Photo: Rlwjones / Wikimedia Commons, VAR decision during an FA Cup match at the Etihad Stadium, Manchester (4 January 2020). Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

In the 72nd minute at Stamford Bridge, Cole Palmer played Estêvão through on goal. The Brazilian finished high into the Manchester United net.

The goal didn’t stand.

Officials reviewed the decision and ruled Estêvão offside. It was his second disallowed goal of the afternoon.

There’s nothing particularly controversial about disallowing an offside goal. If a player is offside, the goal shouldn’t count. Having technology available to help officials get those decisions right seems difficult to argue against.

But the ball had crossed the line. The goal had initially been awarded. Then it was taken away.

Football has always had incorrect decisions, including ones that changed matches. VAR was introduced to correct some of the most consequential mistakes. And there is evidence that it does.

According to the Premier League’s Key Match Incidents Panel, 88% of 138 selected referee incidents through the first seven rounds of the 2026/27 season were judged correct on the field. After the VAR process, that figure rose to 99%.

Those figures don’t cover every decision made during those matches. They’re judgments made by a panel applying the laws and the league’s officiating framework. But they do show that VAR has corrected mistakes that otherwise would have stood.

That matters. A wrongly disallowed winner or an incorrectly awarded penalty can change a match. Removing VAR would mean accepting that some of those mistakes would go uncorrected.

What surprised me when looking into the system was how much its designers had already considered the potential cost of those corrections.

During VAR’s original development, the International Football Association Board described its philosophy as “minimum interference – maximum benefit.” The intention was to correct consequential errors while protecting the flow and emotion of football.

IFAB’s rules try to manage that trade-off. VAR can only examine certain incidents, and overturning a subjective decision requires a high threshold. Offside positions are treated differently because they’re considered factual decisions.

But limiting interventions doesn’t mean limiting checks. Every potential goal is checked, even if the decision eventually stands. Most of those checks happen without a formal review, and some without a noticeable delay.

The number of overturned decisions tells us little about how often supporters actually experience a delay, or how those delays affect them.

IFAB requires reviews to be completed efficiently, although accuracy takes priority over speed. There is no maximum time limit.

The rules explain why officials can spend time reviewing a goal. They don’t tell us how supporters feel about waiting.

In March 2026, the Football Supporters’ Association published a survey completed by nearly 8,000 respondents. Among them, 91.6% agreed that VAR had removed the spontaneous joy of goal celebrations.

Overall, 75.7% opposed VAR’s continued use.

The survey was voluntary, so respondents may have been more motivated to participate if they held strong opinions about VAR. We can’t assume these percentages represent Premier League supporters generally. But the dissatisfaction among those who answered is difficult to overlook.

One finding was particularly revealing. Despite those views on VAR, 93% supported retaining goal-line technology.

Both systems use technology to assist officials, but they operate differently. Goal-line technology answers whether the ball has crossed the line and generally communicates its result almost immediately. VAR can involve judgments about contact, interference or other aspects of an incident.

The survey doesn’t establish whether speed, scope, certainty or something else explains the difference in support. It does establish that these respondents didn’t object equally to every use of officiating technology.

That raises another question. Are supporters rejecting VAR itself, or the way it currently works?

In May 2026, YouGov surveyed 434 British adults who watched Premier League football at least fairly regularly. It found that 72% believed VAR had made watching matches less enjoyable.

Yet 68% wanted VAR retained with changes. Only 18% preferred removing it entirely.

That’s a considerable contrast with the FSA’s findings. The surveys used different methods, reached different groups and asked differently worded questions, so their percentages aren’t directly comparable.

Still, both found dissatisfaction with the experience of watching football under VAR, while producing very different answers about what should happen next.

The Premier League has been trying to address some of that frustration. Semi-automated offside technology is intended to speed up certain decisions, while referee announcements and improved communication are meant to explain what’s happening.

Those are reasonable changes. But faster decisions may not entirely solve the problem supporters are describing. They could simply shorten the time spent waiting for an answer.

There is another side to that uncertainty. A goal incorrectly allowed to stand can be just as consequential for the team and supporters on the receiving end. VAR gives officials an opportunity to correct it.

We have evidence that the technology improves the accuracy of selected decisions. We also have evidence that many survey respondents believe it has made football less enjoyable. What we don’t have is a reliable way to determine how much of that dissatisfaction comes from waiting, uncertainty, disagreement with decisions or some combination of them.

Nor can we establish whether the changes being introduced will restore the spontaneity supporters say they’ve lost.

At Stamford Bridge, Estêvão’s goal was initially awarded, then overturned. Officials judged him offside, and VAR gave them the opportunity to correct the decision.

That’s a meaningful improvement.

But IFAB’s original ambition wasn’t only to correct mistakes. It was to do so with as little interference as possible.

The Premier League measures the decisions VAR corrects, and it asks supporters about their experience. What I haven’t found in the published evidence is a clear way to judge whether the balance between the two is the one football originally intended.

Research & References

This article draws on official Premier League match reporting, the league’s Key Match Incidents Panel findings, the International Football Association Board’s VAR protocol and original documentation, and supporter research published by the Football Supporters’ Association and YouGov. Source links are provided throughout the article where the relevant incidents, figures and statements are discussed.

The Premier League’s officiating accuracy figures concern 138 selected referee incidents from the opening seven rounds of the 2026/27 season. They reflect the judgments of the Key Match Incidents Panel and should not be interpreted as accuracy rates for every refereeing decision or every VAR check.

The supporter surveys also require care. The FSA’s March 2026 survey was voluntary and attracted nearly 8,000 respondents. Its results cannot be assumed to represent all Premier League supporters. YouGov’s May 2026 findings came from 434 British adults who watched Premier League football at least fairly regularly. The surveys reached different groups, used different methods and asked different questions. Their percentages are not directly comparable.

IFAB’s protocol establishes the procedures and principles governing VAR, including the distinction between automatic checks and reviews. It does not establish how frequently supporters experience noticeable interruptions or how those interruptions affect their enjoyment of matches.

These limitations matter to the article’s conclusion. The available evidence supports VAR’s contribution to correcting selected officiating decisions and documents dissatisfaction among surveyed supporters. It does not establish the precise causes of that dissatisfaction or whether the current balance between accuracy and interference is the one football’s governing bodies originally intended.

Photo: SdHb / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0.

Within days of footage from an earlier Kylian Mbappé interview circulating online, three Chinese companies had ended their partnerships with him, and a state broadcaster had suspended coverage of Spanish football.

The meme itself had been circulating for years. It was part of a running joke about Mbappé’s influence at Paris Saint-Germain, with images depicting him as powerful political figures. During an interview recorded in April for the French programme The Bridge, he was shown an image placing his face onto that of Mao Zedong, China’s former leader, and appeared to describe the figure as a Chinese dictator. The footage circulated publicly in October.

Mao remains a politically significant and sensitive figure in China, where public criticism of his legacy is subject to restrictions.

The recording was subsequently removed. Reuters reported that it had not independently authenticated the video.

On October 27, Mbappé apologized, describing his comments as ill-judged and acknowledging that they had offended people in China and Chinese communities elsewhere. Chinese companies Mengniu, Shanghai Milkground and Eastroc Beverage ended their commercial relationships with him.

The consequences extended beyond his sponsorship agreements. According to Chinese state-backed media reporting cited by Reuters, state television halted La Liga broadcasts, while another broadcaster, Migu, was reportedly not showing Real Madrid's upcoming match against Racing Santander.

La Liga issued its own apology on October 27. Real Madrid followed the next day.

What caught my attention was something in La Liga’s statement.

The league acknowledged that Mbappé had spoken in a personal capacity and that his remarks did not represent the competition. It nevertheless apologized on behalf of its clubs and announced plans for an awareness and communication protocol involving clubs and players.

I wanted to understand how that happened.

La Liga’s relationship with China didn’t begin with Mbappé, or even with his arrival in Madrid.

The league had been developing its presence in the country for years. By July 2024, its Shanghai office was approaching its tenth anniversary. That month, La Liga announced a memorandum of understanding with China Media Group (CMG), China’s state broadcasting organization, covering cooperation in football.

Two months later, La Liga signed a broadcasting agreement with CMG in Beijing. Javier Tebas attended the ceremony alongside CMG president Shen Haixiong, who also served as a vice minister within the Chinese Communist Party’s publicity department.

The agreement coincided with Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s visit to China. La Liga itself connected its football activities to the broader commercial and institutional relationship between the two countries.

In August 2026, the league announced another agreement, this time with the digital broadcaster Migu. It covered live access to all 380 La Liga matches per season through 2029–30.

In his October 27 statement, Tebas spoke about the league’s longstanding connections with Chinese authorities, sporting institutions, broadcasters and supporters. He argued that the remarks of one individual should not damage those relationships or negatively affect the clubs and partners involved.

In its October 27 statement, the league announced plans to develop an awareness and communication protocol in collaboration with clubs and players. The stated intention was to help prevent similar incidents in the future.

La Liga had acknowledged that Mbappé’s remarks were personal. Yet the response it proposed would extend beyond the player involved, bringing clubs and other players into the discussion.

Cultural-awareness guidance isn’t necessarily unreasonable. Footballers represent clubs with supporters around the world, and understanding how comments might be received elsewhere can be useful.

But what would the protocol actually ask of them?

The announcement didn’t specify whether it would provide voluntary guidance, establish expectations for public communication, or introduce requirements that clubs and players would be expected to follow. It also didn’t explain whether those measures would extend to comments made outside a player’s professional responsibilities.

We also haven’t established whether any of La Liga’s commercial partners or Chinese officials requested the proposed measures.

The relationships La Liga had built in China help explain why it became involved. When the controversy affected those relationships, the league responded. Tebas publicly identified the connections with Chinese institutions, broadcasters, commercial partners and supporters that he wanted to protect.

I kept coming back to the proposed protocol.

What I still don’t know is whether La Liga intends for that protocol to govern what players say outside their professional responsibilities.

Research & References

This article draws on original reporting from Reuters, EFE and ABC News, alongside official statements from La Liga and Real Madrid. The reporting concerns Kylian Mbappé’s remarks, the response from Chinese sponsors and broadcasters, and La Liga’s commercial relationships in China. Source links are provided throughout the article where the relevant events and statements are discussed.

An important limitation concerns the original recording. Reuters reported that it had not independently authenticated the footage. That distinction matters when describing what Mbappé appeared to say, even though his subsequent apology was separately reported.

The central question comes from La Liga’s reported announcement of an awareness and communication protocol involving clubs and players. The available account does not establish whether that protocol would provide voluntary guidance, introduce formal requirements, or apply to remarks made outside players’ professional responsibilities.

Nor have we established whether Chinese officials, broadcasters or commercial partners requested those measures. The timing of La Liga’s response and its existing commercial relationships help explain the circumstances, but they do not establish who proposed the protocol or why particular measures were chosen.

Those limitations shape the conclusion. The article examines how a controversy involving an individual player may affect a league’s wider relationships. It does not establish that La Liga has introduced restrictions on personal expression or that its commercial partners demanded them.

Photo: Paul Thomson, Home Dugout, Old Trafford (2003), via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Manchester United have already shown they can play good football under Michael Carrick.

In January, United beat Manchester City 2–0 at Old Trafford. They defended compactly, protected the middle of the pitch and attacked quickly when opportunities appeared. United’s defensive movements were coordinated, and they were able to exploit the spaces City left available.

Nine months later, United lost 4–1 to Como in the Champions League. Their pressing was far less coordinated. Players moved to close down opponents without consistent support, leaving passing options available and space between United’s lines.

The opposition, personnel and circumstances were different. Two matches can’t establish everything about a manager, much less what happened on the training ground. And while the pressing problems against Como were visible, the footage alone can’t tell us whether they came from the instructions, individual decisions or failures in communication.

If United have demonstrated that they can execute an effective tactical plan, what would it take to make those performances more consistent?

It’s a question that extends beyond Carrick. Erik ten Hag found success by adjusting his approach to the players available. Rúben Amorim arrived with different tactical principles. Each period offered evidence of what United could do, alongside questions about what they could sustain.

Ten Hag’s first season ended with a third-place finish, 75 Premier League points and a League Cup. United had become particularly effective at attacking quickly when opponents left space behind them.

Opta’s expected-points model placed United at 64.21 points that season, nearly eleven fewer than they actually collected.

That doesn’t mean United were lucky to finish third. Expected points estimate results using the quality of chances created and conceded. They aren’t a corrected league table, and they can’t account for every aspect of a team’s performance. Still, the difference raises questions about what lay beneath United’s results.

Carrick’s initial 2026 spell offered another example.

Across his first fourteen Premier League matches in 2026, Carrick’s United collected 32 points. Their expected-goals difference was +2.22, ninth-best in the league over that period. They also scored 27 goals from 20.06 expected goals.

Carrick had made identifiable changes to United’s shape and player roles. The team was winning, and those changes deserve consideration.

The underlying figures, however, suggest that the results were considerably stronger than the balance of chances created and conceded.

That isn’t proof that United were fortunate, or that the improvement couldn’t last. Fourteen matches is a limited sample, and expected goals cannot capture every aspect of a team’s performance.

It does mean the club had more to evaluate than the points total when deciding whether Carrick should lead the team permanently.

These periods aren’t directly comparable. Ten Hag’s figures cover an entire league season, while Carrick’s cover fourteen matches. Expected points and expected-goals difference are different measures, and neither can tell us whether a manager will succeed over several seasons.

They do, however, illustrate why United should be careful about relying too heavily on results when assessing progress.

A team can win while conceding opportunities that may eventually prove costly. It can also improve its performances without immediately seeing those improvements reflected in the table. The difficult part is determining which changes are likely to last.

Ten Hag and Carrick both found success by making use of United’s ability to attack quickly. Does that mean the club should continue building around those strengths?

The football that works with one squad, against one group of opponents, isn’t necessarily the football a club should aim to play five years later.

Amorim’s appointment tested that distinction. He arrived with a recognizable approach built around a back three and wing-backs. United knew what kind of football he had coached successfully before appointing him.

The transition was difficult. Opponents found opportunities around United’s two central midfielders, and the system sometimes left the team exposed.

But the numbers complicate the picture. Across Amorim’s 27 Premier League matches in 2024/25, United averaged 1.24 non-penalty expected goals per game. Through his first eleven league matches the following season, that increased to 1.48.

At the other end, however, non-penalty expected goals conceded rose from 1.34 to 1.51 per match.

United were generating more expected goals in attack, but also allowing opponents more. The samples weren’t equal, and the opening fixtures of 2025/26 were particularly demanding. We can’t attribute those changes entirely to Amorim’s coaching.

There was evidence of attacking development, alongside defensive problems that remained unresolved. That makes it difficult to judge the project from results alone.

A manager should be capable of adapting to the players available. But a club appointing someone for their tactical ideas must understand what those ideas require. Recruitment, development and the time allowed for change are all part of that decision.

United shouldn’t need to rebuild their squad every time they appoint a manager. Equally, insisting that a new coach preserve everything that worked previously would make meaningful change difficult.

The current squad brings that tension into focus.

Matheus Cunha can carry the ball into space. Bryan Mbeumo offers movement across the front line, while Amad can create opportunities in tighter areas. Bruno Fernandes remains an important source of chances, and Benjamin Šeško offers a different presence through the middle.

There are several ways a manager could use those qualities. Finding a combination that consistently produces good opportunities is another matter.

Across United’s opening five Premier League matches of 2026/27, they attempted 113 shots, more than any other team. Yet their average non-penalty expected goals per shot was just 0.08, joint-second lowest in the division.

There was another number worth considering. United had accumulated 9.1 non-penalty expected goals, fourth-highest in the league.

So they were creating a substantial volume of chances, even if the average attempt wasn’t particularly dangerous.

We can’t conclude that United weren’t creating opportunities. But the figures leave questions about where those attempts were coming from, how effectively the available attackers were being used, and whether United could produce a similar attacking threat without relying on so many shots.

Five matches won’t settle those questions. Injuries also affected the combinations available. It’s enough to make them worth examining.

The defensive numbers present a related challenge.

According to Opta, United spent 42 percent of their defensive time in a high block during those opening five league matches, compared with 26 percent during Carrick’s previous spell.

But their higher positioning wasn’t producing many high regains. United recorded 26 high turnovers, fifteenth in the league.

Defending higher requires more than moving players up the pitch. The initial pressure needs support, passing routes need closing, and the defensive line must respond to what happens ahead of it. Otherwise, the spaces United hope to exploit when attacking can become spaces opponents exploit against them.

The January derby demonstrated that Carrick could organize United effectively, although from a more compact defensive position. The defeat to Como showed how difficult that coordination could be to maintain in different circumstances, without establishing precisely why it broke down.

United could examine how a candidate’s teams respond when their initial pressure fails, whether they can create opportunities against organized defenses, and how their approach changes when important players are unavailable.

But the manager isn’t the only person responsible for answering them.

In July 2024, United extended Ten Hag’s contract following a review of the previous season. By October, he had been dismissed.

Amorim arrived the following month with a contract running until 2027.

In October 2025, Jim Ratcliffe publicly argued that Amorim needed three years to demonstrate his ability. Asked whether the club would give him that time, Ratcliffe said yes, pointing to Arsenal’s patience with Mikel Arteta.

Amorim was more cautious. He welcomed the support but acknowledged that football rarely offers those kinds of guarantees.

United dismissed him in January 2026.

That sequence doesn’t establish that the club made the wrong decision. Nor does a public expression of confidence prevent a club from responding to changing circumstances.

But it does leave a question about what United considered sufficient evidence to change direction, particularly after publicly emphasizing the importance of patience.

Carrick’s permanent appointment makes that question particularly relevant.

His initial spell produced excellent results and helped secure Champions League qualification. United had identifiable reasons to retain him. But the underlying numbers also offered grounds for caution.

What expectations did the club establish for the next stage?

We don’t know.

We can examine the appointments, public statements and performances. We can’t establish what was discussed internally, which indicators United prioritized or how they intended to evaluate the longer-term project.

Those limits shouldn’t prevent us from examining the responsibilities involved.

A head coach controls much of the team’s preparation, organization and tactical development. The club determines who holds that position, influences the squad through recruitment and decides how the coach’s work will be judged.

If United want to defend higher, the available players must be capable of supporting that approach. If they want greater control in possession, recruitment and coaching need to work toward the same objective. And if they expect a difficult transition, they need to distinguish between problems that come with development and problems that suggest the approach itself isn’t working.

That doesn’t require United to commit indefinitely to any manager. It requires clarity about what they’re asking that manager to accomplish.

What does Manchester United actually need from its next manager?

The evidence doesn’t point toward one formation or a particular possession figure. United have played effective football in different ways, and the current squad has qualities worth building around.

For United, that means examining whether a coach has demonstrated an ability to organize a team collectively, create opportunities against different defensive approaches, and adjust when opponents begin finding answers.

That standard applies to Carrick as much as anyone United might consider replacing him with.

His early success shouldn’t be dismissed because the underlying numbers were less impressive. Nor should those results settle the question of whether he’s the right person to lead the next stage.

The same scrutiny should apply to an external candidate. Previous trophies, an established tactical identity or an impressive opening spell can all provide useful evidence. None tells United everything about how that coach would work with this squad or develop it over time.

There isn’t a reliable formula for identifying the perfect appointment. We also don’t know how closely United’s internal assessments already resemble the standards we’ve explored.

But the club can examine what a candidate’s teams have actually improved, how those improvements were achieved, and what happened when their initial approach encountered difficulties.

Then United have to decide whether they’re prepared to provide what that approach requires.

Research & References

This article draws on official Manchester United announcements, Premier League records, Opta analysis, and original reporting from BBC Sport and other football journalists. Sources are linked throughout the article where the relevant findings and statements are discussed.

The statistical comparisons cover different periods and measure different things. Erik ten Hag’s expected-points figures relate to the full 2022/23 Premier League season, while Michael Carrick’s expected-goals figures cover his first fourteen league matches in 2026. Expected points and expected-goals difference are not interchangeable, and neither provides a definitive assessment of a manager’s performance.

The figures examining Rúben Amorim’s time at United compare 27 league matches in 2024/25 with eleven in 2025/26. The analysis of United’s attacking and defensive performances under Carrick in 2026/27 covers the opening five league matches. Those differences in sample size, opposition and circumstances limit what can reasonably be concluded.

The tactical observations about United’s matches against Manchester City and Como draw on match footage and published analysis. They describe how United defended and pressed in those matches, but cannot independently establish the instructions given to players or the reasons those instructions may not have been carried out.

The article also examines United’s managerial appointments, contract decisions and public statements. Those records establish what the club announced and what its representatives said publicly. They do not reveal the internal criteria used to assess managers or the discussions behind individual decisions.

These limitations matter when considering what United should require from its next manager. The evidence can identify strengths, weaknesses and questions worth asking. It cannot establish which candidate would succeed, whether the club already uses similar evaluation methods, or how any particular appointment would develop over several seasons.

Stoke City Academy and Training Ground, Clayton Wood, Staffordshire, England (2016). Photograph by Jonathan Hutchins / Geograph / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0

Over the years, I’ve worked with a few students who were involved with, or had attracted interest from, MLS and MLS-affiliated academies here in the United States.

As a teacher, I’ve seen students pursue opportunities that extend well beyond the classroom. Those experiences made me curious about how much responsibility a football academy takes for the person, rather than just the player.

I started looking into how academies approach that responsibility and eventually came across the Premier League’s regulations in England.

For certain players, clubs must provide at least three years of support after their academy registration ends.

English football spends years assessing young players. Clubs examine their performances, technical ability, physical development, and potential, trying to determine who might eventually play professionally. Most won’t.

There are only so many opportunities available, and academies have to make decisions about who progresses.

But release doesn’t necessarily end a player’s involvement in football. Some find opportunities elsewhere. Others pursue education, employment, or something entirely different.

I wanted to understand what that responsibility looks like in practice, how the support reaches former players, and how anyone determines whether it’s working.

The three-year commitment comes from Rule 222 of the Premier League’s 2026/27 Youth Development Rules.

Under those regulations, academies must develop and implement an induction and transition strategy. For players leaving during the Professional Development Phase, that strategy must include support for at least three years after their registration ends.

This doesn’t apply to every child who leaves an academy. The Professional Development Phase generally begins at under-17 level, so younger players aren’t automatically covered by the same three-year requirement.

The commitment itself is mandatory. The accompanying guidance describes how clubs might provide that support, including mental and emotional wellbeing, education and employment advice, opportunities to continue playing, and connections through academy alumni networks.

The guidance also recognizes that a player’s circumstances, age, and time spent at an academy should influence the assistance offered. Three years of support doesn’t necessarily mean three years of identical services for every player.

The Premier League also says academies should prepare young people for opportunities beyond professional football, rather than judging their development solely by whether they become professional players.

Under the Premier League’s regulations, Category One, Two, and Three academies must employ a suitably qualified, full-time member of staff responsible for personal development, life skills, and the club’s induction and transition strategy. Category Four academies must nominate an existing staff member to carry out those responsibilities alongside their other duties.

Maybe I’ve got a future in football after all.

Academies are also independently audited.

The Professional Game Academy Audit Company (PGAAC) assesses clubs in areas including safeguarding, compliance with youth development regulations, and the quality of academy operations.

The assessments cover areas including education and player care, and academies can be required to address deficiencies identified during the process.

In November 2022, Carlisle United announced that its academy had completed an external audit. Induction and transitions were among the areas the club identified as having been assessed.

The regulations also require clubs to establish and follow up on mechanisms for gathering feedback separately from academy players and their parents or guardians.

In 2022, researchers published a study examining the experiences of four former academy players who had completed two-year scholarships between the ages of 16 and 18.

All four described feeling increasingly excluded before their release. One recalled arriving at training and discovering he hadn’t been assigned to a team for a practice activity.

Players also described the difficulty of release meetings. They recalled being called individually into meetings while their teammates waited, and the embarrassment of returning afterward.

All four reported receiving no wellbeing aftercare from their former clubs.

These accounts predate the 2026/27 regulations examined here. They cannot establish whether clubs are meeting the current requirements.

