies don’t show up on a comptroller’s spreadsheet.

But the honest version of the story is this.

For decades, hosts lost money on the World Cup and got something real in exchange: prestige, attention, a new place in the world’s imagination.

In 2026, FIFA sold that same loss to cities that already had all three.

Host cities were told the World Cup would put them on the map.

Turns out they’re the ones paying for the ink.

See you next Wednesday.

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German football has seen its fair share of dramatic downfalls in recent times, with the likes of FC Schalke 04 and VfL Wolfsburg dominating headlines having traversed from Champions League escapades to relegation ruin over the past few decades.

Before all that however, it was 1. FC Kaiserslautern who were among the first to show signs of spiralling uncontrollably down the football pyramid - from winning two Bundesliga titles in 1991 and 1998 to playing in the German third tier just twenty years later.

Founded in 1900, 1. FC Kaiserslautern rose to prominence after the Second World War under the leadership of legendary captain Fritz Walter. The club won German championships in 1951 and 1953, while several Kaiserslautern players formed the core of West Germany’s 1954 World Cup-winning squad.

As one of the Bundesliga’s founding members in 1963, the club remained competitive and later enjoyed another golden era in the early 1990s, winning the DFB-Pokal in 1990 before securing the Bundesliga title in 1991 and again in 1998 when, led by manager Otto Rehhagel, they became the first and only newly promoted team to win the Bundesliga immediately after earning promotion from the second division.

This remarkable success cemented the club’s place in German football history and demonstrated how effective management, strong team spirit and tactical discipline could overcome financial limitations and adversity.

Recruitment and Managerial Changes

Player recruitment and managerial decisions played a significant role in both the club’s success and eventual decline.

During its strongest years, Kaiserslautern consistently identified talented yet affordable players who suited the club’s disciplined style of play.

Experienced managers such as Karl-Heinz Feldkamp and Otto Rehhagel built balanced squads by blending youth with experienced professionals, creating teams capable of competing against wealthier clubs.

Shrewd acquisitions such as Olaf Marschall, Ciriaco Sforza, Ratinho, Michael Schjønberg, Petr Kouba and a young Michael Ballack were key in that 1998 Bundesliga title, and were followed up by the arrivals of Miroslav Klose, Youri Djorkaeff and record signing Lincoln which helped the club enjoy a 10-year spell in the top flight.

However, following the early 2000s, recruitment became increasingly inconsistent - the club failed to invest when the going was good, while promising academy graduates were sold to ease financial pressures.

Frequent managerial changes further destabilised the club, in particular the departure of Otto Rehhagel who famously went on to lead Greece to Euro 2004 glory, and with each new coach introducing different tactical ideas and transfer priorities, squad continuity suffered, resulting in declining performances on the pitch and a loss of the clear identity that had once defined the Red Devils.

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Ownership and Board Influence

Equally damaging were the decisions made by the club’s board and ownership.

Following years of sporting success, ambitious spending on wages, aging players and the expansion of the Fritz-Walter-Stadion placed enormous financial pressure on the club.

The stadium redevelopment for the 2006 FIFA World Cup left Kaiserslautern with significant debt, while repeated failures to secure Bundesliga promotion reduced television revenue and commercial income.

Boardroom instability, disagreements over financial strategy and unsuccessful investment decisions further worsened the situation.

Although former club legend Stefan Kuntz initially helped stabilise the club and guided them back to the Bundesliga in 2010, financial problems continued to bubble beneath the surface and eventually those years of poor governance contributed to insolvency proceedings in 2020, highlighting how off-field decisions can be just as influential as performances on the pitch.

Signs of Recovery

The club’s recent history has been defined by decline but also signs of a resurgence of sorts in Southwestern German.

Despite a devastating drop to the 3. Liga in 2018, the unwavering support of its fanbase kept the club alive during difficult times and promotion back to the 2. Bundesliga in 2022 marked an important turning point, with the team establishing itself as a competitive second-tier side while continuing efforts to improve its financial stability.

Although a return to the Bundesliga remains a work in progress, Kaiserslautern’s rich tradition, loyal supporters and renewed organisational focus suggest that the club is slowly rebuilding its reputation after years of decline.

The recent sale of star striker Ragnar Ache to 1. FC Köln was their highest value departure since Klose left for Werder Bremen in 2004, and if the funds earned are reinvested appropriately then Kaiserslautern fans will be optimistic that better days are yet to come for Die Roten Teufel.

The story of 1. FC Kaiserslautern is a reminder that success in football depends on more than talent alone.

The club's historic achievements were built upon exceptional leadership, smart recruitment and a strong connection with its community, while its decline resulted from financial mismanagement, inconsistent planning and instability both on and off the pitch.

Despite experiencing one of the most dramatic falls in German football, the Red Devils remain a symbol of perseverance and hope that one day they can return to the heights that once made them one of Germany's greatest football clubs.

