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Welcome to issue #091 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.
A club can have 5 million followers and still be commercially weak.
Are fans wrong, or is the club measuring the wrong thing?
The mistake
Most clubs report:
followers
impressions
engagement rates
None of these explains revenue.
They describe visibility. Not value.
A sponsor does not pay for how many people scroll past your content.
They pay for how much attention your audience gives you, and how often they come back.
Attention behaves like capital
If you strip away the language, attention is not a marketing concept.
It is an asset.
It has three properties:
it accumulates over time
it can be allocated across channels
it generates returns when structured properly
Clubs invest heavily in tangible assets:
players
facilities
staff
But they do not treat attention with the same discipline.
No clear ownership.
No reporting standard.
No link to P&L.
That is inefficient.
Reach is a poor proxy
A fan who watches a clip for 5 seconds and leaves has almost no economic value.
A fan who spends 90 minutes per week with the club has a completely different profile:
higher probability to buy
higher retention
higher referral
These two profiles are often counted the same.
They should not be.
Most clubs are optimizing for scale.
Very few are optimizing for depth per fan.
The model
You can break this into three layers.
1. Capture
Where attention is generated.
Matches, social media, press, players.
2. Depth
How long attention is held.
This is where most clubs underperform.
Short formats dominate.
Access is limited.
Narrative is weak.
3. Conversion
What attention becomes.
Tickets.
Subscriptions.
Merchandising.
Sponsorship value.
If depth is weak, conversion will always be fragile.
Where clubs underinvest
Three levers increase depth.
Access
Not content.
Access.
how decisions are made
how players are developed
how the club actually operates
Without this, everything feels interchangeable.
Time
Short formats create awareness.
They do not create attachment.
Long-form does.
Not once a season. Every week.
Consistency
Attention increases only if it is repeated.
Most clubs operate in campaigns.
Attention requires systems.
The commercial implication
I don’t see this as a media discussion.
It is a revenue discussion.
A club with:
high reach
low depth
will always struggle to monetize.
A club with:
lower reach
high depth
will outperform commercially over time.
This is already visible in other industries.
The important question
Inside most clubs, who owns attention as a business line?
Not social media.
Not communication.
Attention.
Who is accountable for increasing:
time spent per fan
frequency of interaction
conversion per touchpoint
If the answer is unclear, the club is leaving value on the table.
A different way to read a club
Instead of asking:
“How many fans do we have?”
Ask:
How much attention do we control, and how efficiently do we convert it?
This is a more precise question.
It leads to different decisions.
what content to produce
what access to open
where to invest
how to price
Clubs are competing in a market where attention is becoming more expensive every year.
Most are still treating it as free.
That window will close.
The ones who structure it now will not need to chase revenue later.
They will already have it.
Keep winning,
Federico
Last week Viktor wrote a brief, built a landing page, and opened a pull request.
Last week, Viktor wrote a campaign brief, built a landing page, opened a pull request, generated a board-ready PDF from live Stripe data, and sent a follow-up email to a churned customer. All from Slack. Same colleague that also pulls your reports and monitors your dashboards. 5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.