I love soccer, and I like soccer analytics, but I know finance and accounting.
Soccer is hard.
This newsletter is my attempt to anchor the sporting and front office elements of football in the mainstream battle-tested frameworks of accounting and corporate finance that can be found in business textbooks.
This isn’t about the dollars and cents a club generates and spends. It’s about the goals they score and concede, but explored through analogy to revenues and expenses with a clear actionable recommendation for any front office, big or small.
It will start with an essay, broken up into several posts, recommending that player recruitment departments organize their processes around principles analogous to sound corporate finance valuation framework and distill all critical decisions down to a single metric with a standard unit of account: marginal goal difference. It will connect the dots along way to describe how and why this works — why the structure of a financial valuation model can help us build a robust player recruitment process.
2021 Update: OK, this is officially more of a meditation on front office and soccer theory than an actionable powerpoint, but perhaps both are in the cards here.
December 2021 Update: We are leaving front office theory for a period of exploring soccer theory itself.
Follow me on twitter @tiotalfootball.
