Italy finally has its champion

There was something quite wholesome about the podium at Sunday’s Mexican Grand Prix.

Standing alongside Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, two drivers with eleven world titles between them, was 20-year-old Kimi Antonelli, who had just become Formula 1’s youngest-ever world champion.

Finishing third was enough for the Mercedes driver to seal the championship with four races to spare. He’s won nine races this season, becoming world champion in only his second year in F1, just as Hamilton did in 2008.

The most remarkable part of the story is what it means for Italy.

Despite being home to Ferrari, Italy hasn’t produced an F1 world champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953. That’s a 73-year wait, finally ended by a young man from Bologna. And awkwardly for Ferrari, he did it driving a Mercedes.

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2 months ago · 16 likes · Sara Neves, Will Colahan, and Track Limits

Ferrari actually had the opportunity to sign Antonelli when he was just eleven. The story goes that he was considered too young for its driver academy and believed he couldn’t handle the pressure of being an Italian racing for Ferrari. Mercedes took the gamble instead, nurturing him through the junior ranks before handing him Hamilton’s seat in 2025.

That decision wasn’t universally popular. Antonelli struggled during his rookie season, prompting questions about whether he had been promoted too quickly and whether the team lost sponsors.

Yet they’ve been vindicated spectacularly. What’s particularly impressive is the composure Antonelli has shown this year, both on track and under the growing expectations of an entire country.

And that podium photograph, with Verstappen and Hamilton celebrating alongside him, feels like one we’ll look back on in years to come. And who knows, it could be a preview of a title battle for next year?

Here are some of my highlights from writers on Kimi's historic championship:

• Il Nostro Kimi – Business of Speed: A lovely, personal piece from on what Antonelli’s world title means to him as an Italian-American Ferrari fan, and the joy of finally having an Italian world champion after 73 years.

• Peter Bonnington: The Engineer Who Turned Down Ferrari and Delivered a Third Champion: A fascinating look by at the man behind Kimi Antonelli’s success, from working with Schumacher and Hamilton to turning down Ferrari and helping guide F1’s newest world champion.

• Mexico 2026 : takes us through a wonderfully chaotic Mexican Grand Prix weekend, from Kimi’s crowning moment to unexpected driver changes and plenty of paddock drama.

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Baseball’s smallest market has its biggest moment

Sticking with champions, the Milwaukee Brewers won their first World Series last week, beating the Tampa Bay Rays in five games.

It’s a remarkable achievement for a franchise that had waited 44 years just to return to baseball’s biggest stage.

Milwaukee is the MLB’s smallest television market, and the Brewers had only the 19th-highest payroll among the league’s 30 teams this season, at roughly $143 million.

For comparison, the Los Angeles Dodgers spent approximately $338 million. Milwaukee swept them 4–0 in the National League Championship Series on their way to the title.

And this wasn’t some lucky October run. The Brewers finished the regular season with 103 wins, the best record in baseball.

It’s a wonderful story about what smart recruitment, player development and good management can achieve without the financial firepower of baseball’s biggest teams.

The timing makes it particularly interesting.

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MLB’s collective bargaining agreement, which governs the financial relationship between teams and players, expires on 1st December. Owners want to introduce a salary cap, limiting what teams can spend on players, alongside a minimum spending requirement. The players’ union is firmly opposed, concerned about the implications for salaries.

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The result could be another lockout, with the 2027 season potentially facing disruption.

So what does Milwaukee’s success tell us? On one hand, it proves smaller-market teams can still compete and win. On the other, a single championship doesn’t erase baseball’s enormous financial inequalities.

It’s an awkward question for both sides of an argument that could dominate baseball’s winter.

The end of San Siro?

One of football’s most famous stadiums could soon be approaching its final years.

AC Milan and Inter have unveiled plans for a new 71,500-seat stadium to replace San Siro, their historic shared home, which first opened in 1926.

The proposed stadium, backed by the clubs’ owners, RedBird Capital and Oaktree Capital, is targeting its first match in the 2031/32 season. It will carry the name of Italian insurance giant Generali, following a naming-rights agreement reportedly worth around €650 million.

It’s bringing a much-needed change for Italian football and gives a stark indicator of its financial position.

While clubs across Europe have invested in modern stadiums, many Italian teams still play in ageing grounds, often owned by local authorities. That restricts their ability to generate revenue from premium hospitality, sponsorship and events beyond matchdays.

For Milan and Inter, the new stadium is meant to change that, creating a year-round commercial destination rather than a place that comes alive only on matchdays.

But it comes with a difficult trade-off.

San Siro is more than a football ground. It’s a century of history, derby nights, European finals and memories for generations of supporters. Unsurprisingly, plans to replace it have faced opposition.

But nostalgia doesn’t pay the bills, and Italian football has increasingly struggled to keep pace with the commercial growth of its European rivals.

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4 days ago · 32 likes · 21 comments · Nikola Vuković, CFA

raises some fascinating questions about the fallout from Mbappé’s remarks on China, and what happens when sporting organisations are forced to choose between their principles and commercial interests.

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That’s a wrap. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

The NFL’s next big play

The NFL is taking another big step towards becoming a serious player in sports investment.

Last week, its investment arm, 32 Equity, announced a partnership with General Atlantic, a global investment firm managing around $130 billion. Together, they plan to invest in businesses across sport, media, technology and fan engagement, while bringing in money from outside investors.

32 Equity isn’t new. It was established in 2013 and is owned collectively by all 32 NFL franchises, which have since contributed around $256 million. Its investments already include companies like Fanatics and On Location.

But the new partnership could take that model much further.

The NFL has something most investment firms don’t; enormous commercial influence. Its relationships with broadcasters, sponsors, teams and millions of fans can help the very businesses it invests in grow. And by bringing in outside capital, it could substantially increase the scale of those investments without relying solely on money from its owners.

There’s also an interesting financial twist. NFL owners could earn a share of the profits from investing other people’s money, potentially outside the league’s revenue-sharing arrangements with players.

It’s another example of how the NFL is looking to turn its commercial power into new sources of income, well beyond television rights and sponsorships.

There’s quite a lot to unpack here, so I’ll be taking a closer look at how 32 Equity works, what this partnership changes and what it could mean for the wider sports industry in an AGM deep dive next week.

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UEFA’s battle to unseat Infantino

The battle over Gianni Infantino’s future as FIFA president is gathering pace, but removing him is proving far from straightforward.

At the heart of the dispute is FIFA’s abandoned plan to create a commercial business valued at around $20 billion, covering competitions including the World Cup, and sell up to 20% to private investors.

The proposal sparked fierce opposition, particularly over how such a major decision had been developed without proper consultation. FIFA eventually abandoned the plan, and Infantino apologised for how it was handled.

But UEFA’s concerns go much further.

Last week, European football’s governing body sent FIFA a list of 42 questions covering everything from the failed investment proposal and how decisions are made to Infantino’s relationship with Donald Trump and FIFA’s Peace Prize.

UEFA wants answers by 2nd November, just over two weeks before the deadline for candidates to enter next year’s FIFA presidential election.

European officials are also looking for someone to stand against Infantino, although no challenger has emerged publicly. UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin has already ruled himself out.

And Friday provided another reminder of just how difficult that challenge could be.

Asian football’s president, Sheikh Salman, publicly backed Infantino for another term, despite previously joining UEFA in condemning the investment proposal. Infantino appears to have repaired that relationship following his apology.

That’s the problem UEFA now faces. While it has built considerable opposition to Infantino in Europe, FIFA’s president is elected by football associations across the world.

With the 18 November deadline approaching, finding someone willing to challenge him is only half the battle. The much harder task will be bringing together enough support from outside Europe to make it a genuine contest.

Everything’s bigger in Texas

There’s something about the Grand Prix at Austin that I really love.

Miami has the yachts, Las Vegas has the Strip, but I think Austin has a pretty strong claim to being the heartbeat of Formula 1 in America.

Unlike those newer races, Austin didn’t just benefit from F1’s American boom. It helped lay the foundations for it.

When COTA first hosted a Grand Prix in 2012, F1 was still struggling to establish itself in the US Previous attempts had come and gone, and there was plenty of uncertainty about whether the sport could really take off with American audiences.

Fourteen years later, things look rather different.

F1 now has three races in America, while Austin has become one of the biggest weekends on the calendar, and has secured its place until 2034. Concerts, parties and events across the city have helped turn the Grand Prix into a huge cultural occasion.

But what makes Austin special is that the circuit itself is genuinely good.

From the steep climb into Turn 1 to the sweeping high-speed corners inspired by Silverstone and the long back straight, COTA has become a favourite with drivers and fans.

Sunday’s race gave us another big moment as Kimi Antonelli took his ninth victory of the season, finishing 13 seconds ahead of Charles Leclerc, with Max Verstappen third. The Mercedes driver made a one-stop strategy work while several rivals stopped twice, moving him another step closer to his first world championship.

He’ll have to wait until Mexico for another chance to wrap it up.

A few interesting pieces from other writers that caught my eye around the Austin weekend:

Really enjoyed this piece from on why COTA succeeded where so many other attempts to bring F1 to America failed.

Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys

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All year long here on YouTube, I’ve been walking you through F1’s turbulent history in America by exploring each of the various venues that have defined its place in the US, and up until this point, all of those venues have had one thing in common: they were not permanent, purpose-built racing circuits made…

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13 days ago · 7 likes · Elizabeth Blackstock

Loved this piece from on how F1 fans in Austin are putting their own spin on the traditional Texas cowboy hat.

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Credits: Emily Lopez…

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10 days ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Natalia Tautiva vega

has a great rundown of the special liveries at Austin this year and the thinking behind how teams use these one-off designs.

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12 days ago · 11 likes · 6 comments · Sarah Beakey

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Really thought-provoking piece from on what we actually mean by ‘sports culture’, and how the rush to commercialise it risks undermining the very things that make sport so special to fans.

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15 days ago · 57 likes · 14 comments · Daniel-Yaw Miller

has a great piece on what European football could learn from F1’s financial turnaround.

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10 days ago · 4 likes · Michael Broughton

Listening

Charlie Baker’s NCAA Vision — an interesting listen for anyone following the changing landscape of American college sports.

Is F1 Losing Its Exclusivity? — an interesting question as the sport continues its expansion, especially across America.

That’s a wrap. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

Formula 1’s rise over the past decade has left the rest of sport asking who could follow. The sport I keep coming back to isn’t the Premier League, the IPL or the NFL.

It’s showjumping.

For the uninitiated, the format is simple. A horse and rider tackle a course of fences in an arena against the clock, and one dropped pole can cost a title.

The F1 parallels are in the world around the arena.

The Global Champions Tour alone runs from Doha in March to Miami Beach in April, Paris in June and Monaco in July. Horses are flown between continents much like cars are shipped between Grands Prix.

Luxury names like Longines, Rolex and Hermès are part of the landscape. And like F1, success depends on more than the person competing. Except in showjumping, the horse is another athlete, not a machine.

The comparison is not new. In 2015, Eleanore Kelly, a former rider turned equestrian journalist, wrote that showjumping was “fast becoming the new Formula 1”.

A decade on, F1 is a global entertainment business with teams valued in the billions. Showjumping has not followed.

Why has a sport with so much heritage, money and cultural pull struggled to break through?

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The strange business of showjumping

There is no shortage of money at the top. In May, a seven-year-old stallion called Orpheus sold for $2.47m at auction in Belgium. In 2022, a six-year-old mare, Chyazint, fetched €4m, a record for the PSI sale in Germany. Proven championship horses can go for far more: in 2013, Jan Tops, the founder of the Global Champions Tour, reportedly paid €11m for Palloubet d’Halong.

A few layers down, the picture changes. Some riders are living from pay cheque to pay cheque, relying on an asset that can be worth millions but is also alive and unpredictable.

“It’s an investment vehicle, but it’s also a live animal,” says Grace Fariello, who rode and worked in the sport before founding the equestrian technology company . Horses get injured and fall ill, and “a lot has to go right to get a good return”.

You also need several horses to compete at the highest level. Camille Martin, who has worked in equestrian sport from the Caribbean to Saudi Arabia, reckons an elite rider needs at least five, and sometimes closer to eight. Each comes with monthly running costs, “before you even take into account exceptional events like medical or veterinary issues”. Then come grooms, feed, entry fees and flights.

“The actual orchestration of competing at that level is incredibly complex, incredibly expensive and incredibly demanding,” says Fariello.

The prize money is not all it’s made out to be. “If you make a good weekend, it pays your trip, your accommodation fees for that weekend,” says Martin. Sponsorship is thinner still. Most deals, Fariello says, “aren’t paid. They’re either free product or a discount on the product.”

The pressures aren’t confined to showjumping. “Riding event horses for owners barely pays for itself after you have paid the grooms, rent, and feed bill,” the British eventer and Olympic champion Laura Collett told Kelly in 2023. Like many riders, she keeps the business going by buying, producing and selling horses.

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4 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Orra

That brings its own bind, Martin says. Sell too many, and you have nothing left to compete on. Keep them all, and you run out of cash. The horse may be worth millions, but the business built around it can struggle to break even.

A fragmented sport

So why do competitors in a sport with valuable horses, global competitions and premium sponsors struggle to make a sustainable living? Part of the answer lies in a commercial structure that has grown organically rather than being built around a single championship.

At the top, nobody owns the commercial rights as a whole. F1 has one commercial rights holder that sells television, sponsorship and hosting rights for the championship. Showjumping’s elite tier is split between the FEI, national federations, the Rolex Grand Slam, the privately run Global Champions Tour, Major League Showjumping and hundreds of independent organisers. Different competitions have their own commercial arrangements, all competing to attract the same riders and horses, often through prize money.

The Rolex Grand Prix at Aachen alone offered €1.5m in prize money this year. “Prize money is really one of the drivers of where people would compete,” says Martin. There are enormous purses available, but they are spread across competing events rather than concentrated in one championship.

In the middle, business runs on personal networks rather than an open market. Riders, owners, breeders and trainers find each other through who they know.

At the bottom, inside the yards, the fragmentation shows up in the tools. Fariello describes operations responsible for “incredibly valuable live animals” that run on whiteboards, Excel, QuickBooks, email and people’s memories.

That is the gap Orra is trying to close. It is a single system that joins horses, staff, vet records, schedules, transport and finances. Orra says 33 barns and 175 horses across six countries now use it.

“The next generation of talent is very used to technology,” Fariello says, and making them “work off of a whiteboard” is “just not a sustainable way to build a sport”.

As more money arrives, the businesses behind the sport are being pushed to professionalise. The question is whether the top of the sport can do the same.

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Can showjumping finally package itself?

For all these challenges, showjumping still has immense commercial potential, and investors are starting to make some big bets on it.

The most ambitious is the Premier Jumping League (PJL), which is due to launch in April 2027. Backed by Frank McCourt, the league is promising $300m in guaranteed prize money across its first three seasons, with sixteen teams competing at fourteen venues around the world.

Each team will have five riders, selected from a pool of the world’s top 250 and offered salaries, giving those who make the cut a more predictable income. Broadcasts will be free to watch, and the league has partnered with Box to Box Films, the company behind Drive to Survive, to help tell the stories.

For Kelly, who made the F1 comparison more than a decade ago, this could be a significant step forward.

“The challenge has been bridging the gap between the sport as insiders experience it and how it is presented to the wider world,” she tells me. She believes the PJL’s financial backing, free-to-view broadcasts and more sophisticated approach to storytelling could help close that gap.

There are already signs of serious investor interest. Jason McCarthy, a trader and competitive racing driver, paid $50m for the league’s first team before it had jumped a fence.

