Capturing fan data is now a widespread capability across the industry. The challenge is what comes next: how to process that information, interpret it and turn it into revenue. Club América has become one of the leading references in the region. After years building a data strategy around its fan base, the club has repositioned its value proposition for brands.

“Club América today is not just a football club. It is a new media channel for brands”, said Jorge Balandra, the club’s Commercial Intelligence Director. Brands, noted Baptiste Maurel, Marketing Director, are no longer looking only at follower counts. They want to know what fans consume, when they come to the stadium, what they do outside of it.

The other challenge is the fan who does not yet exist: the generation consuming content on platforms that traditional football has barely begun to master. Alejandro Lesende, Chief Finance and Administration Officer at Concacaf, presented the case of Concacaf Kickoff, a brand built specifically for teenagers and children — developed with them, not for them.

“We built this brand with young people. The look, the colours, all of it was done with kids. We didn’t bring in agencies of old men who’ve been doing marketing for decades”, said Lesende. Juan Diego García, CEO for Iberoamérica at GGTech Entertainment, warned of the cost of failing to act with urgency: gaming audiences now exceed those of the FIFA World Cup and the Super Bowl: “Let’s not fight something that is going to be much bigger than us. Let’s understand that we have a real opportunity here.”

The full match is no longer the product

That same generation — the one that does not watch ninety minutes and grew up consuming fragmented content across multiple platforms — is also reshaping the broadcasting model. “The full match is the foundation — but it’s not the main product anymore”, said Kelly Shouldice, VP of Brand and Content at Northern Super League. “The younger generations are not watching ninety minutes. They want the stories around it.” Sascha Fussmann, founder and CEO of One Life Agency, pointed to where value is shifting: “People want to follow people. Whoever manages to sell the perspective of a player and own the full content storyline — that’s going to be the winner.”

The model built around the match as the central and sufficient product faces the same challenge inside and outside the stadium. If the fan is no longer activated by live broadcast alone, the venue cannot depend solely on ninety minutes either. “The big revenue has to come from what the stadium is used for ten minutes after the final whistle”, said José Ramón Fernández, General Manager at Grupo Pachuca. The model debated in the room points toward integrating the stadium into a broader urban ecosystem — housing, retail, hospitality, offices — that generates value 365 days a year.

The day also covered other ground — football’s role as a tool for community cohesion, officiating technology, and reaching the next generation of fans — completing a session built around a single underlying question: how does the football industry build business models that are worthy of the relationship it already has with its supporters.

World Football Summit Mexico City 2026 kicked off yesterday at Camino Real Polanco — seven days before the host city inaugurates the biggest World Cup in history. Senior leaders from FIFA, the FMF, LALIGA, Club América, Tigres, Atlas FC, Ticketmaster and Miami Heat were among those on stage for a day of sessions covering fan data and monetisation, stadium infrastructure, rights strategy, club management and the commercial development of women’s football.

The 2026 World Cup, projected to generate $3 billion in economic impact for Mexico and reach a global broadcast audience of 6 billion viewers, ran through much of the day’s conversation, with FIFA Mexico COO Jurgen Mainka, FMF Secretary General, Íñigo Riestra, Televisa Univision Global President of Sports, Olek Loewenstein and Host City representative Michel Bauer setting the scale in the opening session.

But the tournament is only the most visible expression of a broader moment for Mexican football. The day’s sessions also examined how clubs are turning fan data into revenue, how stadiums are being built into commercial platforms, how leagues protect and monetise their rights, and how women’s football is establishing itself as a business on its own terms.

Mexico 2026: The World Cup Returns to the Global Capital of Football

Speakers

• Michel Bauer, Host City Mexico City
• Olek Loewenstein, Global President of Sports, Televisa Univision
• Jurgen Mainka, Chied Tournament Officer, FIFA
• Íñigo Riestra, Secretary General of the Mexican Football Federation (FMF).

Key takeaways:

• A ‘Team Mexico’ structure of 600 professionals has been assembled across the organising effort.
• The tournament will leave a lasting operational legacy across customs, airports, border control, security and transport.
• Projected economic impact stands at $3 billion, with a global broadcast audience of 6 billion viewers.
• The event will serve as the professional foundation for Mexico’s bid to host the 2031 Women’s World Cup.

