The Business of Football: No Filter! - Part 1 - with Dr. Giambattista Rossi

What does a football club actually buy when it signs a global superstar? Is it results, a bigger brand, or both? And when that calculation goes wrong, what does it cost the club for years to come?

In this special two-part episode of Don’t Forget Your Ticket, host Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg sits down with Dr. Giambattista Rossi, Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck Business School, University of London and one of the most candid voices in football economics today. Part one opens with the economics of signing superstars, drawing on lessons from American sport, before turning to Italian football: its structural decline, its identity crisis, and the stories of clubs that invested heavily in star power and paid a far higher price than expected.

Giambattista brings an economist’s rigour and an insider’s directness to questions the football world often prefers to leave unanswered. Why is Italian football increasingly irrelevant on the global stage? How did the signing of Cristiano Ronaldo set Juventus on a path from the epitome of stability to the epitome of instability? Why do Inter Milan and AC Milan (two of the most recognised brands in world football) still lack proper owners? And is Como’s rise a genuine model for others to follow, or a story that only works as long as the money keeps flowing?

For a podcast rooted in the commercial and ticketing realities of sport, this conversation addresses something every club must eventually face: the relationship between what happens on the pitch, who owns the club, and what that means for the fans in the seats. When financial decisions are driven by real estate ambitions, capital gains targets, and ownership structures that treat football as a secondary concern, the matchday experience (and the commercial ecosystem around it) pays the price.

In this episode, we cover:

• The superstar economics question: What clubs are really buying when they sign a global name, why football’s collective nature makes individual productivity harder to measure than in American sport, and how clubs like Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid have built entirely different strategies around it.

• Italian football’s arrogance problem: How decades of assumed superiority, shifting demographics, and a financial model built on media money that no longer exists have combined to leave Italian football in a deepening crisis.

• The Juventus and Ronaldo story: Why the signing was a complete outlier in Juventus’s recruitment culture, why their sporting director walked out over it, and how the chain of events that followed brought one of Europe’s most stable clubs to the epitome of instability.

• Investment funds as owners: Why Inter Milan and AC Milan are still controlled by financial institutions rather than genuine football owners, and what that signals about the real depth of the crisis in Italian club football.

• Como: fairy tale or illusion? Why Giambattista refuses to call it a model, and why the question of what happens when the owner leaves is the only one that really matters.

If you work in sport, follow football, or are interested in the commercial and economic forces shaping how clubs operate and how fans engage with them, this episode is essential listening. Subscribe now so you don’t miss part two.