For decades, investors have spent fortunes on horses. McCarthy has paid for the sporting property around them.

There are, however, reasons for caution. The Global Champions League already offers a team format, as part of a circuit with more than €36m in prize money across its competitions this season. McCourt himself previously owned half of the Global Champions Tour. The calendar is already crowded, and a new league could add to the fragmentation rather than end it.

Kelly is optimistic about the potential, but conscious of that risk.

“Money alone won’t guarantee success,” she says. “The real test will be whether it can attract new audiences, deliver genuine value for sponsors and create a sustainable commercial model that benefits the wider sport.”

That will ultimately determine whether the PJL succeeds.

F1 didn’t take off simply because cars became expensive or wealthy people discovered motorsport. It already had a centralised commercial structure and, over the past decade, found new ways to build on it through better storytelling, broader distribution and making a technical sport more accessible to casual fans.

Showjumping has the raw ingredients. What it has lacked is a way to bring them together. If the PJL can grow the audience and the sport's overall value, rather than simply move money around an already crowded calendar, it could finally make good on that F1 comparison.

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

F1 completes the set

F1 is going back to Africa for the first time since 1993. Last week it signed a 10-year deal for the Formula 1 African Grand Prix, presented by Visit Rwanda, at a new circuit in Bugesera, about 40km south of Kigali. Once it happens, F1 will race on every inhabited continent again.

The Wurz/Tilke layout packs 17 corners and 197 metres of elevation change a lap, which Carsten Tilke reckons is a calendar record.

South Africa, which hosted 23 of Africa’s 24 championship races (Prost won the last), bid too.

Two things I’m watching.

The sportswashing row. Human Rights Watch has documented extensive restrictions on political opposition, independent media and government critics in Rwanda. It has also accused the country of using major sporting events and partnerships to “sportswash” its human rights record. F1 has weathered similar criticism over Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and China. It will likely do so again, but not every fan will welcome the move.

Then the date. “Early 2030s”, no year. That’s unusual for F1 and looks a bit like an exit ramp. The circuit has to be built and homologated from scratch next to an airport not due to open until 2028.

Are the Jags finished with London?

London’s NFL season wrapped up yesterday: Texans 34, Jags 31 at Wembley, settled by a field goal as time expired.

The big question was: Did attendance dip? Not dramatically, but London is getting choosier and more price-sensitive on match-ups. The NFL cut prices to stop Colts–Commanders becoming the first Tottenham NFL crowd under 60,000. It scraped 60,907. No surprise, Eagles–Jags sold out.

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The more interesting news came on Saturday. Jags president Mark Lamping said 2028, when their renovated stadium opens, is the “natural year” to start playing every home game in Jacksonville.

I get it. The Jags have played 16 London games since 2013 and built a proper UK following. But giving away a home game every year always felt a bit unnatural, even when the maths worked. Since 2022, they’ve run the Wembley game themselves and kept the revenue, historically worth 11–15% of their local income. However, spending $1.4bn on a new 63,000-seater at home narrows that gap and makes giving up home games for London a worse deal.

A question mark already hangs over next, even though they will play most home games in Orlando while Everbank Stadium is renovated. Khan says they’ll “definitely” be in London; Lamping says they owe the NFL one international game and hopes it’s London, but there are no guarantees.

The NFL has invested heavily in the UK. So what does London look like without its “home” team, and who takes the Wembley date? Or, given how much the NFL invested in the Tottenham Stadium, have we seen the NFL’s last game under the iconic arch?

The football regulator opens the books

The Independent Football Regulator published the draft of its first State of the Game report last week, covering English football’s top five tiers. The final version lands next year.

The headline is that football clubs are struggling:

• £9bn in revenue, yet 94% of the 116 clubs made a loss, £1.7bn between them

• 63% of EFL and National League clubs are technically insolvent

• 17 clubs would lose money before paying a single player

• 32 clubs couldn’t last 30 days without fresh owner money

The stat I keep coming back to: the average Premier League club now earns more than eight times what a Championship club does. The regulator reckons that’s the cliff clubs below overspend to climb, with parachute payments making it worse.

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Which makes distribution the real fight. The Premier League has reportedly offered £1.8bn over ten years; the EFL wants £1bn over five. The regulator would rather football sorts it out, but it holds a backstop power if it doesn’t.

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18 days ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Keira Doody | Paddock Culture

• Maul Stats: on where rugby union is actually heading. He takes apart World Rugby’s 2026–31 strategy and Eddie Hearn’s Henry Pollock hype, but agrees with Hearn on one thing: the sport is “so unambitious”. It’s the opener to a series sketching what rugby could look like by 2040, and one worth following.

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2 months ago · 24 likes · 14 comments · Matthew Gaston

• Sporty TidBits : on why India v Pakistan is pencilled into the 2027 World Cup a year in advance, and why even that certainty isn’t rescuing the broadcaster that paid around $3bn for the rights. Same lesson as this week’s regulator report, different sport: when the money sits in one place, everything bends towards it.

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15 days ago · 9 likes · 7 comments · Ani Nair | Sporty TidBits

Listening

Christian Horner on being pushed out of Red Bull, the Ferrari rumours, the Alonso signing that nearly happened, and whether Newey can turn Aston Martin into winners.

The first episode of Wisden’s new Cricket Business Report, with Mike Fordham (ILT20, ex-Hundred) and CPL chief Pete Russell on how franchise leagues actually get built, sold and paid for.

That’s a wrap. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

MLB is slimming down

MLB is in the swing of its playoffs, and owners have just pitched arguably the biggest schedule shake-up in 65 years. Thursday’s proposals to the players’ union:

• 154 games, not 162, last played in the early 1960s, though now with interleague play.

• A seven-game Division Series, up from five.

• Top seeds picking their opponents in the first two rounds.

It bucks the trend: the NFL, NHL, and MLS have all lengthened their seasons. But in essence, MLB is adding more of its most valuable property: playoff baseball.

With regional sports networks fading, the future is national, and new deals start in 2029. National TV has limited space, so a slimmer season with more marquee playoff games (imagine seven games of Yankees v Red Sox or Dodgers v Giants) is a more viable national TV product.

Premier League: open for investment

It might be all Man City right now (and will be for a while), but elsewhere Premier League clubs are opening up to investment.

Crystal Palace’s owners have hired Raine, the bank behind the Chelsea sale, to field interest at a £900m valuation, roughly double the club’s value in July 2025, when Woody Johnson paid a reported £190m for 43%. Sources say investment, not a sale, is the priority. The money is for Selhurst Park’s expansion from 25,000 to 34,000 seats.

Everton, meanwhile, have hired Moelis to explore new investment, including selling control. The Friedkin Group bought a struggling club in 2024 and completed the new stadium. Now it can add capital or bring in an investor, possibly at a profit.

As for City: a 3–0 win at Anfield on Sunday, their first game since the verdict. And the Prime Minister is being pulled in – Andy Burnham, ex-Mayor of Manchester, says he’ll publish details of his meetings with City executives after questions over political pressure.

F1’s waiting list

Cities and countries are queuing up to host a Grand Prix, but F1 is raising the at explains why.

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24 days ago · 2 likes · Vincenzo Landino

Louise Young, F1’s chief race promotion officer, calls the bar “really high”, and the playbook goes well beyond the track:

• Government backing

• A destination that shows off local culture

• Easy links between airport, hotels and city

• A show from Thursday to Sunday, not just race day

• A race that grows the audience

Rwanda is reportedly lined up for 2030, which would be F1’s first African race since 1993. Malaysia wants back in at an estimated $73m a year, after the stand-in Bahrain GP drew a record 261,000 to Sepang.

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3 months ago · 11 likes · The Paddock Journal and Will Colahan

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• : the absolute expert on F1 business, Tiggy Valen, has launched Party of Two with Esses. It’ll be a series of sit-downs with the biggest names in F1 business. First up is a huge name – Derek Chang, CEO of F1 owner Liberty Media.

• : teased last week, my piece on how F1 drivers are actually taxed, sparked by Bottas at Sepang.

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24 days ago · 13 likes · The Paddock Journal and Will Colahan

• : on how the horse girl era is exposing brands that get equestrian life wrong. A great taster for my equestrian sports deep dive, out very soon.

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a month ago · Lona Price Jones

Podcasts

City’s appeal, plus Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark on college sports.

Skip to the baseball bit, on MLB’s playoff payroll gap and the salary cap fight.

That’s a wrap. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

Manchester City’s guilty verdict has put one of football’s favourite off-field questions back on the agenda - how much money does a club actually make?

Strip away the legal drama and the commission’s findings are actually a sponsorship story. It found that City used “sham” contracts to disguise around £830m of owner funding as revenue, helping the club appear to comply with spending rules.

That matters because sponsorship income in modern football is not just a commercial nice-to-have. Under the Premier League’s new Squad Cost Ratio, spending on the playing squad is tied to football-related revenue and player-trading profits. More genuine revenue gives clubs more room to spend; lose commercial income, and that room becomes tighter.

At the same time, the Premier League is also dealing with a significant change to where that revenue comes from.

This is the first season without betting companies on the front of matchday shirts. Eleven clubs had betting companies on their shirts last season, including several outside the big six who had come to rely on the category for valuable income.

What is interesting is that the expected financial cliff edge has not arrived. At least not yet.

Ampere Analysis estimates that front-of-shirt income has actually risen 8% this season to £444m. Eight clubs replacing betting sponsors swapped deals worth a combined £67m for new ones worth £75m. Crystal Palace replaced NET88 with American software company Temporal, while gambling companies themselves have not disappeared: Aston Villa and Everton have kept betting partners elsewhere on their shirts.

That is considerably better than expected. Before the summer, forecasts suggested clubs losing betting deals could see front-of-shirt values fall by roughly a third, with particular concern around teams outside the biggest commercial clubs.

The temptation is to conclude that football worried about nothing.

That would be the wrong lesson.

Betting companies were unusually useful sponsors because many were prepared to pay handsomely for one thing Premier League clubs could guarantee - enormous visibility. Restrictions on front-of-shirt deals do not end that relationship overnight, but they do make relying on a steady stream of high-paying gambling brands a less secure long-term strategy.

The interesting question then is not simply which industry replaces them. It is whether clubs can get better at selling everything else they have.

Formula 1 offers a useful precedent.

For almost four decades, F1’s colours were tobacco brands - Marlboro, John Player Special, Rothmans, Mild Seven. Advertising restrictions eventually forced tobacco branding out of the sport.

The comparison is not perfect. Tobacco restrictions were broader and backed by law, while Premier League clubs have voluntarily given up one particular sponsorship position.

What is interesting is what F1 did next. It did not just go find another industry willing to buy the same space. The sport and its teams became much better at working out what made their platform valuable to different kinds of companies.

Sell the platform, not just the shirt

To understand that, I spoke to , who writes the F1 partnerships newsletter .

Asked what brands get from F1 that they cannot get in quite the same way from football or the NFL, she starts with geography. F1 is “a truly global, travelling sport”, visiting 24 race locations across 21 countries and reaching a fanbase of around 800 million.

Sunday's Sponsors

Discussing the sponsorships that are driving Formula 1, focusing on the meaningful partnerships that are boosting fan engagement & creating lasting impact.

By Sarah Beakey

That matters because a sponsor is buying much more than global TV exposure. It can activate in different markets throughout the season, create pop-ups around certain races and tailor its marketing to local audiences as the sport moves around the world.

A Premier League club cannot replicate a travelling championship, but the principle is useful.

The shirt may be its most visible commercial asset, but it sits within something much bigger: a stadium, hospitality, retail, pre-season tours, social media channels, international supporters and the global reach of the Premier League every weekend.

The opportunity is to think about that entire footprint rather than treating the shirt as the product and everything else as an add-on. What does a sponsor actually want to achieve, and which parts of the club can help it get there?

Make the partnership useful

Sarah says the partnerships that tend to last are the “mutually beneficial” ones.

With so many brands now operating in F1, some of the traditional benefits have also become less distinctive. Paddock passes, premium hospitality and even driver appearances are now, as she puts it, closer to “the bare minimum” of a partnership deal.

The stronger partnerships can help teams with the actual business. For example, reaching audiences, improving fan engagement, supporting particular programmes, or providing products and technology the team can use.

You can see that idea in some of F1’s newer deals.

Revolut gets F1’s global platform through its partnership with Audi as it expands into new markets. Audi, in turn, gets more than another logo on the car, with Revolut involved in parts of the team’s financial operations and payments experience.

The Paddock Journal

How do you build a Formula 1 team that lasts?

New Formula 1 teams are rare. Why? Because F1 cars are complex, and getting them race-ready requires the right people, drivers, factory, engine, and race operations. Whether you are a brand-new team, like Cadillac, or taking over an existing one, like Audi, putting all those elements together is expensive and often takes years. Cadillac expects its start-up costs to exceed $1 billion, and staying on the grid year on year costs roughly $250 million a season…

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2 months ago · 13 likes · The Paddock Journal and Will Colahan

Atlassian’s title partnership with Williams follows a similar logic, with its software being used across the team’s engineering and operations.

Football already has versions of this.

Temporal’s agreement with Crystal Palace initially looks like a straightforward purchase of Premier League reach. But Palace is also becoming a customer, using Temporal across parts of its digital operations.

Know what only you can sell

The final lesson is less about sponsorship mechanics and more about positioning.

“Luxury and premium brands are ultimately what F1 was built on,” Sarah says.

That association has been developed over decades through partnerships with brands such as Rolex, TAG Heuer and Moët & Chandon. And although Liberty Media has deliberately broadened F1’s audience in recent years, Sarah argues that brands and fans still see it as a premium, aspirational sport.

That matters commercially.

Brands are not simply buying the number of people who watch Formula 1. They are also buying into what being associated with Formula 1 says about them.

Football clubs have their own versions of that identity. The difference is that it will not be the same for every club.

Sunday's Sponsors

What Can F1 Learn From The World Cup?

Welcome back to Sunday’s Sponsors, a Formula 1 sponsorship newsletter discussing partnership announcements and activations, with a particular focus on those driving fan engagement and meaningful impact. Thank you for being a paid subscriber to the newsletter, I hope you enjoy this bonus post…

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3 months ago · 16 likes · Sarah Beakey

One might offer global scale. Another might have an unusually strong connection to its city. Others might be associated with youth development, data, supporter culture, fashion, music or a particular history.

The important thing is understanding which of those associations genuinely belong to the club — and which brands might value being part of it.

Football does not need to become F1

What came through most clearly from speaking to Sarah is that F1 and its teams have become very good at understanding what makes their platform distinctive.

Its global movement allows brands to activate market by market. Its premium positioning attracts companies that want to borrow from that image. Its technology, people and access give partners things to build around beyond simple exposure.

Football clubs have a different set of assets, but they are no less valuable.

A Premier League club can combine a deeply local identity, a stadium, a city, generations of supporters and a particular culture, with an international audience that very few businesses could ever build themselves.

Some have high-profile academies, global fanbases or strong associations with music, fashion or technology.

The end of front-of-shirt betting sponsorship has not created the financial crisis many expected. But clubs should be careful not to treat that as proof that nothing needs to change.

Betting money has been unusually easy money for football. If that becomes less dependable over time, the answer should not simply be to find the next industry willing to pay the most for the same piece of shirt.

The opportunity is to get much better at understanding what makes each club commercially distinctive, and then finding more creative ways to make that valuable to partners.

This piece include contributosn from . Check out her Substack .

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

Protect College Sports Act

Big week in Washington for college sports. Last Monday the US Senate passed the Protect College Sports Act, 77–22.

