European football files more financial information than any other sport on the continent. Annual accounts, licensing submissions, related-party disclosures, ownership structures. It is published, it is legible, and it is almost entirely ignored — because reading it is an accounting job, not a football one.
Founder & Editor
Football is covered by people who can read a match. It is rarely covered by people who can read a set of accounts.
I spent three years as a financial services auditor at EY in Paris, where the work was unglamorous and specific: take a set of numbers someone has prepared, find the document underneath it, and check whether the two agree. Applied to football, that habit turns out to be unusually productive — because the gap between what clubs announce and what clubs file is where the actual story sits.
This publication is written in English about continental European football, which is a deliberate choice. The English-language coverage of football finance is excellent on the Premier League and thin everywhere else, largely because the source documents for France, Italy, Spain and Germany are not in English. Mine are.
The name is the method. P&L is the profit and loss account — the document in which a club is obliged to say what it earned, what it spent and what remains. Pitch is where the money goes: the wages, the transfer fees, the stadium.
Football is covered almost entirely from the pitch side. What happens on it is reported minute by minute; what it costs appears once a year, in a filing nobody reads. This publication works from the other end. It starts with the accounts and asks what they say about the football — which is a slower way to arrive at the story, and usually a more accurate one.
Four rules hold it together. Filed accounts rather than reported figures, because the number a club capitalised is not the number the press quoted. Source documents read in their own language, since the French, Italian, Spanish and German filings are not published in English. Accounting before narrative, because the mechanics decide what a club can do long before strategy does. And the arithmetic shown rather than asserted, so that disagreeing with a conclusion means pointing at a line, not at an opinion.
One mechanism explained once, properly, so it can be cited.
One club, its accounts, the model holding it together.
A single deal taken apart: structure, debt, consequences.
Artificial intelligence is part of the process here, and saying so is simpler than pretending otherwise. The subject, the angle and the argument are mine. I use an AI assistant to draft, to structure, and to argue back at what I have written — the work an editor would do, faster and at any hour.
The division of labour is the part that matters. The assistant writes. It never decides what is true. Every figure is checked against the document it came from before publication, sources are named in the piece, and a number that cannot be traced back to a document is either labelled an estimate or removed.
Errors are corrected in the article itself and noted at the foot of it, with the date. Nothing is quietly amended. The byline is mine, and so is the mistake if one gets through. If you have found one, the address below is the fastest way to reach me.
Written in Paris. Open to conversations with clubs, investors, advisers and anyone working on the financial side of the game — including corrections, disagreements and documents.
Or on LinkedIn.
One analysis, three numbers worth keeping, one file to watch. Nothing else.