Clubs boast of tech partnerships and AI projects, but off the pitch almost all of it is aimed at selling: automatic highlights, fan data and content. Internal management is modernising, but with classic software. And when technology touches fans directly, it runs into the law or the terraces.
October 21, 2026
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In the late 1990s, creatine became the public face of Italian football's biggest doping scandal, even though it was never banned. Today UEFA recommends it and top clubs sign deals with supplement brands. The science barely changed in that time: what took longer was for the suspicion to lift.
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Drake, Rosalía, the Rolling Stones, Coldplay and now Tyler, the Creator. The Clásico shirt has become music's most coveted showcase, but what Barça sells in the shop is almost symbolic. The value lies elsewhere, and the key piece of the deal — who pays what — has never been told.
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When a big group buys a modest club, supporters tend to celebrate the arrival of money, scouts and players. But the most comprehensive study to date finds no evidence that those clubs improve. What changes is something else: the club starts playing a role within a network, and the group decides its ceiling.
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LaLiga referees are the best-paid in Europe and Premier League ones publish how many times they get it wrong every week. The comparison says little about wages and a lot about transparency: what reduced errors was VAR, and what money buys is time, not better eyesight.
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On Tuesday, El Monumental bids farewell to Lionel Messi from the Argentine national team. Behind the emotion lies a bill: for years, much of what the AFA earned abroad was paid for because of him. The question is how much of that money leaves with the number 10.
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Messi says he regrets not having studied and that it is the only thing he asks of his children. The number that matters is not that he didn't do it: it's that almost none of them do, and the reasons have nothing to do with the player.
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The Premier League has found City guilty and the punishment is yet to be decided. Relegation is among the options. Precedents show that what destroys a club is not going down, but the debt it carries on the way. And on that front, City resembles no one.
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Instinct says a club that plays sixty games a year should be worth more than a national team that plays ten. The contracts say otherwise. What a brand buys in each case is not the same merchandise.
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The leak about the case has revived calls to erase the club's trophy haul. It is the sanction that makes the most noise and repairs the least, because the offence is accounting and the victory was sporting.
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Nike's fall has become ammunition for the culture war. The dates tell a different story: the company hit its peak in 2024, six years after the campaign that supposedly destroyed it. What came next was a distribution and product problem.
Frenkie de Jong avoided surgery and the conversation drifted toward his wages. Behind every serious injury lies a crossroads between what the evidence says, what the fixture list demands, and what suits the club's accounts.
The club has just signed with Nespresso and keeps Spotify on the shirt until 2030. A sponsorship has two values: the money that comes in and what the brand does with that association. The problem is that only one of the two shows up in the accounts.
Spain lifted the trophy against Argentina and took the prize money. But the country where the tournament truly changed something was Canada, where football overtook hockey in the ratings. The problem is that attention has yet to become business
The big men's clubs fund their women's teams with losses no other business would tolerate. The result is a brilliant peak and, below it, clubs that cannot make payroll. The United States chose a different path, and now its money is crossing the Atlantic
The Real Madrid striker's brand switch is not just another boot deal: it reveals who really owns a footballer's image, who bears the risk, and why the traditional fixed sponsorship is starting to disappear at the top of the game.
Hosting a final barely leaves any direct money for the stadium owner, because ticketing, television and sponsorship belong to UEFA and FIFA. What Barcelona, Madrid and Morocco are really competing for is something else: credibility to pay off their stadiums, public investment and power.
The CJEU did not correct one article of the transfer regulations. It stripped away the two administrative mechanisms FIFA used to enforce its decisions without going through any court. The only way back requires FIFA to stop dictating rules and start negotiating them.
The Court of Justice of the EU has replaced market price with book value as the measure of what it costs to break a contract. The bill will be paid first by the clubs that produce footballers, not by those that buy them.
LaLiga has just signed off the most generous spending permission Barça has had in years, but a spending allowance and sound finances are two different things, and confusing them is the reading error of the season.
France Football is no longer a magazine that hands out a trophy. It is a trophy that sustains, out of convenience and legitimacy, a magazine that barely turns a profit.
England does not compete with the rest of Europe in the transfer market: it finances it. Italy responds with accounting engineering, Germany by selling before buying, and Spain by concentrating all its purchasing power in three clubs. Four economic models that are no longer playing the same game.
