Welcome to issue #019 of Contemporary Football, your inside look at how the game really works behind the scenes.
Monday to Friday, you’ll uncover a new perspective on football business, and sometimes a deeper story that sharpens your thinking and gives you an edge in the beautiful game.
If you need support on your football journey, just write me.
Hey everyone,
Hyperliquid makes €1.2 billion in net income with 11 people.
Nasdaq needs 9’000 people to reach the same figure.
Different industries, yes.
But that got me thinking.
Could something like this ever happen in football?
Could a club be run by three people and a stack of smart tech?
The uncomfortable truth
90% of what football clubs do today…
is not football.
It’s:
admin
negotiation
compliance
scouting
budgeting
contracts
logistics
league reporting
planning
the same tasks repeated every week
Almost none of this requires “football intuition.”
It requires discipline.
And discipline is something technology does very well.
What three people (and smart tech) could run
If we strip away the noise, a tiny team could manage:
A scouting engine scanning 100,000 players per day
A contract & compliance bot that never sleeps
A training-load model that updates injury risk every week
A fan intelligence system that handles ticketing and pricing
A transfer-value model that adjusts in real time
A financial cockpit that sends alerts before problems appear
This isn’t science fiction.
It already exists in other industries.
Football is just late to the party.
And the club would actually become more disciplined.
Less chaos.
Fewer mistakes.
More time for decisions that matter.
What tech doesn’t replace
It doesn’t replace coaches.
It doesn’t replace dressing-room authority.
It doesn’t replace culture, leadership, or human relationships.
But it removes everything that distracts from those things.
And those distractions, the endless noise, are exactly what destroy value in football.
The real question
It’s not:
“Is this possible?”
It is:
“Who has the courage to be first?”
The first club that builds a Hyperliquid-style operational engine…
will open a gap so big that other clubs will look like Nasdaq:
big, slow, overstaffed, and unable to compete on speed.
Football rewards courage.
And this is courage of a new kind.
The courage to redesign the entire operating system of a club.
That’s all for today!
See you tomorrow,
Federico