7 posts
Barcelona sold its first fan tokens at €2 in under two hours. They trade at 29 cents today, and the sector that was worth billions is worth $151 million. The autopsy question isn't whether it was a bad investment — it's what the product was, and who was actually buying.
Apple paid $50 million extra to leave MLS three years early. DAZN, freshly a billion dollars richer in Saudi capital, paid a billion to give a tournament away free. Two opposite bets on what football attention is worth — and neither one is a media business.
Spain's top flight has spent eighteen months blocking shared Cloudflare and Vercel IPs on matchdays, under a court order it holds jointly with its own broadcaster. OONI measured 554,510 innocent domains caught in six months of it. This site runs on the infrastructure in question.
Tottenham's March go-live — Service Cloud with telephony on Amazon Connect, an AI agent on the fan channels, a Data Cloud identity graph over the most instrumented stadium in English football — is the best-documented club CRM story going. A practitioner's read of what the press release says, what it actually involved, and what it leaves out.
English clubs sit on demand data FIFA could only dream of — named buyers, decades of renewal history, a waiting list 110,000 deep — and not one of them will run the algorithm. The constraint isn't in the software; the same two platforms that sell every Premier League seat price dynamically everywhere else they operate.
Sky Sports was reportedly happy with the Baller League's numbers and still isn't broadcasting season four. Whichever side walked away first, the six-a-side league's retreat to YouTube answers a question football has been asking badly — it was never the format that needed fixing.
FIFA ran the first algorithmically priced World Cup. It ended with a congressional letter, a $60 concession tier covering less than one percent of seats, and a resale market doing the price discovery FIFA wouldn't.