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Welcome back to World Cup Wednesday.

Have you actually noticed this year’s sponsors?

Not the football. The boards. The little logos in the corner of every broadcast, the names wrapped around the pitch.

You’ve definitely seen Adidas, Coca-Cola, Visa, Qatar Airways, Hyundai and Kia, Lenovo and maybe even ADI.

But the one we want to focus on today is Aramco.

To quickly recap, this is the biggest World Cup ever staged. 48 teams, 104 matches, 16 host cities across the United States, Mexico and Canada.

It’s also on course to be the most lucrative. FIFA’s marketing and sponsorship revenue for this cycle is projected to comfortably top a record $1.78bn (SportBusiness), part of a roughly $14bn four-year haul FIFA says it’ll mostly plough back into the game.

A chunk of that record is being contributed by an oil company.

But not many seem to be talking about it.

So who exactly is Aramco?

Saudi Aramco is the world’s largest oil producer, worth somewhere around $1.6 trillion and, for a spell after its 2019 float, the most valuable listed company on Earth.

It is 98.5% owned by the Saudi state.

It is also the world’s single largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter, responsible for more than 4% of all global emissions since 1965. This is more than the entire United Kingdom.

In 2024 alone it accounted for 4.28% of global CO₂, more than any other company on the planet (Carbon Majors database, via the LA Times).

It pumps over 12 million barrels of oil a day, and just 0.01% of the energy it produces is renewable (Fossil Free Football).

Its CEO, Amin Nasser, told an industry conference in 2024 that the world should “abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”

This is not a company quietly hedging towards a green future. This is the fossil-fuel business, at maximum volume, putting its name on the most-watched event in the world.

First it was F1. Then it came for football.

Aramco’s route into sport is worth tracing, because it tells you this is a strategy, not a one-off.

In March 2020, it became Formula 1’s sixth global partner. Instant access to an “engaged audience of 500 million fans,” title rights to three Grands Prix, branding on every straight.

That same spring, the UK advertising regulator received 60+ complaints about an Aramco campaign claiming it was “powering a more sustainable future.” Aramco pulled the ad (ClientEarth).

The sport push kept going: cricket’s ICC, women’s golf, a Saudi club in Al-Qadsiah.

Then, on 25 April 2024, the big one. FIFA named Aramco a Major Worldwide Partner — the top tier — with exclusive rights in the energy category across the 2026 men’s and 2027 women’s World Cups.

The fee was never disclosed. Experts estimate around $100m a year, roughly $400m across the deal (LA Times).

For context on the broader play: fossil-fuel firms have poured over £4bn into sports sponsorship, and Aramco is the single biggest spender, with nearly £1bn across ten active deals (New Weather Institute, via the BBC).

The pushback.

This is the part FIFA would rather you didn’t notice.

Within weeks of the 2024 announcement, more than 130 professional women’s footballers from 27 countries signed an open letter demanding FIFA drop the deal.

Their line is hard to forget: “This sponsorship is much worse than an own goal. FIFA might as well pour oil on the pitch and set it alight.”

In May 2026, health, climate and sports-science experts warned that actively promoting fossil fuels creates “a conflict of interest with the protection of player welfare.”

And as the tournament kicked off, climate activists — Sierra Club, Third Act, Hip Hop Caucus among them — staged a day of action outside five World Cup stadiums, from SoFi in LA to Hard Rock in Miami.

Madeleine Orr, a sport-ecology academic at the University of Toronto, put it bluntly: having Aramco as a worldwide sponsor “completely undermines any credibility FIFA has, or could have had, around sustainability claims.”

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So why would an oil company sponsor the World Cup?

There’s a more obvious answer, and then the more interesting one.

Familiarity with everyone. The World Cup is the most-watched event on Earth. Roughly 1.5 billion people watched the 2022 final alone. You cannot buy that kind of eyeball count anywhere else.

Familiarity that lasts. A World Cup memory is a lifelong one. Sponsors get woven into the highlight reels, the background of a generation’s summer. It’s marketing that doesn’t expire and because the spectacle is so beloved, almost no one tied to it gets seen in a bad light.

They’re not trying to sell you oil. And this is the key. Aramco isn’t running boards in Dallas hoping you’ll fill up at one of its forecourts.

Fossil-fuel advertising works differently. As Fossil Free Football’s Frank Huisingh argues, it’s “not really about selling us our next product… but about building influence and soft power. Aramco is using the largest platform on earth to spread its message.”

The lazy word for this is sportswashing. And it is, to be fair, accurate.

Amnesty International says Saudi Arabia, largely through its wealth fund, has spent billions on sportswashing to distract from a record of executions, jailed activists and suppressed dissent.

But it would be too simple to stop at that word.

Because the deeper goal, as the Guardian’s Oscar Berglund puts it, is to make fossil capital feel like “a necessary evil, so embedded that we cannot imagine life…without it.”