Understanding Growth: LATAM, AI and Protecting the Value of Football (LaLiga)

Speaker:

• Javier Tebas – President, LaLiga

Sustainable growth in Latin American football requires building leagues with independent commercial value, financial discipline and robust rights protection.

Key takeaways:

• LALIGA tripled its revenues — surpassing €2 billion — following the centralisation of its audiovisual rights in 2015.
• Financial control mechanisms successfully resolved the structural debt accumulated across Spanish football.
• Dynamic anti-piracy blocking reduced illegal consumption by 60%.
• Artificial intelligence is now a core driver for optimising operations, sports medicine and broadcast delivery.

Connected by the Game: Data, Technology and the Fan Experience (Ticketmaster)

Speakers:

• Alejandro Ordaz – Deputy Director of Marketing and Revenue Management, Ticketmaster Mexico
• Regina Dávalos – Commercial Director, Ticketmaster Mexico
• Everardo Valdez – Director of Institutional Relations and Media, CF Monterrey Rayados
• Matthew Jafarian – EVP Business Strategy, Miami Heat.
  

The session focused on anticipating and enhancing the fan’s purchase journey through immersive digital tools.

Key takeaways:

• The Virtual Venue tool was unveiled for Estadio BBVA, making it the first venue in Latin America to offer 360° virtual walkthroughs allowing fans to preview their seats before buying.
• The initiative follows the successful migration of more than 40,000 Rayados season-ticket holders to digital ticketing.
• The core principle: the matchday experience begins long before kick-off, and purchase clarity drives conversion.

Attendance, Loyalty and Engagement: Untangling the Confusion (FXP)

Speakers:

• Santiago Montes Escobar – Strategic Planning and Commercial Innovation Lead, CD Guadalajara
• Edgar Martínez – VP of Content, FMF
• Rubén Cuevas – CMO, Deportivo Toluca FC
• Enrique Arrambides – Commercial Leader Mexico, Nielsen Sports.

Clubs are no longer competing simply to fill seats — they are competing to understand who their fans are, what they consume and how they engage beyond matchday.

Key takeaways:

• Toluca presented a compelling commercial turnaround: from low attendances in 2021 to sold-out season-ticket inventory and a waitlist of over 20,000.
• Chivas highlighted the use of digital assets to underpin data-driven commercial decision-making.

The New Fan Economy: How Data Converts Engagement into Revenue

Speakers:

• Javier Tafich – Commercial Director, Tigres
• Aldo Guerrero – VP Business, Boletomóvil
• Marcelo Martínez – Founder & CEO, Raidar.io
• Edgar Martínez – VP of Content, FMF
  

Monetising modern football depends on full-funnel fan identification — inside and outside the stadium.

Key takeaways:

• Tigres illustrated the scale of the challenge: an estimated fanbase of 10 million, with 40,000 matchday attendees — of whom 25,000 remain unidentified in their systems.
• A highly engaged superfan can generate up to 20 times the lifetime value of a casual supporter.
• Planned initiatives include cashless payment systems, secondary ticketing market tracking and AI-powered behavioural prediction tools.

The Stadium as a Platform: Fans, Data and Revenue in the Connected Venue (Sportian)

Speakers:

• Jorge Balandra – Fan Relations Director, Club América
• Ramón González, North America Business Manager, Sportian by Globant
• Leonardo Gurria, CTO/CIO, Grupo Ollamani
• Tiago Hendges, CTO, Grêmio Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense.

The stadium of the future must function as a unified digital ecosystem — one where technology operates as invisible infrastructure.

Key takeaways:

• The fan experience no longer begins at the turnstile; it starts at trip planning.
• Robust connectivity — antennas, audio systems, CRM integration — enables personalisation at the level expected in banking or retail.
• Sponsors are shifting towards a publisher model, demanding real ROI metrics grounded in segmented fan data.

