Every club has two scoreboards: The Game Behind the Game

Every club has two scoreboards. For the next six months, I’m going to show you the second one: the money, from the Premier League to the NBA.

Every Saturday, millions of people watch 22 players chase a ball. Every Monday, a much smaller group of people (owners, lenders, broadcasters, sovereign wealth funds, private equity partners) work out what that ball was actually worth.

I want to write for the first group about what the second group knows.

Sport is a business that can’t hide!

Most companies get to tell you their story on their own terms. They choose what to emphasise in an earnings call. They bury the bad news on page 87 of an annual report, the pages they know you can’t be bothered to read.

Sport can’t do that. The scoreboard is public. Performances are public. The league table is public. Increasingly, the accounts are public too: Premier League clubs file at Companies House, however NBA salaries aren’t published to the dollar, and FIFA announces its prize money in press releases you just need to know where to look. Take a look at Manchester City. Manchester City won title after title, but the 115 FFP charges over its finances showed that the second scoreboard has a much longer memory than the first. On the pitch you can out-run anyone, but you can’t run away from the numbers.

That makes sport the best classroom there is for learning how money really works:

• Want to understand leverage? Look at a football club bought with borrowed money and then made to pay off its own purchase price.

• Want to understand media economics? The NBA signed a TV deal worth about $76 billion over 11 years in 2024, at a time when traditional TV is shrinking.

• Want to understand accounting tricks? Football’s transfer market has more creative accounting than most hedge funds.

Two scoreboards, one season!

The first scoreboard tells you who won on Saturday. The second tells you who will still be standing in five years.

Over the next six months, I’ll show you the second one. That means the debts behind the trophies, the TV deals behind the fixtures, and the owners behind the badges. Read both, and you’ll never watch a transfer, a trade or a title race the same way again.

I’ll read the accounts so you don’t have to. You bring the opinions about your favourite sports team and what you would like to read!

Share