In other words: Aramco isn’t washing one bad weekend. It’s buying permanence the quiet idea that oil is just part of football, part of life, not going anywhere.

It also wants to be in the room. The same World Cup that hosts the football hosts the executives, the billionaires, the world leaders. In short, the people Aramco most wants to rub shoulders with. Its ROI, one sponsorship expert noted, is measured in “reputation of the company…how the brand Saudi Arabia has improved.”

This is soft power for a state that, at the COP climate talks, is “widely regarded as the worst blocker of climate action.”

And then there’s 2034.

Here’s the thread that ties it all together.

The 2034 World Cup is going to Saudi Arabia, confirmed in December 2024 through an uncontested bid, after FIFA conveniently restricted eligibility to Asia and Oceania. Reporting suggests FIFA president Gianni Infantino personally helped bend the rules to get there.

So join the dots.

The Saudi state owns Aramco. Aramco is now FIFA’s marquee partner across 2026 and 2027. Saudi Arabia hosts the whole thing in 2034.

As one sponsorship expert flatly noted, it’s “common practice for state-owned companies in future host countries to sponsor events such as the World Cup.”

This isn’t a coincidence of branding.

What can we actually do?

Not much, on our own. That’s the honest answer.

But the playbook exists, and it’s the one that beat Big Tobacco.

Keep naming it. Keep condemning it. Make it so that no matter how good the football is, associating with these companies stops being a clean, costless win.

It’s slow. It’s easier said than done. But the alternative is to shrug, enjoy the spectacle, and let the logo become wallpaper.

Aramco bought into the World Cup to sell you the idea that you have no choice but to keep burning fossil fuels.

Don’t buy it.

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“Stranger things have happened than the prospect of Messi vs Pico Lopes – but not many”

There is a Shamrock Rovers centre-back at the World Cup.

Not watching it. Playing in it.

Roberto “Pico” Lopes is in the knockout stages of the 2026 World Cup with Cape Verde, and next up is Lionel Messi’s Argentina.

You probably already know how he got there. The now-famous LinkedIn message from a Cape Verde manager that sat ignored as suspected spam, the Google Translate call-up, the dad from Cape Verde and the mam from Dublin. We’ve covered his background before, and frankly so has half the planet by now.

So we won’t dwell on it.

What’s harder to look away from is what’s happening back home.

While his family back home cheer him on, a large portion of Irish population have gathered too.

On Aisling Close in Crumlin, neighbours have been watching his games on an inflatable screen propped against a wall, with a projector borrowed from the local school.

Shamrock Rovers fans have also rallied around one of their own.

And here’s the part worth sitting with: a lot of those Rovers supporters aren’t old enough to remember Ireland at a World Cup. Some of them weren’t even born for it.

Ireland last graced a World Cup in 2002.

That’s why this connection matters so much to football culture in this country. For a chunk of a generation, this is the closest they’ve come to having someone of their own on that stage.

But, in the interest of full disclosure, I was three months old myself the last time Ireland were at a World Cup.

So I won’t be pretending to yearn for the days of Saipan anytime soon.

And, here’s the thing some people are still underrating: Cape Verde were never supposed to be here.

The pre-tournament numbers gave them somewhere around a 1% chance of getting out of their group.

This is a country of roughly 525,000 people. One of the smallest nations by land area and population ever to qualify for a World Cup.

But this didn’t come from nowhere.

Cape Verde have been quietly building for over a decade, with back-to-back quarter-final runs at the Africa Cup of Nations marking them out as serious overachievers long before now.

The qualifying campaign sealed it — top of their group, a 3-0 win over Eswatini in October 2025 booking a first-ever World Cup.

Then came the tournament itself.

A 0-0 draw with Spain. A 2-2 with Uruguay. A 0-0 with Saudi Arabia.

Second in the group, and the smallest nation in history to reach the World Cup knockout stages.

Pico has been integral to all of it.

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This is where it gets interesting for us.

A player contracted to a League of Ireland club is competing — and progressing — at a World Cup.

That is proof of concept. The League produces players who can compete on the very biggest stage.

You don’t need exact figures to see the traction it’s pulling.

Look at the League of Ireland’s own social channels. A post celebrating Pico did numbers their usual content simply doesn’t.

Moments like Stephen Bradley FaceTiming him live on RTÉ became their own little events.

And even if our national broadcaster hasn’t exactly been at its best this tournament, it almost doesn’t matter because the story didn’t stay in Ireland.

FourFourTwo, ESPN, NPR, Al Jazeera, Fox — they’ve all run it.

A Crumlin lad and a tiny island nation became one of the defining feel-good stories of the World Cup.

The lesson for clubs is simple: authentic stories travel, and one player’s journey is worth more brand value than any ad campaign you could buy.

But the important thing from a marketing and branding perspective, is that the League of Ireland don’t let the momentum die with this tournament.