The Connected Athlete: Building the Ultimate Performance Ecosystem

Speakers:

• Ryan Croft – Director of Latin America, Teamworks
• Tom Mayo – Executive Director, Leagues Cup
• Andrew Nestor – Partner, Innovatio Capital.
  

Club growth is increasingly dependent on the digitalisation and centralisation of internal operations.

Key takeaways:

• Professional sport is entering a phase where clubs require cleaner systems, centralised information and departments operating under a shared strategic vision.
• The urgent priority is centralising data — medical, financial, commercial and sporting — so that institutional knowledge is not held in silos or dependent on individuals.
• Breaking down departmental barriers unlocks data that can simultaneously support athlete performance and welfare, and optimise contracts and travel logistics.

ROI in Elite Sports: Integrating Data, Infrastructure and Capital

Speakers:

• Aníbal Fajer Alonso – President, Atlas FC
• Kike Levy – CEO, Gameday by NJF Holdings
• Marc Spiegel – Managing Member, Innovatio Capital.
  

Return on investment in elite sport must be insulated from on-pitch results through sound institutional structure.

Key takeaways:

• A club should be managed as an investment, content and community platform simultaneously.
• Institutional culture, transparency and leadership function as competitive infrastructure — reducing volatility and protecting long-term value.

Scaling the Game: Lessons and Strategies for Growing Women’s Football Globally

Speakers

• Claudia Carrión – Corporate Director, Club América Femenil
• Stefano Petruzzo – CEO, Olympique de Marseille Feminines

Women’s football must stop being treated as an extension of the men’s game and establish its own brand identity and commercial operation.

Key takeaways:

• Club América Femenil demonstrated its scale with hard numbers: 26,000 fans at a final, 6.8 million TV viewers and status as the first Mexican club to compete in a Women’s Club World Cup.
• The challenge has shifted: proving that women’s football commands an audience is no longer the issue. The work now is building the commercial infrastructure — dedicated facilities, standalone sponsorship deals and independent revenue strategies — to sustain it as a business.

The FIFA World Cup kicks off in Mexico City on 11 June. Across the following 39 days, 104 matches will be played across 16 venues in three countries. Not one of those venues was built for this tournament. The most recently constructed stadium in the rotation is SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, completed in 2020 — for the NFL. In the United States, eleven American football stadiums will be fitted with temporary overlays to meet FIFA requirements and then returned to their regular use when the tournament ends. In Mexico, three existing football stadiums have been renovated. In Canada, two existing multi-purpose venues. Zero new permanent infrastructure.

Compared to Qatar 2022, where an entire portfolio of stadiums was built from scratch in a desert, this represents a fundamental shift in how the world’s most powerful football governing body thinks about hosting its flagship event. The architects behind it argue that shift has been a long time coming.

The cost nobody talks about

Jeff Keys, Global Events Practice Leader at Populous — the firm that worked on five of the sixteen 2026 venues — put it plainly at WFS Mexico City 2025.

“Everybody likes to get focused on the upfront capital cost,” he said. “But if you think about the portion of the iceberg that sits above the water line versus below the water line — quite often what’s above is your front-end capital cost. What’s below is your lifecycle cost for the next 30 to 50 years. The debt, the salaries, the maintenance, the utilities.”

The argument is straightforward: a stadium built to World Cup specification for a tournament that lasts six weeks will spend the remaining decades of its life carrying costs designed for an event it will never host again. The Maracanã, rebuilt for 2014, reported operating losses running to millions annually within years of the tournament. The infrastructure left behind by Athens 2004 became one of the most cited cautionary tales in sports governance.

The solution Keys advocates is what he calls right-sizing.

“If a World Cup says you have to have 45,000 seats but you only need 30,000 for legacy, you should probably think about a design that’s 30,000 seats that can increase temporarily. Because if you overbuild, all you’re going to do is increase those lifecycle costs.”

The 2026 World Cup, played in existing venues with temporary capacity additions, is the most visible application of that principle in the tournament’s history.

What you don’t leave behind

The shift in 2026 reflects a broader trend that has accelerated significantly over the past decade. London 2012 used temporary infrastructure equivalent to the three previous Olympics combined. Paris 2024 built one new permanent venue. LA28 will build zero. “Sometimes the legacy is what you don’t leave behind,” Keys said at WFS Mexico City.