It sets national rules on NIL, transfers and eligibility, lets schools pay athletes up to roughly $50m a year and overrides state NIL laws. The real win for the NCAA and conferences is limited antitrust protection, making their rules much harder to challenge in court. Tellingly, the bill stalled until the SEC and Big Ten got their changes in.

It’s neutral on the biggest question, whether athletes are employees. House Republicans want employee status ruled out altogether, and any change sends the bill back to the Senate. The House isn’t due back until after the midterms; if the bill isn’t law by 3 January, it dies.

If you want more detail, then is a must-read for you:

Practice Session

The new NIL bill and its many flaws

Last night, the Senate passed the Protect College Sports Act by a vote of 77-22…

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a month ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Manvi Mittal

Man City, Saracens and punishment

Three and a half years after the charges, City finally have their verdict: guilty of every serious financial charge from 2009–10 to 2017–18, including “sham” commercial deals that flattered the books by over £900m.

City are appealing. Punishment comes at a separate hearing and possibly this season

It reminded me of Saracens (not a legal comparison, to be clear). In 2019–20 they were fined £5.36m, docked 35 points and relegated for salary cap breaches. It felt enormous. Yet they kept the titles from those years, bounced straight back up and were champions again by 2023.

So what does an effective sporting punishment actually look like, if even relegation can be a short detour?

Plenty has been written about the verdict, but these pieces from and were my highlights.

Sam On Sport

Ill-Gotten Gains

Ill-Gotten Gains…

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a month ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Sam on Sport

Joey D'Urso

Manchester is a nicer place because of Man City

Hello, and welcome to my weekly newsletter about how football explains global politics, money and power…

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a month ago · 23 likes · 18 comments · Joey D'Urso

Do F1 drivers actually pay tax?

Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia (yes, really) was chaos: rain, a twice-delayed start and glitching power units. Verstappen won.

But one of the most interesting bits came away from the racing. Italy’s tax police have reportedly asked drivers for returns going back seven or eight years. Valtteri Bottas, a Monaco resident, said drivers already pay tax in more than half the countries they race in, which is fine “as long as we know”.

So much for the idea that Monaco means no tax. Roughly how it works:

• Residency matters, but isn’t everything. Monaco doesn’t tax residents’ income (French nationals aside).

• Drivers can owe tax where they race. Many countries tax non-residents on what they earn there.

• Every country does it differently. Some tax a slice of salary by days spent there, some chase sponsorship income too, and enforcement varies (hello, Italy).

I’ve been digging into this for a piece for The Paddock Journal, which should be out soon.

What else I’m reading on Substack:

has the lowdown on why Nike might be heading back to F1 after 24 years away for .

The Paddock Journal

Why Are So Many People Talking About Nike Potentially Returning to F1?

At the beginning of the season, online commentary went into overdrive that a Nike sponsorship deal in F1 was potentially about to drop. When nothing concrete emerged, the rumour mill quickly died down. Then in September, a significant appointment to Nike’s Board of Directors reignited the conversation…

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a month ago · 13 likes · The Paddock Journal and Sarah Beakey

breaks down how Charles Leclerc’s sponsors became the first clients of the creative studio he co-founded.

Beyond the Paddock 🏁

The Commercial Value of Creative Ownership

Professional athletes are becoming increasingly involved in the creative work behind their commercial careers, with some establishing their own production companies. In Formula 1, Charles Leclerc co-founded Sidequest in 2025 with filmmaker Antoine Truchet…

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a month ago · 3 likes · Isabella von Habsburg

has an insightful interview with NFL UK legend Jason Bell.

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🏈 The Touchdown Collective: Jason Bell exclusive interview

You don’t often hear from me on a Sunday - apart from on Substack notes - but I thought an exclusive interview demanded its own newsletter! Enjoy…

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a month ago · 3 likes · Michael Ham

Podast Picks

Two for your headphones this week:

That’s a wrap. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

This week’s edition features a joint article with looking at the NFL’s international strategy and where it goes next. You can find more of Carla’s work at .

Three weeks ago, more than 100,000 fans packed into the MCG for the NFL’s first regular-season game in Australia. Now, after this weekend’s game in Rio, the league heads to London for three consecutive weekends, a market it has been building since 2007.

That contrast captures where the NFL’s international strategy now stands. This season features a record nine games across seven countries and four continents, ranging from established markets like London to newer experiments such as Melbourne.

The international series started with a few games in London, which at the time was considered a stretch, but the NFL wants to go further and further and eventually hit sixteen international games a season. That would mark a significant change for the league, players, and the markets it wants to build. Carla and I are taking a deep dive into the NFL international strategy and what it actually means for its growth and whether it can work.

What would sixteen international games actually mean?

If the NFL held sixteen international games, it would shift from occasional overseas matches to a consistent, league-wide approach. The event infrastructure is nearly in place, but operations and market growth still need work. The bigger questions are whether the league can make the logistics repeatable and whether those games translate into long-term market growth.

Sixteen games would change the current model in several ways:

• Each team is currently guaranteed to play internationally at least once every eight years; sixteen games would allow all 32 teams to play abroad every season.

• The approach would also become more franchise-led. All 32 teams now participate in the Global Markets Program, with rights distributed across 22 international markets, giving clubs a framework to build local commercial, fan-development, and marketing activity around international games.

• Sixteen games does not mean sixteen fixed locations. The NFL can stick to established cities and try a few new ones, similar to F1’s circuit approach. NFL executive Peter O’Reilly has described the strategy as ‘not one and done’, with the league intending to return to market regularly.

There is another important part of the sixteen-game ambition. It is linked to the NFL’s ambition to expand the regular season from seventeen to eighteen games and reduce the preseason to two. A second bye week has also been discussed, although none of those changes have been agreed with the NFLPA.

Why does the NFL want every team involved?

Having every team take part means the same teams aren’t always chosen; therefore, this model shares both the workload and the benefits. Also, when each team plays abroad every year, it gets a chance to connect with international markets, even if the game is not in its home area.

For the NFL as a league, more teams playing overseas means more inventory for broadcasters, sponsors and host cities, while creating more opportunities to turn overseas fans into regular NFL viewers rather than people who only engage when a game comes to town.

How close is the NFL to sixteen games?

For 2026, the NFL has planned nine international games in seven countries, with sixteen teams taking part. Starting in 2027, owners have approved up to ten games.

To reach sixteen international games, the league would need seven more than the nine scheduled in 2026, or six more than the ten currently permitted from 2027.

Ten is the maximum allowed under the current collective bargaining agreement, so expansion beyond that would require further agreement with the NFLPA.

But that’s not all:

• Even though every team now has international marketing rights, the league must ensure teams carry out their plans locally and share their results openly.

• The NFL should add more venues, gain more government support, and increase promoter capacity in established and new cities across four continents while maintaining high standards.

• Adding these international fixtures makes an extra bye week non-negotiable and effectively stretches the calendar.

Although teams and the league can manage single long-distance games now, they will need shared rules for travel, recovery, and fairness to handle a bigger schedule.

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The limits of the current model

The NFL generated more than 100,000 possible schedules for 2026, and shortlisted 6,000 as playable. The new program of nine international games plays a part there: the league has to account not only for where those games fall, but also for the weeks before and after them to limit the burden of long-distance travel.

Time zones (and jet lag), arrival times, kickoff times, bye weeks, preparation, and opponents all factor in. London and Melbourne are both hosting international games, but each comes with its own set of problems.

The first game in Australia highlighted how different those approaches can be. San Francisco arrived roughly a week early to acclimatise. In contrast, Los Angeles arrived about a day before the game after designing its preparation around minimising disruption to the team’s normal routine.

There is nothing inherently wrong with teams choosing different strategies. But the contrast shows how little established precedent exists for a trip this extreme. If Australia becomes a recurring part of the schedule, and if Asia follows, the league may eventually need more common expectations around preparation and recovery.

The Rams’ 27-7 defeat inevitably invited questions about whether their late arrival worked, although one result cannot settle that debate. More revealing was the response afterwards; both Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan expressed reservations about making this type of journey regularly.

Do international games build market, or just successful events?

Demand is strong, but public evidence is still limited on how much of it becomes long-term fandom.

Melbourne drew 100,021 people, making it the seventh-most-attended regular-season game in NFL history and one of the largest international crowds the league has ever staged. At the same time, the NFL cites an independent survey identifying 8.8 million self-described NFL fans in Australia. But Melbourne is also a great fit for sports consumption, with the Olympic Park and calendar events like the F1 GP and the Aus Open. Also, Australia has a long culture of similar sports like Australian Rules and Rugby.

The NFL also leaves year-round infrastructure in some markets, but its depth varies significantly. Australia has a local office, an NFL Academy, flag football programs, and a multiyear relationship with the Victorian government. Other mature markets also have permanent infrastructure, while newer ones rely more heavily on club marketing rights, flag football, media distribution, and recurring events.

Latin America offers an alternative example: the 2025 Sao Paulo game averaged 17.3 million viewers globally, but 16.2 million were in the United States, and about 1.1 million were outside it. Mexico presents a different case: it already has one of the NFL’s largest established international fan bases, so games there can reinforce existing fandom while still creating opportunities to acquire new fans.

London provides a useful comparison because the NFL has had almost two decades to build beyond the event itself. The UK has now staged 42 regular-season NFL games since 2007, attracting more than three million attendees in total, while the league estimates that the country has more than 17 million NFL fans.

The league also has permanent infrastructure around the games. Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was purpose-built with NFL requirements in mind, teams run year-round marketing activity in the UK, and the Jaguars have established a particularly sustained presence through their annual London fixtures.

That does not prove that every new host can follow London’s trajectory. But it illustrates what the NFL is ultimately trying to create: not simply a city capable of selling out one Sunday, but a market where games sit alongside broadcasting, sponsorship, flag football, team activity and year-round fandom.

Where could the NFL grow next?

Reaching sixteen international games does not require finding sixteen different countries. If anything, the next stage of the NFL’s strategy looks less like collecting new flags on a map and more like deciding which markets deserve to become permanent parts of the calendar.

There are already different levels emerging.

London, Germany and Mexico are the anchors. All have established fan bases and repeated games, while Mexico now has a three-year commitment covering 2026 to 2028 and Germany already has games scheduled in Munich and Berlin through 2029. The UK is further along: London has staged 42 regular-season games since 2007, and Tottenham is contracted to host at least two a year through the 2029 season.

Behind them is another group the NFL is trying to turn from successful events into recurring destinations. Spain returned to the schedule in 2026 after Madrid’s debut a year earlier. Brazil has moved from São Paulo to Rio. France is hosting its first game this season. Australia’s new agreement guarantees at least two games across four years, with an option for a third, and NFL international chief Gerrit Meier has said the league would ultimately like Australia to become an annual stop.

The NFL increasingly talks about international growth as an ecosystem. Games sit at the top, but underneath them are broadcast deals, sponsors, flag football, local events and individual teams building their own followings through the Global Markets Program.

That gives the league a useful testing ground before committing to a regular-season game. Is there already an audience? Are teams prepared to invest year-round? Is there a suitable stadium and a government or promoter willing to support the event? And, increasingly importantly, can the league keep coming back?

Japan is perhaps the clearest candidate for the next wave. The Rams already hold marketing rights there, while league executives have openly identified Japan as a future possibility. Brett Gosper, who oversees Europe and Asia-Pacific for the NFL, recently pointed to its existing football following, sporting culture and familiarity with American sports. The complication is geography: a Japanese game would present many of the same time-zone and travel questions Melbourne has just exposed.

Elsewhere the picture is less advanced. NFL teams now have marketing rights in South Korea, Italy, Argentina, Colombia and the UAE, among others. Those are worth watching, but marketing rights should not be confused with a pipeline of future games. For now, they are better understood as places where the NFL is testing whether commercial activity and fan engagement can create the conditions for something bigger.

Latin America may offer the most obvious room to deepen what already exists. Mexico is arguably the NFL’s strongest international market: the league estimates 40 million fans there, operates a permanent office and has ten teams with local marketing rights. Brazil is much newer, but is already on its third straight season hosting a game. Rather than continually stretching the map, adding frequency in markets like these may ultimately do more to create habitual NFL fandom.

And eventually, an international franchise?

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has become noticeably more confident about the prospect of an NFL team outside the US. In August, he said he had “no doubt” it would happen eventually; in September he went further, saying Europe was the most likely destination and that more than one team could ultimately make sense.

The interesting part is that the question has shifted. London has spent years showing it has the fans, stadiums, and commercial market required to host the NFL. The bigger problems are sporting: travel, scheduling, player recruitment, taxes, and what happens when a European team reaches the playoffs and potentially has to cross the Atlantic repeatedly.

Having multiple European franchises might reduce some of that isolation, but it would also require a much bigger structural decision about expansion. Not every owner appears convinced. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said this month that an expansion team in Europe remains “pretty far” into the future.

For now, sixteen international games matter more than an international team. If the NFL can make a schedule in which playing in London, Munich, or Mexico City feels relatively routine, and Melbourne or Tokyo no longer feels like an expedition, it will have solved much of the problem that has kept a permanent franchise theoretical.

AGM Recomends

If you enjoyed this week’s piece, check out more of work, including her latest article on Chelsea at Off-Ball Logic.

Off Ball Logic

When Chelsea’s money stopped being special

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a month ago · 5 likes · 5 comments · Carla Bilche

has recently joined Substack and is well worth subscribing to. Her latest piece is a great behind-the-scenes look at the production chaos around Max Verstappen’s kart race.

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Max VS 100: Inside the Production’s Brilliant Chaos

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a month ago · 11 likes · 5 comments · Molly Elizabeth Agnew

Plenty of rumours are swirling around Nike and a possible move into F1, and has a great write-up on what it could mean.

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Contact here for Advertising & Partnerships // Support the newsletter here…

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a month ago · 16 likes

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

In late August, Lando Norris posted a video explaining the camera that had been following him for months. He said Prime Video had been filming behind-the-scenes life on and off the track since the spring. Three episodes, working title Lando, produced by Box to Box Films behind Drive to Survive, out sometime in 2027.

It arrived in the middle of a remarkable fortnight. Norris won at Zandvoort, his second straight victory after Hungary. He announced the docu-series that same week, and two days later, he revealed he had signed with McLaren until the end of 2030. Days after that, he co-founded a junior racing team, LN4 Fusion, which will run cars in Italian Formula 4, Formula Regional and Formula 3 from next season.

None of which will win him a second world championship. Kimi Antonelli has been the story of 2026, and after fourteen rounds the Italian’s lead is large enough that Norris’s defence is effectively over.

But the reason to write about Norris now is not the championship. It is that he's become a kind of champion F1 hasn't really had before.

He arrived in F1 in 2019, the same season Drive to Survive first appeared on Netflix. Since then, the sport has become younger, more accessible and increasingly built around drivers as individuals. Fans no longer meet them only through races and sponsor appearances. They follow them through the week, watch them play games on YouTube, and attach themselves to a driver in a way that can matter as much as loyalty to a team.

Norris was made for that shift. He never looked like a racing driver being taught how to make content. He looked like someone shaped by internet culture who also happened to be exceptionally good at driving an F1 car. His gaming, streaming and humour made him one of the grid’s most recognisable drivers before he won a race, and Quadrant, the brand he founded in 2020, gave him somewhere to put it all and an audience that belonged to him rather than to McLaren.

But plenty of drivers understand social media. What separates Norris is how he carries himself even while competing and winning a World Championship.

F1 has always prized emotional control. Its champions are ruthless characters who apply pressure, play mind games, and never let a rival see weakness. Verstappen is the clearest modern version: ferociously competitive and largely uninterested in being liked.

Norris has never convincingly pretended to be that person.