Three of the four players had attended the same academy, and they were describing experiences from years earlier. I couldn’t use those interviews to determine how common those experiences were across English football.

Three participants described their most severe psychological difficulties emerging some time after release. The fourth reported a more positive adjustment, eventually finding enjoyment in football again.

A separate study published in September 2026 examined release from the perspective of academy staff.

Researchers interviewed 18 staff members, including eight coaches and ten support staff, working across professional academies in England and Scotland.

Staff described regular reviews and conversations intended to prepare players for decisions about their futures. Yet some players and families still appeared surprised when release came.

They also described difficulties offering support immediately after the decision. Players could struggle to absorb information about education, trials, or other opportunities while processing the news that they wouldn’t be retained.

The researchers recommended separating the release decision from a later conversation about next steps, suggesting that the follow-up take place around a week afterward.

Maintaining contact presented another challenge. Staff described families who stopped responding after release, leaving them uncertain whether further attempts to help would be welcomed.

The club responsible for ending a player’s academy career may also be the organization expected to help them afterward. Even when the people offering support weren’t involved in the decision, that relationship could affect whether the player wanted to remain in contact.

The researchers suggested that a centralized, independent support system might offer another route to assistance, although their interviews didn’t establish whether such an approach would work better.

In 2024, researchers examined a medical aftercare intervention involving male players aged 18 or older who had been released from a Category One Premier League academy during the 2022/23 season.

The players received their medical records, information about previous injuries and cardiac screening, individualized health recommendations, and contact details for further support.

Of the 15 eligible players invited to participate, 12 completed the study.

All 12 reported being satisfied with the information they received. Nine said it helped them feel better prepared for their next career steps, while ten believed similar information should be provided to other released academy players.

Five participants didn’t know when their next cardiac screening was due. Eleven knew whom to contact at their former club about medical or welfare questions, and nine knew about external mental-health resources.

The responses were positive, but this was one intervention involving twelve players at a single academy. Players who were injured or no longer communicating with the club were excluded, and there was no comparison group.

The research measured participants’ responses to the intervention. It didn’t establish whether their health or career outcomes improved over the following years.

Premier League Futures provides selected current and former academy players with opportunities to explore careers beyond playing. The Professional Footballers’ Association offers independent advice and other assistance to young players.

These are additional routes to support, rather than evidence that every eligible player receives the same assistance.

Three years of support after release is a substantial commitment.

The Premier League has established regulations requiring it, and there is independent oversight of academy operations. Research also provides examples of practical assistance that former players have valued.

But providing support and determining whether that support has helped are different things.

A player might receive help finding another club but decide to pursue education instead. Another might accept support and still struggle to find their next opportunity. Neither outcome alone tells us whether the assistance was appropriate or effective.

The research also raises questions about whose experiences are captured. Players who stop communicating with their former clubs may be difficult to include in assessments, regardless of why that contact ended.

I started looking into this because I wanted to understand what responsibility an academy has to a player once their time there ends.

I found regulations requiring continued support, independent oversight of academy operations, and research showing that some forms of assistance are valued by former players.

What I couldn’t establish from the publicly available material was how the effectiveness of that three-year commitment is measured. Detailed assessments may exist internally, but I couldn’t determine what they measure or what they’ve found.

The Premier League has made a commitment to players whose academy careers have ended. I can see what the regulations require. I still don’t know how well that commitment works for the people it’s supposed to help.

Research & References

This piece draws on the Premier League’s 2026/27 Youth Development Rules, information about academy oversight and player development, and peer-reviewed research examining the experiences of released academy players, academy staff, and medical aftercare.

Where possible, I’ve linked directly to the regulations, original studies, and official announcements throughout the article. These include the Premier League’s requirements for induction and transition support, Carlisle United’s 2022 academy audit announcement, and research published in 2022, 2024, and 2026.

An important distinction runs through the reporting. The Premier League’s regulations establish what clubs are required to provide, but those requirements don’t establish how effectively support reaches former players or whether it improves their circumstances.

The research also has limitations. The 2022 study involved four former players, three of whom attended the same academy. The 2026 study examined the perspectives of eighteen academy staff members rather than measuring outcomes for released players. The 2024 medical aftercare study involved twelve participants at a single academy and did not assess their longer-term outcomes.

Those limitations matter.

The accounts of former players help explain why support after release is important. The staff interviews identify challenges clubs may face in delivering it. The medical intervention offers an example of assistance that participants valued. None of those studies establishes how consistently the Premier League’s three-year aftercare commitment is delivered or how effective it is across the academy system.

This investigation does not assume that clubs are failing to support released players. It also does not treat the existence of regulations, audits, or support programs as proof that the intended outcomes have been achieved.

Sources consulted include official Premier League regulations and academy-development material; Carlisle United’s public audit announcement; research published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, and BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine; and information from the Premier League and Professional Footballers’ Association about additional player support.

What do you think?

When a young player is released from an academy, how much responsibility should that club have for helping them afterward?

Football at the Torneo del Barrio in Medellín, Colombia. Photograph: Bryan Arroyave Zapata.

I first came across the Torneo del Barrio through a COPA90 documentary recommended to me on YouTube.

The tournament takes place in Medellín, Colombia, on a small concrete court surrounded by spectators. I hadn’t heard of it before, but I was interested in the football almost immediately.

There didn’t seem to be much room for anyone to do anything.

Players moved forward and backward, occupying spaces their teammates had left only seconds earlier. Possession changed quickly, and the shape of the game seemed to change with it.

I was particularly interested in what happened when a player moved forward. The space he’d occupied was suddenly available to someone else, whether a teammate or an opponent.

It reminded me of chess pieces shifting around a board, except everything was happening at once.

Players contest possession during the Torneo del Barrio. Photograph: Bryan Arroyave Zapata.

I wanted to know more about the tournament and eventually contacted Leonardo Weir, a player who had competed in several editions.

We spoke about his experiences, including matches that had stayed with him and how he believed the competition had developed over time.

Afterward, I went looking for more footage.

One recording featured Uptown La 24 against La 27.

I found myself watching the movement away from the ball almost as much as the player in possession.

The court was small enough that those movements seemed to matter almost immediately.

Spectators sat and stood close to the playing area, sometimes with very little separating them from the players.

I’d initially been interested in how the football worked in such limited space. Leonardo had experienced the tournament from inside it.

Leonardo Weir told me he had played in seven editions of the Torneo del Barrio over approximately four years, including the edition underway when we spoke.

During that time, he’d represented La Banda de la Cruz, La 24 FS, Dinama FS, and Mónaco FS.

Leonardo had seen the tournament change during his time playing there.

He recalled earlier editions that attracted relatively little attention. Few nationally recognized players participated during that period, according to his recollection.

He remembered more recognizable players becoming involved as the tournament developed.

He believed the competition had grown stronger and attracted considerably more attention, both within Colombia and internationally.

When I asked about matches that had stayed with him, Leonardo remembered two quarterfinal matches against Uptown La 24 during his first season with La Banda de la Cruz.

He described them as una locura.

Crazy.

The following season, he told me, he won the tournament.

But it was his description of the atmosphere that caught my attention.

Leonardo described the feeling of playing a neighborhood match in front of so many spectators as comparable to playing professional football anywhere in the world.

A player reacts during the Torneo del Barrio, with spectators gathered nearby. Photograph: Bryan Arroyave Zapata.

I’d spent a fair amount of time watching the players, but the spectators were difficult to ignore.

They stood along the boundaries, sat in chairs, and found whatever space offered a view of the football. In some of the recordings, there seemed to be very little separating the people watching from those playing.

I wanted to see more of that environment.

That’s how I came across Bryan Arroyave Zapata, a photographer who had spent time documenting the Torneo del Barrio.

Spectators watch the Torneo del Barrio from around the playing area. Photograph: Bryan Arroyave Zapata.

I initially contacted Bryan about using his photographs for the article. As we talked, I became interested in what he’d experienced while taking them.

He described a crowded setting, with spectators, vendors, children, and adults gathering around the matches. Some people climbed fences to get a better view.

Photographing the tournament meant working close to the action.

Bryan recalled one occasion when a ball struck him directly in the face.

His photographs captured different parts of the tournament. Some showed players challenging for possession on the concrete, with spectators standing just beyond the court. Others focused on the people watching.

Spectators watch the football from beside the court. Photograph: Bryan Arroyave Zapata.

The Torneo del Barrio is played in Barrio Antioquia, a neighborhood in Medellín. Establishing exactly when the competition began, however, has been more difficult than I expected.

FUTTO, which broadcasts the tournament, lists its history as beginning in 2018. In a 2024 interview with Hinchas Colombia, one of the tournament’s organizers identified 2020 as its starting year.

Leonardo also remembered editions taking place during the tournament’s earlier years.

Those accounts don’t quite agree. I couldn’t establish from the available reporting why the dates differ.

By April 2023, El Colombiano was reporting on the tournament and its growing popularity.

In that reporting, the tournament’s organizer described initially arranging a children’s competition, followed eight days later by an adult tournament involving 14 teams.

Matches were played five against five on a concrete court, with two 20-minute halves. Some evenings featured four to six matches.

The competition had also attracted sponsors and prize money.

Santiago Rodríguez, who became involved in broadcasting the tournament, recalled encountering an established crowd when he first visited. He described the atmosphere around the matches before proposing that they be streamed, in an interview with Athleta Magazine.

The spectators were already there.

In April 2023, El Colombiano reported approximately 140,000 live views across 46 broadcasts, according to figures provided by Rodríguez.

Those were reported viewing figures, not independently audited audience data. The 140,000 views should not be confused with 140,000 individual viewers.

The broadcasts made the matches accessible to people who weren’t standing beside the court.

How much that contributed to the tournament’s subsequent growth is harder to establish. Leonardo remembered stronger competition and greater visibility, but his recollections alone cannot tell us what caused those changes.

Players and spectators amid orange smoke at the Torneo del Barrio. Photograph: Bryan Arroyave Zapata.

I started looking into the Torneo del Barrio because I was interested in the football.

There didn’t seem to be much space, yet players were constantly finding somewhere to move. I wanted to understand more about what I was watching.

Speaking with Leonardo and Bryan helped, although perhaps not in the way I’d initially expected.

Leonardo described the feeling of playing a neighborhood match in front of a crowd that made it feel like something much bigger. Bryan described working beside that same court, surrounded by the people who came to watch.

Neither conversation explained precisely why the football looked the way it did.

I still don’t know whether the playing conditions produce a distinctive style, or how much the tournament’s growing visibility has changed the competition.

And I haven’t been there myself.

But I understand a little more about what happens around the football, even if I still have questions about what happens on the court.

I’d like to see both in person.

Players gather on the court during the Torneo del Barrio in Medellín. Photograph: Bryan Arroyave Zapata.

Research & References

This article began with a COPA90 documentary about Medellín’s Torneo del Barrio. I later watched additional match footage, including a recording of Uptown La 24 against La 27.

The reporting also includes conversations with Leonardo Weir, who described his experiences playing in the tournament, and Bryan Arroyave Zapata, whose photographs and firsthand observations helped me understand the environment surrounding the court. Those conversations took place in Spanish through private correspondence and audio messages.

Historical information about the competition comes from FUTTO, Hinchas Colombia, and El Colombiano. Santiago Rodríguez’s account of the tournament’s broadcasting development comes from an interview published by Athleta Magazine.

The sources do not agree on when the tournament began. The article preserves that discrepancy rather than selecting a date the available reporting cannot establish.

The reported broadcasting figures are historical figures attributed to Rodríguez, not independently verified audience measurements. Leonardo’s observations about the tournament’s development are presented as his experiences rather than objective measurements of playing standards.

My observations about movement and space come from watching recordings. They do not establish that the court’s dimensions produce a distinctive playing style, or that broadcasting caused the tournament’s growth.

The photographs accompanying this article are by Bryan Arroyave Zapata and are reproduced under license.

Photo: Eirian Evans / Geograph Britain and Ireland. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Original photograph.

In October 2025, Sir Jim Ratcliffe was asked about Ruben Amorim’s future at Manchester United.

He said Amorim needed three years to prove himself.

By January, Amorim was gone.

Less than three months separated those moments. United’s results remained inconsistent, questions about Amorim’s approach persisted, and his relationship with the football department had deteriorated.

There were reasons to reconsider his position. But I kept coming back to the three years.

United had already been through something similar with Erik ten Hag.

In June 2024, the club reviewed his position and decided to retain him. In July, it extended his contract. By October, he had been dismissed.

Two managers. Two decisions to back them. Two reversals.

Then, on October 13, 2026, Lisandro Martínez raised a familiar concern.

Following United’s Champions League defeat to Atlético Madrid, the defender publicly questioned the club’s summer recruitment and named director of football Jason Wilcox.

Martínez was speaking after a frustrating defeat. His criticism wasn’t proof that recruitment had failed. But he’d directed attention above the dugout.

United had changed managers, appointed executives, reorganized its football department, and spent heavily on players.

We’d spent months debating what the managers were getting wrong. I wanted to know how United judged the people who’d hired them.

Those decisions weren’t necessarily wrong. Ratcliffe had even acknowledged mistakes made during the rebuilding of United’s football leadership.

But how were we supposed to judge the people making them?

We spend plenty of time evaluating Manchester United’s managers.

What about everyone else?

Erik ten Hag probably couldn’t have picked a better afternoon to complicate his employers’ plans.

On May 25, 2024, Manchester United beat Manchester City 2–1 at Wembley to win the FA Cup. It was Ten Hag’s second trophy in two seasons, arriving days after United had finished eighth in the Premier League. Their lowest finish of the Premier League era.

United had beaten the champions in a cup final after spending much of the season struggling against considerably less formidable opposition.

By then, Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS group had assumed responsibility for United’s football operations. Ten Hag’s future was under review, and Wembley had given the new leadership something else to consider.

There were arguments for keeping him. Injuries had disrupted the season, younger players had developed, and the FA Cup offered evidence that the team could still respond to his coaching. United were also rebuilding their football department. Replacing Ten Hag wouldn’t necessarily resolve problems elsewhere in the club.

On June 11, United decided to retain him. On July 4, it extended his contract through June 2026.

According to Jamie Jackson in The Guardian, Ten Hag’s willingness to accept tactical input from Jason Wilcox had impressed Ratcliffe and Dave Brailsford. Wilcox had reportedly suggested using Bruno Fernandes as a false nine against City in the cup final.

United were appointing executives to oversee football decisions beyond the manager. A coach willing to work within that structure might have been worth keeping.

We don’t know how heavily that collaboration influenced the review.

United’s July announcement also included an endorsement from Dan Ashworth, who had formally started as sporting director that month. He hadn’t been in post for the June decision, but was publicly supporting it by July.

By October 28, Ten Hag was gone.

Nine Premier League matches into the new season, United had won three, drawn two, and lost four. They were 14th.

Those results gave the club grounds to reconsider. United had finished eighth the previous season, and the problems hadn’t disappeared.

But the leadership had known about those problems in June.

I don’t think changing its mind was necessarily the mistake. Nine more matches provided new evidence, and a club should be willing to act on it.

What I wanted to know was what United had expected when it decided to keep him.

What had changed by October to make the plan approved in June no longer worth pursuing?

United’s next appointment would raise a similar question, under rather different circumstances.

When Manchester United announced Ruben Amorim as their new head coach on November 1, 2024, there wasn’t much mystery about how he liked his teams to play.

At Sporting CP, Amorim had won two Portuguese league titles and established a recognizable approach built around a back three, most often arranged in a 3-4-3.

United knew what they were getting. At least on the pitch.

There was an immediate complication. Much of United’s squad had been recruited under previous managers, whose tactical preferences differed from Amorim’s. Players accustomed to a back four were being asked to learn different responsibilities.

Amorim chose to introduce his system immediately. I can understand why. United had hired a coach whose success was closely associated with that approach. Asking him to abandon it before he’d had a chance to establish it would have been a strange start.

But there were reportedly concerns about the fit.

According to Rob Draper’s later reporting in The Guardian, sporting director Dan Ashworth had raised reservations about whether Amorim’s preferred system suited United’s existing squad. Draper reported that Ashworth favored a safer appointment and warned that United lacked the players for a 3-4-3.

United maintained that everyone had supported the appointment once it was made. We don’t know precisely how Ashworth’s earlier concerns were discussed or addressed.

Amorim’s first, partial season ended with United finishing 15th in the Premier League. The following summer, the club invested heavily in its attack, signing Matheus Cunha, Bryan Mbeumo, and Benjamin Šeško.

By January 2026, United were sixth. An improvement, certainly, but performances remained inconsistent.

On December 24, Amorim acknowledged that building a team for his preferred 3-4-3 would require considerable time and money. He also accepted that he might need to adapt.

Two days later, United beat Newcastle 1–0.

Amorim had changed to a back four. Patrick Dorgu played further forward and scored the winner.

Against Wolves on December 30, United drew 1–1. Contemporary match reports described a return toward Amorim’s familiar three-defender approach, although published formation graphics differed.

Subsequent reporting described Wilcox questioning Amorim’s tactical choices, including his willingness to persist with the system he had brought from Sporting.

One win and one draw, against different opponents, hardly settle an argument about formations. But Amorim had demonstrated that he could change his approach. The disagreement appeared to concern how often he should do so.

Reporting from BBC Sport, Sky Sports, and The Guardian described growing tension over tactical flexibility, recruitment, and the division of responsibilities between Amorim and the football department. Some accounts suggested United’s leadership believed he’d agreed to adapt his approach, although the precise understanding between the two sides remains unclear.

Following United’s 1–1 draw at Leeds on January 4, Amorim insisted that he’d come to United to be the manager, not merely the coach. He challenged others within the organization to fulfill their responsibilities.

A remarkable distinction from someone officially appointed as head coach.

The following day, United dismissed him.

The club’s statement acknowledged that United were sixth and said the change was intended to give the team the best possible chance of finishing as high as possible. It did not identify a dispute with Wilcox as the reason.

There was a sporting argument for dismissal. Amorim’s overall league record had been poor, and the improvement in position hadn’t resolved concerns about performances.

But United had appointed him knowing his preferred system. There had reportedly been reservations about its compatibility with the squad, and the club had publicly backed him for the longer term.

How much of Amorim’s approach was United prepared to accommodate, and how much was he expected to change?

His successor would inherit many of the same players.

And he was about to do something rather different with them.

Michael Carrick’s first advantage was that he didn’t have to wait for a transfer window.

When he took charge in January 2026, he inherited much of the squad Ruben Amorim had been working with. He began by changing how they played.

United returned to a back four. Bruno Fernandes operated in more advanced areas, and Patrick Dorgu was used further forward rather than primarily as a wing-back.

Dorgu was particularly interesting.

Under Amorim, he’d scored the winner against Newcastle in December after United changed their shape. Carrick continued using him further forward, and Dorgu scored against Manchester City and Arsenal in his new manager’s first two Premier League matches.

Three goals across three matches, under two different coaches.

It would be tempting to conclude that Amorim had been using him incorrectly.

Except Amorim had already tried something similar.

Carrick hadn’t discovered an attacking player nobody else knew existed. He’d continued using a player whose versatility was already apparent.

And Dorgu wasn’t the only one.

Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo had arrived in the summer of 2025 with experience across multiple attacking positions. Benjamin Šeško offered another option through the middle.

All three had been recruited while Amorim was head coach, yet they could contribute after United moved away from his 3-4-3.

Mbeumo scored against City and Arsenal during Carrick’s opening two league matches. Cunha supplied the cross for Dorgu’s goal against City and scored the winner at Arsenal. Šeško also began scoring more regularly.

We can’t establish how much of that flexibility was deliberate recruitment planning. But United had changed managers without immediately needing to replace the attacking players signed during his predecessor’s tenure.

The results strengthened Carrick’s case.

Across his first 16 Premier League matches as interim head coach, United won 11, drew three, and lost twice.

Thirty-six points from 16 matches. An average of 2.25 per game.

By May 22, United had secured Champions League qualification and a guaranteed third-place finish, with one league match still to play.

Sixteen matches weren’t a full season, and the improvement couldn’t be attributed solely to a change of formation. But Carrick had produced results with the players available.

According to BBC Sport’s reporting, Jason Wilcox played a leading role in the process of selecting United’s permanent head coach, with Omar Berrada and Ratcliffe also involved.

On May 22, United appointed Carrick permanently, with a contract through 2028.

Carrick had already worked with the squad he would be expected to manage. United had seen his approach in competitive matches and could evaluate his results.

The football department had also assembled players who could contribute under more than one coach. Whether that was deliberate planning or simply useful recruitment remained difficult to establish.

By the time Manchester United appointed Michael Carrick permanently, the football department responsible for selecting managers looked considerably different from the one that had reviewed Erik ten Hag two years earlier.

Some of that change was intentional. Some of it came rather sooner than planned.

Omar Berrada began work as chief executive in July 2024. Dan Ashworth arrived as sporting director that same month, while Jason Wilcox had joined as technical director in April.

By December, Ashworth was gone.

Five months.

United had spent considerable time assembling a leadership team intended to provide stability beyond the manager. Its sporting director had barely settled into the role before departing.

The club described the separation as mutual. Reporting subsequently raised questions about disagreements within the football leadership, including the Amorim appointment. Other accounts, citing club sources, denied that a disagreement over Ten Hag’s replacement caused the departure.

Ratcliffe later described the problem as one of chemistry. He declined to explain the details.

Wilcox became director of football in June 2025, taking on broader responsibility for the sporting operation. Berrada remained chief executive, while Dave Brailsford’s involvement in day-to-day football matters reportedly became less prominent.

Ratcliffe and INEOS continued to exercise considerable influence over football operations, although the Glazer family retained majority voting control of Manchester United plc.

When Ten Hag’s position was reviewed in June 2024, Berrada and Ashworth hadn’t formally begun their roles. By November, both were in place when United appointed Amorim. And by May 2026, Wilcox was director of football as the club considered Carrick’s permanent appointment.

Three decisions, made under a football structure that was still changing.

In March 2025, Ratcliffe publicly accepted that retaining Ten Hag and appointing Ashworth had been mistakes. He apologized and explained that United’s newly assembled leadership had struggled to separate Ten Hag’s performance from the circumstances around him.

Ratcliffe had acknowledged the mistakes. He’d explained why they happened and said United had learned from them.

I wanted to know what that learning looked like.

The summer of 2026 brought further scrutiny. United strengthened their midfield following Casemiro’s departure, and Carrick spoke publicly about recruitment priorities and financial constraints.

After the Champions League defeat to Atlético Madrid in October, Martínez questioned the summer business and named Wilcox among those responsible for football decisions.

His criticism wasn’t an independent assessment of United’s recruitment. But subsequent reporting suggested the frustration extended beyond Martínez. According to Jamie Jackson in The Guardian, other players also questioned the squad’s depth and the decision to concentrate summer spending on midfielders.

There was a complication. Martínez was approaching the end of his contract, and the same reporting suggested his comments were also being interpreted as an attempt to secure a move.

That didn’t make his criticism wrong. It did make his motivations harder to establish.

United had reasons to retain Ten Hag, appoint Amorim, and promote Carrick. The circumstances were different, as were the executives involved.

What remains harder to establish is how the football department evaluated the risks behind those decisions, and whether its approach changed when they went wrong.

I began with the suspicion that Manchester United kept changing managers while the people making those appointments escaped the same scrutiny.

That was too simple.

People above the manager had left. Responsibilities had changed. Ratcliffe had publicly accepted responsibility for mistakes and said the club had learned from them.

What I couldn’t establish was how United evaluated those decisions internally, or whether its process had improved.

And there were reasonable sporting arguments for dismissing both Ten Hag and Amorim.

Carrick complicated things further.

United had appointed him after he improved results with much of the squad he inherited. Players recruited under Amorim had contributed to that improvement. Whatever problems existed within the football department, it hadn’t assembled a group of players who became useless the moment their manager left.

I hadn’t expected that to be quite so important to the story.

But it didn’t settle the questions surrounding the decisions themselves.

We don’t have access to United’s internal assessments. What we can examine are the commitments it made publicly, the decisions that followed, and the risks that were already apparent.