His colleague Partho Dutta, who leads Populous’s Latin American stadium practice, drew the contrast with Qatar explicitly.

“If you trace the history of the World Cup from Germany to South Africa, Brazil, and now to today, you will see how FIFA’s direction has evolved. It is more and more sustainable. For this World Cup there are no new venues being built. Look at how different that is from Qatar.”

What it means for the industry

For the football business, the implications extend well beyond tournament planning. The same logic that applies to World Cup infrastructure applies to club and league venue strategy. The stadiums that are generating the most sustainable returns today are not necessarily the largest or the newest — they are the ones whose capacity was calibrated to what the market actually supports, and whose surrounding development generates revenue on the 300 days a year when no match is being played.

The 2026 World Cup did not invent that principle. But by applying it at the largest scale in football history, it has made it very difficult to argue against.

WFS Mexico City 2026 is on track to be the most ambitious edition of the event in the Americas. More than 2,000 professionals from over 50 countries will gather at Camino Real Polanco on 3 and 4 June to debate the future of football as a global industry. The same month that Mexico hosts the world’s best players for the FIFA World Cup, WFS Mexico City will bring together the best professionals working off the pitch.

Across two days and two stages, the programme will address the conversations that define the business of football today: how the industry is governed and financed at a time of deep transformation in club and league ownership; how technology and data are reshaping operational and commercial management; how football builds relationships with its audiences in the streaming and social media era; and what role the world’s most popular sport plays in the communities it serves.

The speaker list reflects the breadth and cross-sector nature of those conversations. Federation commissioners, club presidents, content platform executives, investors, technologists and social impact leaders will share a stage at what is set to be the most internationally represented edition in the event’s history in the Americas. Among the 150+ confirmed:

• Grace Ahrens — Executive Director, Women in Soccer
• Mikel Arriola — Commissioner, FMF
• Michel Bauer — CEO, Host City Mexico City
• Omar Carrión — Sr. Integrated Marketing Director, Mars Snacking
• Mary Connor — CEO, Common Goal
• Corinne Counsell — Sr. Manager Community & Social Impact, Gotham FC
• David Faitelson — Journalist and Analyst, TelevisaUnivision
• Héctor González-Iñarritu — Chief Operating President, Club América
• Miguel Herrera — Host and Commentator, TelevisaUnivision
• Vanessa Huppenkothen — Host, TelevisaUnivision
• Wera Kuri — CEO, Blue Women Pink Men
• Alejandro Lesende — Chief Administration Officer, Concacaf
• Olek Loewenstein — Global President of Sports, TelevisaUnivision
• Kely Nascimento — CEO, The Impact Game
• Melissa Pardi — VP Soccer Forward Partnerships, U.S. Soccer Federation
• Quentin Paquelier — CMO, Club América
• Stefano Petruzzo — CEO, Olympique de Marseille Féminines
• Kelly Shouldice — VP Brand and Content, Northern Super League
• Francisco Suinaga — President, Deportivo Toluca FC
• Javier Tebas — President, LALIGA

The support of organisations as diverse as Host City Mexico City, LaLiga, Meltwater, Sportian, TelevisaUnivision, TikTok, Uber and Volvo is a reflection of something WFS has long argued: football has moved well beyond clubs and federations to become a sector that cuts across mobility, media, technology, sustainability and the digital economy.

The Female Leader Gathering will bring together women executives from across the industry in a closed-door session, reflecting WFS’s conviction that accelerating female leadership in football is not a matter of symbolic representation but a strategic priority for the industry as a whole.

WFS Mexico City 2026 arrives in the city with a commitment that extends beyond the programme. Before the doors open, former professional footballer and activist Paola “Wera” Kuri, founder of Blue Women Pink Men, will have led the renovation of a football pitch in the Tizapán San Ángel neighbourhood alongside Comex, Zucaritas and WFS — reclaiming a public community space through sport, art and civic participation.