When he drives badly, he usually says so. When his confidence is low, you can see it. He has talked openly about anxiety and pressure, and there is little sense of him trying to build a harder persona or win a psychological edge through the media.

For a long time, people held that against him. Through last year’s title fight, every harsh self-assessment was taken as proof that he lacked the mentality to beat Verstappen, or his cooler McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri. His willingness to admit his doubts was read as an inability to overcome them.

Which is why the championship mattered beyond the result.

He won it by two points. He cried in the car. He cried again in the pen afterwards, and then said something more interesting than the tears.

Asked what he was proudest of, he did not talk about beating Verstappen. He said he had won it “not by being someone I’m not”, that he had done it fairly and honestly rather than by turning himself into a more aggressive driver. He said he was proud less because he had become world champion than because of how many other people he had made happy.

It is a strange thing for a newly crowned champion to say, and it is the whole of him in a paragraph. He had not conquered the vulnerability. He had won with it still on show.

As an F1 World Champion, Norris now has two racing operations with his name on them. Quadrant began as a gaming channel and ended up fielding sim racers. LN4 Fusion will put real cars on real grids next season, in the same development classifications Norris climbed a decade ago. Neither is the obvious use of a world champion’s money. A driver looking to convert a title into wealth has easier options than junior single-seaters, which are expensive, unglamorous and mostly watched by nobody.

But that is rather the point. Champions tend to narrow as they win. The circle tightens, the access shrinks, the public version gets more managed. Norris has gone the other way. In the months since Abu Dhabi, he has widened, back into the ladder he came up, further into the brand he built for the people who watch him, and now into three episodes of Prime Video.

Letting Box to Box make a series about him is the logical end point of all of it. Norris has never drawn much of a line between the driver and the person, so there is nothing obvious to protect. Whether three episodes, shaped, cut, and released a year late, can hold anything as unguarded as a man crying in a car in Abu Dhabi is another question. But the instinct to say yes is the same instinct that made him admit his doubts in the middle of a title fight.

Every sporting era produces athletes who succeed in it. Occasionally it produces one who seems to explain it. Norris’s openness works because it doesn't look like a tactic, and as long as that stays true, he looks more and more like the driver modern F1 was built for.

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College football in London

Saturday evening saw something unusual at Wembley. The stadium, now a second home for the Jacksonville Jaguars, hosted its first taste of big-time college football, with 46,000 watching Arizona State beat Kansas 24-17 in the Union Jack Classic.

It was a much lower-key affair than the NFL games London has become used to. The entire upper tier was closed, and there is obviously a very long way to go before this resembles the NFL’s International Series. But this isn’t being treated as a one-off either. The organisers have a three-year agreement with Wembley and the Big 12 clearly wants to make international games part of its future.

The interesting thing is that college football is starting from a very different place.

The sport has enormous global brands, Ohio State, Texas, USC, Michigan and others, but much of their existing international footprint comes from the universities themselves. They have alumni scattered worldwide. Ohio State has a London club and regular football watch parties, but it is quite literally an alumni organisation built around connecting former students and friends of the university.

That isn’t quite the same thing as the NFL, where someone from London can simply decide at 12 that they support the Patriots, Packers or Eagles and still be following them 20 years later.

Notre Dame is probably the closest college football gets to that. Its following has always stretched beyond people who actually went there — its London club even has a name for them, “subway alums” — helped by its history, Catholic identity and obvious connection to Ireland.

But I actually think that is why college football has more potential here than it might first appear.

The easy response is that British people will never understand it because university sport means almost nothing here. But college football fandom isn’t really comparable to British university sport. It is about place, family, tradition and inherited loyalties. In that sense, it has quite a lot in common with the way football and other sports work here.

The marching bands and 100,000-seat stadiums might feel very American. The idea that you support a team because your dad did, because everybody in your town does, or because hating the people down the road is simply part of growing up is considerably less foreign.

It may take a few years, and probably some better-known programmes than Arizona State and Kansas, but college football has something to work with here.

AGM Recommends

Reading

Italian football has had little to celebrate lately, and most of Serie A is being left behind commercially. Como are building something different, and as a bonus, they play in one of the most beautiful settings in European football. has a good write-up on what they’re doing.

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3 months ago · 17 likes · 2 comments · Front Row

Influencers became a surprisingly big talking point at the US Open. has a really thoughtful take on the backlash and what was actually going on.

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2 months ago · 105 likes · 15 comments · Daniel-Yaw Miller

Had a lot of fun writing for last week on one of F1’s stranger questions: why have Italian drivers had so little success?

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2 months ago · 15 likes · Sara Neves, Will Colahan, and Track Limits

Listening

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

If you’re enjoying Any Given Monday, tap subscribe and follow on Instagram.

We are now less than a month away from the start of the NFL season. There will be plenty to follow on the field, but some of the most interesting stories could happen away from it. Here are three I’ll be watching.

Gameday broadcast booths

It is rare to enter an NFL season with this much uncertainty around the major broadcast booths. Usually these jobs stay locked down for years, but a unique set of circumstances means we could see plenty of movement over the next twelve months.

The biggest question is at CBS.

Tony Romo is currently on leave following his arrest on suspicion of operating a vehicle while intoxicated, and CBS Sports president David Berson said that there is no timetable for a decision on his future. In the meantime, J.J. Watt has been promoted to work alongside Jim Nantz in CBS’s No.1 booth.

That effectively gives Watt an audition for one of the biggest jobs in sports broadcasting. But it is far too early to assume Romo is definitely gone, particularly with four years reportedly still remaining on his contract.

Then there is Greg Olsen.

His Fox contract expires after this season, and he has made little secret of his ambition to get back into a No.1 booth after losing that position to Tom Brady. If CBS eventually has a vacancy, Olsen would be an obvious name to watch.

Amazon could also become part of the reshuffle.

Kirk Herbstreit’s Prime contract is up after this season, while the longer-term future of the Al Michaels-Herbstreit partnership will inevitably attract attention. Travis Kelce is another wildcard. He is still playing in 2026, but whenever he does retire, his profile and growing media career mean he will immediately become one of the biggest names available to broadcasters.

Whatever happens, there could be a lot of network musical chairs over the next year. Who ends up calling the biggest games in 2027 could become one of the more interesting off-field stories of this season.

ESPN’s neutrality

The NFL’s deal with ESPN was finally completed in January following regulatory approval. ESPN acquired NFL Network, NFL Fantasy and distribution rights to RedZone, while the NFL received a 10% stake in ESPN.

In some ways, bringing NFL-owned media properties under a larger media company is not particularly remarkable. What makes this deal different is that the league now owns part of one of the biggest independent media organisations covering it, and one that also pays billions for the right to broadcast its games.

For a UK comparison, imagine the Premier League owning 10% of Sky Sports.

ESPN has insisted that nothing will change editorially, and there is no evidence that the NFL is dictating its coverage. But the structure creates an obvious question: can ESPN continue to scrutinise the NFL as aggressively when the NFL is also one of its owners?

We have already had a taste of the scrutiny that will now follow these decisions. After 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was seriously injured in a car crash in July, Dan Patrick criticised ESPN and Adam Schefter over the timing of the story, questioning whether ESPN had held the information until the 49ers were ready to announce it.

There is no evidence that ESPN suppressed the story at the NFL’s request, and Schefter has denied sitting on it. But that is almost beside the point. The ownership structure means editorial decisions like this will now inevitably be viewed through a different lens.

In years gone by, ESPN has produced some brilliant journalism on the NFL. At its best, that journalism should occasionally make the league and its teams uncomfortable.

That is why this is worth tracking throughout the season. Do we continue to see investigative reporting that challenges teams and the league? Or does ESPN increasingly move towards access-driven coverage that protects those relationships?

The answer probably won’t come from one big story. We'll see it gradually over time.

International games

This is the NFL’s biggest international season yet.

There are a record nine international games across four continents and seven countries, including first regular-season games in Australia and France, alongside games in London, Madrid, Munich, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro.

Australia is perhaps the most interesting test. The 49ers and Rams will play at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Week 1, taking the NFL into a completely new market while creating one of the biggest logistical challenges the league has attempted with a regular-season game. Goodell has already said the NFL views Australia as a long-term market rather than a one-off experiment.

If it works, it strengthens the case for taking the league even further into Asia. Japan has already been discussed as one potential future market as the NFL looks for the next stage of its international expansion.

The story to monitor is where the NFL takes this international growth.

Owners have approved up to 10 international games per season from 2027, which is the maximum currently permitted under the collective bargaining agreement with the NFLPA. Goodell has repeatedly said his eventual ambition is 16 international games a year, effectively allowing every team to play abroad once each season.

That means the next barrier to international growth isn’t necessarily finding cities that want NFL games. It is getting the players on board.

Moving from nine games this season to 16 would require another significant shift in the schedule and negotiations with the NFLPA. At the same time, the league continues to explore an 18-game regular season, an idea the players’ union has already pushed back against.

How players respond to the travel demands this season, particularly in Australia, could therefore have implications far beyond 2026.

The NFL has proved it can find international demand. The next challenge is working out just how global the regular season can realistically become.

Fenway Sports Group sells Liverpool minority stake

FSG has agreed to sell a minority stake in Liverpool to 1892 Holdings, a consortium led by former QPR chairman Amit Bhatia that includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. The exact stake has not officially been disclosed, but reports put it at around 30%, with the deal valuing Liverpool at more than £5 billion.

Bhatia will become Liverpool’s vice-chairman and join an expanded board alongside Elaine Saverin of EE Capital and Bryan Baum of K5 Sports. Bezos, who is the lead investor in K5 Sports, will not personally have a seat on the board.

The big winner from the deal is FSG. It bought Liverpool for just £300 million in 2010 and is now reportedly selling roughly a third of the club for more than £1.5 billion, around five times what it originally paid for the entire club, while still retaining majority ownership and operational control.

That reflects a remarkable turnaround under FSG. Liverpool went from a club struggling with significant debt and ownership uncertainty to one of the most valuable and commercially successful clubs in world football.

For fans, the interesting part of the deal isn’t really Jeff Bezos’ fortune. Financial rules mean Liverpool cannot simply spend unlimited amounts of new owner money on transfers and wages. The bigger opportunity is what this group could bring commercially. Adding people with networks across technology, investment and global business to Liverpool’s board could open up new sponsorship, partnership and revenue opportunities.

That matters because, in modern football, the ability to spend is increasingly tied to the ability to generate revenue. It also gives Liverpool a broader ownership base and could make any eventual transition away from FSG less abrupt if, further down the line, it decides to sell more of its stake.

Surpries Cadillac changes

Cadillac sacked Team Principal Graeme Lowdon and replaced him with Marcin Budkowski.

Cadillac says the move was part of a “planned leadership transition”. However, that doesn’t feel like the full story. Cadillac CEO Dan Towriss said the team had been considering the change for months, but also confirmed that it wasn’t mutual and that Lowdon had effectively been dismissed.

It could simply be that Cadillac always saw Lowdon as the person to get the team onto the grid before bringing in someone like Budkowski to lead the next phase. If Cadillac wants Budkowski to have a meaningful influence on next season, these are the kinds of changes that need to be made now.

But for a new team still trying to establish itself, changing its leadership midway through its first season is hardly a sign of stability.

The wider context is that building a successful F1 operation takes time. Red Bull entered in 2005 and didn’t win a race until 2009. Toto Wolff only joined Mercedes three years after its return as a works team, while Zak Brown arrived at McLaren in 2016 and the team didn’t win the Constructors’ Championship until 2024.

Cadillac shouldn't be judged on whether it is winning yet. The more interesting question is whether a major leadership change this early is part of the long-term plan, or evidence that the original one is already being rewritten.

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Following on from media being a big story in the NFL this season, has a great piece on the sad decline of local beat writers in sports.

With the US Open only a few weeks away, asks some important questions about the future of tennis fandom.

RacquetTheory

Can Gen Z Afford the US Open?

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3 months ago · 27 likes · 6 comments · Racquet Theory and Will

F1 restarts this week, and has a great breakdown of the Mercedes storylines that could shape the second half of the season.

Tracksidetalks

🔥 Russell vs Antonelli | rivalry in the making

Welcome back to another ‘Tracksidetalks’ post, as today I’m completing a request from ( Lola Vespasiani ), covering the rivalry / relationship between both Mercedes drivers along with on track fighting and how one goal can affect team bonds…

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3 months ago · 2 likes · Julia

F1 has always been at the forefront of technical innovation, but The Race explores an interesting question: has the sport become anti-innovation?

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

Record Breaking Performance

For only the fifth time this century, Real Madrid finished last season without a major trophy. For a club with an ambition to become the most commercially successful sports team in the world, you might think that would be a major setback. You would be wrong.

According to its recently published accounts, Real has just set another record, not for trophies but commercial performance. Operating revenue for 2025/26 reached $1.39 billion, passing the previous sports team record of $1.23 billion set by the Dallas Cowboys in 2024.

What stands out is not only how quickly Real’s revenue has grown, but where that growth has come from.

Revenue has increased by 61% since 2018/19 and, remarkably, 93% of that growth has come from income Real manages directly: its stadium and marketing operations.

Stadium revenue has more than doubled, rising from around $200 million to $414 million. That accounts for roughly 41% of the club’s total revenue growth since 2018/19. Marketing revenue has risen from approximately $337 million to $614 million over the same period, accounting for another 52%.

Real Madrid’s marketing revenue is so far ahead of its competitors in Europe that it alone would be enough to place it inside the top ten of the Deloitte Money League.

Then there is the Bernabéu.

It is difficult not to draw a line between the redevelopment and the increase in stadium revenue. The Bernabéu has gone from being primarily a football stadium to an asset designed to make money throughout the year.

It is not just somewhere to watch Real Madrid. There is the club museum, restaurants, a shopping centre and a growing calendar of major events. I saw some of that first-hand earlier this year.

The NFL played its first regular-season game there in 2025 and has since agreed a multi-year deal to return. Concerts should eventually become another part of the model too, once the club resolves its dispute with the local council over noise levels.

None of this has come cheaply. The redevelopment cost around $1.6 billion.

But you can already see the effect. Stadium income is now more than twice what it was before the redevelopment began.

Is it sustainable?

Broadly, yes. What makes Real’s growth sustainable is that much of it is coming from revenue the club can influence itself.

Sponsorship, merchandising and the Bernabéu are not completely separated from results on the pitch, but they are far less dependent on whether Madrid wins La Liga or the Champions League in any one season.

There are still risks.

The obvious one is the stadium itself. With more than $1.25 billion of stadium debt still outstanding, Real needs the redevelopment to keep producing the returns it was built to generate.

There is also a fairly striking gap between revenue and what actually reaches the bottom line. Real generated $1.39 billion in revenue but reported only around $30 million in profit after tax.

That helps explain something else: despite generating more revenue than any sports team in the world, Real Madrid is still not valued as highly as the biggest NFL and NBA franchises.

Forbes values Real at $9.5 billion, below six NFL and NBA teams.

The reason is mostly structural.

NFL and NBA franchises operate in closed leagues with substantial revenue sharing and salary controls. European football offers nothing like the same certainty. Clubs are more exposed to sporting performance, player costs are harder to contain, and the economics of the competitions they play in can change far more dramatically.

So Real Madrid may now be able to generate more annual revenue than any NFL or NBA franchise.

But as long as it operates within European football’s current structure, investors are likely to see it as a less predictable asset than the biggest American sports franchises — no matter how many concerts, sponsorship deals or NFL games the Bernabéu can host.

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Stories I’m following:

FIFA still in crisis mode

There have been more twists and turns in the FIFA story. Gianni Infantino is still FIFA President and issued a blunt put-down of his critics in a statement earlier this week. 

