Economics and strategy
Bruno Soler is an economist with an MBA. It was during that master's that he met Carla Costa, and together they spotted a gap in how football is covered: most media focus on what happens on the pitch, while very few explain the economic forces that shape the sport. With that idea they founded Futbolnomics, an outlet specialized in the business of football, where Bruno brings his experience in economics, business strategy and finance to explain — with data and context — how clubs, transfer markets, broadcasting rights, competitions and the multi-billion-dollar industry actually work.
31 articles
FIFA tried to hand 20% of its commercial business to a private equity fund for 4.2 billion dollars. It had zero debt, record liquid reserves and an intact monopoly. The plan lasted less than a long weekend.
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Gianni Infantino has engineered a commercial subsidiary to let private capital into football's most profitable business without surrendering a single governance vote. The trick is elegant; the mortgage is permanent.
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The club that paid 222 million for Neymar has put on the robe of financial restraint. Selective memory is an elite sport, and they compete hard in that one too.
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Psychology has spent decades documenting what the fan opening Change.org refuses to see: denying defeat does not save you from pain, it just finances it in instalments. The data on avoidance, cortisol and rumination are merciless.
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Two cardiac deaths, a cratered stock market, a GDP gap and a silver medal nobody wants around their neck. The data on losing a final are uncomfortable reading.
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Earlier debuts and later retirements are outliers that dominate headlines. Average careers have barely shifted; what exploded were the wages of a handful of chosen few.
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At the 2026 World Cup, a presidential phone call rewrote the rulebook mid-tournament. FIFA has not stopped being a political instrument: it has simply changed hands and methods.
Winning promotion and going straight back down, if contracts are structured properly, builds more asset value than a decade of comfortable mid-table mediocrity. The numbers say so; almost no one admits it.
The science of the winning red falls apart the moment the budget enters the picture. Colour moves merchandise, but capital rules on the pitch.
The gap between crowd-sourced valuation and actual transfer price is not a system failure: it is the system answering a different question from the one the market asks.
Thirty years of campaigns, banners and taking the knee, with no aggregate figure and no independent impact evaluation. The only hard result was delivered by a judge, not a slogan.
For the 2026 World Cup, FIFA switched on uncapped dynamic pricing, took 30% on every resale through its own platform, and built the very business it spent years claiming to fight.