“This edition of WFS Mexico City coincides with a moment that will not come around again for decades: a World Cup on Mexican soil, an industry in full transformation and a region with the potential and ambition to lead the next chapter of global football. Our mission is to bring together the people who will drive that chapter and give them the space to do so.” — Jan Alessie, Co-Founder and Managing Director, World Football Summit

In this edition of The Pundit’s Seat, she talks about nearly a decade of the 1% pledge, the scale of what Common Goal has quietly built, and why the launch of World Football Giving Day — days before the World Cup kicks off in North America — is the moment to reconnect the industry with what football is truly capable of.

You were a first-round draft pick in the 2003 WUSA draft, played for the Philadelphia Charge and later in the Icelandic Premier League. How did a professional footballer end up co-founding Soccer Without Borders — and what did your time as a player teach you that shaped everything that followed?

When my playing career was winding down, I went through the same identity crisis a lot of athletes experience. Your whole life has been structured around the game — your teammates, coaches, schedules, and goals. Then suddenly you’re asking: who am I now? What do I do?

What I realized then in my 20s was that what I loved most about soccer was never really playing professionally or winning championships. It was about friendship. It was about feeling welcome in a new place. It was about understanding the world better through the people I met, the places I travelled to, and the communities I experienced through the game.

I teamed up with Soccer Without Borders founder Ben Gucciardi while studying sociology in graduate school with a focus on sport. I was asking these big questions: what is sport really for? How does it shape society and culture? But with every year of working within Soccer Without Borders and getting to meet and listen to communities from Nicaragua to Egypt to Guatemala to Uganda and beyond, those questions because much more nuanced. Who is the system designed for? Who is left out? In many ways soccer mirrors society — who is included and who is pushed to the margins.

That became my mission: how can soccer be a place where everyone, regardless of circumstance or identity, can feel a sense of belonging? 

Common Goal launched the 1% pledge in 2017. Nearly a decade on, what has genuinely changed in how football organisations engage with their social responsibility?

Football generates huge revenue, mobilises people globally, and affects millions and millions of young people. What they experience through football — what they see athletes wearing, what players say publicly, what happens in stadiums — all of that affects individuals, communities and culture.

In the lead up to the launch of the pledge, there was this momentum building around athlete activism and football embracing social issues and recognizing its responsibility as an industry, not just as individual clubs doing isolated projects.

I think the 1% pledge accelerated this. It provided a platform for athletes to share what they care about beyond the game and to give back through it. It built a bridge between the industry and the football for good sector that was ready to grow, to deepen, and to be more visible. Athletes have always played an important role in social change — you can look at the history of civil rights, human rights, the Olympics — but I think the 1% pledge made it so that you didn’t have to go alone. You didn’t have to be the most famous or the one with the most resources. Everyone could do something. 

And when people move together, they become greater than the sum of their parts. Instead of isolated acts of giving here and there, you start building a movement that changes expectations across the industry.

Nine years on, I think we’ve seen a real acceleration in the idea that social impact should be embedded into football, not treated as an exception. Even the language has changed. Many organizations no longer talk about ‘social responsibility’ roles — they talk about purpose, community engagement, culture.

There’s now a growing understanding that engaging communities and making the world better is not separate from football. It’s part of football.

Common Goal has built the largest global network devoted to using football as a force for social change. What is the next frontier for the platform — and what are the biggest challenges ahead?

Collectively, the Common Goal Community is now more than 200 organisations across 117 countries. Every year, those organisations directly serve around 3.6 million young people.

What people often don’t realise is that this is not work happening on the margins. If Football for Good were a football federation, serving3.6 million young people a year would actually make it the third largest football federation in the world.

So for us, the next milestone is showing that this approach to using football for youth development and community development is not a fringe idea. It’s sophisticated, it’s established, and it deserves to be invested in systematically.

The next step is supporting it at a foundational level and recognising that Football for Good is a valuable part of the football ecosystem in and of itself. Football for Good contributes something unique — both to football and to society — and that value should be recognised and supported.

Our goal is to keep growing and strengthening the network until every young person has access to a healthy football environment that helps them play, learn and thrive. And hopefully more and more people across the industry will continue to see its value and invest in it.

