After the Expanded Tournament: The Ledger
A larger field across three host nations delivered record attendance and record cost. The distribution of both has landed very unevenly.
Leagues & Clubs
Governance, competition structure, ownership and the institutions that run the games.
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21 AUG2025
Calendar Congestion Becomes a Balance-Sheet Problem
Expanded competition formats have pushed elite squads past the load their medical departments can manage. Injury cost is now large enough to appear in financial planning.
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18 APR2024
Expansion Fees Are the New Media Rights
Closed leagues have discovered that selling a new franchise is the highest-margin transaction available to them. The constraint is that each sale permanently dilutes the seller.
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27 APR2023
Relegation Risk Is a Credit Risk
Lenders to clubs in open leagues are underwriting a revenue stream that can fall by two-thirds on a single result. The instruments used to manage it are not adequate.
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28 APR2022
The Forced Sale and the Limits of the Ownership Test
A sanctioned proprietor, a licence to operate, a court-supervised auction: this year produced a template for divesting a sporting asset under duress that nobody had drafted in advance.
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22 APR2021
Forty-Eight Hours: Anatomy of a Competition That Never Kicked Off
The breakaway announced in April collapsed faster than any comparable venture in modern sport. Its failure was a financing failure before it was a political one.
