The Soccer Business Podcast

Former Manchester United, Chelsea and Spain midfielder Juan Mata and his business partner Jürgen Griesbeck join Simon Evans to launch Unleash Football, a new project that aims to give players, fans and the wider football community a bigger say in how the game is run.

Unleash Football is part of the C Lab framework. It lets anyone take part by answering questions on an anonymous survey platform. Mata and Griesbeck say the results will be a "mandate" from the game: a first wave of data that can be built on in later waves and shared with governing bodies, candidates in the FIFA presidential election, and the media. The project was unveiled at the World Football Summit.

In this conversation, recorded at the World Football Summit in Madrid, Mata and Griesbeck discuss:

Sam Mewis signed her first pro contract for $15,000. Ten years later, the league she came up in has free agency, purpose-built stadiums and a wave of brands that had never touched sport before. 

In this episode, I spoke to two USWNT world champions, Emily Sonnett and Sam Mewis. We discussed how they turned a sport that barely had a league into a career, what it takes to build a team around you as a pro, and how they're planning for life after the final whistle.

We talk about:

#nwsl #uswnt #womenssoccer #soccerbusiness

Como's rise from Serie D to Serie A is one of the most unlikely stories in modern football — but what's happening off the pitch might be even more interesting than what's happening on it.

In this episode, I sit down by Lake Como with club President Mirwan Suwarso to break down how the club engineered its climb through Italian football, and the innovative commercial strategy powering its next chapter — one that leans into tourism, fashion, and food as much as it does results on the pitch.

We talk about:

Kay Cossington spent 20 years building women's football from the inside at England's FA — then walked straight into private equity. Now she's CEO of Bay Collective and Head of Global Women's Football at Sixth Street, running a multi-club ownership platform with no ceiling on ambition.

She talks through the FA's "What It Takes to Win" model that led to hiring Sarina Wiegman, why England never tried to copy the US college pipeline, and what she really thinks happens when private equity money meets a sport still building its infrastructure. Plus: the uncomfortable question nobody's asking about patient capital versus the five-year-flip playbook already familiar from the men's game.

Robert Faulkner, Chief Marketing Officer of Wrexham, joins the pod to break down how the club, backed by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, have managed their extraordinary rise through the divisions, their new American fan base and the global impact of the Welcome to Wrexham documentary. This episode was recorded on-site at the World Football Summit in Madrid.

Women’s soccer is no longer just a game on the field - it’s an emerging asset class, and Chelsea Washington knows exactly why that matters. From becoming the first player drafted from her college into the NWSL to working in sports finance and investment today, she breaks down the business side of the women’s game that most fans never see.Simon Evans and Vnciane Ngomsi sit down with Chelsea Washington for a sharp, revealing conversation about the shift from athlete to investor, what she learned inside the locker rooms of the league’s golden era, and why the next phase of women’s soccer will be defined by patience, infrastructure, and smarter capital.

You’ll discover: * How Chelsea’s playing career unexpectedly prepared her for sports finance *

What it was like sharing a locker room with legends like Alex Morgan, Marta, Ali Krieger, Ashlyn Harris, and Sydney Leroux *

Why the NWSL’s valuation surge is exciting, but still demands long-term thinking

* How private equity, institutional money, and minority stakes are changing the sports investment landscape

* Why the Canadian Northern Super League may have a structural advantage in building from the ground up

Chelsea also explains how her time in Australia helped her reset, regain confidence, and finish her playing career on her own terms.

She shares what separates sustainable growth from hype, why women’s teams need intentional ownership and dedicated resources, and where the biggest opportunities for young players and future investors may be emerging next.If you want the clearest possible view into where women’s soccer is headed - on the pitch, in the boardroom, and across the global investment market - this episode is essential listening.

Zavier Gozo from Salt Lake to Premier League Crystal Palace, Sebastian Berhalter and Max Arfsten to Middlesbrough, even two USL strikers moving to Scotland. Why are British and European clubs suddenly buying players from MLS and USL? And can MLS and USL grow by being 'selling leagues'? Tom Bogert of The Athletic, America's number one journalist on soccer's transfer market, joins The Soccer Business to take a look at what is going on? 

Jennifer Levine, Vice President of Communications and Public Relations with the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) joins the pod to talk about the growth of the league, their core and target audiences, how the league is story telling and whether there is competition with other women's sports league such as the WNBA. This is the first of our new series 'The Women's Soccer Business Podcast'.

Clubs are paying for mountains of player data — and using as little as 15% of it. Dean Bracha, founder of Marquee, joins the launch episode of The Stack to explain how his Tel Aviv-based platform is using AI to close that gap, and why he thinks most recruitment departments are still making multi-million-pound decisions on a fraction of the information available to them.

Simon Evans and André Da Costa dig into how Marquee's 12 proprietary AI models work as a "decision intelligence layer" sitting on top of a club's existing data stack — automating roughly 70-75% of the recruitment analysis process while leaving the final call, the "eye test," and the agent relationships to humans.

They cover real scenarios (what happens if Real Madrid come for Declan Rice on transfer deadline?), the industry's data-opacity problem, why AI still has a trust issue inside football clubs, and where the human scout still beats the model. This is the first episode of The Stack — The Soccer Business's new series on the tools and systems running modern clubs, covering technology from both a performance and a commercial angle.

In the first of our new series on investment topics 'The Deal Room' we take a look at reports that Amazon owner Jeff Bezos is part of a consortium looking to acquire a sizable chunk of Liverpool FC. With the club's valuation reported to be somewhere between $6 billion and $8 billion, what would this investment mean for the club? Does Fenway Sports Group have an exit strategy and what kind of presence would Bezos be at Anfield? Former Liverpool CEO Peter Moore returns to the pod to give his view on the situation.