World Football Giving Day launches on May 26, weeks before the World Cup. What is it, how does it work, and why does football need its own giving day?

World Football Giving Day is a new moment — and hopefully a new tradition — for everyone who loves the game to give back through football.

It’s about supporting the places where the real heartbeat of football lives: the Football for Good ecosystem, the communities using the game to change lives every day. Football exists everywhere in the world, but the heart of the game is in those communities that use football to create belonging, opportunity and hope.

Football needs its own giving day because right now the world needs belonging, opportunity, and hope more than ever. And football could deliver it, if it would lead with its heart. 

If we can reconnect people to that — reconnect them to what football is truly capable of beyond entertainment — then not only can we drive investment into communities where it’s needed most, we can also remind the entire industry of the power football has beyond itself.

Between 15 and 20% of the world’s professional footballers have African origins. The continent exports more than 6,000 players a year. Less than 1% of global football revenue returns to Africa. Basketball has followed the same pattern. At WFS Rabat 2025, two senior executives from NBA Africa argued that this model is not inevitable — and presented five years of evidence.

The long game

“We didn’t open the NBA office in 2010 and say ‘let’s start a professional league’,” said Amadou Gallo Fall, President of the Basketball Africa League. “We wanted to make sure we put the fundamentals in place.” What followed was nearly two decades of coaching structures, junior programmes, academies and government partnerships built before a professional competition was viable.

The NBA Academy Africa in Saly, Senegal — built within a football academy — was designed to give identified talent a clear pathway without relying on the chance encounters that had defined earlier generations. Hakeem Olajuwon was a handball goalkeeper when an American coach visited his school. “Imagine how many of those guys are constantly being missed across the continent,” Fall said. “We don’t want to leave it to chance anymore.”

Last year, a player who arrived at the Academy from Cameroon at fourteen was drafted directly into the NBA.

The Basketball Africa League launched in 2021. In four seasons it has contributed $250 million to host-city economies and catalysed 37,000 jobs. The projection for the next decade stands at $5.4 billion — a figure that reflects a compounding model: each new city adds jobs, tourist spend, media attention and corporate interest.

Infrastructure before competition

Not every African country has arenas capable of hosting professional sport. Rather than treating that as a constraint, the NBA structured public-private partnerships to build them. Rwanda put up a 10,000-seat arena. Senegal built one with 15,000 seats. Lagos has private-sector investment underway.

African football shares the same starting conditions — the talent, the fan base, the cultural weight — and the same structural problem. Few people are better placed to describe it than Frédéric Kanouté, the former Sevilla and Mali striker who has spent years working on football development across the continent. “We talk about academies in Africa, but let’s be honest — most of them do not meet the basic requirements,” Kanouté said at WFS Rabat 2025. “Some have no infrastructure. Some do not even have balls. Of every thousand young players who dream of becoming professionals, perhaps five will make it.”

The cost of that failure, he argued, is largely invisible. “We only talk about those who succeeded — Drogba, the great names,” said Kanouté. “Nobody talks about how many are lost along the way because the formation was not right.” The consequence is predictable: “Today, young footballers in Africa dream of leaving. Nobody can stop them — that is where they believe they can earn a living. The question is what Africa does to make them want to stay.”

The NBA spent two decades building an answer to that question in basketball. “We are the biggest exporter of talent,” said Amadou Gallo Fall. “But we decided it was time to create something right here on the continent.” For football, the blueprint now exists. The institutions willing to follow it are the piece that remains.

Mapping the foreign capital flowing into Latam football

Mexico has emerged as the most attractive market in the region, with six Liga MX clubs now under foreign investment and transactions ranging from minority stakes to full acquisitions. But the trend extends well beyond: from Brazil’s Botafogo to Uruguay’s Racing Club de Montevideo, from Colombia’s Internacional de Bogota to Chile’s O’Higgins FC, the map of foreign capital in Latin American football is being redrawn across the entire continent.

LATAM Football Asset, a report produced by El Míster in partnership with World Football Summit, maps every major deal across the region, the investment models behind them, and the funds and holding groups leading the charge.