What helps is that the alliances which brought down FEE are starting to fray. Mexico has broken ranks with CONCACAF to back Gianni Infantino, while Argentina has also come out in support of him. This is alongside unanimous support from AFCON. 

UEFA, meanwhile, is keeping its boycott in place and says it has lost confidence in Infantino’s presidency. If the boycott stays in place, it’s hard to see a way through for Infaintio once FIFA tournaments. 

However, the thing I keep coming back to is that we’re seeing plenty of boycotts, resignations and rejection, but much less debate about what actually needs to change at FIFA.

This whole episode has raised serious questions about the checks, balances and accountability within FIFA’s governance model. If this ends with Infantino simply being replaced without addressing those structural issues, there’s a risk football finds itself back in a similar position further down the line.

I’ll be coming back in the next few weeks with a few options for how FIFA could restructure.

Formula 1’s growth hits a speed bump

Liberty Media published its financial report for Q2, which showed a rare period where F1 earnings were down on the previous year. Liberty Media revenue fell 38% year-on-year in Q2, from $1.23bn to $764m.

The big reason is the calendar. F1 held just five races during the quarter compared with nine last year, partly because the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian GPs did not take place following the conflict in the Middle East.

Across the first half of the year, F1 staged eight races compared with 11 in 2025. A lot of this should balance out as more races are held later in the year, although F1 is still currently set for 23 races rather than last year’s 24 after Malaysia stepped in to host the Bahrain GP in October.

The expectation is that the numbers will even out over the next few quarters. Still, it’s an interesting one to watch if race cancellations start having a more sizeable impact on F1’s revenue.

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Number of the Week

That’s the reported high end of what advertisers are paying for a 30-second commercial in Super Bowl LXI, which Disney says has already sold out of advertising space. Disney had reportedly sought $10 million per commercial before advertisers pushed back on pricing, with many spots ultimately selling for an estimated $8 million to $9 million.

AGM Recommends

Ben Stokes speaks! After stepping down as England Test captain, Stokes sat down with For The Love of Cricket to reflect on his time in one of the biggest jobs in the sport.

is one of the best data analysts on Substack, and his newsletter should be a must-subscribe for any sports fan. I’m excited to see him turn his attention to F1 later this week.

The Numbers Game

I Simulated 10,000 Premier League Seasons. Here's Who Wins.

I ran 10,000 simulated Premier League 26/27 seasons to see where teams are most likely to finish in the coming year…

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3 months ago · 47 likes · 22 comments · Dan Fleming

For anyone struggling to get through the F1 summer break, has a great piece from a few weeks ago looking at some of the excitement around one of F1’s newest teams.

Oh Rouge

How Revolut and Audi are redefining Formula 1 aesthetics

I’m still sinking in everything that happened during my past week in London and my weekend at the Silverstone Grand Prix. One of the highlights was definitely spending Saturday with Revolut and Audi F1 at the Paddock Club, including a motorhome tour, a meet and greet with the drivers, and watching Q1 from their garage (one of the peak experiences of my …

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4 months ago · 4 likes · Alba Carballal Muiños

Finally, if you’re looking for some good book recommendations for the rest of 2026, has you covered.

All Sports Books

Sports books coming later in 2026

The second half of the year sees lots of great sports books coming out. Here are twelve I am particularly looking forward to reading with the full list, sorted by sport, below. Do let me know which one’s you’ll be picking up. Happy reading…

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3 months ago · 52 likes · 8 comments · All Sports Books

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

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ICYMI

• FIFA has scrapped its plan to sell a stake in its competitions to private investors after widespread opposition, including support among UEFA members for a possible boycott. The reversal puts Gianni Infantino under growing pressure, with several European members withdrawing their support ahead of next year’s FIFA presidential election.

• The Big Ten and SEC have backed the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan Senate bill that would give schools, conferences and the NCAA targeted antitrust protection when enforcing rules on eligibility, transfers and athlete compensation. Separately, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction granting eligible Division I athletes from the high-school class of 2022 a fifth season of eligibility.

• CBS has placed Tony Romo on leave “until further notice” following his arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence. J.J. Watt will replace him alongside Jim Nantz and Tracy Wolfson on the network’s lead NFL broadcast team.

• Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora is reportedly leading a consortium prepared to offer more than $1bn for a proposed London franchise in NBA Europe.

• The Mubadala DC Open has reportedly quadrupled its revenue since 2019. Its growth, driven by stronger ticketing, sponsorship and concessions alongside an increased focus on full-tournament packages, offers a useful case study in how tennis events can build value beyond the action on court.

Who could join the F1 calendar next?

Sepang’s return as the Bahrain Grand Prix has revived an old Formula 1 question: which circuit or country could be next to join the elite calendar for motorsports?

The first question to unpick is whether there is space for new circuits to join. F1 Concorde Agreement allows for 25 races; 24 has become its working ceiling, and Stefano Domenicali says that remains the target for 2027.

The Paddock Journal

The Hidden Logic Behind the Formula 1 Calendar

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3 months ago · 11 likes · The Paddock Journal and Will Colahan

The changes for 2027 and 2028 are already largely accounted for. Zandvoort leaves after this season, while Barcelona and Spa will alternate, creating two spots filled by Turkey and Portugal.

Istanbul Park returns in 2027 on a five-year agreement, while Portimão has signed a shorter deal for 2027 and 2028. That two-year contract makes Portugal the most obvious bridge to whatever comes next. That makes 2029 the first obvious point at which the calendar could move again, and a new circuit joins, if F1 sticks to the 24-race cap.

Thailand

Thailand appears to have made the most progress. Its government approved around $1.2bn for a proposed five-race agreement from 2028 to 2032, and has since published a preliminary street-circuit layout around Bangkok. The project was initially driven by former prime minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, whose removal created some political uncertainty. However, design work continued after she left office and, on current evidence, it is the strongest candidate for the next permanent addition.

Africa

Africa remains F1’s biggest geographical gap, but its competing projects are still some way from becoming races. Kyalami has received FIA approval for plans that would allow it to upgrade from Grade 2 to the Grade 1 status required for F1. Approval of those plans is significant, but the work still needs to be completed, and South Africa has yet to secure a race agreement and a funding package.

Rwanda’s proposed circuit outside Kigali has been complicated by the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and diplomatic pressure on F1 to end its discussions with the country. Morocco is also reportedly exploring a $1.2bn motorsport and tourism development near Tangier, although that remains at the early planning stage.

Hockenheim

Hockenheim has reopened discussions about returning the German Grand Prix. It’s commercially attractive for F1: there are now two German manufacturers on the grid in Mercedes and Audi, and the new majority owner, emodrom, is investing €250m in the wider site.

That redevelopment includes an expanded Porsche Experience Centre, a hotel and a Motorworld complex, but nothing for F1 facilities. The principal obstacle remains the economics of staging the race. Circuit managing director Jörn Teske has repeatedly said that Hockenheim cannot absorb the hosting fee without government or other third-party support. Until that funding model changes, Germany has a credible argument for returning but not an advanced bid.

Do Football clubs get any value from pre-season tours?

Now the World Cup is over, pre-season is fully up and running, and Europe’s biggest clubs are back on the road. Manchester City, Bayern Munich and Chelsea have travelled east, while Liverpool has been touring the United States.

Pre-season tours highlight the tension between the sporting and commercial sides of a club. Coaches would rather be based at a settled training camp, as long-haul flights and sponsor appearances disrupt any rhythm. Pre-season is also the one window in the year when a coach can focus on teaching a system rather than preparing for the next fixture.

The commercial return is clearer, which is why tours survive the pushback. Clubs absorb neither the ticketing nor travel costs and can receive up to $5 million in appearance fees per match. That fee, however, is only part of the value. Tours also allow clubs to fulfil sponsorship obligations and strengthen their international fan bases.

It is one of the trade-offs that comes with football clubs becoming global brands, with supporters far beyond their home cities and regions. Despite the disruption to pre-season preparations, tours are likely to continue and grow. For coaches, they may still be preferable to the alternative: moving competitive league matches abroad.

Coming up this week

• The North American hard-court swing is properly underway, with the National Bank Open in Canada setting up the road to the US Open.

• The Hundred continues across England and Wales, with the group stage moving into its final stretch and plenty still to play for.

• Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Seattle Seahawks premieres this week, with HBO and NFL Films going inside the training camp of the defending Super Bowl champions.

Substack

Most sports have gone quiet for the summer, but tennis is still swinging, and has a good read on what happened on the ATP and WTA Tours last week.

Aces & Faults

Aces & Faults from Washington, Memphis, & Los Cabos

Ace: This week marked the first-ever title for rising sensation Alexandra Eala. Unseeded in Washington, Eala defeated Qinwen Zheng, defending champion and seventh seed Leylah Fernandez, second seed Elina Svitolina, third seed Naomi Osaka, and top seed Jessica Pegula in her remarkable run. Eala was down a set when the final was suspended due to rain and …

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3 months ago · 4 likes · Amanda Bergman

The has been in Franciacorta with Liam Nachawati, an eleven-year-old racing OK Junior for Ricky Flynn Motorsport, and a family betting everything on getting him to F1.

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3 months ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · The Paddock Journal

Transfer reporting has become a substantial business in its own right, and has written on the messier end of how it works.

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The Problem with Modern Transfer Reporting

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3 months ago · 14 likes · 7 comments · Jed Devereux

Podcasts

The Race Business has a fascinating interview with Flavio Briatore, one of F1’s most experienced executives and operators.

With The Hundred well underway, the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast has an interesting debate on franchise cricket.

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next week.

ICYMI

Quite a bit has happened since the last edition. Spain won the World Cup, Jannik Sinner defended his Wimbledon title, and the commercial side hasn’t stopped for a second. Here are a few things I found interesting:

• The Kansas City Chiefs have released the first renderings of their new $3bn stadium, a fully enclosed 70,000-seat dome opening in Kansas City, Kansas, in 2031. The roof uses translucent ETFE panels, and the bowl geometry was modelled by audio engineers to preserve Arrowhead’s crowd noise.

• Mexico’s shirt is the best-selling of the World Cup, ahead of Argentina and Germany, with Adidas projecting over 3 million units for each of the three. Mexico leads all 14 federations Adidas kits at the tournament, and did so after going out in the last 16 to England.

• The Seattle Seahawks sold to the Khosla family for a reported $9.612bn, an NFL record against the $6.05bn paid for the Commanders in 2023. Owners vote on 26 August in Atlanta. Paul Allen paid $194m for the franchise in 1997.

• Sepang will host this year’s Bahrain Grand Prix in October, an unusual workaround that keeps Bahrain on the calendar without racing in the country itself. Qatar and Abu Dhabi remain as the final two rounds, but Stefano Domenicali confirmed that if those races cannot go ahead, the 2026 season will conclude in Europe instead.

FIFA wants to sell the World Cup but UEFA won’t take part

The World Cup has left FIFA in a position of extraordinary commercial strength, and they now expect to top $15bn in revenue across the 2023 to 2026 cycle. The important point is, though, that whatever the tournament looked like from the outside, it has strengthened rather than weakened Infantino’s hand. More than 200 members have reportedly already pledged their support for his re-election in 2027.

Infantino is now trying to use that position of strength to push through one of the most significant commercial changes to the World Cup. On Tuesday, FIFA began a consultation on the creation of FIFA Forward Enterprise (FEE), a new subsidiary that would bring together the commercial rights for its competitions, including broadcast, sponsorship, licensing, ticketing and hospitality, and operational delivery of FIFA tournaments. FIFA says the aim is to create a more focused operation that can unlock value and return more money to its members.

The proposed scale is enormous. FIFA values FEE at $20bn and says it could raise up to $4.2bn by selling a minority, non-controlling stake of up to 20 per cent to outside investors. FIFA insists it would retain sole control of the company, including majority board representation, and that sporting decisions, governance, the international calendar and competition formats would remain with FIFA and its members.

It would be significant, and FIFA wants to move quickly. Infantino has given members until 19th September to decide whether they want to participate in the new funding model. Those that do could access up to $40m across the 2027 to 2030 cycle, made up of $20m through FIFA Forward and a further optional $20m through FEE. Those that do not would remain on the existing Forward 4.0 model, which is closer to $10m per association for the cycle.

However, the backlash has been seismic. UEFA said the plan crossed a line football’s institutions should never cross, and that the game’s soul and governance are not assets to trade. The FA called itself “deeply concerned” at the lack of process, while CONCACAF and the AFC both said they had not been properly consulted before the proposal became public.

Earlier today, UEFA’s members met virtually and voted unanimously to withdraw from all FIFA competitions. The boycott covers the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup, and it holds for as long as the FFE proposal remains alive rather than only if members approve it in September. UEFA will lift the threat only if FIFA abandons the plan in full and gives binding assurances it will not return to the idea. “The World Cup is not for sale,” the statement read.

European nations have won seven of the last ten World Cups, and the tournament’s commercial value rests heavily on their players and their broadcast markets. FIFA still holds the votes, needing only a simple majority of its 211 members, with Infantino’s support concentrated across Africa, Asia and South America. All eyes are on FIFA’s responses, and the next few weeks and days leave football at a significant crossroads.

F1 Mid-Season Review

The first half has been unpredictable in the way new regulations always make a season unpredictable, and unexpected in that nobody had Kimi Antonelli leading the championship at the summer break. He leads by 50 points with six wins from eleven rounds. For all the shouting about the regulations and a calendar thrown in disarray by conflict, there is a lot here to be positive about the 2026 F1 season.

Commercially, the sport sits in a strong position. Q1 revenue reached $617m, up 53 per cent year on year, with primary revenue covering race promotion, media rights, and sponsorship up 55 per cent to $496m.

This is despite two races dropping off the calendar but has produced the season’s strangest calendar quirk. Last weekend, F1 announced that Sepang will host an event titled the Bahrain Grand Prix from 2nd to 4th October, funded by Bahrain, some 6,000km from Bahrain. Qatar and Abu Dhabi remain as the final two rounds, but F1 confirmed that if those races cannot go ahead, the 2026 season will conclude in Europe instead.

Attendance shows the audience has not gone anywhere. Silverstone drew 564,000 across four days, the largest crowd in the sport’s history, beating a 31-year-old Adelaide record and adding roughly 64,000 on its own 2025 figure. Melbourne set a circuit record at 483,934, the fifth consecutive year it has done so.

Television is harder to read, for structural reasons. F1 claimed audiences up 25% across its biggest markets after three rounds, Spanish figures fell over the same stretch, and the American series moved exclusively to Apple TV, leaving no honest comparison against ESPN’s 1.1m for Melbourne last year. The opacity suits everyone who has to report a number.

On track, the cars have proved complex enough that circuit characteristics now dictate performance, and momentum moves between teams accordingly. Mercedes have the constructors’ title close to settled at 379 against Ferrari’s 307 and McLaren’s 220. Whether the drivers’ fight survives the second half depends on that variance, and the smart money still puts Antonelli as favourite.

Reading

If you want in on the debate engulfing the World Cup, has a great piece making the case for a 64-team tournament.

Joey D'Urso

A 64-team World Cup would be good, actually

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3 months ago · 20 likes · 7 comments · Joey D'Urso

The New York Knicks have been one of the biggest sports stories of the summer, and has written a wonderful piece on Knicks star Jalen Brunson.

Between the Sidelines

The Guard that Could

Happy Thursday, and welcome back to Between the Sidelines…

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3 months ago · 44 likes · 6 comments · Sophia Prieto

No one does sponsorship analysis better than , who has a great piece on what F1 can learn from the World Cup.

Sunday's Sponsors

What Can F1 Learn From The World Cup?