We’ve spent plenty of time asking whether Ten Hag deserved to be sacked, whether Amorim should have adapted sooner, or whether Carrick was the right man for the job.

Those questions matter.

But the managers weren’t the only people making decisions.

And if United expects its coaches to deliver against standards established by the football department, it’s reasonable to ask how that department determines whether those standards were right in the first place.

Research & References

This piece draws on official statements and announcements from Manchester United, Premier League match records, public interviews with Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ruben Amorim, and contemporary reporting on the club’s managerial appointments, recruitment decisions, and football leadership.

Where possible, I’ve linked directly to the original reporting or primary sources throughout the article. These include Manchester United’s announcements concerning Erik ten Hag, Ruben Amorim, and Michael Carrick; Ratcliffe’s public explanations of the club’s decision-making; and reporting from BBC Sport, Reuters, Sky Sports, and The Guardian.

An important distinction runs through the reporting. Official announcements establish what Manchester United decided and what the club publicly communicated. They do not necessarily explain every consideration behind those decisions. Accounts of internal disagreements, tactical expectations, and recruitment priorities often depend on reporting from people familiar with discussions that were not public.

Those accounts are attributed accordingly. Where reporting conflicts, particularly concerning Dan Ashworth’s departure and the circumstances surrounding Amorim’s appointment, the competing explanations are acknowledged rather than treated as settled findings.

The statistical comparisons also have limits. Carrick’s initial results provide evidence of improvement, but 16 Premier League matches cannot establish that a tactical change alone caused it. Likewise, the contributions of players recruited under Amorim demonstrate their usefulness under another coach without establishing how deliberately that flexibility was planned.

The October 2026 reporting concerning Lisandro Martínez presents a similar distinction. His public criticism of recruitment is documented, while accounts of broader dressing-room dissatisfaction and interpretations of his possible transfer motivations remain attributed reporting. Neither establishes the private intentions of everyone involved.

Those limitations matter.

This investigation does not assume that dismissing a manager was necessarily the wrong decision, that reported disagreements prove institutional dysfunction, or that improved results under a successor establish failures by his predecessor.

The evidence allows us to examine United’s public commitments, the decisions that followed, the people responsible, and the risks that were already apparent. It does not provide access to the club’s internal evaluations or establish whether its decision-making process has improved.

Sources consulted include official material from Manchester United and the Premier League; interviews and reporting published by BBC Sport; original reporting from The Guardian, Reuters, and Sky Sports; and contemporary match coverage.

What do you think?

When Manchester United appoints a manager, how much responsibility should the football department carry for what happens next?

Is changing course evidence that the club has recognized a mistake, or should we expect a clearer explanation of why the original decision was made?

And after Ten Hag, Amorim, and now Carrick, what would actually convince you that United’s decision-making has improved?

Michael Carrick playing for Manchester United during a preseason friendly against Club América in Seattle, July 2015. Photo: Matt Janzer / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Manchester United have looked slow.

Not always. There are still presses, recovery runs and stretches where the tempo rises. But there have also been long periods this season where United seem half a step behind whatever is happening around them.

Second balls disappear. Midfielders get dragged into space. Opponents play through the first pressure and suddenly there is a lot of grass between the people trying to stop them.

Then the running numbers started showing up.

United were near the bottom of the Premier League in several measures of high-intensity work. Distance covered became part of the conversation. Sprint numbers followed. After a few particularly flat performances, the explanation started writing itself.

Maybe they just weren’t being worked hard enough.

That was the part I wanted to test.

Carrick’s sessions had already been described as shorter. Once United started looking leggy, that detail stopped sounding incidental.

It started sounding like evidence.

At least at first.

I wanted to know whether the numbers actually took us there.

The numbers really are bad.

That part holds up.

Through the first five Premier League matches, United were 16th for total distance covered. More concerningly, separate GeniusIQ data had them bottom of the league for high-intensity distance, time spent at high intensity, total sprints and sprinting time.

That is the kind of data that makes the eye test feel vindicated.

United look passive, the numbers say they are producing very little high-intensity work, and suddenly the fitness explanation feels pretty obvious.

Except the categories are not interchangeable.

Total distance is not sprinting. Sprinting is not pressing. Pressing is not fitness. And none of them, on their own, tell us what is happening in training.

That was where the easy explanation started to wobble for me.

United are holding more of the ball than they did last season. They are defending higher. They are spending more time in a high block.

All of that changes what running is supposed to look like.

The concern is still legitimate.

The diagnosis is where things get harder.

The first problem with using running numbers as a verdict on fitness is that football decides what kind of running a team has to do.

United are averaging close to 60 percent possession in the Premier League this season. Under Carrick last year, that number was closer to 49 percent.

That matters.

Spend more time with the ball and there are fewer minutes available to chase it. Sit deeper and you may accumulate more defensive distance. Play higher and you may ask for fewer runs overall, but more explosive ones when the ball turns over.

Liverpool are probably the cleanest warning against reading mileage too literally. They have been among the lowest-distance teams in the league while producing one of its highest sprint totals.

Same sport. Very different physical profile.

United complicate it further.

Their out-of-possession sprint frequency has not collapsed. They are averaging roughly 89 of those sprints per 90 this season, compared with 86 under Carrick last year.

That was the number that stopped me from treating this as a simple effort problem.

United are still making explosive defensive actions.

The harder question is what those actions are actually accomplishing.

This is where the tactical picture starts to matter.

United are defending from a high block much more often than they did last season. Opta has them at 42 percent this year, up from 26 percent during Carrick’s spell last season.

On paper, that sounds aggressive.

The problem is that United are not consistently turning that higher starting position into sustained pressure. Their PPDA sits only a little better than league average, and their high-turnover numbers remain middling.

The fitness explanation was getting messier.

If the front line jumps and the first pressure is beaten, somebody has to deal with the space behind it. Opta’s analysis suggests United’s back four has not always held an equally aggressive height, which leaves more for the midfield pair to cover between the press and the defence.

That is where the tracking data gets uncomfortable.

United rank at the bottom of the league for tracking runs, and the midfield is being asked to defend more open space than it did last year.

From the outside, that can look exactly like a team that is not fit enough.

But spacing can create the same picture. Timing and role clarity matter too, especially if you are asking players to cover distances they are not particularly suited to cover.

Last season, Carrick managed this part of the game better. United were not suddenly full of elite runners then either, but the structure protected them more effectively in transition.

This season, the shape is more aggressive without the personnel becoming dramatically quicker.

The space still has to be covered by someone.

By this point, “they are not fit enough” was starting to feel less like an answer and more like one possibility among several.

So what does training actually tell us?

Less than people usually want it to.

Public reporting described Carrick’s sessions as shorter, while United’s own preseason material showed a mixture of running, gym work and football-specific training.

That matters, because the easy version of the criticism is that United simply have not been working hard enough.

The public evidence does not really let us say that.

It also does not let us say the opposite.

Football-specific drills can absolutely build conditioning, but they do not automatically reproduce the same high-speed and sprint exposure players face in matches. A tight-sided game can leave everyone exhausted without necessarily reproducing that same kind of high-speed work.

My U10 rec team has also occasionally finished training looking completely spent. I would not recommend using that as evidence of elite conditioning methodology.

The problem is that the part that would actually settle this is mostly hidden.

We do not have United’s GPS data. We do not know the weekly sprint-exposure targets, individual load plans or how much extra high-speed work gets added away from the clips the club releases.

If MUTV wants to add Carrington GPS data to next season’s subscription, I’ll reluctantly consider the upgrade.

Until then, we can see what training looks like.

We cannot see enough to know whether the physical dose is right.

The World Cup makes this harder too.

United were not the only Premier League club trying to build a preseason around players returning at different times, in different physical states, after different tournament runs.

Arsenal had the same problem. Liverpool did too. City arguably had an even bigger one.

And the physical profiles that followed were completely different.

Arsenal came out of a heavily disrupted summer and still ranked among the league’s highest-distance teams. Liverpool sat near the bottom for total distance but produced huge sprint numbers. City looked much closer to United across several early running metrics.

That gave me something useful to compare United against.

The World Cup clearly complicated preparation.

It did not make every team look the same.

So United’s fragmented preseason belongs in the explanation, but it cannot carry the whole thing.

What happened after those players came back clearly depended on more than when they returned.

By this point, the numbers had answered part of the question.

United’s high-intensity output really is poor. The high block is real. So are the tracking problems once that first pressure is broken.

What the numbers had not done was tell me whether any of that began in training.

Physical preparation is still one possibility, but so are tactical structure, execution and personnel.

The annoying part is that those things can overlap.

A midfielder can be asked to cover too much ground and still fail to make the run he should. A training program can be sensible in theory and still fall short of what the system demands on Saturday. A tactical plan can also make fit players look slow if the distances between them are wrong.

That was the distinction I kept coming back to.

The data can show us what United are struggling to produce.

It is much worse at telling us where the problem starts.

Watching United lately, it is easy to reach for the simplest explanation.

They look slow, so maybe they are not fit enough. They fail to sustain pressure, so maybe the sessions are not demanding enough.

The numbers do not get us all the way there.

What they show is a team struggling to produce the kind of high-intensity football its structure seems to demand. United are defending higher without consistently turning that position into pressure, and when opponents get through the first line, the tracking numbers are poor.

Training may be part of it. So might the distances Carrick is asking this midfield to cover.

The frustrating answer is that those things can overlap, and the public data is not capable of separating them for us.

I started this looking for a fitness problem.

What I found was a physical problem with more than one possible cause.

Research & References

This piece draws on Premier League and Opta tracking data, GeniusIQ physical-performance data reported by Reuters, Manchester United’s own preseason and training material, contemporary reporting on Michael Carrick’s training methods, and peer-reviewed sports-science research into football conditioning and high-speed running exposure.

Where possible, I have linked directly to the underlying data or original reporting in the body of the article. The physical metrics used here do not all come from the same provider or describe exactly the same type of movement. Total distance, sprint frequency, high-intensity running, pressing actions and tracking runs are therefore treated as separate measures rather than interchangeable definitions of effort or fitness.

The early-season comparisons also come with an important limitation. Most of the current United data used in this piece covers the first five Premier League matches, while comparisons with Carrick’s previous season are generally expressed as per-90 rates across his 17 league matches in charge. Those figures can help identify changes in United’s physical and tactical profile, but five matches are not enough to establish a settled season-long pattern.

The training question has an even larger limitation. Public reporting and club footage can tell us something about how United train, but they cannot provide the internal GPS data, individual loading plans, sprint-exposure targets or complete session design that would be needed to judge the physical program directly.

The sports-science research used here similarly describes general mechanisms rather than Manchester United specifically. Football-specific drills can contribute meaningfully to conditioning, while sided-game formats can produce less high-speed and sprint exposure than competitive matches depending on pitch size, player numbers and other constraints. That does not establish what Carrick’s players are or are not doing behind closed doors at Carrington.

The World Cup comparisons are also treated as context rather than controlled experiments. Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United had different numbers of players involved, different tournament workloads, different return dates and different tactical demands once the Premier League season began.

Those limitations matter.

This article does not treat low running numbers as proof of poor fitness, poor fitness as proof of inadequate training, or tactical structure as an alternative that automatically clears physical preparation. The evidence is used to test how much Manchester United’s public match data can actually tell us about where the problem begins.

Sources consulted include official material from the Premier League and Manchester United; data and analysis from Opta and GeniusIQ; reporting from Reuters and the BBC; and peer-reviewed research published in sports-science and football-performance journals.

What do you think?

When a team looks physically flat, what do you trust more: what you see, the running numbers, or the tactical context around them?

Do United look underprepared physically to you, or are the numbers reflecting the way Carrick is asking them to play?

And if the answer is somewhere between the two, where would you start looking first?

Young PSIM Yogyakarta supporters at Manahan Stadium. Photo: Altair Netraphim / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Nobody is born caring about a football club.

Somebody has to put it in front of you first.

Maybe that happens at home. Your dad puts you in the shirt before you know what the badge means. Maybe the club is already part of the city around you, close enough that supporting it never feels like much of a decision. For somebody else it starts on television. A player, a goal, a shirt, a match you happened to catch and then, for whatever reason, wanted to see again.

There usually isn’t much ceremony to it.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

Because the beginning can be almost accidental, and somehow years later people are arranging weekends around fixtures played by strangers. Songs get learned. Trips get planned. Kids get pulled into it. A match from twenty years ago can still put somebody back in a specific room, next to a specific person, at a very specific point in their life.

We call a lot of that football culture.

I realized pretty quickly I wasn’t sure what I meant by that.

My first thought was that the difference had something to do with participation. Watching was consumption. Building something around the game was culture.

That explanation lasted about as long as it took me to start researching it.

Supporters can form intense attachments to clubs in cities they have never lived in. Real relationships can grow around a product sold by a multinational entertainment business. Supporters create songs and traditions that clubs eventually package and market. Parents pass clubs to children who promptly decide they like somebody else.

The boundary kept getting harder to see.

Maybe there isn’t a point where football stops being entertainment and becomes something more.

Maybe the better question is what starts collecting around it.

The most obvious answer is repetition.

Football never really goes away.

There is another fixture coming. Another Saturday. Another reason to check the score, meet somewhere or send the same person a message. Even a team doing absolutely nothing interesting still gives you a calendar.

But doing something over and over does not automatically make it meaningful.

Sometimes a habit is just a habit.

The interesting part is what starts attaching itself to it.

Sociologist Mitchell Lee got an unusual chance to watch some of that happen almost from scratch. During New York City FC’s inaugural season, he studied the development of the club’s singing culture. This was not a tradition with generations behind it. The club barely had a past.

Supporters still began settling into repeated behaviors.

Songs became part of how an emerging group understood what we do here.

Lee is actually careful about calling what he observed a “community.” The word can imply permanence and cohesion that fluid supporter groups do not always have.

That distinction matters.

Football writers, clubs and supporters use community pretty freely. Sometimes what we are really talking about is attachment. Sometimes shared behavior. Sometimes there are durable relationships underneath it.

Those things can overlap without being the same thing.

There is evidence for the relationships, though. Research using social-network analysis around an MLS club and a USL club in the American Midwest found measurable networks of co-attendance among supporters. Shared supporters-group membership and interaction around the team were associated with stronger ties within those networks.

That does not mean football manufactures friendship.

It means football gives people a reason to keep ending up in the same place.

A fixture can become the excuse for the conversation. After a while the conversation becomes part of the fixture. Eventually it can be hard to tell which part you were really coming back for.

Places pick up meaning too.

A stadium is concrete, steel and plastic seats until enough life happens there.

Then one section becomes where you stood with your dad. One pub becomes the place everybody met. One street becomes a walk you know without thinking about it.

Research into the abandoned Za Lužánkami stadium in Brno looked at exactly that connection between football grounds and collective memory. Zbrojovka left the ground in 2001. Fourteen years later, supporters helped revive the abandoned stadium long enough to stage an exhibition match there.

The football had moved on.

The meaning attached to the place had not.

That is probably what repetition gives us more than anything else: chances for football to get tied to people, places and parts of our lives that were never really about football to begin with.

Then somebody else gets brought into it.

Research by Simone Sarti involving more than 4,000 University of Milan students found early family socialization to be an important mechanism in the transmission of football fandom. The sample is not representative of every supporter everywhere, but it gives some weight to something football families already understand pretty well.

We hand this stuff to each other.

Not just shirts.

Routines. Stories. Knowledge. Places. Ways of spending time.

But inheritance is messy.

Kevin Dixon’s work on becoming a football fan pushes against the idea that tradition simply reproduces itself intact. People receive practices inside particular social conditions, then interpret them. Change them. Sometimes resist them completely.

Ilan Tamir deliberately studied fathers whose sons supported different clubs. For some of those fathers, the choice disrupted expectations around family legacy and team heritage.

The sons had not failed at being football supporters.

They had just done something different with what had been handed to them.

A parent can pass down Saturday afternoon without successfully passing down the club. A sibling can introduce the game and watch the other person build a completely different relationship with it. A family can move thousands of miles and carry a football identity somewhere the club itself has never been.

What gets handed over is really just the starting point.

Before digging into the research, I had asked a few people around me a deliberately simple question:

Why does football matter to you?

It wasn’t a survey, and I wasn’t trying to prove anything with the answers. I just wanted to see where people went when the question was left open.

What caught my attention was how quickly football gave way to people.

They talked about brothers, friends, parents and children. Playing together. Watching together. Having something to fall back on as relationships changed.

I kept coming back to one word: heritage.

Not heritage as perfect inheritance. Football rarely works that neatly.

You can inherit the ritual, the stories, even a way of spending time with people.

You cannot inherit somebody else’s memories.

Those have to become your own.

The ritual can be handed over.

The meaning has to be made again.

Heritage also sounds sturdier than it really is.

Sometimes the next person does not want what they are being handed. Sometimes the club changes. Sometimes the people around it change. Sometimes the place disappears. Sometimes the practical conditions that allowed the ritual to repeat become harder to maintain.

A recent study of English supporter activists campaigning against rising ticket prices and reductions in youth and senior concessions found that their concerns went beyond simply paying more for football.

They were worried about what gets interrupted: grandparents taking children, parents sitting with sons and daughters, season tickets remaining in families, going back to the same ground together year after year.

Their argument was that access helps make those repetitions possible. If enough of that becomes harder, passing the practice forward becomes harder too.

That does not mean an older version of football culture deserves automatic protection.

Traditions can pass along exclusions and assumptions about who counts as a “real” supporter just as easily as they pass along songs and stories.

Commercial football complicates the picture even more.

The forces that have made clubs easier to follow around the world can exist alongside pressures making some forms of traditional matchgoing harder to sustain.

Broadcasting carries the match.

Marketing carries the badge.

Digital spaces give distant supporters somewhere to gather.

Then people start doing things with what arrived.

They create routines, group chats, trips, jokes, friendships and supporter groups the club never fully planned.

And eventually some of that becomes commercially useful too. Clubs can market an atmosphere and identity supporters helped create themselves.

At that point, trying to sort everything neatly into “commercial” or “authentic” stops being especially useful.

A club can profit from something supporters genuinely built together without making what they built fake.

So when do the roots of the badge reach the heart?

I am not sure there is a moment you could point to.

Buying the shirt does not do it.

Knowing every player does not do it.

Neither does attending some magic number of matches or supporting the same club for forty years.

Forty years can describe meaning.

It can also describe habit.

The difference seems to be how much else gets attached along the way: a morning routine, a person, a place, a particular season, a trip, even a story you have heard enough times that you remember it despite never being there.

One match becomes the afternoon you spent with somebody. One stadium becomes a place where somebody still exists in your memory long after they stopped sitting beside you.

Eventually football starts carrying things that are not really about football anymore.

That does not make any of it permanent.

What gets handed down can change enough that the people who started a tradition barely recognize what survives.

Maybe surviving was never going to mean staying exactly the same.

The badge itself can travel almost anywhere now.

A broadcast can put it in front of millions of people. A shirt can be shipped across the world. A club can collect supporters on another continent before some of them ever see its stadium.

Meaning does not move that easily.

Somebody has to make something out of what arrives.

And if it is going to last beyond them, somebody else eventually has to make something out of it too.

Maybe there was never going to be a clean answer to when that happens.

Not when football becomes impossible to separate from who you are.

When it becomes difficult to separate it from the people, places and memories through which you learned to care.

Research & References

This piece draws on peer-reviewed research in football sociology, supporter behavior, cultural transmission, social identity, collective memory and intergenerational fandom.

Where possible, I have linked directly to the underlying academic studies rather than summaries of their findings. The studies used here examine different supporter populations, clubs, countries and methods, so their findings are treated as evidence of particular mechanisms rather than universal rules about how all football supporters experience the game.

Several of the studies used in this piece are deliberately narrow. Simone Sarti’s research is based on 4,047 University of Milan students. Mitchell Lee’s work examines social identity during New York City FC’s inaugural MLS season. Ilan Tamir’s study focuses specifically on fathers whose sons support different clubs, while the recent English ticketing research draws on interviews with 21 supporter activists involved in the Stop Exploiting Loyalty campaign.

Those limitations matter.

This article does not treat family transmission as automatic, supporter groups as synonymous with community, or ticket prices as proven causes of cultural decline. The evidence is used to examine how football practices can be repeated, transformed, resisted and passed between people over time.

Sources consulted include research published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Men and Masculinities, European Journal for Sport and Society, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, The Sociological Review, and related academic publications.

What do you think?

When did football stop feeling like something you watched and start feeling like something you carried with you?

Was it a person? A place? A ritual? A particular match?

And if someone introduced football to you, did you inherit their club too, or did you end up making something different out of it?

I’m curious what football heritage looks like for you.

Etihad Stadium, Manchester. Photo: Cléria De Souza / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Manchester City sent me looking at Financial Fair Play.

Which isn’t exactly surprising right now.

But somewhere in reading about the case, I got stuck on something much simpler.

Fair.

We’ve been arguing about Financial Fair Play for more than fifteen years. Clubs have been investigated, fined, restricted and excluded from competitions under rules carrying some version of that name. Supporters have learned entirely too much about allowable losses, amortisation, related-party transactions and accounting periods.

And I’m not sure we agree on what the fair part is supposed to mean.

I certainly didn’t.

My assumption going into this was that I more or less understood the arrangement. Football clubs were spending too much money, UEFA wanted them to become financially sustainable, and Financial Fair Play was just the name they gave the solution.

The further I went back, the less comfortable I became with that explanation.

Because fair wasn’t added later.

It was there at the beginning.

In August 2009, before the regulations themselves had been approved, UEFA’s Professional Football Strategy Council backed a set of financial-control measures whose stated aims included improving “financial fairness in European competitions” and the “long-term stability of club football across Europe.”

Those are two different ideas.

And football had a very real problem with the second one.

In 2009, top-division European clubs generated about €11.7 billion in revenue. Revenue had increased 4.8 percent from the year before.

Costs increased 9.3 percent.

The clubs collectively lost nearly €1.2 billion.

Employee costs had climbed to 64 percent of revenue.

Two years later, those aggregate losses had reached roughly €1.7 billion.

That number is almost difficult to reconcile with what was happening everywhere else. Football wasn’t a dying industry. Revenues were growing. Television money was growing. Commercial income was growing.

The sport was getting richer.

It was also getting worse at keeping the money.

Portsmouth showed what could happen when the money underneath all of that stopped working.

The club entered administration in February 2010, only months after UEFA had first publicly backed the principles that would become Financial Fair Play. The administrator’s report eventually put Portsmouth’s liabilities at more than £100 million. Draft accounts showed staff costs equivalent to 109 percent of revenue.

One hundred and nine percent.

Just on staff.

And Portsmouth hadn’t only borrowed against what it already had. Some future transfer instalments owed to the club had been brought forward through financing arrangements, turning money due later into cash available sooner.

I recognized that immediately.

I’d spent an entire previous investigation trying to understand why football clubs pull future income into the present. There is nothing inherently reckless about doing it. Receivables financing can simply solve a timing problem.

But Portsmouth had much bigger problems: enormous wage costs, substantial liabilities and a football club that eventually couldn’t pay everyone it owed.

And everyone matters here.

Football clubs were owed money.

So were tax authorities.

So were ordinary businesses.

Once the club went into administration, the consequences weren’t confined to the owner who had taken the risk or the players whose contracts had helped create the wage bill. They reached creditors who had never agreed to gamble on whether Portsmouth could stay competitive in the Premier League.

That changed the question for me a little.

From where we sit now, supporters often experience financial regulation through what their club can’t do. A player can’t be signed. Another has to be sold. And somehow following a football club now occasionally requires a working knowledge of amortisation.

Go back to 2009 and 2010, though, and something else is visible.

UEFA wasn’t inventing a financial problem to justify regulating football clubs.

There was one.

None of that tells me whether Financial Fair Play is actually fair.

But it killed the easiest version of the argument I had brought with me.

Before I could figure out whether the solution was fair, I needed to understand exactly what it was supposed to protect.

The answer, at least on paper, was fairly straightforward.

UEFA wanted clubs to pay their bills.