All of this could be fleeting.

A World Cup ends. The cameras move on. The story cools.

But the momentum is real right now and that is exactly the moment to use it to brand and market the League of Ireland for the rest of the season.

Because here’s the kicker: the second the World Cup ends, there are League of Ireland matches to actually go and watch.

Some people in Ireland don’t even realise the league plays through the summer.

That’s a genuine shame and a wide-open opportunity.

This is a recruitment pitch to every young player wondering if the domestic game can take them somewhere.

It’s a story for investors, at the exact moment outside money is starting to take Irish football seriously.

And it raises a fair question: if Pico can do this, who else in another setup could be doing the same and is the League of Ireland being taken seriously enough as a pathway?

The profile of this league is rising. We’ve written about it before, from fan ownership debates to the arrival of foreign capital.

This is another data point in the same story.

It’s disappointing, of course, that Ireland aren’t there themselves.

But to have someone born and bred here Irish to his core, even in another shirt, go and make history on that stage?

For a generation that’s never seen Ireland at a World Cup, that’s not nothing.

That might just be everything they need to fully endorse Irish football going forward.

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On June 13, Brazil opened its tournament against Morocco. The match was carried in Brazil by a channel called CazéTV.

It peaked at 12.7 million concurrent viewers.

That was not just a record for the channel. It was the largest live audience in YouTube history, beating an Indian moon landing broadcast, and the first time any non-Chinese platform passed 10 million people watching the same stream at once.

CazéTV now holds six of the ten biggest live audiences YouTube has ever recorded.

And it is doing all of this for free.

Here is the part that makes traditional broadcasters nervous.

For 54 years, almost every World Cup watched by Brazilians aired on Globo.

That ended this year.

In 2026, CazéTV is the only Brazilian broadcaster showing all 104 matches. Globo is showing just over 50.

A channel that did not exist before late 2022 just out-scaled the most powerful media company in the country.

So where did it come from?

CazéTV is the creation of Casimiro Miguel, a 31-year-old from Rio de Janeiro.

He is not a TV executive. He is a streamer.

A former games journalist at Esporte Interativo, Casimiro blew up during the pandemic by sitting in front of a webcam on Twitch, reacting to reality shows, street-food videos and football, and simply talking to his audience.

His thing was never tactics. It was personality, humour and the feeling that you were watching with a mate rather than a broadcaster reading from a script.

In 2020 and 2021 he started streaming individual Brazilian league matches on Twitch, some behind a paywall, in partnership with a Rio sports marketing company called LiveMode.

LiveMode is the quiet engine behind all of this. It was founded by Edgar Diniz and Sérgio Lopes, the same pair who built Esporte Interativo years earlier, so they already understood how to grow a sports brand the giants ignored.

Then came the opening that changed everything.

No traditional Brazilian broadcaster was willing to meet FIFA’s asking price for the digital rights to the 2022 World Cup.

So LiveMode struck a deal with FIFA, and CazéTV was launched to stream 22 matches from Qatar.

The opener pulled around 1 million viewers. By Brazil’s quarter-final exit, the channel was peaking at 6.9 million.

That was the moment the model proved itself.

What followed was a land grab.

The Women’s World Cup. The 2023 Pan American Games. The Paris 2024 Olympics, where it ran over 500 hours of coverage and reached 42 million people. The 2025 Club World Cup. The Brazilian top flight. The Europa League and Conference League.

By January 2024, CazéTV was already the biggest sports channel on YouTube in Brazil.

Then the ownership changed.

In November 2025, LiveMode bought out Casimiro’s production company and took 100% of CazéTV. Casimiro did not cash out and disappear. He became a partner in the group’s global holding company instead, trading a slice of one channel for a slice of the whole machine.

And in May 2026, the machine attracted its most famous backer yet.

Cristiano Ronaldo bought a significant stake in LiveModeTV, the international arm of the business.

The terms were not disclosed. But the context tells you the scale.

Before Ronaldo arrived, General Atlantic and XP Investimentos had put an estimated R$440 million into the group for a little over 20%, implying a valuation of roughly R$2.2 billion.

So Ronaldo has not bought into just a trend.

He bought into a company built on a simple, ruthless idea: give away premium sport for free, gather an enormous audience, and sell that audience to advertisers.

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Now, back to CazéTV, and the moment this week that showed exactly what makes it different.

The Vozinha story.

Cape Verde, at their first ever World Cup, held Spain to a 0-0 draw on June 15. Their hero was a 40-year-old goalkeeper called Vozinha, who turned professional late and spent most of his career in obscurity.

He went into the match with around 46,000 Instagram followers.

CazéTV, watching the saves pile up, did something a traditional broadcaster would never think to do mid-game. It pointed its audience of roughly 31 million subscribers straight at him and told them to go follow the guy.

His following hit 1 million within minutes of the final whistle.