Welcome back to Sunday’s Sponsors, a Formula 1 sponsorship newsletter discussing partnership announcements and activations, with a particular focus on those driving fan engagement and meaningful impact. Thank you for being a paid subscriber to the newsletter, I hope you enjoy this bonus post…

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3 months ago · 13 likes · Sarah Beakey

Finally, I wrote a piece for exploring a new way to think about how F1 builds its season calendar.

The Paddock Journal

The Hidden Logic Behind the Formula 1 Calendar

In the coming weeks, Formula 1 will publish its 2027 calendar. Under Liberty Media, the calendar has become more than just a list of dates, instead, it is now a menu with each race having its own recognisable identity, audience, and price…

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3 months ago · 10 likes · The Paddock Journal and Will Colahan

Podcasts

Beyond FFE, English football has its own money fight. Premier League clubs are voting on the ‘New Deal’, worth around £1.5bn to the EFL over ten years and funded partly by lifting the transfer levy from 4% to 6%. It needs 14 of the 20 clubs, and one former Premier League board member has already predicted it falls. The Price of Football is the best guide to why Championship economics make this so hard to settle.

ESPN is the other story. Its layoffs were announced following the acquisition of NFL Network and RedZone distribution rights. The Varsity, at Puck, has the sharpest read on what happens when a league part-owns its own broadcaster.

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next Monday.

ICYMI

• The NBA Finals drew their biggest crowd since Jordan. The series averaged 20.6 million viewers, the most-watched finals since 1998. Game five peaked at 33 million.

• Crystal Palace’s American owners are testing the water. The FT reports that Woody Johnson, Josh Harris, and David Blitzer are exploring a sale of their shares, possibly a controlling stake. Johnson only bought in last summer. A long-overdue Selhurst Park rebuild sits in the background.

• The Big Bash is edging towards private money. Cricket Australia and the six states agreed in principle to let each state sell stakes in its own clubs, though four conditions still stand in the way. Cricket Victoria looks likely to go first, possibly selling the Melbourne Renegades outright. For scale: England’s Hundred fetched nearly £1 billion, and the IPL is valued at nearly $20 billion.

• F1 handed its ticketing to a unicorn. Formula 1 named Fever, a live-entertainment tech platform, its official ticketing supplier from 2027; a five-year deal that ends Platinium Group’s decade-plus run. Fever, founded in 2014 and valued at $1.8 billion, is better known for Candlelight concerts than Paddock Club passes.

• The NFL’s rarest draft might return. Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, ruled ineligible after a gambling case, has applied for the supplemental draft, a seldom-used summer mechanism. No player has been picked in one since 2019, and the league still has to approve holding it at all.

• The Williams sisters are back at Wimbledon. Serena and Venus have been handed a doubles wild card for the Championships. It is Serena’s first Grand Slam since 2022. Their last Wimbledon doubles title came in 2016. Serena has also been handed a singles wild card

Can USMNT ever win the World Cup?

The World Cup is well and truly up and running. Despite the ticketing backlash and other issues, the on-pitch product has carried the tournament. The 48-team format has mostly dodged the dead-rubber problem critics feared: with eight of twelve third-placed teams advancing, most groups stay alive into the final round. It has been high-scoring and rarely dull.

The three hosts have all delivered. The US has been the story, top of its group with a game to spare after beating Paraguay 4–1 and Australia 2–0, even without Christian Pulisic. Winning it remains a long shot; the realistic ceiling is matching or bettering the 2002 quarter-final, the team’s high-water mark of the modern era.

But the hype is not the prize. A World Cup win is, and the US is years of structural work away from it. Hosting in 1994 left the country a league, MLS, which has grown ever since. The national team has not: thirty-two years on, the 2002 quarter-final is still the ceiling.

The bottleneck is structural, and it is not mainly “college versus academies”; that debate is half-settled. The golden generation came through MLS academies and European clubs, not the college game; college is no longer the elite men’s pathway. The real drag is pay-to-play: a youth system that filters talent by family wealth before it filters by ability.

That filtering is the problem. Elite youth soccer runs $3,000–$5,000 a year, with academy places reaching $7,000 — beyond lower-income families, the communities that produce players almost everywhere else. A country of 340 million ends up picking from a smaller, wealthier pool than its size implies. The US has the participation numbers and the money. It has never built the pathway.

The fix is half-built already. Local MLS academies are free and produced this generation; the task is to extend that reach into the neighbourhoods that pay-to-play shuts out, and to reward clubs for developing players rather than charging for them. Christian Pulisic joined Chelsea for around $71m; but the Pennsylvania academy that raised him received nothing. If the US are serious about winning the World Cup, they need to ensure more funding and incentives flow down to local academies. Reward the development and free academies become a business model, not a favour. Fees alone will not finish the job, but right now the country is barely starting it.

1994 gave American soccer a league. 2026 will be judged on whether it finally gives the country a route to the top that does not price out its best players at fourteen.

College sports: the Protect Act clears a hurdle

The Protect College Sports Act is the most credible federal vehicle yet. That is not the same as a bill that will pass.

On 18th June it cleared the Senate Commerce Committee 19–9, with bipartisan backing from Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell, and now heads to the full Senate. Real progress: the predecessor SCORE Act died in the House twice, pulled for lack of votes. This version is a compromise — Cruz softened on employment status, Cantwell accepted a one-time transfer limit, and new protections for women’s and Olympic sports won a US Olympic Committee endorsement.

But it is squeezed from both sides. The SEC and Big Ten — the “Power 2” — came out against it on 2nd June, warning it could shrink the revenue-share payments their schools now make under the $2.8bn House settlement. Athlete advocates oppose it too, because its antitrust exemption strips players of the right to sue. With a 60-vote Senate threshold and a House that has already buried one bill, the two richest conferences sit close to a swing vote.

The deeper flaw is what the bill avoids. It is explicitly neutral on the question that sets the economics, whether athletes are employees, and parks that with a federal court in Johnson v. NCAA. The Sorsby saga, which pushed a quarterback into the NFL’s supplemental draft, is exactly the eligibility litigation a uniform rulebook is meant to end. But a symptom does not move sixty senators.

So: committee cleared, then a stall on the floor or in the House, and likely a slip into the next Congress. Trump’s executive order and its 1st August deadline keep the heat on, but an order cannot grant antitrust immunity or pre-empt state law. The defining question, whether a scholarship athlete is an employee, stays where it has sat all along: a courtroom in California.

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On the pods this week

The business of horse racing. Royal Ascot wrapped on Saturday — five days, £10.65m in prize money, and racing’s shop window for the year. Unofficial Partner’s episode on the business of the sport is the ideal companion: the money, the model, and where racing goes from here.

F1’s newest track, previewed. Madrid’s Madring joins the calendar in September, and The Race F1 Podcast got a tour of it three months out. Edd Straw and Jon Noble weigh up whether its centrepiece — a 550-metre, steeply banked corner — makes this a real addition or another Valencia, with home favourite Carlos Sainz, who’s been close to the project, chipping in. The must-listen for F1, and one you’ll have your own take on, having been out there yourself.

Yes, the NFL still exists. In the quiet of the offseason, Front Office Sports sat down with Fernando Mendoza — the No. 1 pick and reigning Heisman winner — on adjusting to life as a pro. The line that lands for this audience: the biggest shock wasn’t the football, but the “professionalism and business” of the building. Tom Brady’s mentorship, via a nightly read of his newsletter, features too.

The Week Ahead:

• Wimbledon qualifying gets underway. The scramble for the last main-draw places runs Monday to Thursday at Roehampton, before the Championships proper begin on 29 June (British hopeful makes his injury return at Eastbourne this week). The singles draw is made on Friday.

• The World Cup group stage reaches its climax. The final round of group games runs through to Saturday 27th June, settling who survives the 48-team field. Then comes a first: a Round of 32, the extra knockout round that opens on Sunday and runs to 3rd July.

• F1 is back at the Red Bull Ring. After a weekend off, the Austrian Grand Prix takes over Spielberg from 26 to 28 June, with the race on Sunday afternoon. Four different winners in the past four years here.

• And the PWR final lands at the Stoop. Premiership Women’s Rugby crowns its champion on Sunday 28 June at the Twickenham Stoop. Trailfinders, semi-final debutants who knocked out three-time winners Gloucester-Hartpury, face Saracens. Whoever lifts it, the Gloucester-Hartpury era is over (Subscribe to GSR Podcast for the best preview).

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next Monday.

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ICYMI

• The Olympic pay fight escalated. IOC president Kirsty Coventry said she does not believe in paying athletes, then clarified she meant prize money, defending the IOC’s “solidarity” redistribution model. Olympians were unconvinced: Australian champion Cameron McEvoy noted that an appearance fee for every competitor, plus podium prize money, would cost roughly 1.5% of the IOC’s revenue over an Olympic cycle.

• Goodell skipped Congress. Roger Goodell declined to testify at the House Judiciary Committee’s 10th June hearing on the Sports Broadcasting Act’s antitrust exemption, citing the ongoing Sunday Ticket litigation while sidestepping scrutiny of why more NFL games now sit behind streaming paywalls.

• Wimbledon raised the purse. The All England Club lifted 2026 prize money 20% to a record £64.2m, with each singles champion earning £3.6m. It still equals only about 15% of last year’s revenue; players, fresh from press-conference protests at the French Open, want 22% by 2030.

• Utah confirmed a $100m deal with Otro Capital. It is among the first direct PE investments into a college athletic department.

• The Knicks cashed in. New York's first NBA title since 1973 — a 4–1 win over the San Antonio Spurs — became a record off the court too: Fanatics took more than 8,000 orders a minute and posted the biggest 24-hour sales of any league champion to date, ahead of last year's Super Bowl-winning Eagles.

• The women’s Lions found their coach. The British & Irish Lions named Jo Yapp, a former England captain and most recently the Wallaroos’ head coach, as the first head coach of their inaugural women’s team. The first women’s Lions tour brings three Tests against New Zealand’s Black Ferns in September 2027. Hear Yapp on the job below.

The World Cup’s other tournament

The 2026 World Cup kicked off on 11th June, and fashion has treated it as a global shop window from the first whistle. The interesting part is how brands are attaching themselves to it, increasingly not through FIFA, but around it.

Official sponsorship is expensive and crowded, so the more inventive routes run through federations, players, kit suppliers, and the culture surrounding the tournament.

Luxury has moved closest to the team bus. Loewe now dresses Spain off the pitch — its first sporting partnership, and a deal running to the 2030 World Cup that Spain co-hosts. Crucially, it sits separate from the on-field kit contract with adidas: the Spanish FA has sold its formalwear and its kit twice over.

Gabriela Hearst tailors Uruguay in domestic merino, Dunhill suits Japan, Cavallaro Napoli the Netherlands. Off-pitch formalwear has become a category of its own.

Nike works the same idea from the streetwear end. Its X2 programme pairs seven federations with seven designers and seven youth organisations — Jacquemus for France, Palace for England, the Virgil Abloh Archive for the United States, Patta for the Netherlands, NOCTA for Canada, Slawn for Nigeria, PEACEMINUSONE for South Korea, each with a ‘Cryoshot’ boot reworked as a street trainer. These are identity projects, not kit launches, and they sell to people who will never buy a replica shirt.”

Underneath all of it, the replica shirt remains the commercial engine; the global football merchandise market was worth roughly $16bn last year. But the margin has migrated to everything around it. FA’s no longer sell a home and away kit; they sell a wardrobe: pre-match tops, travelwear, training gear, lifestyle capsules, limited collaborations, each carrying a fatter markup than the mass-produced jersey.

Hamilton wins in red.

Lewis Hamilton won the Spanish Grand Prix on Sunday — his first victory for Ferrari, and his first anywhere since the 2024 Belgian Grand Prix, 686 days ago.

A three-stop strategy and a timely virtual safety car set it up, and championship leader Kimi Antonelli’s engine failed while running second. But the pace was real, and over a hot afternoon Hamilton showed, slowly, what he can still do on the track. The win also ended Mercedes’ perfect start to 2026 — six wins from six.

For Ferrari, the result vindicates the commercial logic of the signing. Ferrari did not merely hire one of the grid’s best drivers. It hired the only one who moves freely between Formula 1, fashion, celebrity, and culture in a way no rival can. That dual value is why Ferrari signed him, to lift the team on and off the track.

Ferrari is still the sport’s most valuable team, worth $6.4bn on Sportico’s latest count. But the lead is no longer safe, and the threat is Mercedes.

Mercedes presses Ferrari on both fronts. On the track, it has won every race this season but this one. Off it, it is the better business: its 2025 accounts posted a record £167m operating profit on flat revenue, as sponsorship offset a smaller prize-money cheque. Ferrari owns the bigger brand; Mercedes, second in value at $5.88bn, owns the bigger margin and the faster car. Brand value is not the same as profit, or pace.

One win does not change the balance. But it makes a Ferrari title for Hamilton sound less like fantasy and more like a plan. Barcelona was the first proof. The harder task is turning a moment into a season.

The Week Ahead

• England v New Zealand, second Test. England resume their three-match series from Wednesday (17th–21st June).

• The grass-court swing continues. Tour warm-up events lead into Wimbledon, which opens on 29th June.

• Royal Ascot, 16th–20th June. Britain’s richest flat meeting — five days, 35 races, £10.65m in prize money — is as much a fashion and society fixture as a sporting one. The Gold Cup runs on Thursday’s Ladies’ Day.

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Podcasts

• The Good, the Scaz & the Rugby: The award-winning women's rugby podcast, hosted by World Cup-winning Red Roses Emily Scarratt and Natasha Hunt with broadcaster Elma Smit. Six seasons in, it pairs real warmth and humour with serious ground on player welfare, coaching, and the growth of the women's game, and lands access to most outlets can’t. This week's way in: their interview with the first Head Coach of the British and Irish Lions women's team.

• Racing Pilot. A podcast for anyone who wants the commercial machinery behind the racing. The hosts work on the sport’s business and media side, and guests include Tiggy Vallon of Paddock Project and The Race’s Edd Straw. Start with the recent episode on how the average F1 team came to be worth more than $3bn.

That’s a wrap for this week. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next Monday.

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On 10th June, the House Judiciary Committee will ask Roger Goodell to defend a law older than the Super Bowl.

The 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act underwrites the NFL’s economics, and Washington has begun probing where it bends. Chairman Jim Jordan has invited the commissioner to a hearing titled “Examining the Sports Broadcasting Act”, which Goodell can decline. He is unlikely to.

The Act does one essential thing: it grants the NFL a narrow exemption from antitrust law, letting it pool its clubs’ media rights and sell them as a single package. Without it, 32 clubs jointly setting the price of their broadcasts would invite prosecution. That permission built the modern league. Each of the 32 teams collected an identical $432.6m in national revenue last year, most of it from television, up from $138m eighteen years ago. Pooled selling, shared equally, keeps Green Bay competitive with Dallas.

The deals have since outgrown anything 1961 anticipated. The NFL’s current contracts run beyond $110bn through 2033: roughly $2.7bn a year from ESPN and ABC, $2.2bn from Fox, $2.1bn from CBS, and $2bn from NBC. Football supplied 86 of the 100 most-watched US broadcasts last year, by the league’s own count, and the NFL has priced that scarcity accordingly.

The exemption, though, covers only broadcast networks. Courts have repeatedly held that it does not extend to cable, satellite, or streaming, and the NFL’s agreements with Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube have never fallen under its protection.

So when politicians ask whether the league has outgrown its antitrust privileges, they point at deals the privilege never covered — and at a renegotiation window that opens in 2029.

