The Business of Football, Explained Like an Analyst Would Explain It
Oct 18, 2026
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3 min read
Wages get the outrage. Amortization gets ignored. It is the other half of what a signing actually costs — and Barcelona, along with a handful of peers, learned to bend it until the regulators bent back.
Oct 11, 2026
Barcelona's entire stadium bet rests on one projection: that a rebuilt Camp Nou adds roughly €247 million a year in revenue. The closest live test of whether that number is real is happening across the country, at the Bernabéu.
Oct 4, 2026
General Motors paid roughly $450 million for the right to enter Formula One as its eleventh team — before building a car, hiring a driver, or scoring a point. That entry price is the most honest valuation of an F1 grid slot anyone has published.
Sep 27, 2026
A loan looks like charity, or squad-filler, or a favor between friendly clubs. Read the fine print and it is something more precise: an option contract, and the biggest clubs run a portfolio of them.
Sep 20, 2026
In the summer of 2022 Barcelona sold a quarter of its television income for twenty-five years to stay solvent. Three financial years later, the scorecard is legible. Here it is.
Sep 13, 2026
The Champions League's Swiss-model format is in its third season. It reorganized the group stage into a single table — and in doing so quietly rewired the incentives around every match.
Sep 6, 2026
The summer window closed this week. Read Barcelona's moves through the salary cap rather than the transfer fees, and a chaotic-looking window turns out to be almost mechanical.
Aug 30, 2026
4 min read
Brighton built a top-four Premier League side on less than half the wage bill of their rivals. The analytical parallels to quantitative investing are not accidental.
Aug 23, 2026
The CVC–La Liga deal raised €2.7 billion for Spanish football in 2021. Understanding what was sold requires thinking like a private equity investor, not a football fan.
Aug 16, 2026
Barcelona is spending €1.45 billion to rebuild its stadium. Here’s how to think about whether the bet makes sense.
Aug 9, 2026
Spain’s approach to player income taxation creates a layer of complexity that makes every top-tier signing structurally more expensive than it appears on paper.
Aug 2, 2026
Barcelona received approximately €70 million per year for its shirt sponsorship and stadium naming rights combined. Here’s what the market says that package is actually worth.
Jul 26, 2026
La Liga’s salary cap is preventive, not reactive — and that single distinction explains most of what you’ve read about Barcelona’s transfer windows for the past four years.
Jul 19, 2026
5 min read
Players are employed by clubs. They’re compelled to international duty by FIFA. The economic asymmetry that creates is one of the more peculiar features of professional sport.
Jul 12, 2026
7 min read
Madrid finished a second consecutive season without a major trophy. Revenue will hit a sports-team record. Both facts come from the same playbook.
Jul 5, 2026
Missing the Champions League costs a club far more than the prize money it doesn’t collect. Here’s the full accounting.
Jun 28, 2026
A great World Cup performance isn’t just a memory. It’s a synchronized information event that reprices an entire asset class. Here’s the mechanism.
Jun 21, 2026
Barcelona runs its academy on a fraction of what a single elite transfer costs. Here’s what it would take to replace that academy’s current output on the open market.
Jun 14, 2026
FIFA’s commercial machine generated a record $7.5 billion in the cycle that ended in 2022 — and has budgeted $11 billion for the cycle that closes with this tournament, with recent estimates pushing toward $13 billion. Here’s the structure.
Jun 7, 2026
Barcelona sold 25 percent of its TV rights for 25 years to raise emergency liquidity. Here’s what the implied cost of capital actually was.
May 31, 2026
Saturday’s Champions League final put fifteen years of Qatari investment in PSG to its most public test. Either result tells you less than the coverage is going to suggest.
May 24, 2026
How a football club ends up committed to paying more than it earns — and why getting out is harder than it looks.
May 17, 2026
16 min read
A portfolio strategist's look at the most fascinating ongoing business case in world football.