Within 24 hours he had close to 10 million followers, more than Victor Wembanyama and Patrick Mahomes.

A broadcaster did not just cover a star. It manufactured one in real time, because it owns the audience and the distribution at the same time.

That is the bit the rest of the industry is still catching up to.

So what does CazéTV actually signal?

It signals that the old assumption, that big live sport must sit behind a TV deal or a paywall, is no longer a law of physics.

A free, ad-funded, creator-led channel can now win the rights to the single biggest sporting event on earth in one of the biggest football markets on earth, and then post the largest live audience in the platform’s history.

It also exposes how much of this opportunity the English-speaking world has ignored.

In the US and UK, premium sport keeps getting locked deeper behind subscriptions and bundles. The instinct is to charge more to fewer people.

Brazil just proved the opposite can work at enormous scale. Charge nothing, reach everyone, monetise the attention.

CazéTV did not find a loophole. It found a different business model entirely.

And yet, outside Brazil, most people have no idea this company exists.

Ask a sports fan in London or New York who broadcast the World Cup opener to nearly 13 million concurrent viewers, and you will likely get a blank look.

That gap is the whole point.

Even inside Brazil, the scale of what happened is, as one observer put it, a revolution that is still poorly understood.

The reception there has been close to euphoric. CazéTV is seen as the underdog that beat the establishment, built on trust, humour and the sense that it is on the fans’ side rather than the rights-holders’ side.

The reception outside Brazil is mostly silence, because the rest of the market has not been paying attention.

Globo, to its credit, has noticed. It launched its own free digital sports product, ge TV, in a move widely read as a direct response.

When the incumbent starts copying the disruptor, you know the disruption is real.

So here is where I think this goes.

CazéTV will not stay a Brazilian story for long.

The Ronaldo investment was specifically into the international arm. That is not an accident. The next phase is exporting the model, most likely starting in markets where football is huge and free, ad-supported streaming is underbuilt.

LaLiga rights in Brazil are already locked up until 2032. The Olympics are secured through 2028. NFL international games, table tennis, CONMEBOL highlights, the catalogue keeps widening.

The risk is obvious. The whole thing rests heavily on YouTube’s economics and on a model where rights costs keep rising while the product stays free. If ad revenue ever lags behind rights inflation, the maths gets harder.

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Welcome back to World Cup Wednesday.

One of the strangest business stories of this World Cup has not come from a broadcaster, a sponsor announcement or a record ticket sale.

It came from a row of condiment bottles.

Inside Levi’s Stadium, which is not called Levi’s Stadium during the World Cup, bottles of sauce in the media area had their labels covered with black tape.

Outside the same stadium, the iconic Levi’s logo was covered with a white sheet.

Except it did not really work.

The wordmark was hidden, but the shape of the sign was still obviously Levi’s. So the brand did what smart brands do. It leaned into the absurdity, updated its social media, turned the covered logo into a joke, and arguably got more attention from being hidden than it would have from simply being visible.

That is the funny version of the story.

The business version is much more important.

FIFA is running one of the most controlled commercial environments in sport.

And at the World Cup, there is no such thing as accidental brand exposure.

The reason stadiums have different names during the World Cup is relatively simple.

FIFA sells exclusivity.

If a company pays to become an official FIFA partner, World Cup sponsor or tournament supporter, part of what it is buying is protection from rival brands appearing in official tournament environments.

That is why BMO Field becomes Toronto Stadium.

It is why Gillette Stadium becomes Boston Stadium.

It is why AT&T Stadium becomes Dallas Stadium.

It is why SoFi Stadium becomes Los Angeles Stadium.

It is why MetLife Stadium, which will host the final, becomes New York New Jersey Stadium.

To most fans, these names sound generic.

To FIFA, that is the point.

The stadium is not supposed to be a billboard for a brand that has not paid FIFA. It is supposed to be a neutral World Cup venue, surrounded by FIFA’s own sponsors, partners and approved commercial messages.

That is why the clean-up goes much further than the name above the entrance.

It includes external signage, concourses, seats, staff uniforms, scoreboards, accreditation passes, hospitality areas, parking facilities and even products sitting inside media rooms.

If a brand can be seen in a World Cup environment, FIFA wants to know who put it there and whether they paid for the right to be there.

But, this is not new.

FIFA and UEFA have applied similar rules for years. The Allianz Arena, for example, has long had to operate under different names for major international and European competition when Allianz is not an official partner.

But 2026 makes the policy more visible than ever.

That is because this World Cup is being played across the United States, Canada and Mexico, and many of the host venues are not traditional football grounds. They are NFL or multi-purpose stadiums built inside a commercial culture where naming rights are part of the architecture.

The brand is not just on the front door.

It is on the roof, the seats, the concourse, the cupholders, the payment terminals, the screens, the entrances and sometimes the identity of the building itself.