That sounds almost insultingly simple considering what Financial Fair Play eventually became, but creditor protection was there from the beginning. The original regulations talked about clubs settling what they owed to other clubs, employees and tax authorities. They talked about financial discipline, responsible spending and protecting the long-term viability of European football.

They also said something that would become much more complicated.

Clubs should operate on the basis of their own revenues.

At first, that made sense to me too.

If a football club earns £100 million every year but regularly spends £150 million, something has to fill the gap. Maybe it’s debt. Maybe it’s an owner. Maybe it’s money borrowed against income the club hasn’t received yet.

Whatever it is, the football operation isn’t paying for all of itself.

And there were plenty of reasons for UEFA to care about that.

Málaga is probably the cleanest example.

In 2012, UEFA found that Málaga had more than €14 million in overdue payables. By the end of September, more than €8 million was still overdue.

There was an argument over some of that money. Málaga maintained that certain tax obligations had been deferred. UEFA disagreed because the required written agreements weren’t in place by the reporting deadline. The dispute eventually reached the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

CAS sided with UEFA.

Málaga was fined €300,000 and excluded from the next UEFA competition for which it qualified within the applicable period.

There are much sexier parts of Financial Fair Play to argue about.

This isn’t one of them.

Pay your bills.

And Málaga wasn’t alone. In September 2012, UEFA withheld competition prize money from 23 clubs while it investigated significant overdue payments.

By the following reporting deadline, no overdue-payables balances remained at sixteen of those clubs, and UEFA closed their cases.

That’s worth sitting with for a second.

Because when Financial Fair Play is discussed now, the conversation tends to revolve around spending limits. How much can a club lose? How much can an owner invest? How much can be spent on players?

But one of the earliest versions of enforcement was considerably less philosophical.

You owe someone money.

Pay them.

And on that measure, something changed.

In June 2011, clubs monitored by UEFA reported €57 million in overdue payables.

By June 2019, that number was €2 million.

It didn’t fall neatly every single year. And those numbers alone don’t prove that Financial Fair Play caused the entire decline.

But €57 million to €2 million is difficult to dismiss.

The broader financial picture moved too.

In 2011, European top-division clubs had collectively lost roughly €1.7 billion.

By 2017, they recorded an aggregate bottom-line profit of €615 million—the first overall profit in UEFA’s records.

Again, I want to be careful here.

UEFA credits Financial Fair Play with helping produce that turnaround. UEFA is also the organization that created Financial Fair Play.

European football changed enormously over the same period. Revenues grew. Broadcasting deals grew. Domestic rules changed. Clubs became more commercially sophisticated. There isn’t an honest way to look at two numbers six years apart and assign the difference to one regulation.

European clubs, in aggregate, were making more money without immediately losing all of it.

Overdue bills had collapsed.

And for the first time in UEFA’s records, European top-flight clubs were profitable in aggregate.

If Financial Fair Play was supposed to improve the financial health of European football, it is difficult to look at that record and argue that nothing improved.

But there was another problem.

Football clubs don’t spend money in isolation.

If one club receives another £30 million and decides to save it, that’s financially responsible.

If the club it is competing against takes the same £30 million and buys a striker, responsibility might also make the first club worse at football.

That tension existed well before FFP. As revenues grew in the years leading up to the rules, wages were growing faster. Between 2007 and 2012, UEFA calculated that club revenues increased 42 percent. Wage growth reached 59 percent once currency fluctuations were removed.

More money was entering football.

A remarkable amount of it was finding its way back out through the competition for players.

Michel Platini later said something about the creation of Financial Fair Play that caught me.

Some owners, he said, had asked UEFA to intervene because they felt they were being “obliged to invest in order to be competitive.”

That’s different from UEFA protecting clubs from irresponsible owners.

Some of the owners wanted protecting from each other.

The logic isn’t particularly difficult to understand.

One owner spends.

The team improves.

Its rivals now have a sporting reason to spend too.

Nobody has to be reckless. Nobody even has to be behaving irrationally.

The problem is that what makes sense for one club can become expensive when everyone does it.

And suddenly “operate on the basis of your own revenues” starts doing more than protecting creditors.

It puts a limit on how far that competition can go.

That helped me understand why parts of the industry supported the idea. In 2009, the proposal had the backing of UEFA’s Club Competitions Committee, the board of the European Club Association and the Professional Football Strategy Council.

This wasn’t simply UEFA imposing financial discipline on an industry begging to be left alone.

At least some of the industry wanted the restraint.

And by this point, I was having a harder time with the version of Financial Fair Play I had carried into the investigation.

The financial problem was real.

The unpaid bills were real.

The spending pressure was real.

And the financial results that followed were, at minimum, substantially better.

I could understand why football wanted rules.

What I still didn’t understand was why the amount a club should be allowed to spend had to depend so heavily on the amount that club could already earn.

Because those aren’t quite the same question.

This is where I started getting stuck on the money.

Because “operate on the basis of your own revenues” sounds straightforward until you start asking what counts as your own.

Chelsea is a useful place to start.

Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003 and immediately gave Chelsea access to money the football club could not have generated on anything close to the same scale itself.

But Chelsea wasn’t some tiny club suddenly created by a billionaire. In the season before Abramovich arrived, it generated about £93 million in football revenue and ranked tenth in Deloitte’s Football Money League.

A year later, that revenue was roughly £144 million.

Some of that increase came from something fairly obvious.

Chelsea got considerably better at football.

Its run to the Champions League semifinal in 2003/04 generated an estimated €44 million from the competition alone. More success meant more prize money, more television money and eventually more commercial opportunity.

It would be too easy to draw a straight line through those numbers.

Abramovich spent money. Chelsea won. Chelsea made more money.

There is truth somewhere in that sequence, but the numbers don’t tell us how much of Chelsea’s additional revenue was directly caused by owner investment. They certainly don’t tell us what would have happened without it.

What they do show is something more interesting for this question.

Money that begins outside a football club can help create conditions in which the club eventually generates considerably more money of its own.

And once it does, those revenues are treated differently.

That matters because the obvious defense of Financial Fair Play is Portsmouth.

What happens when the person funding everything leaves?

Chelsea gives us an uncomfortable counterexample.

Abramovich announced his intention to sell Chelsea on March 2, 2022. On March 10, he was sanctioned by the UK government, placing severe restrictions on the club’s operations and turning the sale into an extraordinary government-regulated process.

Whatever Chelsea’s dependence on Abramovich had meant before then, access to him had changed abruptly.

Chelsea didn’t disappear.

The club was eventually sold in a transaction involving £2.5 billion for the shares, alongside a commitment from the new ownership to invest another £1.75 billion.

That doesn’t prove Chelsea’s model was sustainable.

A £2.5 billion purchase price isn’t recurring football revenue. It doesn’t tell us what Chelsea would have become without Abramovich’s investment, and one extraordinarily valuable club can’t establish that owner financing is generally safe.

But it does make Portsmouth harder to use as the entire answer.

Outside money can create dependence.

It can also help build something that remains extraordinarily valuable after the person supplying that money is gone.

Then I got to Newcastle.

And the question became harder again.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund led the consortium that bought Newcastle United in October 2021. Whatever else can be said about the takeover, access to capital was not the problem.

Newcastle’s ability to spend it on football was.

The club reported £180 million in revenue for the year ending June 2022, although the new ownership had only been in place for nine months of that period. It also recorded a £70.7 million after-tax loss, with the club pointing in part to investment in the squad during the January transfer window.

Then the revenue started moving.

By 2022/23, Newcastle’s revenue had reached £250.3 million.

In 2023/24, it reached £320.3 million.

Commercial revenue increased 90 percent that year. Matchday revenue increased 32 percent. Newcastle had also returned to the Champions League.

The owners continued putting capital into the club.

But that capital and Newcastle’s ability to spend on its first team are not the same thing.

Financial regulation doesn’t simply say that wealthy owners can’t invest in football clubs. Money can go into facilities, infrastructure and other parts of the business, and the rules can actually encourage equity investment rather than additional debt.

What they constrain is the extent to which an owner’s wealth can become immediate sporting spending.

Newcastle can become richer.

It just can’t become as rich as its owner overnight.

And there is a logic to that.

If Portsmouth taught football anything, it was that the existence of someone willing to cover losses today doesn’t guarantee that person will still be willing, or able, to cover them tomorrow.

But Newcastle also exposes the other side of the decision.

Imagine two clubs.

One has spent decades building a huge supporter base, commercial operation and global brand. It can generate hundreds of millions of pounds every year.

The other has a much smaller revenue base but an owner willing to invest hundreds of millions of pounds into it.

Both owners might have the money.

Both clubs might be perfectly capable of paying their bills.

But financial regulation does not treat their spending capacity as equivalent.

The first club can spend more because the club already earns more.

The second has to grow into that ability.

Which brings us back to Manchester City.

The current Premier League case is now on appeal. An independent commission found City guilty of serious financial-rule breaches across nine seasons, including the use of sham commercial arrangements that artificially inflated revenues and reduced costs. City has appealed those findings.

For this investigation, though, the important part isn’t whether I can relitigate the case.

I can’t.

It’s what the dispute reveals about the system.

Once football decides that spending should be connected to the money a club generates, somebody has to decide what counts as genuinely generated revenue.

That is why related-party sponsorship matters.

It isn’t enough that money arrived in a club’s bank account. Regulators may have to ask where it came from, whether the transaction was genuinely commercial and, in some circumstances, whether its stated value reflects fair value.

UEFA had already confronted that problem with Paris Saint-Germain years earlier. In its 2014 settlement with PSG, UEFA examined the club’s agreement with the Qatar Tourism Authority and assigned it a fair value significantly below the value PSG had submitted.

The money existed.

The question was how much of it should count.

And suddenly I was a long way from unpaid bills.

Financial Fair Play wasn’t only putting a ceiling on spending.

It was drawing a line between different kinds of money.

And I had arrived at a question I hadn’t been asking when I started:

When does an owner’s money become a football club’s money?

I make teams for a living.

Not football teams worth billions of pounds, obviously. Teams of twelve-year-olds in PE.

And in a gym full of twelve-year-olds, fair is remarkably easy to understand.

I know who the strongest athletes are. I know which kids can dominate a game. If I put too many of them on one team, I move somebody.

The goal isn’t complicated. Make the teams competitive enough that both sides have a reasonable chance.

If one team destroys the other, I probably didn’t make very fair teams.

Financial Fair Play doesn’t work like that.

And I think that’s where the word had been tripping me up.

Because if a club is supposed to grow primarily from the money it already generates, then the clubs that already generate the most money retain an obvious advantage.

That isn’t a loophole in Financial Fair Play.

It’s how the system works.

A club with decades of domestic success, a massive supporter base, valuable commercial relationships and regular Champions League income can turn those advantages into greater spending capacity. If that spending produces more success, the cycle can continue.

Success produces revenue.

Revenue permits spending.

Spending can help produce more success.

That doesn’t mean the cycle is automatic. Plenty of rich clubs spend badly. Plenty of smaller clubs outperform richer ones. Football remains wonderfully resistant to behaving exactly as a spreadsheet says it should.

But the advantage is real.

And researchers were asking versions of this question almost as soon as Financial Fair Play arrived.

Some argued that requiring clubs to move toward break-even could suppress spending while strengthening the position of the traditional elite. If established clubs already had the largest revenue bases, restricting the ability of challengers to cover losses with outside investment could make it harder to close the gap.

The uncomfortable part is that some of what happened afterward looks consistent with that concern.

But this is where I had to slow down again.

Because “competitive balance” sounds like one thing.

It isn’t.

A league can be measured by how close its teams finish on points. By how predictable individual matches are. By how concentrated championships have become. By how often different clubs reach the top four.

Those measures can tell different stories.

So can different leagues.

One study comparing six seasons before and after the introduction of Financial Fair Play found a significant deterioration in competitive balance in Spain, Germany and France, but not a statistically significant deterioration in England or Italy.

Another focused on the Premier League and found no evidence that FFP had worsened competitive balance there, with some measures suggesting it may even have improved.

Broader research has found increasing concentration in some European leagues and fewer different clubs reaching the top four or winning championships in many of them. Other long-run research has found the overall effect of FFP on domestic competitive balance to be much smaller.

So I couldn’t get a clean answer from the research either.

There is evidence that parts of European football became more concentrated during the FFP era.

There isn’t clean evidence that FFP caused it.

European football wasn’t standing still while UEFA changed its financial rules.

Champions League money was becoming increasingly important. Broadcasting revenue was distributed differently across domestic leagues. Commercial income was concentrating around globally successful clubs. The biggest teams were becoming international businesses in a way smaller clubs simply weren’t.

UEFA itself eventually acknowledged the problem, warning about what it called “globalisation-fuelled revenue polarisation.”

And there is a particularly awkward piece of evidence here.

From 2003/04 through 2016/17, just 16 clubs received €5.6 billion in Champions League distributions, accounting for 52 percent of all revenue distributed through the competition over that period.

So some of the revenue giving Europe’s biggest clubs greater regulatory spending capacity was coming from UEFA’s own competition.

That makes it very difficult to look at increasing concentration, notice that Financial Fair Play existed at the same time, and stop there.

There are too many other things moving.

UEFA seems to have understood that too. It later discussed measures aimed more directly at competitive balance, including squad limits, luxury taxes, transfer-market reforms and greater redistribution.

At one point, UEFA acknowledged the tension unusually clearly: overspending and unsustainable business models, it argued, could not be the answer to financial inequality.

That’s a pretty good defense.

If the existing hierarchy is unfair, allowing every club to spend whatever its owner is willing to lose doesn’t remove inequality.

It changes where the inequality comes from.

And this was the point where my original question became genuinely annoying.

Suppose a billionaire buys a smaller club.

The owner spends heavily, recruits better players and breaks into a group of clubs that had dominated the league for years.

Has competitive balance become worse?

Maybe.

There is now another extremely wealthy team capable of concentrating talent and winning repeatedly.

But has mobility improved?

Also maybe.

A club that previously had little realistic path into the established elite has suddenly moved into it.

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Manchester City is an obvious reason this distinction matters. Whatever conclusion is eventually reached in its current legal process, City’s rise also disrupted an existing hierarchy in English football.

A system can become more financially concentrated while becoming easier for one particular challenger to penetrate.

Which leaves the alternative.

What if football simply allowed owners to spend whatever they wanted?

That sounds fair in one sense. Every club is allowed to do exactly the same thing.

But permission isn’t the same as capacity.

Every club could be allowed to have an owner willing to spend £500 million.

Every club won’t have one.

We would have replaced an advantage based partly on historic success, supporter size and club-generated revenue with an advantage based much more heavily on the wealth and willingness of whoever owns the club.

Maybe that’s preferable.

But it isn’t neutral.

And this is where my gym version of fair starts to break down.

If I make bad teams in PE, I can stop the game and move a kid from one side to the other.

Nobody has a five-year contract.

Nobody owes another school a transfer payment.

Nobody has borrowed against next year’s dodgeball revenue.

And no local business is going unpaid because one of my teams really wanted to win seventh-grade basketball.

A football club isn’t just one side of a game. It’s an institution that employs people, signs contracts, borrows money and can fail.

So maybe simply making the teams more equal isn’t enough either.

Neither are the alternatives.

An absolute spending cap would attack the advantage of enormous existing revenues much more directly, but it would also represent a fundamentally different way of deciding how much clubs can spend.

A luxury tax could allow clubs to spend above a threshold while making that spending progressively more expensive and potentially redistributing some of the proceeds.

Greater revenue sharing could attack the inequality before clubs ever reach the spending rules.

The Premier League even considered a system known as Top-to-Bottom Anchoring, which would have linked spending at the top more directly to income received by clubs at the bottom.

It didn’t receive enough support.

Instead, beginning in 2026/27, the Premier League moved to a Squad Cost Ratio system. Its basic structure still ties squad-cost limits to football-related revenue and player-trading results.

UEFA’s current rules do something similar. Its squad-cost rule limits specified first-team costs to 70 percent of a calculation built principally from adjusted club revenue and player-trading results.

Different percentages.

Different details.

The same uncomfortable question underneath them.

Why should money generated by yesterday’s success be treated differently from money an owner wants to spend trying to create tomorrow’s?

There are answers.

Portsmouth is part of one.

Málaga is part of another.

The financial turnaround of European football matters too.

But by this point, I didn’t think Financial Fair Play could really be understood as a system designed to make football financially equal.

It isn’t.

Football still allows enormous financial advantages.

History can create one.

Supporter size can create one.

Champions League qualification can create one.

Commercial power can create one.

An owner can create one too, but the rules place different limits on how that advantage can be converted into spending on the pitch.

I started this trying to figure out what Financial Fair Play was actually protecting.

I think I was expecting a cleaner answer.

The clubs, obviously.

Their creditors.

Maybe the competition itself.

And depending on which part of the rules you’re looking at, all of those answers can be true.

What I wasn’t expecting was how quickly the word fair would become the harder part.

Because financially healthy and competitively equal are not the same thing.

A system can make it harder for clubs to accumulate unpaid bills without making it easier for a smaller club to catch a larger one. It can protect employees and creditors while also making existing revenue more valuable. It can stop an owner from immediately converting enormous personal wealth into an enormous playing budget without making the financial advantages already held by established clubs disappear.

Those things can all exist at once.

Which is probably why the gym kept coming back to me.

Nobody is asking me to keep Team Blue solvent.

I’m not checking whether Team Red can make payroll next month. There aren’t creditors waiting outside the gym. Nobody’s future depends on whether one particularly enthusiastic parent gets bored and stops funding the team.

Football has to care about those things.

And once it does, fair becomes harder to define.

The rules UEFA created don’t give every club the same amount of money. They’re built around the idea that clubs should increasingly support their football operations with money the clubs themselves produce.

There is a defensible reason for that.

A club’s obligations don’t disappear when an owner’s willingness to fund them does.

Player contracts still exist.

Employees still need paying.

Transfer instalments still come due.

So do taxes and invoices.

Portsmouth helps explain why that matters.

So does Málaga.

And the improvement in European club finances after the rules arrived makes it difficult to dismiss financial sustainability as nothing more than an excuse for regulation.

But there is a cost to choosing club-generated revenue as the foundation.

Yesterday matters.

The supporters accumulated over decades matter. The commercial relationships built during successful eras matter. Champions League appearances matter. The revenue produced by all of it matters.

Past success doesn’t guarantee future success.

It does, however, help determine how much you’re allowed to spend pursuing it.

And that’s where I ended up seeing Manchester City differently too.

Not as the answer to whether Financial Fair Play works. And not as a shortcut to deciding whether the system is fair.

City’s appeal still matters. The Commission’s findings are findings under appeal, and whatever ultimately survives that process deserves to be treated accordingly.

But the dispute exposes something underneath the regulations that exists regardless of how the appeal ends.

Football has to decide which money counts.

It already has.

Money earned through broadcasting counts.

Commercial revenue counts, subject to rules about how some transactions are valued.

Competition income counts.

Player trading can increase spending capacity.

Owner investment can build parts of a club, but it cannot simply be converted without limit into first-team spending.

Those aren’t laws of nature.

They’re choices about what kind of financial advantage football is prepared to recognize.

I don’t think that makes Financial Fair Play a lie.

I also don’t think it makes the word fair meaningless.

It just means I was asking too much of it.

I was thinking about fair the way I would in a gym: look at the teams, look at what each one has, and try to give both a reasonable chance to win.

Financial Fair Play is trying to solve a different problem.

It asks clubs to compete without making their survival depend entirely on someone continually paying the difference.

That can make football healthier.

It can also leave yesterday’s winners with advantages tomorrow’s challengers don’t have.

And I’m not sure there is a rule that makes both of those problems disappear.

Remove the limits and wealth doesn’t disappear. It moves toward the owners capable of spending the most.

Keep revenue-linked limits and wealth doesn’t disappear either. It remains concentrated around the clubs already capable of generating the most.

Put in a hard cap, redistribute more revenue or tax spending above a certain level, and football would simply be making a different decision about where advantage is allowed to come from.

Maybe that’s what I had been missing in the name all along.

Financial Fair Play doesn’t tell us what fair football looks like.

It tells us which financial advantages football has decided to allow.

Research & References

This piece draws on UEFA and Premier League regulations and financial reports, club accounts and announcements, Court of Arbitration for Sport decisions, contemporary reporting, and academic research into Financial Fair Play and competitive balance.

Where possible, I have relied on primary sources for regulatory language, financial figures, disciplinary decisions and club disclosures. Academic claims are linked to the underlying studies rather than summaries of their findings.

The financial figures used throughout the piece do not always describe identical populations or accounting measures. UEFA’s aggregate profitability figures refer to European top-division clubs, while overdue-payables figures come from clubs monitored through UEFA’s financial-control system. Where those populations differ, I have treated them separately rather than as directly interchangeable.

The competitive-balance research is similarly mixed. Different studies examine different leagues, periods and measures of competitiveness, and the evidence does not establish a clean causal relationship between Financial Fair Play and the concentration of sporting success. The article reflects that uncertainty rather than treating correlation during the FFP era as proof of causation.

Manchester City’s current Premier League case requires particular care. An independent commission has issued findings concerning financial-rule breaches, and Manchester City has appealed those findings. The findings are therefore described as findings under appeal rather than as the final resolution of the case.

Sources consulted include official material from UEFA, the Premier League, Chelsea and Newcastle United; decisions and materials from the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the UK government; Deloitte’s Football Money League; contemporary reporting from The Guardian and other established outlets; and academic research published in Economic Policy, Sport, Business and Management, Sustainability and other peer-reviewed publications.

Regulations, financial information and the status of Manchester City’s appeal are current as of October 6, 2026.

What do you think?

What should “fair” mean in football?

If one club can spend more because decades of success have given it a larger revenue base, while another has an owner willing to invest the same money today, should the rules treat those advantages differently?

And if they should, where would you draw the line?

I’m curious which version of fair makes the most sense to you.

Hillsborough Stadium. Photo: Daniel Bagshaw (Dan1980) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

What Did Madrid Buy?

Imagine a club owns the registration rights to a £50 million player.

Tomorrow morning, nothing about him changes.

He isn’t injured. He doesn’t lose form. He doesn’t get older overnight. He is the exact same footballer he was the day before.

But twelve months disappear from his contract.

Is he still worth £50 million?

That question gets strange very quickly when you look at Trent Alexander-Arnold’s move from Liverpool to Real Madrid.

By the end of May 2025, everyone involved knew where Alexander-Arnold was going. His Liverpool contract was approaching its expiration, and Real Madrid had agreed a six-year deal with him.

Madrid could have waited.

Instead, they paid Liverpool to release him early.

Liverpool confirmed that it received a fee for Alexander-Arnold to leave before his contract expired. The exact amount was never officially disclosed, but it was a multimillion-pound payment for a player Madrid were already set to have soon anyway.

There was a reason.

Alexander-Arnold officially became a Real Madrid player on June 1. The Club World Cup began two weeks later, and Madrid wanted him available for it. The club specifically announced that he would be part of the tournament.

So what did Real Madrid actually pay Liverpool for?

It wasn’t a better version of Trent Alexander-Arnold.

His passing didn’t improve because the transfer happened in June instead of July. Madrid weren’t purchasing additional years on the long-term contract they had agreed with him.

They were paying for access to something Liverpool still controlled and Madrid suddenly wanted.

A few weeks.

Real Madrid could afford to wait for Alexander-Arnold.

They decided they didn’t want to.

And for that brief moment, the most valuable thing Liverpool had left to sell wasn’t necessarily the player.

It was time.

Why the Clock Matters

The strange thing about football contracts is that the clock is always moving, even when nothing else is.

A player can score the same goals, create the same chances and remain just as important to his team. But as the end of his contract gets closer, the club’s position in a potential transfer can change.

There is evidence that this matters beyond the way football people talk about transfers.

One econometric study examined 2,045 fee-paying transfers involving players from Europe’s five major leagues between July 2012 and November 2021. Contract length was among the most important player-related variables in its model. All else being equal, moving from two years remaining on a contract to three was associated with a 22 percent increase in the transfer fee.

