Beyond The Pitch with Joao Martins

Pick up any international school prospectus. It will tell you where its leavers went to university, what the average IB score was, which medical schools and conservatoires they got into. Every subject is sold as an outcome.

Then you reach sport, and you get a fixture list.

Sport is the only page in the prospectus sold on participation. Everything else promises where it takes you. Sport promises that it happens.

This episode is about why the most ambitious schools in the world treat sport as enrichment, and what it costs them. There are just over fifteen thousand international schools, 7.6 million students and sixty-nine billion dollars a year in fee income, and the competition has moved from facilities to hierarchy. Everyone has the pitch. Almost nobody has the pathway.

The argument: turning sport into an outcome needs methodology, benchmarking against an elite standard, and eyes that matter. None of those three can be hired into a PE department. But they already exist in an academy an hour down the road, which has the methodology and the scouting and no route to fee-paying families.

The demand is not theoretical. One four week programme in one corridor drew families from 33 different schools, 42 percent of those who named one at an international school, a quarter of registrations submitted in English, and families from four countries. None of them asked their own school for it. They went outside it and paid.

Neither side crosses the gap. The school that crosses it first buys pathway credibility at a fraction of what building it would cost.

Beyond the Pitch. Sport and education are the same market, and the value is in the audience rather than the activity. Every two weeks, no guests.

I'm João Martins.

linktr.ee/joaoinlinks

50% of professional football academy players in Europe are released before the age of 16. Not at 18. Not at the end of school. At fifteen, before any meaningful academic qualification, before any alternative pathway exists.

Within three weeks of being released, 55% experience clinical levels of psychological distress. 72% say they received no support.

European football produces the best players in the world and discards nearly all of them before they are old enough to vote.

In this episode, I break down why the academy system is structurally designed this way, why the US model is not the answer, and what tennis and golf already figured out that football has not.

More importantly, I look at what the international schools getting this right are doing differently. They are not promising professional careers. They are doing something more valuable: moving the binary choice from fifteen to eighteen, and giving students three more years to find out how good they can be without closing any doors.

Topics covered:

• The 99.5% of academy players who never earn a living from football
• Why the US college model works for basketball but not soccer
• How Rafa Nadal and Mouratoglou built the bridge between elite sport and education
• Why European universities have no competitive sports pathway
• What three years of optionality is actually worth to a family

Beyond the Pitch breaks down the deals, strategies, and decisions that build the biggest properties in sports and education.

Follow João Martins: https://linktr.ee/joaoinlinks

#InternationalSchools #SportsBusiness #FootballAcademy #BeyondThePitch #EliteSport #Education

In August 2026, one of Thailand's largest infrastructure groups will close a school they spent $162 million building and reopen it under the name Wycombe Abbey. Same campus. Same location. Higher fees.

That decision tells you everything about where the international schools market is right now.

In this episode, I break down why the first phase of international education, the infrastructure bet, has hit its ceiling, and what Phase Two actually looks like. It is not about building better campuses. It is about brand hierarchy. And the schools winning that competition are not the newest or the best funded. They are the ones with the deepest proof that their name opens doors.

We look at Wycombe Abbey in Bangkok, Wellington replacing Haileybury across Kazakhstan, and what Eton has understood for five hundred years that most operators are only now starting to price in.

If you are running, investing in, or advising an education or sports property, this episode is about the asset on your balance sheet you probably are not measuring correctly.

Most sports academies sell coaching. IMG Academy sells college scholarships.

A tennis coach borrowed $1 million to buy a tomato field in Florida. 46 years later, it sold for $1.25 billion. How? By understanding what parents actually hire an academy to do: get their kids into college, not teach them better footwork.

In this episode, I break down how Nick Bollettieri built IMG Academy into a sports education empire by rejecting the industry playbook. You’ll see the three-pillar revenue model generating $300 million annually, why a 92% NCAA placement rate justifies $80,000 tuition, and how they turned facilities into margin machines across 14 sports.

This isn’t about tennis. It’s about productizing outcomes instead of inputs, building defensible pathways instead of generic services, and charging based on economic value instead of cost. The framework works for any business solving a high-stakes problem.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This week, we rip up the traditional football business model. For decades, clubs have chased volume, copying giants like Real Madrid while ignoring their most valuable, non-replicable asset: their location.

João breaks down the concept of Geographic Arbitrage and explains how clubs like AS Monaco and Atlanta United are generating massive commercial revenue by rejecting volume in favour of value.

We provide a five-step operator framework for any club to audit their location, identify their category advantage, and build a non-traditional sponsor profile to unlock millions in undervalued revenue. The time to ditch the generic strategy and start selling targeted demographic access is now, before Private Equity does it for you.

Most sports properties think more sponsors equals more money. Wimbledon proves the opposite.

With just 17 partners, they generate $124 million in sponsorship revenue while comparable tournaments with 50 plus partners make less per deal. Their secret? Treating scarcity like a weapon.

In this episode, I break down the Wimbledon commercial playbook: how they turned the all white dress code into a revenue multiplier, why Barclays pays 5.5x more than HSBC did for the same assets, and what happens when you optimize for value instead of volume.

This isn't about tennis. It's about what constraint, discipline, and strategic refusal can do for any business building partnerships.