That makes a clean-stadium policy far harder to execute.

It also makes the examples much funnier.

Gillette Stadium reportedly had branding covered across its seats. Kansas City physically removed GEHA lettering from Arrowhead. Lumen Field became Seattle Stadium. Hard Rock Stadium became Miami Stadium. Philadelphia had branding covered at Lincoln Financial Field. MetLife was scrubbed outside, even if some details inside reportedly proved harder to remove.

Atlanta was one of the exceptions.

Mercedes-Benz Stadium became Atlanta Stadium in official World Cup language, but the giant Mercedes-Benz star on the roof was allowed to remain because covering or removing it without damaging the structure was not considered realistic.

That tells you everything about the scale of the job.

This is not just a name change.

It is a temporary commercial reset of some of the most heavily branded stadiums in North America.

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Now, back to the cover-up.

The reason FIFA is so strict is because the World Cup sponsorship model depends on scarcity.

If every stadium naming-rights partner, local sponsor and existing venue partner could keep full visibility during the tournament, the value of official FIFA sponsorship would fall.

Why would a global partner pay huge money for exclusivity if rival brands could appear on the same broadcast, in the same stadium, around the same match?

That is especially important in 2026.

This World Cup is on course to be FIFA’s biggest commercial tournament ever. SportBusiness Sponsorship has reported that sponsorship revenue is projected to comfortably exceed a revised budget of $1.78 billion, helped by increased US brand investment and major global deals, including Aramco.

That explains why FIFA is so protective.

The World Cup is not just a football tournament.

It is a global sponsorship platform.

Every visible brand inside that platform either supports the value of the model or weakens it.

Which brings us back to Levi’s.

Levi’s should probably be annoyed.

It pays for the naming rights to one of the most recognisable stadiums in American sport, only for the venue to be temporarily renamed San Francisco Bay Area Stadium during the biggest football event on earth.

But the brand response has been excellent.

Instead of fighting the restriction, Levi’s turned the covered logo into content. The silhouette of the sign was still recognisable, the internet did the rest, and the brand joined the joke rather than pretending nothing had happened.

That is the lesson.

In modern sports marketing, speed matters.

Brands do not always need to own the official rights to be part of the conversation. They need to understand the rules, react quickly and find culturally relevant ways to show up without crossing the line.

Levi’s did that.

Lumen did something similar in Seattle, with its marketing team documenting the process of covering up its own branding.

Beats by Dre also benefited from the same dynamic when Jamal Musiala was seen covering the logo on his headphones with tape inside a World Cup environment.

The restriction became the campaign.

That is the strange irony of FIFA’s clean-stadium policy.

The more aggressively a brand is hidden, the more obvious the act of hiding can become.

For sponsors, this creates a new challenge.

Official partners are paying for clean, protected visibility. Non-sponsors are sometimes finding ways to generate attention through creativity, humour and speed.

That does not mean FIFA’s rules are failing.

Most non-official brands will still disappear from the tournament environment. The clean-stadium policy still protects the core commercial product. It still gives official sponsors the broadcast and venue environment they paid for.

But the Levi’s example shows that brand equity is not just about a logo being visible.

Sometimes, if a brand is strong enough, you can cover the name and people still know exactly who it is.

That is powerful.

And it is probably why we will see more of this over the rest of the tournament.

Brands will not be allowed to simply buy their way into the World Cup unless they are official partners.

But the smartest ones will look for the edges.

A covered sign.

A taped-over logo.

A viral player clip.

A strange stadium name.

A moment that looks like a restriction, but behaves like an opportunity.

FIFA is trying to protect the most valuable advertising environment in football.

Levi’s just reminded everyone that sometimes the best advertising is the thing people were not supposed to see.

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“As a fan-owned club, Finn Harps relies heavily on voluntary effort at every level of its operation. That is something we are proud of, and it reflects the deep community roots of this club. But voluntary effort alone is not a sustainable foundation for a professional football club in the modern game. We need investment simply to stand still, and we need significantly more investment to grasp the opportunity that is now in front of us.”

That was an excerpt from the Statement to Shareholders and Supporters 20 June 2026 as Finn Harps confirmed they had received a formal expression of interest from a prospective external investor.

It is hard to argue with it.

For some clubs, takeover interest is just another news story. A new owner. A fresh injection of cash. A familiar line about ambition, infrastructure and long-term growth.

But Finn Harps are not most clubs.

They are one of the League of Ireland’s great community institutions. A Donegal club founded in 1954, elected to the League of Ireland in 1969, and still best known nationally for winning the FAI Cup in 1974.

Today, they play in the First Division.

They are also fan-owned.

And that is what makes this moment different.

Finn Harps have been owned by supporters since 1996, when the Finn Harps Co-Operative Society was formed after a failed takeover. At the time, supporter control was a way to protect the club. It kept Harps local, accountable and alive.