Aired, Not Available

The complaint driving the scrutiny is simpler than the law: fans cannot find the games. The NFL answers with one statistic. More than 87% of its games air on free broadcast television, the league says, which keeps football within reach of almost everyone. The number holds up. Broadcast networks carried 237 of the 272 regular-season games last season.

It answers a narrower question than it appears to. The figure counts games shown on a broadcast network in a particular market, not games a given fan could watch for free from their own sofa. Sunday afternoon coverage on CBS and Fox is local: a market sees its own team, not the dozen other games kicking off at the same hour. Apply those restrictions, as Sportico’s Anthony Crupi did, and the share genuinely available free to any single viewer falls closer to 33%. A Steelers fan in Miami learns the gap quickly.

Cost compounds the friction. Ten networks and services will carry NFL games this season, and a fan who wants all of them pays around $1,000. That bill lands on a shrinking base. Pew now counts just over a third of American households as cable or satellite subscribers, and the figure skews sharply towards the old. “Available on television” reaches fewer homes each year — and the homes it reaches are not the ones the league most wants to grow.

The British Experiment

Britain has already watched this experiment run. For 34 years, the Champions League final aired free-to-air in the UK. This season it did not. TNT Sports, which holds the rights, kept the Arsenal–Paris Saint-Germain final behind its paywall — the first time the showpiece had not been free in the UK since the competition took its current form. Warner Bros Discovery, TNT’s owner, judged the subscriptions worth more than the reach.

The audience answered. Seven million people watched Arsenal lose, against the 12.6m who watched Liverpool win the 2022 final on free-to-air BT Sport. Same competition, comparable English interest, a little over half the viewers. The drop did not move to another screen so much as vanish from the legal one: reports counted some 16.2m illegal streams of the match.

The politics followed the audience. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and London Mayor Sadiq Khan both publicly called for the final to be shown free of charge. Neither could compel it; the final does not sit on the UK’s protected “crown jewels” list, but the instinct is the same one stirring in Washington. When access to a national event narrows, the state takes an interest.

For the NFL, the British case is the warning it has spent years engineering against. The league’s whole defence rests on the claim that football remains broadly free; the Champions League shows what happens to a marquee event when that ceases to be true. Reach falls sharply, piracy fills the gap, and politicians arrive.

Who actually gains?

Strip away the hearing’s language of consumer protection and a commercial question remains: who gains if the exemption goes? The answer is not fans.

The model holds because every club shares equally. The national television money arrives in equal portions, pooled and split 32 ways, which is what lets a city of 100,000 field a team that can beat one drawn from a market fifty times larger.

Remove the exemption and the pooling unravels. A handful of large-market clubs, the Cowboys, the Patriots, the Giants, could sell their own broadcasts and keep the proceeds, out-earning the shared portion several times over. The league’s competitive balance is a financial arrangement before it is a sporting one, and that arrangement is what the exemption protects.

The consumer outcome runs the same way. Thirty-two clubs selling rights separately would scatter games across more platforms, not fewer, and a fan chasing one team would pay more, not less. The remedy most likely to follow from killing the exemption is the disease the hearing claims to treat. That tension sits at the centre of the debate, and the politicians have little reason to name it: doing so dissolves their grievance.

The renegotiation clock

Timing explains the urgency better than principle does. The NFL can opt out of its current deals after the 2029 season, and is widely expected to, which makes the next three years a negotiation rather than a settlement. Paramount’s merger with Skydance has already triggered a clause letting the league reopen the CBS contract early, with the new figure expected 50 to 60% above the current $2.1bn a year. Leverage assembled now shapes those numbers. A commissioner facing a hostile committee weeks before he renegotiates his largest contracts is a commissioner with less room.

The pressure is real, not theatrical. The Justice Department is examining whether the streaming deals breach competition law, and Senator Mike Lee wrote to the DOJ and FTC in March urging exactly that.

The courts have already tested the argument: in 2024 a Los Angeles jury found the NFL liable for inflating the price of Sunday Ticket, its out-of-market package, and awarded subscribers $4.7bn, a sum that trebles to roughly $14bn under antitrust law.

The trial judge vacated the verdict over a flaw in the plaintiffs’ evidence; the Ninth Circuit heard their appeal in March and has not yet ruled. That case asks the question the hearing only poses: whether the exemption reaches past free-to-air broadcast. The FCC’s public docket drew more than 8,000 comments, almost all hostile to the streaming shift, a measure of political heat rather than representative opinion, but heat counts in an election cycle. And the loudest voices in favour of keeping games free are not just fans. Broadcasters have urged Congress to revisit the Act, the incumbents who lose most as the NFL’s inventory drifts to streamers, lobbying to slow the drift. Their consumer argument is sincere, and their commercial interest is plain, and both are true at once.

The real test

The hearing will produce its theatre — an opening statement, five-minute rounds, a headline or two. None of it is the real test. The exemption is not in immediate danger; Congress rarely rewrites a law it can more usefully threaten. The signal to watch is operational, and it sits with the NFL, not the committee.

That signal is a free window going dark. The first marquee game to vanish behind a paywall was the 2024 Chiefs–Dolphins playoff, sold to Peacock; the next will matter more. Move Sunday Night Football, or a wild-card weekend, to a single streamer, and the 87% defence stops being true on the day it is needed most.

The Champions League showed how quickly a paywalled audience shrinks. The NFL knows the figure, which is why it has so far held the line, and why the moment it stops holding will tell us more than any testimony.

Beneath the antitrust language and the consumer grievance, one number governs the argument. Each franchise takes home $432.6m, the same in Green Bay as in Dallas. Pooled selling produces that equality; the exemption protects the pooling. Strip it away, and the cheque stops being equal, which is the outcome a few large-market owners would welcome and the league as a whole would not.

The committee will frame 10th June as a hearing about fans. In the end, it is a hearing about who gets to keep the cheque.

Later this week, there’ll be a longer piece on NFL broadcasting rights.

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Gucci comes to Formula 1

Alpine filled my feed this week because, from 2027, the fashion house replaces BWT as Alpine’s title sponsor, and the team will race as the Gucci Racing Alpine F1 Team, the first time a luxury label has held an F1 title slot. No one has confirmed the figure, but reporting puts it at around $50–60m per season and north of $150m across the deal once success bonuses are counted.

What interests me is how little of this is new. Flavio Briatore, now Alpine’s executive adviser, ran the same play at Benetton, whose clothing money carried Michael Schumacher to titles in 1994 and 1995 — and he brokered this deal too. It all runs through one relationship: Luca de Meo, the former Renault chief, now runs Kering, Gucci’s parent. This is as much a corporate alliance as a sponsorship.

The complication is that both sides are buying from weakness. Gucci’s sales have slipped, and Kering is mid-turnaround; Alpine finished last in 2025. The encouraging part is the car; they’ve opened 2026 in fifth, their strongest start in years.

One subplot worth following: Otro Capital’s 24% stake is up for sale at roughly £536m, valuing the team near $3bn, about three times the 2023 price. Mercedes looked, baulked at the number, and withdrew. Whether that opens a path for Christian Horner or whether Renault has parked the sale entirely is the open question.

Champions League Final

PSG beat Arsenal in Budapest to keep the Champions League, and as a spectacle it delivered: 1-1, settled on penalties, Arsenal painfully close in their first final since 2006 before Eze and Gabriel missed from the spot. Back-to-back titles put this PSG side in any conversation about the modern greats.

What held my attention, though, wasn’t the match but where UEFA now stages them. The final used to be a roadshow; between the 1993 rebrand and Istanbul in 2005, thirteen finals went to twelve different cities, with only Munich repeating. In the twenty years since, the same handful of grounds keep coming back: Wembley has staged three (2011, 2013, 2024), with Paris, Lisbon, Munich and Madrid taking two apiece. The next few only continue the trend: Madrid in 2027 (last there in 2019), Munich, the sole bidder for 2028 (it hosted just last year), and either Wembley or the rebuilt Camp Nou in 2029.

The cause is UEFA’s own requirements. The demands on capacity, hotel stock, and transport now rule out most of the continent, so the showpiece keeps returning to the same handful of mega-stadiums. It is edging towards the NFL’s model: a fixed rotation of giant venues in major cities.

Where it goes from here is the interesting part. The logical endpoint is a settled rota of super-venues, and perhaps, before long, a final beyond Europe altogether: UEFA has begun discussions about a possible final in New York. How far the biggest night in European club football is willing to travel is worth watching.

Baseball’s labour talks have begun

Baseball’s next round of collective bargaining is under way, and it opened precisely where everyone expected.

The owners tabled their first offer on Thursday: a hard salary cap of $245.3m and a floor of $171.2m from 2027, alongside a 50/50 revenue split and the pooling of all local television money. It is the first time they have formally proposed a cap in three decades. The players’ union has refused one for fifty years and showed no sign of shifting; its interim chief, Bruce Meyer, called the offer an attempt to control costs.

For scale: roughly half the league currently spends below the proposed floor, while only a handful of clubs — the Dodgers, Mets, and Yankees among them — sit above the ceiling. The back-to-back champion Dodgers, on a payroll north of $400m, would have the most to unwind. The floor is the element the union might accept, since it forces the cheapest owners to spend; the cap is the one it won’t.

This is an opening position, not a deal, and there is a long way to run; the current agreement holds until 1st December 2026.

The Week Ahead

NBA Finals: Knicks vs Spurs, Game 1, Thursday 1.30 am GMT (Sky Sport/Amazon Prime)

New York's first Finals since 1999, and a rematch of the very series Tim Duncan's Spurs won back then. Win it, and it's the Knicks' first title since 1973. For the NBA, it is close to an ideal draw: its biggest market against Victor Wembanyama, the 22-year-old already cast as the face of the sport, in the opening showcase under the league's new media deal.

The Spurs are favourites, and the Knicks are underdogs for the first time all postseason — which is just how New York likes it.

French Open: Finals Saturday & Sunday (TNT Sports)

The men’s draw has been turned upside down. The Sinner–Alcaraz pairing that has won the last fifteen majors between them is gone, Alcaraz out injured, Sinner beaten in the second round, Djokovic knocked out by 19-year-old João Fonseca — so a first-time champion is guaranteed.

The defending women’s champion, Coco Gauff, is out too, beaten in the third round. Tonight’s night session on Court Philippe-Chatrier is also a blockbuster game (around 7:15 pm GMT, TNT Sports): world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka against Naomi Osaka, into the second week of Roland Garros for the first time in years and playing again like the four-time champion she is.

Monaco Grand Prix: Qualifying Saturday, 3 pm GMT & Race Sunday, 2 pm GMT (Sky Sports)

Monaco's race is, more often than not, a procession: track position is everything, and overtaking is close to impossible. So if you watch one session, make it Saturday's qualifying. A single lap flat-out between those barriers, with no margin at all, is still one of the best hours of the F1 calendar, and pole here is worth more than almost anywhere else on the schedule.

A big change this year: for the first time, F1 has moved the race to early June for freight and sustainability reasons, a rare alteration to a weekend that has barely changed since the first Monaco Grand Prix in 1929.

Kimi Antonelli leads the title race for Mercedes.

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Budapest’s hosting headache: on how much staging the final stretched the city.

Joey D'Urso

Is Budapest too small for the Champions League Final?

Hello and welcome to my weekly newsletter about football, and how it explains global politics, money and power…

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6 months ago · 16 likes · 10 comments · Joey D'Urso

Something lighter from : a profile of the man behind some of Formula 1’s most iconic trophies.

The Grand Prix Life

Inside the Paddock: The Man Behind Formula 1’s Most Iconic Trophies

There are names in Formula 1 that everyone knows — the drivers, the team principals, the architects of speed. And then there are the people whose work becomes part of the sport’s history, even if they rarely stand in the spotlight themselves. Richard Fox is one of them…

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5 months ago · 4 likes · Stephanie V.

Podcasts

Front Office Sports Today: the pick for NBA Finals week, built around an interview with Mark Cuban on owning an NBA franchise.

The Economist: Why snooker, long associated with Sheffield pubs, has become one of the fastest-growing sports in China.

That’s the first one. If it’s your sort of thing, subscribe, and I’ll be in your inbox again next Monday.

Twelve months on, it’s gone further than I expected. I’ve met some incredible people, ended up in rooms I never thought I’d be in, learned a huge amount, and worked alongside brilliant writers. I’ve even seen my own writing on platforms I love reading — the , and .

A year in, I’ve also got a much clearer sense of which parts of this I love, which parts you enjoy, and how to keep the whole thing sustainable without burning out. So a couple of things are changing.

What’s changing

First: I’m stopping the weekly F1 breakdowns.

Partly because there are people already doing them better than I could justify spending my time matching ( and are both worth your inbox), and partly because dropping them frees me up to write more deep dives, which are consistently what you engage with most.

I’ll still be posting F1 content, and the best bits of those breakdowns won’t disappear either; they’ll fold into something new.

Second: from Monday 1st June, AGM is going to look a bit different.

There’ll be a free weekly newsletter: my take on the business and cultural stories in sport that catch my attention that week, plus a few Substack and podcast recommendations. Free to everyone, every week.

And then there are the deep dives. These are the pieces AGM is really built around: why families are quietly behind the county cricket resurgence, what the NFL’s international strategy actually adds up to, what the biggest untapped market in F1 is, and plenty more on the business, culture, and politics shaping sport.

Here’s how it’ll work:

Free: the weekly newsletter and one deep dive a month.

Paid (£5/month or £45/year - two months free): every deep dive, plus the full archive. (£5 covers the flat white I’ll order in the café I’m usually writing from — so you’re basically buying the coffee that keeps me going.)

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If you’ve been reading for a while, paying is the thing that lets AGM keep getting better — more reporting, more of the work you signed up to read. If you’d rather stay on the free list, that’s genuinely great too. You’ll still get lots in your inbox every week.

Either way, thank you for reading and for all the support you’ve shown AGM so far. The best of it is still to come.

For those of you who are new: a few of this year’s most-read pieces, in case you missed them:

This week’s piece has been over a year in the making, a personal recount of my search for the best live sport experience in London for young families.

Scroll to the end for recommended reading & listening from other Substackers. This week features , , and .

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A boundary went past us, and my one-year-old daughter clapped along with the crowd. She had no idea what she was clapping for. The Oval was packed in the way county cricket is packed on a warm spring afternoon; slowly, contentedly, with picnics and pushchairs parked along the boundary.

I’d spent the last year trying to find somewhere in London where I could take a baby to watch live sport without apology. I’d tried most of the obvious options. None of them came close to this.

My daughter was born last spring. The first few months were the usual quiet recalibration of an old life around a new one. Live sport mattered more than I’d admitted. I’d grown up with weekends shaped around fixtures, and I wanted some version of that for her, something we could share, even though at this stage she’d remember none of it.

So I started looking. The criteria were simple. Somewhere close to home. Somewhere, a baby and a buggy weren’t a problem. Somewhere with enough going on to hold her attention, but I could leave easily when she’d had enough.

The list narrowed quickly. Most Premier League clubs don’t admit children under two, which dispensed with football before I’d really started.

I’m a long-time Harlequins supporter and tried the Stoop a few times. The verdict was mixed. The club itself is trying hard, the staff are good, the facilities are there, but a rugby crowd is a rugby crowd, and the Stoop is a small, intense ground. There were sideways looks when we arrived after kick-off. Sharper ones when we left a few minutes before half-time because, as anyone with a one-year-old will tell you, children are children.

None of this is the club’s fault. It’s a broader problem for rugby, which has a fan base that hasn’t yet decided whether it wants to grow or keep things as they’ve always been.

