Understanding the business behind the beautiful game.
Football is more than a sport. It is a global industry shaped by financial decisions, economic incentives and the allocation of resources. Behind every transfer, league table and academy system lies an economic story worth examining.
The Football Economist was created to explore these stories. Rather than focusing solely on what happens on the pitch, the publication investigates the economic forces that influence how clubs operate, compete and develop.
From the relationship between wage expenditure and sporting performance to the financial incentives created by promotion and relegation, the aim is to approach familiar football questions from a different perspective.
Does spending more actually lead to success?
Can youth development generate a financial return?
How do economic incentives shape competition?
Research driven by evidence, not assumptions.
The publication combines ideas from economics and finance with statistical analysis to investigate questions about the modern game. The objective is not simply to present opinions, but to examine the evidence behind them.
Each piece of research aims to make its reasoning transparent: identifying the data used, explaining the assumptions made and recognising the limitations of the analysis. Where a relationship is statistical rather than causal, that distinction matters.
Football finance
Examining the financial structures that shape modern football, from club revenues and wage expenditure to transfer markets and financial sustainability.
Economic analysis
Applying economic theory to the incentives and decisions behind the game, including promotion and relegation, competitive balance and investment.
Statistical research
Using data, quantitative methods and visualisation to investigate relationships, test hypotheses and identify patterns that conventional analysis can overlook.
An alternative way of staying connected to football.
The Football Economist was founded in August 2024, out of a desire to explore football beyond the experience of playing and watching the game.
A foot injury had limited my ability to return to playing football at the level I had aspired to. I began looking for another way to remain connected to a sport that had always been important to me.
Economics offered an unexpected opportunity. I became interested in the financial decisions, incentives and structures that influence the game, and in how economic concepts could help explain them.
What began as an independent project gradually developed into a research publication, combining two interests through writing, data analysis and economic theory.
For me, The Football Economist represents a way to approach football from a different perspective: not just as a game to follow, but as an economic system to understand.
Building a deeper understanding of football.
The long-term ambition is to develop The Football Economist into a platform for increasingly rigorous and accessible research into the economics of football.
Future work will explore more advanced quantitative techniques, original datasets, financial modelling and interactive visualisations. The intention is to keep asking meaningful questions, challenge conventional assumptions and make the economic dimensions of football easier to understand.
Ideas, evidence and analysis.
Explore some of the questions that have shaped the publication's research so far.