That doesn’t mean another year automatically makes every player 22 percent more expensive. Transfers are far messier than that. Age matters. Performance matters. The financial strength of the buying club matters. So do the player’s intentions and the selling club’s willingness to let him go.

But contract length changes the negotiation because it changes what the selling club can do.

With several years remaining, a club can reject an offer and keep the player.

It can demand a higher fee.

It can offer a new contract.

It can decide that another season of the player is worth more than whatever is currently being offered.

As the contract gets shorter, some of those options begin to narrow.

Eventually, the clock reaches zero.

That boundary became one of the defining features of the modern European transfer market because of Jean-Marc Bosman.

Bosman’s contract with RFC Liège expired in 1990. He wanted to move to Dunkerque in France, but the transfer was blocked when the French club would not pay the fee demanded by Liège.

The dispute eventually reached the European Court of Justice. In 1995, the Court ruled that rules requiring a new club in one EU member state to pay the former club for an out-of-contract player from another member state restricted the free movement of workers.

The modern transfer system is more complicated than one court case, but Bosman established something fundamental about what happens when contractual time disappears.

The footballer does not become worthless.

The former club simply loses the contractual position that allowed it to demand a transfer fee for letting him leave.

Kylian Mbappé is an extreme example.

Paris Saint-Germain had paid €180 million to sign him from Monaco. When Mbappé joined Real Madrid in 2024 after his PSG contract expired, Madrid did not pay PSG a transfer fee.

One of the best footballers in the world obviously wasn’t suddenly worth nothing.

What reached zero was the amount of contractual time PSG had left to sell.

A player’s footballing value and a club’s ability to capture some of that value through a transfer fee are not the same thing.

Which makes the Trent Alexander-Arnold example from earlier even stranger.

Liverpool had only a small amount of contractual time remaining. Normally, you might expect that time to become less valuable with every passing day.

Then Real Madrid decided it needed some of those days.

And suddenly, Liverpool still had something worth buying.

When the Clock Starts Working Against You

Brighton know this calculation better than most clubs.

Their success in the transfer market has been built partly on identifying players early, developing them and knowing when the value of selling outweighs the value of keeping them.

Paul Barber has spoken openly about that balance. Brighton understand that their best players may eventually want to move on. When they do, Barber has said the club has a responsibility to maximize their value and sell when the deal is right for both sides.

The important part is timing.

Barber has described trying to find the best value available “at that particular point.”

Kaoru Mitoma may be approaching one of those points.

Brighton signed Mitoma to a new contract in October 2023 that runs until June 2027. At the time, technical director David Weir celebrated securing one of the club’s most important players for the long term.

Three years later, that long term has become much shorter.

In March, Fabian Hürzeler was asked directly about Mitoma entering the final season of his deal and whether Brighton were discussing another contract with him.

They were.

Hürzeler said the club was in a “very transparent exchange” with its players and acknowledged something every club eventually encounters in a contract negotiation.

“There’s always two sides, the club’s side and the player’s side.”

Brighton can offer Mitoma another contract. They can offer more money, greater security or whatever else they believe makes staying attractive.

What they cannot do is add another year to his contract by themselves.

Mitoma has to agree to give it to them.

Recent reporting suggests that agreement may not be coming. TEAMtalk reported this week that talks have stalled and that Mitoma is currently unlikely to sign an extension. That remains reporting based on unnamed sources, rather than a decision announced by Mitoma or Brighton.

But the underlying problem exists whether that report ultimately proves correct or not.

Mitoma’s current contract still ends in June 2027.

Every month Brighton go without an extension removes a little more of the time they once controlled.

They can still keep him.

They can still sell him.

They can still try to extend him.

But those options do not remain equally useful forever.

And Mitoma does not necessarily have to force anything for the balance to change.

He can wait.

The same clock that gradually reduces Brighton’s contractual control can increase Mitoma’s ability to influence what happens next.

Which exposes one of the limits of saying that a football club “owns” time.

A club can secure years of a player’s career through a contract.

It can sell some of that remaining time to another club.

It can use the time for itself.

But if it wants more?

The player has to sell it back.

What If You Have Time You Don’t Want?

If Mitoma shows why clubs want more contractual time, Richarlison shows why simply having it is not enough.

Tottenham have spent much of 2026 talking publicly about becoming better sellers.

In February, chief executive Vinai Venkatesham wrote that player trading was partly about “knowing when to sell” and being decisive with players who were no longer part of the club’s future. Doing so, he said, was essential to maximizing value.

By the beginning of this season, Tottenham were confronting almost exactly that problem with Richarlison.

The Brazilian still has a contract through June 2027, but his place at the club has changed considerably.

Richarlison made his desire to leave clear during the summer. Tottenham subsequently left him out of their Premier League squad.

There was interest.

According to Brazilian outlet ge, Tottenham rejected offers from Trabzonspor worth £15 million and £20 million during the summer. Richarlison remained at the club after the major European transfer windows closed.

Now Vasco da Gama want him.

Richarlison wants the move too.

But Tottenham still control his registration, and ge reports that Spurs want more than £20 million to sell him permanently.

On paper, that sounds like leverage.

Tottenham have something Vasco wants. Richarlison remains under contract. If another club wants to acquire those contractual rights now, Tottenham can demand compensation for surrendering them.

But there is another side to the calculation.

Richarlison is not registered for Tottenham’s Premier League squad. He has made clear that he wants to leave. His contract is moving toward its final months, and every potential buyer can see the same circumstances.

Tottenham still have time.

The question is how much of that time they can convert into value.

That question has become even more complicated this week.

Richarlison’s representatives are now pursuing a route to terminate his contract. Brazilian reporting says they intend to take the dispute to FIFA, arguing that his exclusion from Tottenham’s Premier League squad supports a case for sporting just cause.

Whether that argument succeeds is unresolved.

FIFA’s rules make sporting just cause a case-by-case determination, and the provision contains conditions that make Richarlison’s situation considerably more complicated than simply saying an unregistered player can walk away.

For our purposes, the legal outcome is almost beside the point.

The dispute exposes something about contractual leverage.

A club can possess time without possessing complete control over what that time is worth.

If Tottenham use Richarlison, his remaining contract has sporting value.

If they sell him, it may have financial value.

If they extend him, they create more time.

But every one of those options becomes more complicated when the player wants to leave and the club is no longer using him in its main domestic competition.

That does not mean Tottenham have no leverage.

It means contractual control and negotiating leverage are not quite the same thing.

And sometimes the hardest part of owning time is knowing when to stop holding onto it.

Sometimes Keeping Time Is the Point

None of this means a club should always sell before the clock runs out.

Sometimes the time itself is worth more than the money being offered for it.

Crystal Palace spent more than a year making that calculation with Marc Guéhi.

In the summer of 2024, Newcastle tried to sign him. Palace rejected an offer reported by the BBC at £65 million.

A year later, the situation looked very different.

Guéhi had entered the final season of his contract and had made clear that he did not intend to sign another one. Liverpool were discussing a deal worth around £35 million.

The financial logic of selling was obvious. If Palace kept him through the final year of his deal, they risked receiving no transfer fee at all.

But there was another calculation happening at the same time.

Oliver Glasner believed Palace could not adequately replace their captain so late in the window. The club tried to find replacements, but the move eventually collapsed on deadline day.

Glasner later described chairman Steve Parish’s decision in unusually simple terms.

“He decided against the money and for the sporting perspective of Crystal Palace.”

Palace knew the clock was working against them financially.

They kept him anyway.

The £35 million Liverpool were prepared to pay had to be compared with something much harder to put on a balance sheet: the value of having Guéhi available for the season ahead.

His performances.

His leadership.

The difficulty and cost of replacing him.

The results Palace believed they could achieve with him that they might not achieve without him.

Suddenly, keeping a player whose transfer value was disappearing did not necessarily mean Palace had mismanaged the asset.

They were choosing to use what remained.

Palace eventually did sell Guéhi, but only after using another half-season of the time they had left. In January 2026, Manchester City signed him on a five-and-a-half-year deal.

Palace therefore did not simply choose between selling Guéhi and losing him for nothing. They chose to keep him when they believed his sporting value mattered more, use him for another part of the season, and then sell what remained of his contract when the calculation changed.

Borussia Dortmund made an even more extreme version of that decision with Robert Lewandowski.

In 2013, Dortmund knew Lewandowski’s contract had only another year to run. They also knew keeping him could mean watching one of Europe’s best strikers eventually leave without a transfer fee.

Hans-Joachim Watzke publicly said they were willing to accept exactly that.

Dortmund wanted Lewandowski for another season badly enough that Watzke said the transfer fee was of secondary importance.

They kept him.

Lewandowski scored 20 Bundesliga goals the following season, finished as the league’s top scorer and then joined Bayern Munich when his Dortmund contract expired.

Dortmund received no transfer fee.

It would be easy to describe that as losing a valuable player for nothing.

Economically, though, there is another way to look at it.

Dortmund effectively chose to spend the transfer income they could have collected in exchange for one more season of Robert Lewandowski.

They did not maximize the value of selling their remaining time.

They maximized the value of using it.

Transfer value is only one kind of value a footballer provides.

A club does not exist simply to buy contracts cheaply and sell them before they expire.

It exists to win football matches.

Sometimes those goals align. Selling at the right moment funds the next player, protects the club from losing an asset without compensation and creates room for the squad to evolve.

Sometimes they conflict. The fee may be attractive while losing the player makes the team worse, particularly when an adequate replacement is expensive or unavailable.

That is why the value of contractual time cannot be measured by the transfer fee alone.

The closer a contract gets to expiry, the less time a club has left to sell.

But it also has less time left to use.

Sometimes the smartest decision is to cash that time in.

Sometimes the smartest decision is to spend it on football.

Who Actually Owns the Clock?

The easiest way to think about a long contract is as control.

Four years remaining gives a club options.

Three years still gives it options.

Two years might start a conversation.

One year can force a decision.

But the closer we have looked at those decisions, the harder it has become to say that the club actually owns the clock.

It owns contractual rights for a period of time.

That is different.

Brighton can offer Mitoma another contract. Tottenham can decide what price would make selling Richarlison worthwhile. Crystal Palace had to choose between Guéhi’s remaining football and the money available for selling him.

What none of them can do is stop the calendar.

And they cannot unilaterally add more time when it runs low.

That requires the player.

The incentives on either side of a contract can also begin to move in opposite directions.

A club approaching the end of a valuable player’s deal may want another three or four years because those years restore options. It can keep him longer, negotiate from a stronger position or decide later that the right moment has arrived to sell.

The player may look at exactly the same situation differently.

Signing that extension provides whatever wages, security and other terms come with the new deal.

It also gives the club more contractual time.

Refusing it allows the existing clock to continue running.

Eventually, that can change who has the stronger hand.

Under FIFA’s current transfer rules, a professional whose contract has expired, or is due to expire within six months, can conclude a contract with another club, subject to the rules governing that process.

That does not suddenly make the player more talented.

It changes his options.

The buying club is watching the same clock.

Sometimes it can wait too.

If the seller wants £80 million today but the player could become available without a conventional transfer fee later, waiting becomes part of the negotiation.

But waiting has a price of its own.

Real Madrid could have waited for Trent Alexander-Arnold.

Then they would not have had him for the Club World Cup.

So Madrid stopped waiting, Liverpool briefly regained something worth selling, and a few remaining weeks acquired a multimillion-pound value.

That might be the clearest answer to the question we started with.

Time does not have one fixed value in football.

Its value depends on who needs it.

A club with four years remaining on an important player may have enormous leverage.

A club with one year remaining might still decide that year is worth more on the pitch than in the transfer market.

A player approaching the end of his contract may discover that waiting creates options he did not have before.

And a buying club that suddenly needs someone now might pay millions for weeks it could otherwise get for nothing.

So maybe the most valuable thing a football club can own really is time.

The problem is that it never owns it permanently.

It can secure it.

Use it.

Sell it.

Spend it.

And, with the player’s agreement, buy some more.

But every contract contains the same promise from the moment it is signed.

Eventually, the time runs out.

Research & References

This piece draws on club announcements, interviews with managers and executives, court and regulatory material, contemporary reporting, and academic research into football transfer fees.

Where possible, I have relied on primary sources for contract dates, club decisions and direct comments. Reported transfer fees are identified as reported rather than treated as officially disclosed figures.

The relationship between contract length and transfer value is supported by an econometric study of 2,045 fee-paying transfers involving players from Europe’s five major leagues between July 2012 and November 2021. In that model, moving from two remaining contract years to three was associated with a 22 percent increase in the transfer fee, all else being equal. The study does not suggest that every additional contract year automatically increases a player’s value by 22 percent; transfer fees are influenced by numerous player, club and market factors.

The legal history of contract expiry is grounded in the Court of Justice of the European Union’s Bosman ruling. Jean-Marc Bosman’s contract with RFC Liège expired in 1990, but his proposed move to Dunkerque was blocked when the French club would not pay the fee demanded by Liège. The Court ultimately ruled that the transfer rules at issue restricted the free movement of players moving between EU member states after their contracts had expired.

The current situations involving Kaoru Mitoma and Richarlison require particular care. Brighton have confirmed discussions over Mitoma’s future, while reporting that he is currently unlikely to extend his contract comes from unnamed sources rather than an announcement from Mitoma or the club. Richarlison’s representatives are reportedly pursuing a route to terminate his Tottenham contract, but whether sufficient grounds exist for that attempt to succeed remains unresolved.

The Marc Guéhi section draws on contemporary reporting around Crystal Palace’s negotiations with Newcastle and Liverpool, as well as his eventual January 2026 transfer to Manchester City. The reported fees discussed involve different buying clubs, transfer windows and circumstances and should not be interpreted as a clean measurement of how much Guéhi’s value changed simply because another year disappeared from his contract. The fee for his eventual move to Manchester City was not officially disclosed.

The Robert Lewandowski example is treated as an economic interpretation of Borussia Dortmund’s decision to keep him for the final season of his contract despite knowing that he could subsequently leave without a transfer fee. Dortmund did not describe the decision as “spending” potential transfer income on another season of Lewandowski; that is the framework used in this piece to understand the choice.

Sources consulted include official material from Liverpool, Real Madrid, Brighton & Hove Albion, Tottenham Hotspur, Crystal Palace, Manchester City and FIFA; the Court of Justice of the European Union; academic research published in Economies; and reporting from BBC Sport, Reuters, The Guardian, ge, UOL and TEAMtalk.

Reporting and contract situations are current as of September 10, 2026.

Old Trafford. Photo: Ank Kumar/Wikimedia Commons, CC0. Cropped.

I’ve shared season tickets before.

The funny part is, they weren’t even for my team.

My family is from Detroit. We’re Lions fans. But living in Indianapolis, we had access to Colts season tickets, and my relationship with them was almost entirely practical.

We had tickets to football games.

Sometimes we went. Sometimes someone else did.

I never really thought much beyond that. If we couldn’t use the tickets, someone else could. It felt pretty simple.

Then I started reading about Manchester United’s latest fight over season tickets.

The club has spent months trying to crack down on ticket touting, using account activity and digital patterns to identify what it believes are organised networks abusing the ticketing system.

Supporters agree that touting is a problem.

The argument is over what happens when the same patterns used to find a tout also resemble the way ordinary supporters have managed tickets for years.

That was what caught my attention.

My own experience with season tickets had always felt straightforward. We had them, we used them, and sometimes we shared them.

But the deeper I looked at what was happening at United, the less straightforward any of it became.

This wasn’t really just a fight about who could use a ticket anymore. It was becoming a fight about what a club could reasonably conclude from the way supporters used them.

And that left me with a different question than the one I started with.

When does a pattern become proof?

The Problem United Was Actually Trying to Solve

Manchester United did not invent the problem.

Ticket touting is real, organised and profitable, and the club has spent years trying to identify fake accounts, automated purchasing, coordinated networks and tickets being resold outside its official system.

In some cases, the scale is hard to ignore.

United said one device connected to its ticketing system had accessed 1,088 separate accounts.

That is not a family helping each other with tickets.

It is exactly the sort of activity you would expect the club to investigate.

United’s wider anti-touting work had already been moving in that direction. The club had previously reported thousands of sanctions linked to false identities, bots and suspicious ticket activity, while also blocking tickets it believed had been obtained or controlled through abusive systems.

So when United began looking more closely at account behaviour in 2026, the logic was fairly straightforward.

If organised touts were controlling large groups of supposedly independent supporter accounts, looking for unusual concentrations of activity made sense.

The club said the average ticket holder accessed around 1.2 accounts from a single device.

Its investigative threshold was set at seven or more accounts.

That did not mean seven accounts automatically made someone a tout.

According to United, it meant the activity was unusual enough to warrant a closer look.

And that distinction is important.

A pattern could tell the club where to investigate.

It could not, by itself, explain what had happened.

When Normal Starts to Look Suspicious

And that is where the system began to run into football supporters being football supporters.

United’s investigation was built to identify unusual patterns.

The problem is that unusual does not always mean dishonest.

Supporters had been sharing account access with family and friends for years. Someone might manage tickets for an older parent. A parent might control a child’s account. A group of friends might rely on one person to handle applications or ticketing because that was simply how they had always done it.

From the outside, those arrangements can look messy.

From inside the group, they can feel completely normal.

That became a problem because some of the same activity United was trying to identify in organised touting networks could also appear inside legitimate supporter networks.

One of the more striking cases involved a six-year-old season-ticket holder whose account was restricted after being linked to activity across a much larger group of accounts.

The point is not that United believed a six-year-old was personally running a ticket operation.

It is that the account was being managed by someone else.

And once one person begins managing multiple accounts, the digital pattern can look very different from the relationships behind it.

A supporter sees:

my dad.

my son.

my mate.

the person in our group who sorts the tickets.

The system sees:

Account A. Account B. Account C. One device.

Neither description is necessarily wrong. They are simply describing the same activity from completely different perspectives.

United later acknowledged that it had underestimated how common username and password sharing was among genuine supporters.

That matters, but not because it proves the investigation was illegitimate.

It doesn’t.

It means the club discovered that one of the behaviours it considered potentially suspicious was also more deeply embedded in ordinary supporter culture than it had appreciated.

And once that became clear, the question changed.

The issue was no longer whether unusual activity deserved attention.

It was what United needed to establish after finding it.

When Suspicion Became a Fight About Evidence

By July, the argument had moved beyond whether United should investigate suspicious activity.

Supporters were asking a narrower question:

What should happen after the pattern is found?

On July 18, the Manchester United Supporters Trust made that distinction explicit.

MUST was not arguing that analytics were illegitimate. In fact, it described the use of sophisticated data to identify suspicious activity as sensible.

The concern was what came next.

A pattern might justify scrutiny.

It should not, by itself, become a conviction.

That became the center of the dispute.

Supporter representatives argued that severe sanctions should require corroborating evidence. They wanted clearer explanations of what conduct was actually being alleged, written reasons for decisions, and a process that separated organised commercial activity from ordinary supporter networks that happened to leave similar digital fingerprints.

By July 21, more than 100 supporter groups had backed the Fans’ Forum position.

Again, the disagreement was not really about whether professional touts should be stopped. It was about the standard required before a supporter could lose access to something they may have held for years.

That distinction can get lost quickly when the argument is reduced to “United cracking down on touts” versus “fans angry about ticket bans.”

The actual dispute was much narrower.

United had found a signal.

Supporters wanted to know what evidence came after it.

Through the rest of July, that argument sharpened. Supporter representatives pushed for a clearer separation between intelligence and proof, the issue was escalated to the club’s chief executive, and by the July 30 Fans’ Forum meeting, ticketing sanctions had become one of the dominant subjects of discussion.

The principle being argued for was simple enough:

Use data to find the cases worth investigating.

Then use evidence to decide what actually happened.

That sounds obvious.

In practice, it is much harder.

If one device touches seven accounts, that may tell you something unusual is happening.

It does not tell you whether the person behind it is a commercial tout, a parent, a friend helping an older supporter, or simply the person in a group who has always handled the tickets.

That is why July matters.

The fight was no longer about whether United had the right to look.

It was about how far suspicion could take the club before it became something strong enough to punish.

What Changed After July

By August, United’s language had become more specific.

The club acknowledged that it had underestimated how common account-sharing was among legitimate supporters. It also accepted that the investigation had caused distress and left some fans feeling unfairly treated.

That did not mean United abandoned the crackdown.

It meant the club had to draw the line more carefully.

United later said season tickets would only be confiscated where there was evidence of organised touting, systematic misuse, or activity for financial gain.

That is a much narrower standard than simply identifying unusual device activity, and it separates two stages that had become blurred in the public argument:

detection and judgment.

Unusual activity might be enough to ask questions.

It should not necessarily be enough to answer them.

That distinction helps explain why so many individual cases became contested.

Some supporters provided explanations that United ultimately accepted. Others received reduced sanctions or warnings. Some sanctions remained in place.

MUST’s own tracking suggested that a significant number of outcomes changed during the appeal process, although the Trust was careful to say its figures were still provisional and should not be treated as a final error rate.

That caveat is important.

An overturned sanction does not automatically prove the original suspicion was unreasonable. A reduced sanction does not necessarily mean no breach occurred. And supporters who approached MUST were not a random sample of everyone investigated.

Still, the fact that individual review changed outcomes tells us something.

Context mattered.

The system could identify unusual behaviour.

It could not always establish what that behaviour meant without looking more closely.

That may be the clearest lesson from the dispute.

United was right to look for organised abuse.

Supporters were right to ask what evidence separated organised abuse from behaviour that merely resembled it.

The difficult part was everything in between.

What a Pattern Can’t Tell You

I started with a much simpler question.

If you paid for a season ticket, what exactly did you buy?

That was the part that caught my attention because of my own experience. We had access to Colts season tickets even though we were Lions fans, and I had always thought about them in the most practical way possible.

If we weren’t using them, someone else could.

Simple.

But the United dispute pushed the question somewhere else.

As ticketing moved deeper into digital systems, the club gained the ability to see things supporters may never have thought of as meaningful data.

Who logged in.

From what device.

How many accounts were connected.

Who forwarded what.

What looked ordinary inside a family or group of friends could look very different when reduced to a pattern on a screen.

That does not make the data useless.

Some patterns were extreme enough that they clearly demanded investigation.

But the dispute showed the limit of what those patterns could establish on their own.

A device can tell you that seven accounts were connected.

It cannot tell you why.

That still requires context.

Manchester United has a responsibility to protect supporters from people exploiting scarce tickets for profit.

It also has a responsibility to distinguish those people from supporters whose behaviour merely resembles them from a distance.

Those responsibilities do not cancel each other out. They make the job harder.

So I’m not sure this is really a story about whether United was right or wrong to crack down.

The club was right to look.

Supporters were right to ask what happened after it looked.

A pattern can tell you where to start.

It should not always be allowed to tell you where to finish.

When does a pattern become proof?

Research & References

This article draws upon Manchester United’s ticketing policies and supporter communications, Manchester United Supporters Trust statements, Fans’ Forum reporting, Football Supporters’ Association material, and contemporary reporting to examine the club’s anti-touting investigation and the dispute over how suspicious ticketing activity should be interpreted.

Where appropriate, hyperlinks throughout the article direct readers to the original club statements, supporter-group material and reporting used during the research process. Particular attention was given to distinguishing what Manchester United said its systems identified, what supporter groups argued those patterns did and did not prove, and what changed as individual cases were reviewed.

What do you think?

Using data to identify suspicious ticket activity makes sense.

But when the same patterns can also appear inside ordinary supporter networks, what should a club need to establish before suspicion becomes punishment?

Andreas Pereira signs for Fulham in 2022. Photo: Amcj1990/Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

A few weeks ago, I went looking for the World Cup tax.

The question was simple enough: what happens to a player’s value when the entire football world watches him perform on its biggest stage?

The answer, predictably, wasn’t simple at all.

There were breakout performances, suddenly inflated expectations, clubs trying to separate a month of brilliant football from the player who existed before it, and a transfer market attempting to put a price on all of it.

Then the transfer window closed, and FIFA gave us another number.

More than 260 players who appeared at the 2026 World Cup changed clubs during the mid-year transfer window. Their transfers represented more than $3.3 billion in combined fees.

