The business of football
The money, the business and football's accounts.
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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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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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
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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
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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.
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Fan tokens did not fail for everyone. They failed for whoever bought them. And that asymmetry was written into the contract from day one.
LaLiga's financial fair play does not measure how much money a club has to spend; it measures how much cost a club can commit to without sinking. Madrid and Barcelona post similar revenues and live on different planets.
Stadium naming rights are the most stable business in modern football. The most valuable asset in Europe prefers to walk away.
Private equity funds have no interest in running dressing rooms or picking the starting eleven. They want a share of the business, preferred rights, and a clean exit when the time comes.
The brand with the most national teams, the most sales and the biggest quarterly revenue in its history ended up taking the worst hit on the stock market. A shrinking Nike and a loss-making Puma came out better than the tournament's dominant player.
The Premier League billed £6.4 billion and 90% of its clubs expect to declare losses. Badly invested money is money set on fire with the club crest stitched on.