For almost three decades, that model has been part of the club’s identity.

But in 2026, the question is no longer simply whether fan ownership can preserve a football club.

It is whether fan ownership can still help one compete.

That is the tension sitting underneath the proposed investment.

Last year, Finn Harps tried to modernise the model. The club launched a new membership structure, allowing supporters to become part-owners for €25 per year. The target was ambitious: 3,000 members and a broader, more sustainable ownership base.

The response was strong.

Membership reportedly grew from around 700 to roughly 2,000.

But even that was not enough.

The board’s position is now clear. Fan ownership has served the club, but fan ownership alone cannot fund the next stage. Not if that next stage includes a new stadium, stronger football operations, full-time staff and a more professional structure around the club.

That is why the latest development matters.

On 20 June, Finn Harps confirmed that a prospective investor had submitted a serious and detailed proposal. The board said no transaction had been concluded, but it had unanimously agreed to put the proposal to shareholders.

Members will vote at a Special General Meeting on 5 July.

A 75% majority will be required.

That detail is important.

This is not simply a boardroom decision. It is not a takeover being announced over the heads of supporters. It is a fan-owned club asking its members whether the model that saved Finn Harps is still the model that can take it forward.

According to the Irish Examiner, the interested party is understood to be based in south-east Asia. The company has not been publicly confirmed. The same report said the deal is not part of a multi-club ownership play, and that the figure behind the proposal has a football background but would be entering club ownership for the first time.

If approved, it would be a landmark moment for the League of Ireland.

Not because Finn Harps would be the first club to attract outside money. That has already happened elsewhere. Drogheda United, Waterford and Cobh Ramblers have all shown how quickly external ownership has entered the domestic game.

But this would be different.

This would be a historically supporter-owned Donegal club potentially moving away from full fan ownership in order to compete in a league that is becoming more expensive, more professional and more attractive to international investors.

And, the stadium is central to all of this.

Finn Harps have been trying to deliver a new ground in Stranorlar for years. In December 2025, the club welcomed planning permission for the completion of the new stadium. The project has been described as a 5,580-capacity venue, with public funding already committed but a funding gap still to be closed.

That is where private capital changes the conversation.

The prospective investor has reportedly indicated a willingness to provide the club’s match-funding element for the stadium project. The proposal is also said to include increased resources for the playing squad, support for day-to-day operations and investment in full-time coaching and support staff.

That is the real business case.

This is not just about signing better players.

It is about whether Finn Harps can move from survival mode to infrastructure mode. From a club held together by community effort to one with the capital base to build, staff and compete properly.

That is the opportunity.

The risk is that supporter ownership is not just a financial structure. It is an emotional contract.

For many fans, the point of Finn Harps being fan-owned is not that it is the most efficient model. It is that the club belongs to the people who care about it most.

Once outside capital enters, that relationship changes.

It does not automatically disappear. It does not automatically become negative. But it changes.

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That is why safeguards around the club’s name, identity and community role matter. It is also why the exact structure of the deal matters. Who controls what? What protections are permanent? What happens if the investor’s priorities change? What level of say, if any, do supporters retain?

League of Ireland clubs have already seen the upside and downside of outside ownership.

Drogheda United’s takeover by Trivela brought fresh capital and a more ambitious structure, but the club later lost its European place because of UEFA’s multi-club ownership rules relating to Trivela’s control of Silkeborg.

Cobh Ramblers also showed how quickly things can shift. Their move away from fan ownership under FC32 was described as potentially transformative, but that relationship unravelled within months before another investor came in.

None of this means Finn Harps should reject outside investment.

It means the identity of the investor, the governance terms and the long-term alignment matter as much as the money.

And that brings us back to the bigger question.

Can fan ownership still compete in the League of Ireland?

For years, the answer was yes, because survival itself was the competition. Clubs had to stay alive. They had to keep the lights on. They had to protect their place in the community.

Finn Harps did that.

Supporter ownership worked.

But the League of Ireland is no longer standing still. Clubs are investing in facilities, academies, coaching, operations and recruitment. Government funding has raised expectations around infrastructure. International investors are starting to see value in Irish football. The cost of standing still is rising.

That is the uncomfortable part.

The model that saved Finn Harps may not be the model that builds the next version of Finn Harps.

On 5 July, members are not just voting on an investor.

They are voting on what kind of club Finn Harps need to become.

The challenge is finding a way to bring in capital without losing the thing that made the club worth saving in the first place.

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On Friday, Treaty United confirmed a move many Limerick supporters have wanted for years. The club announced it had entered into an agreement, in principle, to acquire the intellectual property associated with Limerick FC and, subject to the completion of the necessary formalities and approvals, to adopt the historic name from the start of the 2027 season.