Zoom out beyond the World Cup players and the number gets even more ridiculous: more than $9.89 billion in transfer fees were declared for international transfers in the men’s game, the highest figure FIFA has ever recorded for a mid-year window.

Nearly ten billion dollars.

That’s a number large enough to stop meaning much of anything.

We see transfer fees all summer and eventually become numb to them. £40 million. £60 million. £80 million. Another £100 million player. Another club spending hundreds of millions before the window closes.

Eventually they all start to look like the same thing.

A player goes one direction. A giant pile of money goes the other.

Except that isn’t necessarily what happened.

Buried in FIFA’s methodology for calculating all of this spending is an important detail. Its transfer-fee figures include fixed fees, conditional fees and release fees declared through the Transfer Matching System. For the purpose of calculating its totals, FIFA treats all of those fees as though they were paid upfront, regardless of any instalment plans the clubs actually agreed to.

That doesn’t make the $9.89 billion number wrong.

It makes it more interesting.

Because the number we spent an entire summer watching climb wasn’t necessarily a measurement of cash moving between football clubs. It was the value of transfer fees declared through FIFA’s system, including money scheduled to arrive later and conditional amounts that may depend on what happens next.

Which sent me straight back down the rabbit hole.

If football just completed the richest international transfer window ever, and nearly $10 billion didn’t simply move from one collection of bank accounts to another, then what actually happened to the money?

More importantly:

When a football club says it bought a player for £70 million, what does that actually mean?

The Price

Start with the number everyone understands.

A club buys a player for £60 million.

That is the number on the graphic. It is the number supporters argue about. It is the number we use three years later when deciding whether the player was a bargain, a disaster, or somewhere in between.

It is also only one part of the transaction.

A £60 million transfer does not necessarily require the buying club to send £60 million to the selling club when the player signs. The clubs can agree on when those payments will actually be made. Some might be paid immediately, with the rest arriving next summer or even the summer after that.

Bonuses or other conditional payments can complicate the number further, changing what the buying club ultimately owes if certain agreed conditions are met.

That creates our first distinction.

The price of the player and the timing of the payments are not the same thing.

There is a remarkably clean example sitting in Juventus’ own accounts.

When Barcelona signed Miralem Pjanić from Juventus in 2020, Juventus announced the transfer at €60 million, with another €5 million potentially due if certain conditions were met. More importantly for us, Juventus disclosed something that rarely makes the transfer graphic: the €60 million was payable across four financial years.

Months after Pjanić had already become a Barcelona player, Juventus still listed €51.3 million due from Barcelona in its financial statements. The money represented the second, third and fourth instalments of the transfer, scheduled for July 2021, July 2022 and July 2023.

The player had moved.

The money was still moving.

That distinction helps explain the enormous FIFA number we started with. The value attached to a transfer and the cash changing hands when the player moves can be very different things.

And then, because football apparently decided this wasn’t complicated enough, there is another number entirely.

The accounting cost.

Suppose a club buys a player for £60 million and gives him a five-year contract. Under the accounting method commonly used by clubs, the cost of acquiring the player’s registration is capitalised and then amortised across the life of the contract, subject to UEFA’s five-year limit for this purpose.

In our deliberately simplified example, that could mean an accounting charge of roughly £12 million per year rather than the entire £60 million appearing as an expense immediately.

That does not mean the player somehow only cost £12 million that year. It also does not tell us how much cash the club paid that year.

It tells us how the cost is being recognised in the accounts.

So our supposedly simple £60 million transfer has already produced three different questions:

What did the player cost?

When does the club actually have to pay for him?

How does that cost appear in the accounts?

Most of the summer, we talk almost exclusively about the first one.

For what comes next, the second one matters a lot more.

Because if the buying club is allowed to pay later, somebody on the other side of the deal is now waiting to get paid.

The Promise

When Juventus agreed to let Barcelona pay for Miralem Pjanić over four financial years, the unpaid portion of the transfer did not simply disappear.

It became something Juventus was owed.

In accounting terms, that is a receivable.

Barcelona had the opposite side of the transaction. It had agreed to make those payments in the future, making the unpaid amount a payable.

That sounds painfully obvious when written out. One club is waiting for money. The other club owes it.

But scale that across hundreds of transfers, multiple leagues and several years of payment schedules and the transfer market starts to look different.

Football clubs can carry financial relationships with one another long after the players involved have changed shirts.

UEFA has tracked that relationship for years. By the end of 2022, it reported that 44% of transfer payables were due more than 12 months into the future, up from 29% in 2016.

The direction was clear: clubs were increasingly buying now and paying later.

That changes how we should think about the transfer window.

When one club agrees to buy a player, it may be creating payments that will sit on its books for years. The selling club may simultaneously be counting on those future payments as an asset.

That is perfectly normal as long as everyone pays when they are supposed to.

UEFA’s financial rules are built partly around making sure they do. Clubs under its financial sustainability system have to disclose outstanding transfer obligations, including the balance still payable and the due dates for each unpaid portion. UEFA also monitors whether those payments become overdue.

Which gives us another important distinction:

Owing money is not the same thing as failing to pay it.

An instalment due two years from now is not a missed payment. It is money that was never supposed to arrive yet.

For the selling club, that leaves a choice.

It can wait and let those payments arrive exactly as agreed.

But what if it doesn’t want to?

Maybe £20 million today is simply more useful than a larger amount arriving gradually over the next three years. There might be another player to sign, wages to cover or an investment the club wants to make now.

The transfer has already happened. The player is gone.

But the promise of future payment still has value.

And, as it turns out, there are people willing to buy it.

The Machine

The answer is banks, funds and other financial institutions.

And this is where our £60 million transfer starts becoming something else entirely.

Imagine the selling club receives £20 million when the player moves, with another £20 million due next summer and £20 million the summer after that.

The club can wait.

Or it can take those future payments to a financial institution and essentially say: we are contractually owed £40 million over the next two years. What will you give us for it today?

Not £40 million. The financial institution needs to make money too.

But for a discount, the selling club can turn some or all of those future payments into cash it can use now. Depending on how the deal is structured, the club might sell the receivable outright or borrow against it.

There is a name for this: receivables financing.

When the receivable itself is sold to a third party at a discount, it is often called factoring.

UEFA describes the practice fairly simply. A selling club can sell money it is still owed from a transfer to a bank or another financial institution rather than waiting years to receive it. The club gets cash immediately. The financial institution gets the right to the future cash flows.

There is nothing uniquely football about the basic idea. Businesses finance receivables all the time.

What makes football interesting is the kind of receivables it produces, the amount of money involved and the incredibly short periods in which clubs are trying to assemble competitive teams.

Leicester City offers a useful example.

When Riyad Mahrez joined Manchester City in 2018 for £60 million, Leicester subsequently entered into a financing arrangement with Australian bank Macquarie tied to £36 million of future payments from the transfer.

Mahrez was already playing for Manchester City while money from his transfer was still scheduled to arrive.

Leicester had simply found a way to access some of that future value sooner.

That is the machine.

Transfer fees are not the only future income clubs can use this way. Broadcasting distributions, sponsorship payments and other commercial revenues arrive according to schedules of their own, and clubs can obtain financing against some of those future cash flows as well.

Suddenly, “where does the money come from?” has a different answer.

It might come from money the club already has. It might come from money another club has promised to pay. Or it might come from a financial institution willing to provide cash today against income expected tomorrow.

Those things can overlap.

There can be another institution involved too.

Credit insurance can protect a lender against the possibility that the buying club fails to make its future payments. Aon, which works in this market, describes arrangements in which a bank advances money to the selling club, takes assignment of the future transfer payments and insures itself against non-payment by the buying club.

So the player can move from Club A to Club B while Club B still owes Club A money, Club A has already received cash from a financial institution, and that institution is waiting for Club B’s future payments.

It sounds complicated because it is.

But complexity does not necessarily mean something has gone wrong.

The more interesting question is why a club would bother doing any of this in the first place.

The easy answer would be that it needs the money.

That isn’t quite enough.

A club using receivables financing is not necessarily broke. Turning £20 million arriving next year into slightly less money today can be a perfectly rational business decision if the cash is more useful now.

There might be another player available. The timing of wages or other expenses might not line up neatly with broadcasting and sponsorship payments. Or the club might simply believe it can create more value with the money today than by waiting for it tomorrow.

That is the part I kept coming back to.

Football clubs can generate extraordinary amounts of revenue, own players worth hundreds of millions, be owed millions more by other clubs and still need cash.

Those statements sound contradictory.

They aren’t.

Because being wealthy and being liquid are not the same thing.

More Money, More Problems

If all of this sounds like something an industry does when it is running out of money, there is a problem.

Football has never made more of it.

European top-division clubs generated a record €28.6 billion in revenue in 2024. UEFA expects that number to climb beyond €30 billion.

The stadiums are full. Commercial revenues have grown. UEFA competitions are distributing more money. Players continue to move for enormous fees.

Football is not a poor industry desperately trying to manufacture cash.

It is a remarkably wealthy industry that is also remarkably expensive to operate.

UEFA projects non-wage operating costs will consume 36% of club revenue, while financing expenses have increased by more than 50% since the pandemic.

Even record revenue does not guarantee profit. European top-division clubs collectively lost €1.1 billion before tax in 2024.

Football can be making more money than ever without every club making money.

And a club can be worth billions while still caring very much about when the next £20 million actually arrives.

That is where liquidity comes back into the story.

Revenue tells us how much money a club generates over a period of time. It does not tell us whether that money is available on the particular Tuesday when the club needs it.

A sponsorship payment might arrive later in the year. Broadcasting distributions follow schedules of their own. Another club might still owe three instalments on a player it bought two summers ago.

Meanwhile, wages still have to be paid. Stadiums still have to operate. Transfer windows still close.

And the left-back your manager desperately wants is available right now.

Timing matters.

That is why turning future income into present cash can make sense even for a club that is financially healthy.

There is another side to that equation, though.

Every time tomorrow’s income becomes useful today, some portion of tomorrow becomes spoken for.

That is not inherently irresponsible. Businesses borrow, finance projects and manage working capital because they believe using money today can create greater value tomorrow.

Football clubs do the same thing.

What has changed is the scale of the business around them.

As clubs have become more valuable and their future revenues more predictable, they have also attracted a wider range of financial institutions. Traditional banks operate in this market, as do specialist lenders and, increasingly, private credit funds.

The names matter less than what they make possible.

Clubs have more ways to access future income before it arrives.

That raises a more useful question than whether borrowing is good or bad:

What happens when access to tomorrow’s money becomes part of how football operates today?

There is a considerable difference between having future income available to finance an opportunity and needing future income to keep doing what you are already doing.

From the outside, those two clubs can look remarkably similar.

Both have money coming. Both have bills due. Both might borrow against the future.

The difference only becomes obvious when something goes wrong.

When Something Goes Wrong

This is the point where it would be easy to make the whole thing sound terrifying.

Clubs owe one another money. Some of those payments stretch years into the future. Selling clubs can turn future payments into cash today, while banks, funds and insurers become involved along the way.

Put enough arrows on a diagram and eventually the entire transfer market starts to look like something that should have collapsed three Tuesdays ago.

Except it hasn’t.

That matters.

Football has rules specifically designed to stop a future payment from quietly becoming a payment that never arrives.

Under UEFA’s current financial sustainability regulations, clubs in its monitoring system have to report outstanding transfer obligations throughout the season. That includes how much remains unpaid, when each payment is due, whether any amount has been deferred and whether anything has become overdue.

The distinction we made earlier matters here.

Owing another club money is perfectly normal when the payment isn’t due yet.

The problem begins when the due date arrives and the money does not.

UEFA monitors for exactly that. Its enhanced solvency rules check clubs for overdue payments to other clubs, employees and tax or social authorities during the season. Payments more than 90 days overdue can become an aggravating factor and potentially contribute to exclusion from future UEFA competitions.

Those consequences are not theoretical.

During the 2025/26 season, UEFA opened proceedings against seven clubs for overdue payables to other clubs, employees and/or tax and social authorities. Dinamo Batumi ultimately had an exclusion from UEFA competition enforced after again failing the requirements of a previous decision. Other clubs received fines and, in several cases, suspended exclusions.

There is an important limitation to that number.

Those were not necessarily seven clubs failing to make transfer payments. UEFA’s overdue-payables category also includes obligations to employees and tax or social authorities, so the cases cannot tell us how frequently transfer instalments themselves go unpaid.

What they do show is that financial obligations are monitored and that failing to meet them can have real sporting consequences.

That makes the darker version of this story harder to prove.

I went into this wondering whether the increasingly complicated way football moves money had created something dangerously fragile.

Maybe it has.

But I haven’t found enough evidence to say that.

There are risks. A selling club expecting a future payment is relying on the buying club to make it, and that expected cash may already be part of the selling club’s own plans. A delay can therefore create problems somewhere else.

But the system also has safeguards. Receivables financing can move some risk away from the selling club. Insurance can protect lenders against non-payment. UEFA monitors overdue obligations, and clubs can agree to defer payments when circumstances change.

Complexity, by itself, is not evidence of instability.

What we can say is that football has built a transfer market in which enormous amounts of money can be promised years into the future, brought forward through financing and used to support other decisions before every original transfer fee has actually arrived.

Most of the time, the machine keeps moving.

That does not make every use of financing sensible.

The more important question is why a club needs tomorrow’s money today.

There is a considerable difference between pulling future income forward because an opportunity is worth the cost of financing it and doing so because you cannot function without it.

One is finance being used as a tool.

The other can become dependence.

From the outside, they can look remarkably similar.

The player still arrives.

The transfer graphic still shows the fee.

What happened underneath it is much harder to see.

So, Where Does the Money Come From?

Nearly $10 billion.

That was the number that started this whole thing.

After spending a summer watching transfer fees climb, FIFA eventually put a number on the international market: more than $9.89 billion in declared transfer fees.

I assumed I understood what that meant.

I didn’t.

Because when a club announces that it has bought a player for £70 million, there may not be £70 million moving anywhere that day.

Some of it might be paid immediately. Some might arrive years later. The selling club might wait for those payments or turn them into cash sooner. The buying club, meanwhile, has revenues, expenses and obligations moving according to schedules of their own.

The transfer fee is real.

The timing is where things get weird.

That record $9.89 billion figure doesn’t mean nearly $10 billion in cash changed hands during the window. It tells us the value of the fees declared through FIFA’s international transfer system, including payments scheduled for later and conditional amounts that may depend on what happens next.

That is a subtle difference, but after going through all of this, I think it changes how we should look at the transfer market.

Football really does have this much money.

The revenues are real. The transfer fees are real. So are the financial institutions willing to turn future income into cash today.

The money just doesn’t all exist in the same place at the same time.

And maybe that is the simplest answer to the question I started with.

Where does the money actually come from?

Sometimes the club already has it.

Sometimes another club has promised to pay it.

Sometimes it comes from income that hasn’t arrived yet.

And sometimes someone else is willing to provide the cash today because they believe the money will be there tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, I went looking for the World Cup tax because I wanted to understand how football decides what a player is worth.

The World Cup ends. A player has a brilliant month. His value changes. Eventually, two clubs agree on a number.

I thought that was the end of the question.

Turns out, agreeing on the price is only the beginning.

Because once everyone decides that a footballer is worth £70 million, someone still has to figure out how to pay for him.

And the next time one of those giant transfer graphics appears on my phone, I don’t think I’m going to look at the number quite the same way.

The player moves immediately.

The money might take years to catch up.

Research & References

This article draws upon FIFA transfer data, club financial disclosures, UEFA financial reports and regulations, and contemporary reporting to examine how transfer fees actually move through football.

Where appropriate, hyperlinks throughout the article direct readers to the original reporting, financial documents and regulatory sources used during the research process. UEFA’s current regulations, for example, require clubs to disclose outstanding transfer balances, due dates, deferred amounts and overdue payments—exactly the distinctions explored throughout this piece.

What do you think?

When you see a club announce a £70 million transfer, do you think differently about that number now?

And as football gets better at turning tomorrow’s income into money it can use today, when does smart financing become dependence?

Old Trafford, Manchester. Photo: Stacey MacNaught / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I used to write about Manchester United a lot.

Probably too much.

Transfers. Tactics. Players who needed to leave. Players who absolutely had to arrive. The Glazers. Rebuilds. The rebuild after the rebuild. Eventually, I was asking the same questions with different names attached to them.

Then I stepped away from writing about United for a while.

Not intentionally, really. There was just more football I wanted to understand. More stories I wanted to tell. And somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to solve Manchester United every week.

Which might be why I noticed something strange this summer.

I think I can see it.

Not success. Certainly not that. We are two matches into a Premier League season. Declaring anything about Manchester United this early feels dangerous.

But a direction?

Maybe.

United have spent heavily again. They have changed the midfield almost beyond recognition. There are still obvious holes in the squad, some frustratingly obvious. And yet, looking at the players Michael Carrick has been given and the football he appears to want them to play, I keep coming back to the same question.

Can we finally see what Manchester United are trying to build?

Another Rebuild

We’ve been here before.

Every Manchester United manager eventually gets his summer. A few new players arrive, somebody poses with the shirt, and we start drawing formations in our heads before they’ve even found a house in Manchester.

This time, though, the order has been a little different.

Michael Carrick didn’t arrive this summer with a list of demands and a blank check. He arrived in January with somebody else’s team. More specifically, a team largely constructed around Ruben Amorim and a system Carrick almost immediately abandoned.

The back four returned. Bruno Fernandes moved higher. Players began appearing in positions that felt more familiar. United became more compact and considerably more functional.

Then they started winning.

Carrick won 11 of his first 16 Premier League matches as interim manager, losing only twice. United beat Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea along the way and eventually secured Champions League football. By May, the interim label was gone.

That matters because United didn’t spend the summer trying to imagine what Carrick’s football might look like.

They had already seen it.

Carrick had taken a squad built for somebody else, changed how it played and gotten results. The summer gave United their first real opportunity to ask a different question: what could this look like with players actually chosen for it?

If there is a coherent plan here, the easiest place to start looking for it is where United spent the money.

Midfield.

Follow the Players

Manchester United spent roughly £150 million rebuilding their midfield this summer.

That sentence, by itself, tells us almost nothing.

United spending money has never been particularly interesting. They’ve been very good at that. What matters is whether the money tells us anything about the team they are trying to become.

So forget the fees for a minute and look at the players.

Youri Tielemans is 29. He isn’t a project. He is an experienced Premier League midfielder comfortable receiving the ball centrally, progressing possession and controlling the tempo of a match. Last season at Aston Villa, he recorded 27 key passes in 1,861 league minutes despite starting only 21 matches.

Andrey Santos is 22 and offers something different. During the 2025/26 season, Santos completed 90.1 percent of his passes while averaging 57.1 passes per 90, and his 67.8 percent ground-duel success rate led Premier League midfielders who played at least 1,000 minutes. There is development ahead of him, but he already offers defensive security without treating possession like something that needs to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.

Carlos Baleba is 22 as well, but the attraction is much more physical. He can carry the ball, recover it and cover space. When possession breaks down, Baleba gives United the kind of athleticism their midfield has too often lacked.

None of those profiles are especially revolutionary on their own.

Together, they start becoming interesting.

Tielemans can control. Santos can circulate. Baleba can cover.

There is overlap, obviously. There should be. But they aren’t three expensive attempts to solve the same problem. They look complementary.

That becomes more interesting when you look backward at Carrick’s football.

His teams want to build short, create numbers centrally and move players through different spaces as possession develops. That kind of football asks midfielders to receive under pressure, move the ball forward and cover the space left behind when those movements break down.

Suddenly, the shopping list starts making a little more sense.

Maybe United didn’t simply decide they needed better midfielders. Maybe they decided what they needed their midfield to do, then went looking for players capable of doing different parts of it.

That sounds like an incredibly ordinary way to build a football team.

At Manchester United, it feels almost radical.

There is one rather large complication, though.

His name is Kobbie Mainoo.

What About Kobbie?

This is where things get slightly uncomfortable.

Six months ago, Kobbie Mainoo looked like one of the clearest beneficiaries of Michael Carrick taking over Manchester United.

Carrick put him back in central midfield, gave him more freedom and, eventually, Mainoo played his way back into the England picture and onto the World Cup squad.

Then United spent roughly £150 million rebuilding his position.

Mainoo didn’t even start the opening match against Hull.

The easiest conclusion is that Carrick doesn’t see him as part of the long-term plan. I’m not sure the evidence gets us there.

If anything, Carrick’s use of Mainoo last season makes that harder to argue. He trusted him. Mainoo improved. A player who had looked somewhat lost before Carrick arrived suddenly looked comfortable again.

Maybe we’re asking the wrong question.

Perhaps Tielemans, Santos and Baleba weren’t bought to replace Mainoo at all. United aren’t playing a 17-match rescue mission anymore. They have a Premier League season, Champions League football and two domestic cups to navigate. Whatever Carrick ultimately decides his best midfield looks like, he is going to need more than one version of it.

That doesn’t tell us exactly where Mainoo fits.

Two matches into a season probably aren’t supposed to.

But it does change how I look at the spending.

United didn’t spend £150 million to build one midfield. They spent it building a group.

Mainoo’s place within that group is still an open question.

The same cannot be said about the depth everywhere else.

Then There’s the Defense

And this is where my confidence starts to disappear.

For everything that makes sense about Manchester United’s midfield rebuild, there is Luke Shaw standing at left-back with very little behind him.

This wasn’t a surprise.

United had been interested in Lewis Hall since at least March. Newcastle rejected their approach. Other options were considered. By August, another left-back was still being described as a priority.

United knew the position needed attention.

Then they spent roughly £150 million on midfielders.

That doesn’t necessarily make the decision wrong. It does make it a decision.

There is a difference between failing to recognize a weakness and choosing to address another one first. United appear to have done the latter.

The problem is that football doesn’t particularly care about your order of operations.

Shaw has already had uncomfortable moments through the opening matches. Against Ipswich, Abdul Fatawu beat him on United’s left before finding Leif Davis for the opening goal. United have conceded four times through their first two league matches.

Two matches tell us very little. They certainly don’t tell us Luke Shaw is finished, and I’m not particularly interested in pretending they do.

They do remind us what happens when a known weakness remains a known weakness.

And left-back might not even be the whole problem.

Questions remain at centre-back. Matthijs de Ligt’s availability has been a concern. The longer-term picture at both full-back positions is hardly settled. Even before the window opened, there was an argument that Carrick’s defense would eventually need the same kind of attention United have now given the midfield.

And when the window closed, the left-back had never arrived.

Maybe the defense is simply next.

United spent heavily on their attack in 2025 before turning their attention to midfield this summer. There is a version of this rebuild where the defense becomes the next major project.

But that explanation only works if United eventually get there.

For now, Carrick has a midfield that looks increasingly suited to what he wants to do and a defense that still carries some of the same questions it did before the summer began.

Annoyingly, rebuilding a squad piece by piece makes a lot of sense.

There is also risk in deciding which piece gets to wait.

Football supporters, myself very much included, would prefer every problem solved immediately. Preferably by someone exciting, expensive and announced before dinner.

Real squad building doesn’t usually work that way.

The Other Half of Building a Squad

Knowing what you need and actually getting it are two different things.

Joshua Zirkzee may be the best example of that.

By the time the window closed, Zirkzee was still a Manchester United player.

So was the problem at left-back.

United explored options. Zirkzee attracted interest. A late move might have created some of the flexibility needed to address the weakness sitting behind Luke Shaw.

Neither happened.

But moving a player simply because someone wants him isn’t much of a strategy either.

United have spent years buying aggressively and then struggling to recover value when those players no longer fit. Moving Zirkzee on unfavorable terms simply to solve another problem might help today while repeating one of the habits that helped create this squad in the first place.

Keeping him has consequences too. United preserve attacking depth and the value of an asset, but potentially leave Carrick short in a position they already know needs strengthening.

United made their choice. Whether it was the correct one is something else entirely.

That might be the point.

Identifying what a squad needs is relatively easy. Actually getting there means balancing the football, the finances and the players already under contract.