Wimbledon was meant to be the easy win. I grew up a short bike ride from the All England Club and had a vision of a picnic with my family on Henman Hill while dipping in and out of tennis on the outside courts. We even reached out in advance to ask whether it was worth attending with a baby, were reassured it would be fine, and were encouraged to bring her along.

The reality was very few facilities geared toward babies, and staff who looked genuinely surprised that we’d brought one. None of it felt welcoming. The Championships sells itself as a family event. In practice it’s a Grand Slam, and Grand Slams are built around adults who’ve planned a day around the tennis.

Three sports, three different reasons. The pattern was clearer than I’d expected. When you arrive with a small child, you’ll get a look that says, “Not here, not today.”

The place that ended up working was Surrey County Cricket Club, at The Kia Oval.

Cricket runs across the whole day and embraces the slower side of life. You arrive when you arrive. You leave when you leave. The format absorbs interruptions in a way football and rugby can’t, because cricket was built for a slower kind of attention.

The rhythm of the day suits a one-year-old in a way no other live sport does. There are long, quiet stretches where she can nap in the buggy or a carrier. There are sudden bursts of noise, a wicket, a boundary, the crowd standing up, that she finds thrilling. There are intervals long enough to walk her around the ground. There are families everywhere doing exactly the same thing, which means no one is looking at us, silently hoping we’d leave.

None of this happened by accident. It’s part of a concerted effort by Surrey to make the Kia Oval a home for families.

Earlier this season, I went down to The Oval to meet Rebecca Lockyer, Surrey’s Head of Ticketing, Membership and Supporter Services, to learn how they’ve gone about it.

Rebecca was clear that this hasn’t been a recent pivot. “We’ve always tried to be welcoming for everyone and anyone,” she told me, but added that a few years ago, the club ran a deliberate exercise asking what could be improved for families.

The most visible expression of that strategy is the Pride of Lions, Surrey’s junior membership for under-16s. It costs £20 a year. It includes access to every domestic match at the Kia Oval, County Championship, Vitality Blast, and The Hundred, plus access to reserved seats in the Family Zone during Blast fixtures, an interactive membership pack, and invitations to events with players and coaches.

Surrey describes it as the largest junior membership offering in the country, and given the club crossed 20,000 Members in 2025, it isn’t a side project. It’s a pipeline. There are now over 2,000 Pride of Lions members, with total under-18 membership sitting just over 3,000.

It also goes beyond tickets and membership to the ground’s infrastructure itself. Family rooms. Spaces for women to breastfeed. Practical buggy space, and an attitude from all staff that families are welcome no matter what.

The part Surrey is really getting right is the balance. If you’ve paid serious money for a ticket, you don’t want your day disrupted by children being children, and Rebecca was honest about that tension. She described Surrey’s approach as ‘solutions-led’. The Family Zones at Vitality Blast and The Hundred fixtures are the clearest example: dedicated areas with access to rooms full of games and activities, where children can take a break from the cricket without their parents missing the game. The logic cuts both ways. Families get a space designed for them. Other spectators get to watch the cricket undisturbed.

The same thinking has now extended to members, with a dedicated family room inside the pavilion, for Blast fixtures on Sunday. This isn’t paying lip service to inclusivity by adding a buggy park and a baby change and hoping everyone is fine with it. It’s a genuine strategy for making the experience work for everyone.

The obvious risk in any of this is that traditional members resent it. Rebecca said the club had been alive to that, “but we spoke to those members in the pavilion, and they are so happy about it.” The reasoning she described was long-term: those young children could one day be members themselves and part of the club.

Surrey is not alone in this. The Hundred’s 2025 figures show families now make up 41% of attendance, with junior tickets accounting for another 23%. Across the County Championship, attendances have climbed steadily for four seasons. Surrey set a 21st-century record at The Oval in 2025 with 85,000 spectators across the Championship season, and a single-match high of 14,000 against Essex. Four of the seven fixtures last year saw more than 10,000 spectators come through the gates.

There are structural advantages that make cricket well-suited to a good family experience. Multiple formats let the club tailor the day to different kinds of supporters. The game plays out over a longer period, with ebbs and flows, which makes it easy for families to dip in and out.

Surrey is also well positioned to market itself as a family venue: The Oval is in south London, easy to reach for anyone living in the city, and in an area many young families call home.

My journey over the past year has shown that there is no perfect experience for families at live sport, but on the evidence of the past year, cricket at Surrey is the best one I’ve found.

So if you’ve recently become a parent and you’re looking for a great way to spend a weekend this spring or summer, I’d start at The Oval.

Recommendations:

• sits down with Jake Mangin, head coach of Chilean side Selknam, for a state-of-play conversation on Super Rugby Americas.

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Ep.13 – Super Rugby Americas State of Play with Jake Mangin

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• breaks down how stadium financing actually works, covering bank loans, municipal bonds, and private placements.

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As sport has entered an era of hyper-commercialization, with a relentless search for new revenue streams, one critical revenue pillar has emerged – new stadiums. By now you have probably seen hundreds of posts and discussions on this topic, so I will skip pontificating too much about stadiums as commercial engines for the sports teams…

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• explains why athletes were the only ones who got this year’s Met Gala right, and why sport is increasingly the most exciting collaborator in fashion.

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It’s always the most anticipated date of the year for us fashion people, and one of the few moments where you can still spot great couture and genuinely new ideas within the fashion landscape. But this may have been the most underwhelming Met Gala in a very long time and ironically…

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• argues that the IPL has gone from venture capital to index fund, and explains why Blackstone, RedBird, and the Glazers are now treating franchise ownership as a serious long-term asset class.

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Welcome to the IPL, the S&P 500 of sports investment

In 2008, Warren Buffett made a bet. The world’s most respected investor wagered $1 million that a simple S&P 500 index fund, which tracks the performance of 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the US, would outperform a carefully selected basket of hedge funds over the next decade. The hedge…

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6 months ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Inside-Edge and Joshua Evans

This week, I’ve been working with on a fun one: football’s fashion moment.

If you’re enjoying Any Given Monday, tap subscribe and follow on Instagram.

This piece was co-written with . Check out her Substack for more.

In September 2024, a runway was built on the pitch at the Emirates Stadium.

Grime artist and lifelong Arsenal fan Ghetts opened with a spoken word piece. Clara Amfo, Michael Dapaah, and actor Michael Ward watched from the front row.

Then Declan Rice walked, wearing a tailored reimagining of Arsenal’s away kit by Foday Dumbuya, the Sierra Leonean-British designer behind London label Labrum.

It was London Fashion Week. The venue was a football ground. And the strangest thing about it was that nobody seemed particularly surprised.

Four months later, at Anfield, Liverpool’s squad walked down the tunnel against Newcastle in nautical stripes, tailored navy blazers, and knit jumpers stitched with Tommy Hilfiger’s red, white, and blue block. It was the first matchday outing of a partnership the club had called a “first of its kind in world football.” Liverpool won 4-1. The outfits got nearly as much attention as the scoreline.

Two clubs. Two completely different approaches. Same underlying conviction: that in 2026, a football club’s off-pitch identity matters almost as much as what happens on it.

For decades, the relationship between football and fashion followed a simple script. A kit manufacturer made the shirts. A sponsor went to the front. Replicas were sold in the club shop alongside scarves and keyrings. The most adventurous thing a club might do is release a retro range at Christmas.

What changed is the audience. Younger supporters, Gen Z especially, engage with clubs through culture and identity as much as through match results. A 19-year-old in New York or Lagos might discover a club’s badge on a jacket before they ever watch a game.

The NBA worked this out years ago, turning tunnel walks into weekly style moments and players into fashion figures in their own right. Formula 1 followed, with the paddock becoming a rolling runway. Football, the biggest sport on earth, was late to the party. It is making up ground fast.

The shift has been sharpest in the Premier League, where global audiences and cultural capital collide. Arsenal have built what amounts to a fashion programme, a rolling sequence of collaborations with independent London labels that now stretches to more than fifty collections in under two years.

Liverpool has taken the opposite path, partnering with a single global brand and embedding it deep into the matchday experience.

One is a creative director. The other is an institutional deal. Both are bets on the same idea: that the clubs which win the off-pitch culture war will be the ones that grow fastest in the next decade.

For Arsenal, the story starts in 2019, when Los Angeles streetwear label 424, founded by Guillermo Andrade, became their official formalwear partner. It was a signal that few people fully registered at the time. 424 designed suits for the first-team players, the manager, senior staff, and, notably, Arsenal Women, making it one of the earliest fashion collaborations to span both the men’s and women’s sides of a club.

Then came Labrum. Then came Aries.

In October 2024, Arsenal dropped a 26-piece capsule collection with Aries, a London-based independent streetwear brand. The collection was fronted by Martin Odegaard, Bukayo Saka, Declan Rice, and Alessia Russo, alongside musicians Ghetts, Knucks, and Lava La Rue.

It was the most successful collaboration the fashion label had ever produced. At peak demand, Arsenal processed orders for Aries items every 2.5 seconds.

A year later, in October 2025, came A-COLD-WALLs, a 22-piece limited-edition collaboration with Samuel Ross’s London-based label, marking the designer’s first-ever partnership with a football club. The collection drew a line between Arsenal’s industrial origins and A-COLD-WALLs signature architectural minimalism. Garment-dyed finishes, layered dye sublimation prints, hi-build textures. Saka, Saliba, Rice, and Odegaard featured in the campaign alongside players from the women’s squad.

And beyond the headline collaborations, the output has been relentless. Since July 2024, Arsenal have released more than 50 different clothing collections and ranges.

Liverpool’s approach could hardly be more different.

Where Arsenal assembled a roster of independents, Liverpool went all in on a single name. On January 8, 2026, the club announced a partnership with Tommy Hilfiger, the first time the brand had entered club football, and a deal Liverpool called a first of its kind in world football.

Just a few weeks prior, on the eighth of the same month, Liverpool and Hilfiger debuted the announcement of a “first-of-its-kind partnership in world football.”

The new relationship will see the multinational brand dress both the men’s and women’s Liverpool squads for matchday arrivals and collaborate on global campaigns.

The New York brand and the club from Liverpool will work together on special Tommy Hilfiger-curated collections and will also include co-branded club capsules to bring the clothing giant’s prep heritage to Anfield and fans across the world.

In celebration of the newfound collaboration, an announcement featured first-team players and stars of both the men’s and women’s sides, including Virgil van Dijk, Dominik Szoboszlai, Florian Wirtz, Conor Bradley, and Hugo Ekitike, as well as Gemma Bonner and Leanne Kiernan.

Van Dijk said, “It’s great to see our LFC club partnership with Tommy Hilfiger go live. We as players are excited to see the collaboration come to life, bringing together fashion, culture and heritage.”

To further mark the announcement, the largest Tommy Hilfiger flag ever produced was unfurled at Anfield. Pieces of the flag were donated to the Silly Goose Foundation, which was founded by Reagan, a lifelong Liverpool fan and LFC Foundation participant, who “inspires people via her passion for textiles, art and design, frequently sewing LFC-themed pieces that are auctioned for charity.” The flag will subsequently be repurposed into pieces that will be auctioned to raise funds for charity.

This is Tommy Hilfiger’s first foray into the club football world, after previously working with teams in other sports, namely the U.S. SailGP Team and, most recently, a move from Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport to the Cadillac Formula 1 Team.

But why now? Why with Liverpool FC?

Ben Latty, Liverpool’s Chief Commercial Officer, mentioned that the partnership works so well due to a “long-standing connection to innovative style and a deep-rooted sense of community.”

Tommy Hilfiger himself added, “For my entire career, I’ve been inspired by sports icons, stories and uniforms. I am drawn to teams with deep fan heritage and value-driven storytelling, and Liverpool Football Club has an unmatched history shaped by its people - their belief, resilience and pride.”

The men’s squad hit the tunnel styled in Tommy Hilfiger as part of their matchday looks against Newcastle, a game they’d later win 4-1.

Many of the players wore pieces selected for them during a styling session with Randy Cousin, who is Head of Styling at Tommy Hilfiger.

In the video posted by LFC, Cousin explained that the Tommy team meticulously reviewed each player’s social media accounts, noting details such as how they wear their clothes, the right fit, how they style stripes, whether they favour colour in their wardrobe—everything.

The result? Nautical style, American prep, and red, white, and blue featured on players of one of the world’s most well-known teams.

Both of these fashion-forward approaches from Arsenal and Liverpool suggest that a game long shaped by practicality and driven by performance may be stepping into a new season. And in it, players don sharper tailoring and far more stylish boots.

It’s not just Arsenal and Liverpool, though. The fashion bug has spread to other football clubs and has long been present in other sports, such as basketball.

Slightly ahead of its time, New York–based luxury label Thom Browne famously dressed FC Barcelona as the club’s “official off-pitch outfitter” during the 2018/19 season.

And most similar to the Liverpool deal, Real Madrid and Louis Vuitton announced their partnership in June 2025. LVMH is no stranger to the sporting arena, having already made its mark in F1 and designed trophy trunks for some of the world’s most high-profile competitions.

Now, the fashion house is taking on the task of dressing the players of one of Europe’s most successful clubs. Louis Vuitton will provide exclusive outfits for the men’s and women’s football squads, as well as the men’s basketball team, styling players for appearances and designing travel accessories for the club.

Taking it a step further to seal and personalise this partnership, the travel side of the collection will feature Louis Vuitton’s signature Monogram canvas (1) reworked in Real Madrid’s signature white and gold (2) personalised with the club’s “RM” initials and (3) finished with exclusive leather charms.

Similarly, the trend continues in Serie A. Giorgio Armani will dress Juventus’ men’s first team in bespoke suits through the 2025/26 and 2026/27 seasons, while Emporio Armani has partnered with Napoli as a technical sponsor, featuring its EA7 logo on the club’s jerseys and providing off-the-pitch apparel.

However, it goes beyond luxury outfitters dressing teams.

Jerseys themselves are becoming more fashionable, and clubs like Ligue 1’s Paris Saint-Germain have even been credited by Vogue with positioning the team as a fashion and lifestyle proposition, especially with their work with the Jordan Brand.

This makes merging soccer and fashion accessible to fans and players alike.

Just look at PSG’s recent collaboration with the local French brand Walk in Paris.

With teams like Venezia FC focusing on jersey aesthetics, sports giants like Adidas bringing back retro kits that spark a fashionable wave of nostalgia, the rise of the “blokecore” and “blokette” trends on social media, and luxury brands collaborating with Europe’s biggest clubs, football is becoming more fashionable across the board.

So, what does this mean for football overall?

Firstly, the growing trend of younger supporters incorporating sporty pieces, such as jerseys, into everyday outfits means fans can participate in the movement, too.

And secondly, the emergence of new partnerships, even beyond those mentioned here, suggests that more luxury brands will continue entering football and, more broadly, sport as a whole. Whether through collaborations with clubs or ambassador deals with individual players, the possibilities are nearly limitless.

For clubs like Paris Saint-Germain, the ambition is clear: to evolve into something bigger than a football team. Increasingly, clubs are positioning themselves not just within the sporting world but also within the lifestyle space.

And for clubs like Arsenal and Liverpool, the sky remains the limit as they seek to establish themselves in the fashion world.

As Daniel Yaw Miller wrote in his recent Substack piece that detailed Liverpool’s Hugo Ekitike sitting front row next to Vogue’s Anna Wintour at Balenciaga’s Paris Fashion Week show:

“The fact that Ekitike was allowed to travel to fashion week ahead of the Champions League tie on Tuesday night could speak to Liverpool’s wider ambitions to be seen as a team immersed in the fashion industry”

Football has officially shifted beyond the pitch - into the wardrobe.

This piece was co-written with . Check out her Substack for more.

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