The statement framed the move as “an important step toward unifying senior football in Limerick and creating a single identity and pathway for players, supporters, sponsors, and the wider football community throughout the Mid-West region.” As part of the transition, the Limerick FC academy sides, reinstated to the League of Ireland’s underage structure only last year, will be withdrawn before the second half of the season, with Treaty’s academy open to absorbing interested players in the upcoming window.

The headline is simple: one city, one club, one badge.

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A Name Worth Reviving

To understand why this matters, you have to understand what is being reclaimed. Limerick FC, the “Super Blues,” were founded in 1937 and were the sole standard-bearer for senior football in the city for over eight decades. The honours back that up. Limerick won the League of Ireland title twice, in 1959–60 and again in 1979–80 under player-manager Eoin Hand. They lifted the FAI Cup twice, in 1971 and 1982, and added three League Cups along the way, the last in 2001–02.

There were European nights too. The club competed on the continent on six occasions, and while it never won a European tie, it produced moments that outlived the scorelines. There was a creditable draw away to a Southampton side featuring Kevin Keegan and Mick Channon. And then there was the night in 1980 when Limerick, drawn against Real Madrid in the European Cup, came within a disputed penalty of beating the aristocrats of the European game, a tie shifted to Lansdowne Road, where only 6,500 turned up to watch one of Irish football’s great near-misses.

That history ended, at least in name, in 2020. Years of financial trouble culminated in examinership, a points deduction, and the club’s failure to secure a licence for the 2020 season. From the wreckage came a new entity, which was forced to take the name Treaty United before a ball was kicked. For six seasons, Treaty have carried Limerick’s senior flag without Limerick’s name. This agreement closes that gap.

How And Why It Came About

The mechanics are straightforward enough. Treaty will acquire the Limerick FC intellectual property and, once the formalities and approvals are cleared, change its name for 2027. The framing from both sides is unity rather than takeover.

Pat O’Sullivan, the long-time owner of Limerick FC, put it in legacy terms. “After considerable reflection, I have come to believe that the greatest legacy we can leave is not preserving separate organisations, but creating the strongest possible future for the next generation of players and supporters,” he said, adding that he was “proud that the club’s history, traditions and identity will continue to play an important role in the future of football in Limerick.” Treaty United managing director Ian McMahon struck the same note: “We are honoured by the opportunity to become custodians of the Limerick FC name and heritage. This agreement is about bringing people together behind a common vision for football in Limerick.”

The timing is worth sitting with. Treaty are not coming into this from a position of strength on the pitch. After a respectable mid-table finish in 2025, they currently sit bottom of the ten-team First Division. For now, that carries no sporting punishment: 2026 is the inaugural season of the new FAI National League, the third tier of the Irish pyramid, and promotion and relegation between it and the First Division do not begin until 2027. From next season, though, the club that finishes bottom of the First Division can be dragged into a relegation play-off against the National League champions. In other words, Treaty’s current form is a free hit this year. From 2027, the very season the Limerick FC name returns, it will start to bite.

Why Getting This Done Matters

The first benefit is a pathway. Until now, a talented teenager in Limerick has faced a fork in the road: develop with Treaty, or with the Limerick FC academy sides that were only reinstated to the underage structure last year. A unified club removes that choice and gives a young player a single, legible route from the academy to the first team. In a city of Limerick’s size, where football has long ceded ground to GAA and Munster rugby, keeping local talent local is not a marginal gain. It is the difference between a club that develops its own players and one that watches them drift to Cork or Dublin by default.

The second is the end of fragmentation. For six years, Limerick has effectively run two football projects with a finite pool of players, sponsors, volunteers and attention. In a mid-sized Irish city, that duplication is not just wasteful, it is self-defeating: every euro and every volunteer hour spent maintaining two parallel structures is one not spent making either of them stronger. Consolidation pools those resources behind a single club, one that can now field teams across the full pyramid, without splitting the city against itself.

The third is brand and commercial pull. “Limerick FC” carries roughly ninety years of meaning, recognition and European pedigree, from league titles to that night against Real Madrid. Treaty United, by contrast, has spent six years building an identity almost from scratch in a league where commercial income is hard to come by. For a sponsor weighing up a jersey deal, a single historic name is a far easier sell than a young one still establishing itself, and for the lapsed Limerick FC supporters who never quite warmed to Treaty, the old crest is a reason to come back. A unified club with a recognisable badge is simply more sellable, on the pitch and on the balance sheet.

Why It’s Good For The League

Step back, though, and this is a rare piece of good news in a league too often defined by drift. The League of Ireland’s structural story is one of fragmentation, shaky finances, thin infrastructure and reform that arrives slowly, if at all. Against that backdrop, a club voluntarily simplifying itself, pooling resources, restoring a heritage name and building a single clear pathway, is the kind of proactive, sensible decision the league rarely gets to celebrate. It may not guarantee immediate success for Limerick FC next year. But in a league that badly needs examples of clubs getting their house in order rather than letting it fall down, one city choosing one club is a story worth telling.

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