Sometimes a coherent plan still runs into a messy reality.

Can We See It Yet?

I started looking at this summer expecting to find another Manchester United rebuild.

Another collection of talented players. Another enormous transfer bill. Another attempt to convince ourselves that this time, somehow, all the pieces would fit.

I don’t think that’s what I found.

That doesn’t mean United have had a perfect summer. They haven’t. The window closed without the left-back they spent months considering. The defense still worries me. There are players whose roles remain unclear, and two Premier League matches tell us almost nothing about whether any of this will actually work.

But I can see the idea.

Carrick showed United how he wanted to play before they gave him his own players. The club then spent heavily rebuilding the area of the pitch most important to making that football work.

Maybe that’s what feels different.

For so long, Manchester United seemed to buy players and figure out the fit afterward. This summer looks more like they identified what Carrick’s football needed and went looking for players who could provide it.

It feels almost embarrassingly simple when you write it down.

Maybe that says more about Manchester United’s last decade than it does about this summer.

And I’m still reluctant to get too excited.

A plan is not proof.

Coherent recruitment doesn’t guarantee coherent football. £150 million worth of midfielders doesn’t solve the questions at left-back or centre-back. It doesn’t tell us exactly where Kobbie Mainoo fits. And it certainly doesn’t turn September into May.

Carrick still has to make all of this work.

But an incomplete rebuild isn’t necessarily an incoherent one.

That’s where I’ve landed.

For years, I watched Manchester United buy players and wondered how they were eventually supposed to fit together. For the first time in a while, I can look at how they want to play and understand why they bought the players they did.

Can we see it yet?

Yeah.

I think we can.

Now we get to find out if it’s any good.

Research & References

This article draws upon reporting, match records and statistical data from the Premier League, Reuters, Sky Sports, The Guardian, England Football and other contemporary reporting used to examine Manchester United’s summer recruitment and Michael Carrick’s developing squad.

Where appropriate, hyperlinks throughout the article direct readers to the original reporting, match reports and statistical sources used during the research process.

What do you think?

Can you see what Manchester United are trying to build under Michael Carrick?

And if you can, do you think they’ve built enough of it to actually work?

I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments.

Old Trafford. Photo: Steven Haslington / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped from original.

Less than a week.

That’s all it took for the Premier League to feel completely normal again.

Arsenal already look like Arsenal.

Manchester United have already broken my heart. Supporters have declared title challenges over, relegation battles underway, managers frauds and summer signings either world-class or complete wastes of money.

Football is back.

Except, apparently, some of the football teams aren’t finished yet.

That was the thought I couldn’t shake watching the opening week of the season.

We spend an entire summer waiting for this moment. Fixtures are released. Kits are unveiled. Players report for preseason. Managers disappear behind training-ground fences attempting to install whatever tactical revolution they’ve spent June dreaming about.

Then opening weekend arrives.

The whistle blows. The points count.

And the transfer window is still open.

A player starting for your club this weekend could be somewhere else by Tuesday. The midfielder you desperately need might currently be training in another country. Managers are giving press conferences about the players they have while sporting directors negotiate for the players they don’t.

And everyone just sort of accepts this.

If these matches matter—and obviously they do—why are we allowing teams to continue building themselves after the competition has already begun?

The solution seemed painfully obvious.

Close the transfer window before opening day.

Squads finished. Distractions gone. Everyone knows what they have.

Ready or not, this is your team.

There was only one problem with my brilliant solution.

The Premier League already tried it.

And that’s where this got interesting.

They Already Tried That

Here’s the annoying thing about believing you’ve found an obvious solution: sometimes someone else already thought of it.

In 2017, Premier League clubs looked at essentially the same problem and decided enough was enough. The league would later describe the change as an attempt to reduce disruption once the season had started.

Premier League clubs voted to move the summer transfer deadline forward. Beginning with the 2018/19 season, they would have to finish their incoming business before the first match of the season.

And for a moment, football actually worked the way I assumed it should.

The 2018 window closed at 5 p.m. on August 9. Manchester United and Leicester City kicked off the Premier League season the following evening.

That was it.

No new striker arriving after Matchweek 2. No midfielder spending opening weekend somewhere else before appearing in a different shirt a fortnight later. No manager answering questions about the player he might have next week.

At least, that was the idea.

And importantly, clubs didn’t suddenly stop doing business because somebody took a few weeks away from them. Premier League spending still reached roughly £1.2 billion that summer. A year later, with the early deadline still in place, clubs spent around £1.4 billion.

Even Deadline Day survived.

Clubs simply moved the panic forward.

There was just one fairly significant problem.

Nobody told the rest of Europe to stop shopping.

England had closed its window for incoming transfers. The other major European leagues hadn’t necessarily done the same.

And closing the English window didn’t prevent a Premier League player from leaving for a country where the market remained open.

Think about what that meant.

You could enter opening weekend knowing you couldn’t sign another player, only for a European club to come knocking for one of yours.

Sell him, and you couldn’t replace him.

Keep him, and you potentially had an unhappy player sitting in a squad supposedly designed to eliminate uncertainty in the first place.

The Premier League had solved one problem by creating another.

Some managers saw it immediately.

Mauricio Pochettino argued that English clubs were putting themselves at a disadvantage compared with European competitors operating with later deadlines. Jürgen Klopp eventually reached a similar conclusion: the important issue wasn’t necessarily when England closed, but whether the major European markets closed together.

Closing early wasn’t necessarily the problem.

Closing early alone was.

By February 2020, Premier League clubs agreed. After only two seasons, they voted to move the deadline back to its traditional late-August/early-September position.

Which was irritating, because by this point the Premier League had pretty effectively dismantled my brilliant idea.

The problem wasn’t really the early deadline.

It was everything outside England.

The Premier League could control its own deadline.

It couldn’t control everyone else’s.

So perhaps the question isn’t:

Why doesn’t the Premier League just close the transfer window before the season starts?

They did.

The more difficult question is:

How do you finish building a football team when the market you’re building it in has no reason to care that your season has already begun?

Two Calendars

Maybe that is the strangest part of all this.

Football is operating on two calendars.

The first is the one supporters care about.

Opening weekend. Matchweek 2. The derby. The Champions League. Boxing Day. The run-in.

Once the whistle blows, everything feels immediate. Three points dropped in August count exactly the same as three points dropped in April.

The second calendar belongs to the market.

And it isn’t particularly interested in any of that.

Clubs are still evaluating players. Agents are still making calls. Players are still deciding whether they have a future somewhere. Selling clubs are waiting for their number to be met. Buying clubs are discovering that the £40 million player they wanted in July somehow costs £55 million when there are six days left to find one.

Those two calendars overlap.

And this is where I started arguing with myself.

There is obvious value in knowing your squad before opening day.

But there is also value in actually seeing it play.

Maybe the midfielder who looked comfortable in preseason suddenly can’t deal with a Premier League press. Maybe an injury changes the entire plan. Maybe the academy kid you thought needed a loan is ready now.

Another week gives you information.

Then there is the player.

We talk about transfers almost entirely from the perspective of clubs: Who do we need? Who can we sell?

But this is a labor market too.

Imagine spending an entire preseason believing you have a role, only to watch your club sign someone in your position on August 20.

If the window had already closed, your options could shrink dramatically.

Congratulations.

See you in January.

Keeping it open gives that player another opportunity to find minutes somewhere else.

And then there is us.

Because for all our complaining about transfer sagas, football supporters are absolute hypocrites about this.

We want the squad settled.

We want the manager backed.

We want everyone focused on the football.

And then Fabrizio Romano tweets that our club has “made contact” with a midfielder we’ve watched exactly four YouTube compilations of, and suddenly it’s 12:30 in the morning and we’re learning the difference between his expected assists and progressive carries.

Deadline Day has become part of football.

Not just an administrative cutoff.

An event.

And the spectacle isn’t entirely manufactured.

In 2025, spending climbed from roughly £2.73 billion on August 31 to more than £3 billion by the close of Deadline Day.

Move the deadline forward and you probably don’t kill that madness anyway.

We know because they already tried.

In 2019, with the window closing before the season began, Premier League clubs still spent £170 million on the final day.

The circus didn’t disappear. They moved the tent.

So why not have everybody close before their season starts?

Because there isn’t one European opening weekend.

Spain can start before England. France can start on another weekend. Germany can begin later still.

Give each league its own pre-season deadline and we’re back to England’s old problem: one country stops buying while another doesn’t.

Give everyone the same deadline before the earliest league starts and now clubs in later-starting competitions have to finish their business weeks before they play.

Europe’s major leagues already coordinate their closing dates to an extent. The Premier League itself describes this as “harmonisation” with other major European markets.

Maybe that coordination eventually moves earlier.

But it still leaves someone compromising.

And while football tries to figure that out, something else has already started.

The competition.

The Points Are Already Real

The Premier League table is already counting.

Those points don’t come with an asterisk.

Nobody gets to March and says, Well, to be fair, they dropped those three before they signed their midfielder.

A loss in August is a loss.

And this isn’t just about money moving between clubs. Some of the players arriving late will become important parts of teams we’re already judging.

Cole Palmer joined Chelsea on Deadline Day in 2023. By the end of that season, he’d scored 22 Premier League goals, added 11 assists and won the Premier League’s Young Player of the Season award.

Chelsea had already played competitive football before acquiring the player who would come to define their season.

That’s an extreme example.

Most late signings don’t become Cole Palmer.

But the possibility exists for a team to play you in August and become materially different before playing someone else a few weeks later.

And football already accepts plenty of that.

Injuries happen. Players get suspended. Managers get sacked. Form disappears.

January exists.

Competitive integrity has never meant everyone faces exactly the same version of every opponent.

But we’re still choosing to let teams change after the points start counting.

Opening weekend in 2017 gave us an almost absurd example.

Southampton and Swansea played out a 0–0 draw without Virgil van Dijk or Gylfi Sigurdsson as both players’ futures remained unresolved. Van Dijk had been training away from Southampton’s first team after telling the club he wanted to leave. Swansea manager Paul Clement had already said he wouldn’t consider Sigurdsson for selection while negotiations with Everton continued.

The player can still belong to you on paper while the transfer market has already changed the team you’re able to put on the pitch.

Managers spend preseason teaching movements, building partnerships and figuring out which players complement one another.

Then the real matches arrive while somebody upstairs is still negotiating whether one of those pieces stays—or whether another one is about to walk through the door.

For a late arrival, the problem flips.

Preseason is gone.

Relationships now have to be built while points are on the line.

Sometimes it works immediately.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

And we don’t have enough evidence to claim that late transfers systematically cost teams points. It would be easy to find a handful of bad late signings and pretend we’d proved something.

We haven’t.

What we can say is much simpler.

The uncertainty is real.

And perhaps that’s why opening weekend feels like such an odd line to cross.

Everything about football tells us this is the beginning.

The table resets.

The shirts are clean.

Everyone gets zero points and, for a few glorious hours, supporters of nearly every club can convince themselves this might finally be the year.

The competition is ready.

The squads?

Well.

Some of them are still being assembled.

So, What Are We Actually Fixing?

I started looking into this because I thought I knew the answer.

Close the window.

Honestly, I expected to spend an evening finding some numbers, confirming what seemed obvious and writing about why football insists on making something unnecessarily complicated.

Instead, I found out they already tried my idea.

Then I found out why they stopped.

And somewhere between Premier League votes, European registration periods, billions in transfer spending and a handful of very unhappy managers, the question changed.

Because what exactly are we trying to fix?

And that’s where I got stuck.

Because after all of this, I still kind of want the window closed.

I do.

Except now I understand why that doesn’t really work either.

Close England early and Europe keeps shopping.

Keep it open and managers enter competitive matches without knowing exactly what their squad will look like two weeks later.

Try to close it everywhere and now you’re asking leagues with different calendars to build their teams according to somebody else’s schedule.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that are players trying to figure out where they’re actually going to play football.

There isn’t a version where everybody gets what they want.

And if the goal is keeping football supporters from obsessively refreshing their phones every time someone puts an hourglass emoji beside a player’s name, I regret to inform you that nothing can be done.

We’re beyond saving.

But that first part is the bit I can’t quite let go of.

Opening day should feel definitive.

This is Manchester United.

This is Arsenal.

This is Liverpool.

This is the group you’ve built, the manager you’ve trusted and the plan you’ve spent the summer constructing.

Go prove it.

But football doesn’t exist entirely within the white lines.

It’s a competition. It’s an enormous international labor market. It’s a collection of businesses. It’s an entertainment industry.

And, depending on how your Saturday went, it’s a perfectly reasonable way to ruin an otherwise pleasant weekend.

Those things don’t operate according to the same calendar.

I’m not sure they ever completely can.

Europe’s biggest leagues could eventually decide to move together and close their windows earlier. There might be some compromise between market access and competitive certainty.

Or maybe this little bit of early-season chaos is simply the least-bad option.

Or maybe I’m completely wrong about all of this.

The window is still open as I write this.

Maybe September 1 comes and goes without anything particularly remarkable happening. The final deals get announced, everyone posts a graphic of their new signing holding a scarf, and within 48 hours we’re arguing about VAR instead.

Because there will be football to watch.

And eventually, none of us will care when the squad became finished.

We’ll only care what it does once it is.

But until then?

The points already count.

The table is already moving.

The season is already here.

Some of the teams competing in it are still figuring out who they are going to be.

Ready or not, here we go.

Research & References

This article draws upon reporting, historical records and data from the Premier League, BBC Sport, Deloitte, Chelsea FC, The Guardian and other contemporary reporting used to examine the history and impact of the Premier League’s transfer-window rules.

Where appropriate, hyperlinks throughout the article direct readers to the original reports, league announcements and statistical sources used during the research process.

What do you think?

Should the transfer window close before the Premier League season begins, or is the uncertainty simply part of operating in a global football market?

I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments.

Every major tournament begins the same way.

Predictions.

Brazil will always be mentioned.

Argentina rarely sit far behind.

Germany are expected to recover.

Spain are expected to control the ball.

And somewhere near the top of every list sits France.

The names change.

Different footballers.

Different eras.

The same expectation.

One generation watched Zinedine Zidane lift the World Cup.

The next watched Thierry Henry redefine what a modern forward could be.

Then came Karim Benzema.

Antoine Griezmann.

Paul Pogba.

Kylian Mbappé.

Now the conversation belongs to William Saliba, Eduardo Camavinga, Aurélien Tchouaméni, Désiré Doué, and another generation already announcing itself.

The faces change.

The prediction rarely does.

France will compete.

Somewhere along the way, that stopped feeling optimistic and started feeling inevitable.

That raises a more interesting question than whether France can win another tournament.

Why do they keep arriving in position to do so?

Most nations spend decades searching for a golden generation.

France seems to spend those same decades preparing the next one.

Perhaps that isn’t coincidence.

Perhaps it is design.

Ask almost any football supporter why France continues to succeed, and the answer usually arrives without hesitation.

Talent.

Look at the names.

Look at the athleticism.

Look at the technical quality.

France simply produces extraordinary footballers.

There is truth in that.

It is also where the conversation usually ends.

Talent, by itself, explains remarkably little.

Brazil has talent.

Argentina has talent.

England has talent.

Portugal, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands continue to produce remarkable footballers.

If talent alone sustained international success, every major tournament would tell a different story.

The more revealing question is not why France occasionally produce a world-class player.

It is why they continue producing enough of them to remain among the favorites nearly every time the world gathers for a major tournament.

That distinction matters.

One exceptional generation can transform a nation’s history.

It rarely shapes three decades of expectation.

Since lifting the World Cup in 1998, France has experienced disappointment, transition, and even public humiliation.

They failed to score a goal at the 2002 World Cup.

They imploded in South Africa eight years later.

They have lost finals that seemed within touching distance.

Yet every setback has eventually given way to another contender.

Another generation.

Another tournament.

Another expectation.

That rhythm is difficult to ignore.

Eventually, repeated success stops looking accidental.

It begins to resemble design.

Perhaps the real story is not the players themselves.

Perhaps it is the environment that keeps producing them.

Talent creates headlines.

Systems create history.

And maybe that is France’s greatest achievement.

Not producing one unforgettable generation.

Building a football culture capable of surviving the end of each one.

If talent alone cannot explain France’s success, something else must.

That “something” is often reduced to a single word.

Clairefontaine.

Mention the academy almost anywhere in football, and the images arrive immediately: pristine training pitches, elite coaching, and a seemingly endless production line of world-class players.

Its reputation is deserved.

Its mythology is another matter.

Clairefontaine did not build French football.

It became the public face of something much larger.

When the Centre National du Football opened in 1988 under the vision of French Football Federation president Fernand Sastre, it represented a shift in philosophy as much as infrastructure. Rather than waiting for exceptional players to appear, France began investing in a national framework designed to identify, educate, and develop them over the long term.

Clairefontaine became the flagship.

It was never intended to become the fleet.

That distinction matters.

One of modern football’s most persistent myths is that every great French international emerged from Clairefontaine.

Many never did.

Karim Benzema developed through Olympique Lyonnais.

Antoine Griezmann crossed the border to continue his education with Real Sociedad.

N’Golo Kanté climbed through amateur football before earning his professional opportunity.

Eduardo Camavinga and Ousmane Dembélé emerged from Rennes.

Aurélien Tchouaméni developed at Bordeaux.

Their journeys looked remarkably different.

Their destination did not.

That was never a flaw in the French model.

It was the design.

Clairefontaine was never expected to produce every international.

It existed to strengthen the environment capable of producing them.

Across the country, thousands of grassroots clubs feed into district competitions, regional scouting, the Pôles Espoirs, professional academies, and eventually the national teams.

Each stage has its own purpose.

Grassroots football introduces the game.

Regional scouts identify potential.

The Pôles Espoirs refine technical and tactical foundations while allowing young players to continue their education.

Professional academies prepare them for senior football.

The national team becomes the destination—not the beginning.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the French model is not that it relies on one extraordinary academy.

It is that it never had to.

Clairefontaine serves the Île-de-France region, one of Europe’s richest footballing talent pools, but similar pathways exist across the country. Technical advisors, regional development centres, coaching education, and professional clubs work together to create remarkable consistency without demanding identical journeys.

Some players arrive through Paris.

Others emerge from Lyon.

Rennes.

Monaco.

Lens.

Lille.

Bordeaux.

Or countless local clubs scattered across the country.

Different roads.

The same destination.

That consistency may be France’s greatest competitive advantage.

Football celebrates extraordinary individuals.

The French model quietly invests in extraordinary processes.

Perhaps that is the lesson beneath Clairefontaine’s reputation.

The academy became famous.

The network made it possible.

Understanding the structure explains how French players move through the system.

It does not fully explain why the system continues producing elite footballers with such remarkable consistency.

For that, we have to step back.

Much further back.

France begins with one obvious advantage.

A population approaching 70 million provides one of Europe’s deepest potential talent pools. Combined with the country’s cultural diversity, it creates countless pathways into football for children growing up in cities, suburbs, and rural communities alike.

But population has never won a World Cup.

If it had, the international game would look very different.

Potential means little without opportunity.

Opportunity begins long before Clairefontaine.

Across France, more than 12,000 affiliated clubs and over two million licensed players form one of the world’s largest football participation networks. For most children, organized football is not an aspiration reserved for the exceptionally gifted.

It is simply part of growing up.

Every professional footballer begins somewhere.

France has created thousands of places where that journey can begin.

The Federation has spent decades ensuring those first steps are not left entirely to chance.

Its investment extends far beyond elite academies. Through the Direction Technique Nationale (DTN), coaching education has become one of the defining strengths of French football. Technical development, decision-making, tactical understanding, and long-term player growth are emphasized throughout the country.

The objective is not merely to build successful youth teams.

It is to build better footballers.

That distinction changes everything.

A young player moving between clubs or development centres is unlikely to encounter an entirely different football philosophy.

The surroundings may change.

The principles rarely do.

The philosophy travels with the player.

Professional clubs reinforce that continuity.

Academies at Lyon, Rennes, Monaco, Lille, Lens, and Paris Saint-Germain have earned international respect not simply because they discover exceptional talent, but because they continue developing it within an ecosystem that rewards patience over shortcuts.

Ligue 1 strengthens the cycle in another important way.

Unlike some wealthier leagues, where expensive transfers can block academy graduates, French clubs have long relied on developing and selling young players.

Financial reality has become developmental opportunity.

Young footballers are not simply trained.

They are trusted.

Meaningful first-team minutes arrive early.

The pathway remains visible.

Young players can see it.

Parents believe in it.

Clubs invest in it.

The cycle strengthens itself.

The evidence extends well beyond France’s borders.

Nearly 400 French players currently compete across Europe’s five major leagues, second only to Spain.

More than 1,000 French professionals now play abroad worldwide.

At some point, volume becomes evidence.

France no longer produces enough talent merely to sustain Ligue 1.

It produces enough talent to shape football across Europe.

Perhaps that is the country’s greatest advantage.

Not one academy.

Not one generation.

Not one philosophy.

The relationship between them all.

Population creates possibility.

Grassroots football discovers it.

Coaching develops it.

Professional clubs refine it.

International football reveals it.

Talent may begin the journey.

The system is what allows it to arrive.

If the French model truly works, the evidence should extend beyond coaching manuals and academy structures.

It does.

It appears every time a major tournament begins.

France’s modern football story effectively starts in 1998.

Playing on home soil, they lifted their first FIFA World Cup and introduced a generation that would become part of football history. Two years later, they added the European Championship, seemingly announcing the arrival of a new international powerhouse.

Then everything unraveled.

France failed to score a single goal at the 2002 World Cup.

They exited in the group stage.

Euro 2008 brought another disappointing early exit.

By the 2010 World Cup, internal conflict, player unrest, and public embarrassment had left many wondering whether French football had lost its way.

For some nations, those moments become defining chapters.

For France, they became part of a much longer story.

Four years later, they returned to the World Cup quarterfinals.

In 2016, they reached the European Championship final.

Two years after that, they became world champions once again.

In 2022, they reached another World Cup final, falling only after one of the greatest finals the tournament has ever produced.

Now, in 2026, they once again enter the knockout rounds among the favorites.

The players changed.

The expectation remained.

That consistency is difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

It is equally important not to mistake consistency for perfection.

France has not won every tournament.

They have not avoided painful defeats.

Their development model has not eliminated failure.

Instead, it has accomplished something arguably more impressive.

It has prevented failure from becoming permanent.

The same rhythm appears long before players reach the senior national team.

French youth sides have spent decades competing deep into international tournaments.

European Under-17 titles.

Eight European Under-19 championships.

A FIFA Under-20 World Cup.

Olympic success.

None of those achievements guarantees future greatness.

Taken together, however, they reveal something difficult to ignore.

The production line never truly stops.

One generation graduates.

Another is already arriving.

Perhaps that is the most overlooked measure of footballing excellence.

Many nations produce remarkable teams.

Very few continue replacing them.

That may be France’s greatest strength.

Not extraordinary peaks.

Extraordinary continuity.

Every tournament tells a familiar story.

Some names disappear.

New ones emerge.

The shirt remains one of the favorites.

Not because history guarantees the future.

Because nearly three decades of evidence have earned that belief.

At this point, the argument seems almost too neat.

France built an exceptional development system.

The system produces exceptional footballers.

Therefore, France remain among the favorites whenever a major tournament begins.

It is an appealing explanation.

It is also incomplete.

Football history has a habit of humbling anyone who mistakes the present for permanence.

There was a time when Brazil appeared incapable of decline.

Germany defined consistency for generations before enduring one of the most difficult periods in its modern history.

Spain’s golden generation reshaped international football between 2008 and 2012, only for transition to become inevitable.

Belgium assembled perhaps the finest collection of players in its history without winning a major international trophy.

Even Argentina, fresh from World Cup glory, will eventually confront the challenge of replacing Lionel Messi.

Football moves in cycles.

No nation escapes them forever.

That raises an uncomfortable question.

What if France are not unique?

What if this is simply the longest golden generation international football has ever witnessed?

It is a fair challenge.

Zinedine Zidane handed the torch to Thierry Henry.

Henry’s era gave way to Karim Benzema.

Benzema shared the stage with Antoine Griezmann and Paul Pogba.

Then came Kylian Mbappé.

Now the spotlight increasingly falls on William Saliba, Eduardo Camavinga, Aurélien Tchouaméni, Désiré Doué, and another generation already stepping forward.

Perhaps those overlapping careers have simply created the illusion of permanence.

Perhaps France have been extraordinarily fortunate.

The evidence points somewhere else.

Golden generations usually arrive together.

They rise.

They peak.

Eventually, they fade.

France’s recent history has rarely followed that rhythm.

Instead of one defining generation, they have produced overlapping waves of elite footballers that never seem entirely dependent upon one another.

When one era begins to fade, another is already emerging.

That pattern is difficult to explain through luck alone.

Especially when viewed alongside the structure beneath it.

Thousands of grassroots clubs.

Regional scouting networks.

The Pôles Espoirs.

Professional academies.

Standardized coaching education.

Hundreds of professionals competing across Europe’s strongest leagues.

One academy cannot explain three decades of relevance.

One remarkable generation probably cannot either.

This does not mean France have solved football.

Every system eventually faces new challenges.

Other nations continue investing heavily in youth development.

England’s academy reforms continue bearing fruit.

Portugal produces extraordinary talent relative to its population.

Germany rebuilt after failure.

Spain remains one of football’s great educators.

France’s advantage is real.

It is simply not permanent.

Perhaps that is the fairest conclusion.

France are not unique because they are the only nation capable of producing elite footballers.

They are unique because, for nearly three decades, few countries have combined opportunity, coaching, infrastructure, culture, and patience into such a consistently effective model.

The distinction matters.

This is not an article arguing that France have solved football.

It is an article suggesting they may currently offer one of its clearest lessons.

How to build something that survives the end of a generation.

When this World Cup ends, the conversation will return to familiar questions.

Who was the best player?

Which manager got it right?

Who exceeded expectations?

Who fell short?

France may lift the trophy.

They may not.

In many ways, that is beside the point.

The more interesting story has been unfolding long before the opening whistle.

For nearly three decades, France have quietly challenged one of football’s oldest assumptions:

That sustained excellence depends upon sustained luck.

It is easy to celebrate a golden generation.

History is full of them.

Brazil had Pelé.

Argentina had Maradona.

Spain transformed the sport between 2008 and 2012.

Belgium assembled perhaps the finest squad in its history.

Those teams remind us how extraordinary one generation can become.

France asks a different question.

What if greatness is measured not by one generation...

...but by the one that follows?

And the one after that?

That may be France’s greatest achievement.

Not producing Zinedine Zidane.

Not producing Thierry Henry.

Not producing Kylian Mbappé.

Remarkable players have always existed.

Remarkable systems are far rarer.

That does not guarantee future success.

Football eventually humbles every nation.

Another country may build an even stronger pathway.

France themselves will almost certainly experience another period of decline.

History rarely stands still.

But whether France win this World Cup or not, they have already demonstrated something worth studying.

Talent is important.

Infrastructure is transformative.

Great players inspire nations.

Great systems outlive them.

Perhaps that is why France continue to enter major tournaments carrying expectations few countries can match.

Not because the football world assumes another superstar will appear.

But because, for decades, France have consistently given it reason to believe one will.

Maybe the greatest football nations are not those that produce the best players.

Maybe they are the ones that make greatness feel repeatable.

France may not have solved football.

But they have shown what becomes possible when a nation stops hoping for the next generation...

...and starts building it.

Research & References

This article draws upon research from the Fédération Française de Football (FFF), FIFA, UEFA, the CIES Football Observatory, Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP), World Bank population data, official club academy histories, and academic literature on player development and long-term sporting success.

Where appropriate, hyperlinks throughout the article direct readers to the original reports, historical archives, and statistical sources used during the research process.

Football's financial success has transformed the game in remarkable ways. This isn't an argument against growth. It's an exploration of what happens when the economics of football begin to shape football's greatest currency: possibility.

Every August begins the same way.

A supporter walks into a club shop and buys a new shirt.

A parent tells their child that this season might be different.

A newly promoted club dreams of staying up.

A European giant dreams of another title.

For a few brief weeks, before the first whistle blows, football gives every supporter permission to believe.

That belief is one of the sport’s greatest gifts.

Long before league tables take shape, before injuries mount, before expectations settle into reality, possibility belongs to everyone.

It always has.

That is why football has never been only about winning.

It has always been about imagining.

Leicester City lifting the Premier League trophy.

Atalanta conquering Europe.

An academy graduate becoming the club’s next legend.

A newly promoted side surviving against the odds.

Football asks us to believe in things that have not happened yet.

Perhaps that’s why it endures.

But somewhere over the past two decades, football quietly entered a new era.

Not tactically.

Not culturally.

Economically.

The modern game has become one of the world’s most valuable entertainment industries.

Television audiences stretch across continents. Sponsorship agreements reach into the billions. Clubs once considered local institutions have become global brands. The Premier League is watched in nearly every corner of the world, while the UEFA Champions League has become one of the sport’s most valuable annual competitions.

None of this is inherently negative.

In many ways, it deserves to be celebrated.

Football’s growth has transformed stadiums, academies, youth development, women’s football, sports science, and the game’s global reach. Millions now follow clubs they might never have discovered a generation ago.

The Premier League did not become football’s financial centre by accident.

It built a product the world wanted to watch, and its success deserves recognition.

The numbers reflect that success.

When the Premier League was founded in 1992, its first domestic television agreement was worth approximately £304 million over five years.

Its current domestic rights agreement is worth £6.7 billion over four seasons.

International broadcasting has grown even more dramatically. Overseas rights, once secondary to the domestic market, now generate more revenue than domestic television deals. Across broadcasting, commercial partnerships, and international rights, the Premier League now operates on a financial scale that would have seemed unimaginable a generation ago.

This growth extends far beyond England.

The European football market generated a record €38 billion during the 2023–24 season. Real Madrid became the first football club to surpass €1 billion in annual revenue. UEFA now distributes billions of euros annually through its club competitions, while the world’s wealthiest clubs generate commercial income that rivals multinational corporations.

Football has become richer.

That is beyond dispute.

If this essay ended there, it would simply be a story about success.

But economies rarely change only one thing.

When new wealth enters a system, it rarely remains still.

It moves.

It changes behaviour.

It changes incentives.

It changes expectations.

Football was never going to be different.

As television revenue expanded, so did transfer fees.

As commercial income increased, so did wages.

As clubs earned more, the market began asking more.

A player once valued at £20 million became £40 million.

Then £60 million.

Then £80 million.

Eventually, even £100 million no longer felt extraordinary.

The first €100 million transfer represented a landmark.

The world-record transfer that followed did something even more significant.

It reset expectations.

Not just for one player.

For everyone.

Selling clubs had a new benchmark.

Agents had new leverage.

Buying clubs entered negotiations knowing yesterday’s market no longer existed.

Football had not simply become wealthier.

Its understanding of value had changed.

And when our understanding of value changes, every decision that follows begins to change with it.

A major transfer does not only move one player.

It teaches the market.

A record fee becomes a reference point. A selling club sees what is possible. An agent understands what can be asked. A buying club enters the next negotiation knowing yesterday’s number may no longer matter.

This is one of the quiet forces shaping modern football.

Every enormous transfer creates a ripple.

Not always immediately.

Not always fairly.

But eventually, the market learns.

When Neymar moved to Paris Saint-Germain for €222 million, the transfer did more than make him the most expensive player in history.

It altered football’s understanding of value.

Suddenly, elite attackers, young stars, and irreplaceable players occupied a different pricing universe.

A ceiling had been broken.

The rooms beneath it became more expensive.

That is how markets work.

And football, for all its romance, is still a market.

The difficulty is that clubs do not enter that market equally.

A wealthy club can overpay and continue.

A smaller club can negotiate brilliantly and still discover that replacing success has become more expensive than achieving it.

That is the contradiction.

A club can execute the perfect sale and still leave the transfer window feeling poorer.

Because once everyone knows you have money, everyone adjusts.

The selling club adjusts.

The buying club adjusts.

The agent adjusts.

The player adjusts.

The market adjusts.

Success itself becomes more expensive.

Brighton understand this better than almost anyone.

Over the past decade, they have become one of football’s great case studies in intelligent recruitment. They identify talent early, develop players patiently, sell at the right moment, and reinvest before panic has a chance to set in.

Ben White left.

Marc Cucurella left.

Alexis Mac Allister left.

Moisés Caicedo left.

Robert Sánchez left.

Managers and staff moved too.

And still Brighton remained Brighton.

That deserves admiration.

Not sympathy.

Brighton are not victims of modern football.

They are one of its greatest success stories.

They prove that scouting matters.

That coaching matters.

That structure matters.

That culture matters.

A club without the largest budget can still build something extraordinary.

Yet Brighton also reveal a difficult truth.

The better they become at identifying talent, the more attractive that talent becomes to clubs with greater financial power.

That is not failure.

It is the model.

Discover.

Develop.

Sell.

Replace.

Compete.

Begin again.

There is something beautiful about that cycle.

There is also something relentless about it.

Brentford have embraced a similar philosophy.

Atalanta transformed player development into sustained European success.

Bologna returned to the Champions League through outstanding coaching and recruitment.

Ajax, Benfica, and Porto have spent decades proving that exceptional football minds can compete with exceptional financial power.

Those clubs matter because they refuse to fit a simple narrative.

If this essay argued that money had ruined football, they would immediately prove it wrong.

They remind us that intelligence still changes seasons.

That coaching still matters.

That recruitment still matters.

That belief still matters.

Football still creates remarkable stories.

The question is not whether surprise survives.

It does.

The question is what surprise now demands.

Every successful recruitment department must repeat itself.

Every successful manager must evolve.

Every replacement must be almost as good as the player who just departed.

Excellence becomes less an achievement than a continuous obligation.

The wealthiest clubs are not immune to mistakes.

Manchester United have spent heavily while searching for consistency.

Chelsea have invested extraordinary sums without immediately turning that investment into sustained dominance.

Everton spent ambitiously before finding themselves under financial and sporting pressure.

Money does not guarantee wisdom.

It does not guarantee culture.

It does not guarantee balance.

What it often provides is something quieter.

Time.

Another transfer window.

Another opportunity to correct yesterday’s mistake.

That is where the divide becomes most visible.

Not in who makes mistakes.

Everyone does.

The difference lies in who can recover from them.

A failed signing at one club becomes an expensive lesson.

At another, it can shape recruitment for years.

Modern football does not eliminate risk.

It distributes the consequences of risk unevenly.

That reality sits beneath many of the sport’s modern financial regulations.

Profit and Sustainability Rules.

UEFA’s squad cost controls.

Parachute payments.

Revenue-sharing models.

Each exists for a reason.

Football should not reward reckless spending.

Supporters should not lose their clubs because ambition outran sustainability.

Those goals deserve respect.

But every regulation creates incentives.

Modern football increasingly asks clubs to grow before they spend.

Yet meaningful growth often requires investment before growth becomes possible.

That tension has no easy solution.

Financial freedom without limits carries obvious dangers.

Financial restraint can preserve existing hierarchies.

Both ideas can be true at the same time.

Perhaps that is why modern football feels more complicated than ever.

Not because money has replaced merit.

But because the relationship between the two has become increasingly difficult to separate.

Numbers can explain how football changed.

They struggle to explain how those changes feel.

There is a temptation, whenever football changes, to mourn what came before.

To insist that the game has been lost.

That money has won.

That romance is dead.

I don’t think the evidence supports that.

Football is still capable of astonishing us.

A newly promoted club can still survive.

An academy graduate can still become the heartbeat of a city.

A well-run club can still challenge institutions with far greater resources.

A manager can still transform a squad that looked ordinary twelve months earlier.

Supporters still experience seasons that defy every prediction made in August.

Those stories matter.

Because if football had truly become predictable, nobody would still care enough to argue about it.

Perhaps the better question is not whether possibility still exists.

It does.

The better question is what possibility now asks of those pursuing it.

For some clubs, possibility is sustained by generations of success, worldwide supporter bases, commercial strength, and financial certainty.

For others, it depends on identifying one teenager before everyone else does.

Hiring the right manager.

Selling at precisely the right moment.

Replacing without hesitation.

Getting ten difficult decisions right in succession.

The dream remains the same.

The cost of getting there does.

Football has never been perfectly fair.

Resources have never been distributed equally.

Great clubs have always possessed advantages.

What feels different today is not the existence of those advantages.

It is their scale.

And perhaps more importantly...

How difficult they have become to overcome.

Football has always celebrated extraordinary seasons.

Modern football increasingly asks whether extraordinary seasons can become extraordinary eras.

That is a far more demanding challenge.

Not because intelligence matters less.

But because intelligence must endure.

Mistakes carry greater consequences.

Recovery requires greater precision.

Success demands repetition.

If anything, clubs like Brighton, Brentford, Atalanta, Bologna, Ajax, Benfica, and Porto deserve even greater admiration because of it.

Perhaps we have misunderstood what makes them remarkable.

Not that they occasionally compete with richer clubs.

But that they continue doing so after selling the very players who made that success possible.

That is not luck.

It is institutional excellence.

And institutional excellence deserves recognition.

Which brings me back to where this essay began.

Every August.

A new shirt.

A new fixture list.

A league table with every club level on points.

Football has never sold certainty.

It has sold something far more valuable.

Possibility.

The possibility that promotion becomes survival.

That survival becomes Europe.

That an academy graduate becomes a legend.

That this season becomes the one supporters tell stories about for decades.

No balance sheet can measure that.

No television contract can manufacture it.

No transfer fee can replace it.

Perhaps that is why this conversation matters.

Not because football has become richer.

But because possibility has always been the sport’s greatest currency.

My hope is not that football stops growing.

It shouldn’t.

The game deserves its success.

My hope is simply that, as football continues to grow, it never forgets what made people fall in love with it in the first place.

The belief that, somewhere, someone is beginning a season convinced that extraordinary things can still happen.

Because if football can protect that...

It will always be worth believing in.

Research & References

This essay reflects my own analysis. The sources below informed the reporting and research behind it.

This essay was informed by publicly available reporting, financial data, and academic research on football economics. If you’d like to explore the topic further, these are excellent places to begin:

Deloitte: Annual Review of Football Finance

Deloitte: Football Money League

Premier League: Broadcasting Revenue & Profit and Sustainability Rules

UEFA: Club Licensing and Financial Sustainability Regulations

FIFA: Global Transfer Reports

CIES Football Observatory: Transfer Market Research

Transfermarkt: Historical Transfer Records

ESPN FC, BBC Sport, The Guardian, and The Athletic reporting on football finance and recruitment models

Continue the Conversation

What do you think? Has football’s financial growth strengthened the game, narrowed possibilities, or done a little of both? I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments.

Neymar trains with Brazil ahead of the World Cup. Photo: Yahoo Sports/Getty Images.

The sun is setting on the Brazil that taught many of us to love the game.

Ronaldinho. Kaká. Ronaldo. Rivaldo.

The memories remain.

The identity feels harder to find.

Brazil do not lack players. That has never really been the issue. Vinícius Júnior is still there. Matheus Cunha has already scored twice in this tournament. Endrick waits with all the promise young Brazilian forwards seem destined to carry.

But through the opening stretch of this World Cup, Brazil have not always felt like Brazil.

They have looked organized.

They have looked disciplined.

At times, they have looked cautious.

What they have not consistently looked is joyful.

That matters, because Brazil have never existed in football memory as merely another talented nation. Brazil became Brazil because the football felt different. It carried rhythm. Improvisation. Risk. Joy.

Joga bonito was never simply about tricks.

It was about expression.

That is why Neymar’s possible return against Scotland feels bigger than one player entering one match.

Neymar is thirty-four now. He has not yet featured in this World Cup because of a calf injury. Raphinha is unavailable with a hamstring injury. Rodrygo is not at the tournament after a serious knee injury. This is not Brazil at full attacking strength.

Yet Neymar carries something the others, talented as they are, cannot quite carry in the same way.

Memory.

He is not simply another forward.

He is one of the final bridges between the Brazil many of us grew up watching and the Brazil still trying to rediscover itself.

Maybe Brazil do not need Neymar to be their best player anymore.

Maybe they simply need him to remind them what their football is supposed to feel like.

Because this World Cup has repeatedly rewarded teams that understand themselves.

Haiti played with belief.

Ghana refused its assigned role.

Cape Verde competed without apology.

Those teams may not have Brazil’s talent, but they have played with clear identity.

Brazil, strangely, are still searching for theirs.

That is a strange sentence to write about the Seleção.

And perhaps the weight of Brazilian memory makes every modern side feel smaller than it truly is.

Maybe no team can carry the ghosts of 1970, 1982, 1994, 2002, and every yellow shirt that made the game feel like art.

But that is the burden of Brazil.

They are not only judged by whether they win.

They are judged by whether they remind us.

Neymar may not solve Brazil’s midfield. He may not restore the rhythm by himself. He may not be the player he was ten years ago.

But some players carry more than a shirt.

Sometimes they carry a memory.

And for Brazil, Neymar may still carry the memory of the game they once taught the world to love.

Haitian supporters celebrate during the 2026 World Cup. Photo: Associated Press.

There is a student I taught during the 2021–22 school year that I still think about.

He was my first Haitian student.

At the time, Haiti existed in my mind mostly the way distant countries often do. A place you read about more than understand. A country that appeared in headlines but rarely in conversations.

Then he walked into my classroom.

My grandmother’s first language was French. Hearing pieces of that language again years later in an Indiana classroom felt strangely familiar. Haitian Creole carries its own identity and history, but there was enough familiarity to make me curious.

That curiosity became conversation.

Conversation became relationship.

Since then, I have taught Haitian students nearly every year.

They have taught me far more about Haiti than any article, documentary, or textbook ever could.

Which is why this World Cup has felt different.

When Haiti plays, I do not find myself watching strangers.

I think about students.

I think about families.

I think about conversations that happened years before this tournament ever began.

I think about a country that entered my classroom long before it entered my television.

This Haitian side has spent much of its recent history playing away from home. Political instability and violence have made true home matches increasingly difficult. They entered a group many expected them to struggle through. Larger nations. Larger player pools. Greater resources.

Yet they have never looked intimidated.

They press.

They compete.

They believe.

One of the things that has struck me most during this tournament is how little they seem interested in their assigned role. They do not play like a team grateful to be here. They play like a team that believes it belongs here.

That confidence feels familiar.

Over the years, my students have taught me that community matters deeply. Family matters. Pride matters. Success rarely belongs to one person alone.

Watching this team, I see some of those same qualities.

The players run for one another.

The celebrations belong to everyone.

The shirt means something.

There is a temptation in football to measure success only by results. Points. Tables. Knockout rounds. Trophies.

But some teams teach us something regardless of where they finish.

Haiti has become one of those teams.

In a tournament dominated by transfer valuations, superstars, and endless discussion about who belongs among football’s elite, Haiti has simply insisted on belonging.

Not because anyone granted them permission.

Because they already believed they did.

As teachers, we often think we are the ones giving lessons.

The truth is usually more complicated.

Years ago, my students taught me something about Haiti.

This summer, a football team reminded me.

Football does not always teach us something new.

Sometimes it simply returns us to lessons we had forgotten.

Like many supporters during this World Cup, I have spent the better part of the last two weeks watching far more football than I probably should. Three matches one day. Four the next. An afternoon kickoff that turns into an evening one, which somehow becomes a late-night match you convince yourself you should stay awake for.

The expanded tournament has given us more football than any World Cup before it. More teams. More stories. More opportunities to watch players we might otherwise only see a handful of times each season.

It also has a way of changing how we think about players.

League form, scouting reports, underlying numbers, and years of evidence suddenly find themselves competing with performances on the biggest stage in the sport. Players who have spent entire seasons building reputations can see them questioned in a matter of days, while others find themselves transformed by a tournament run that captures the attention of the footballing world.

Watching this tournament unfold, I have found myself wondering how much of the transfer market is truly driven by long-term evaluation and how much is still influenced by what we see over the course of a single summer.

The World Cup has always changed the conversation around players. Sometimes that change is deserved. Sometimes it is not. More often, it simply accelerates beliefs that already existed.

That is where Elliot Anderson becomes such an interesting case.

Anderson did not arrive at this tournament as an unknown player. He was already highly regarded, already expensive, and already attracting attention from some of Europe’s largest clubs. Transfermarkt currently values him at €75 million.

Yet the World Cup has a way of changing how certain numbers feel.

A player valued at €75 million can still feel like a risk. A player performing for England on the world’s biggest stage can suddenly feel like a certainty. That does not mean the player has changed overnight. It means the perception around him has.

The World Cup is not creating Elliot Anderson.

It may simply be accelerating a conversation that was already happening.

At the opposite end sits Lamine Yamal.

His tournament feels different because he arrives carrying expectations rather than seeking them. Transfermarkt currently values him at €200 million, while other valuation models place him significantly higher.

The conversation surrounding Yamal is no longer simply about potential.

It is about justification.

Every difficult match, every missed chance, every quiet evening suddenly carries the weight of expectations that most players will never experience. For him, the World Cup becomes less about discovery and more about validation.

Some players arrive hoping to earn belief.

Others arrive carrying the burden of it.

That may be the real World Cup tax.

It is not always financial. Sometimes it appears in wages, transfer fees, expectations, or reputations. The tournament changes what people are willing to believe, and once belief changes, the market often follows.

We have seen versions of this before.

James Rodríguez left Brazil in 2014 as the tournament’s Golden Boot winner and one of the most exciting players in world football before completing a move to Real Madrid later that summer. Enzo Fernández was named the tournament’s best young player in Qatar before Chelsea triggered his release clause only weeks later. Sofyan Amrabat became one of the defining players of Morocco’s remarkable run before eventually arriving at Manchester United the following season.

Those examples are not identical, and that matters.

James felt like a star being launched into another stratosphere. Enzo felt like a young player whose value had been validated almost immediately. Amrabat represents the other side of the equation: a player whose tournament elevated expectations that proved difficult to sustain afterward.

That is what makes all of this so complicated.

Modern clubs employ entire departments dedicated to recruitment. Scouts watch players over multiple seasons. Analysts evaluate trends, data, and underlying performance. Coaches examine how players function within different systems and against different opponents.

Then the World Cup arrives.

Three group matches. A potential eight-match journey to the final. One hundred and four matches spread across North America in the largest World Cup the sport has ever staged.

Yet despite all of that football, it often takes only a handful of performances for a narrative to take hold.

A player can spend three years building a reputation and see it questioned over the course of a single week. Another can put together three exceptional performances and suddenly find himself attached to clubs that had barely been discussed a month earlier.

Every tournament creates its own mythology.

A breakout midfielder.

A goalkeeper who cannot be beaten.

A young winger who suddenly looks capable of changing an entire club’s future.

Sometimes those stories prove true.

Sometimes they do not.

What fascinates me most is not whether the tournament changes players, but whether it changes us.

How quickly do we believe? How much evidence do we need? Why do certain performances stay with us while years of club football sometimes fade into the background?

For clubs, there is the fear of moving too late.

For supporters, there is the excitement of imagining what a player could become.

For players, there is the knowledge that a month of football may alter the trajectory of an entire career.

The World Cup remains compelling precisely because it allows football to surprise us. It places players in unfamiliar circumstances and asks them to perform beneath the brightest lights the sport can offer.

Some rise to meet that moment.

Others struggle beneath it.

But tournaments do not create players.

More often, they reveal what was already there.

And sometimes, they simply give the rest of us permission to finally believe it.

Sources

• FIFA World Cup 2026 competition regulations.

• Transfermarkt market valuations.

• CIES Football Observatory valuation models.

• UEFA reporting on James Rodríguez’s move to Real Madrid (2014).

• ESPN reporting on Chelsea’s signing of Enzo Fernández (2023).

• Sky Sports reporting on Sofyan Amrabat’s move to Manchester United (2023).

Three matches one day. Four the next. Somewhere between the late kickoffs and the transfer rumors, I started wondering how much of the football market is driven by years of evidence and how much is driven by a few weeks in June.