Download the full report below.

Spiegel will speak at WFS Mexico City on 3–4 June at the Camino Real Polanco. This interview is a preview of LATAM Football Asset, a report produced by El Míster in partnership with World Football Summit, publishing next week.

What were the main factors behind the decision to invest in Querétaro?

When we were looking for a club to acquire anywhere in the world, we had very specific criteria. We wanted a league with growth potential, commercial viability, a quality local and international business community, access to an international airport, and a large city capable of hosting a top-level professional team. Querétaro and Liga MX met all of those requirements. The size of the opportunity and the enthusiasm of the local community to support our project have been impressive.

What do you see as the key advantages of the Liga MX market?

Liga MX is unique because it has a major commercial engine right to the north, in the United States. There is enormous growth potential coming from that market. And it doesn’t have many other sports competing for attention. While baseball is growing and the NBA G-League plays in Mexico City, 99% of people live and breathe football all year round. As a league, we are still in the early stages of modernisation. The next five to ten years will be crucial in terms of restructuring to support the growth that is coming. We have a large fanbase, which means we need to capitalise on and expand our base while improving the experience for our supporters both at the stadium and at home.

LATAM Football Asset will be available next week across WFS and El Mister channels. The full report maps over USD 1.5 billion in foreign investment into Latin American football over the past decade, analyses the three main capital models operating in the region — investment funds, multiclub holdings and private investment — and profiles the key funds and companies behind the deals across Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay.

En una iniciativa conjunta para fomentar el desarrollo profesional de futuras líderes en el sector del deporte, Johan Cruyff Institute y World Football Summit (WFS) anuncian el lanzamiento de una nueva edición del programa de becas exclusivo para mujeres. 

El programa ofrece seis becas formativas para algunos de los másteres más reconocidos del sector, incluyendo:

• Beca parcial del 50% para el Máster en Administración y Dirección del Fútbol en colaboración con el FC Barcelona
• Becas parciales del 60% para el Master in Sports Business and Marketing Blended (versión en inglés o español)
• Becas parciales del 50% para el Master in Football Business Online (versión en inglés o español)

Además de las becas, las candidatas seleccionadas obtendrán entradas para World Football Summit Madrid, que se celebrará los días 15 y 16 de septiembre en La Nave. 

La convocatoria ya está abierta — haz clic aquí para aplicar antes del 19 de junio. Las ganadoras serán anunciadas oficialmente el 18 de julio.

Un impulso al liderazgo femenino en la industria deportiva

La reducción de la brecha de género en la industria deportiva es un compromiso compartido por Johan Cruyff Institute y World Football Summit. En 2025, Johan Cruyff Institute alcanzó un hito en este sentido: por primera vez en 26 años de historia, un programa presencial contó con mayoría de estudiantes mujeres. Se trata del Máster en Marketing y Gestión Deportiva Semipresencial Barcelona, con un total de 13 mujeres y 10 hombres. WFS lo articula a través de su Female Leaders Programme, un programa de promoción del liderazgo femenino en el fútbol que incluye, entre otras iniciativas, el compromiso de que el 30% de los ponentes en sus eventos sean mujeres.

Albert Romans, General Manager de Johan Cruyff Institute, destacó el programa de becas como un impulso al liderazgo femenino en la industria deportiva:

“Con esta iniciativa buscamos seguir profesionalizando el deporte desde la formación. Estas becas refuerzan nuestro compromiso con la igualdad de oportunidades y con el desarrollo de un liderazgo femenino fuerte, preparado y con una visión global”.

Marian Otamendi, CEO de World Football Summit, señaló:

“Desde WFS estamos convencidos de que el fútbol no puede permitirse el lujo de prescindir del liderazgo femenino, por eso llevamos años trabajando para impulsar la presencia de mujeres en puestos de decisión a través de nuestro Female Leaders Programme. La formación es un requisito indispensable para conseguir este objetivo, por eso estamos encantados de poder impulsarla junto a Johan Cruyff Institute.”

Cerrando la brecha de género en el liderazgo deportivo

En la última edición del programa de becas se recibieron 94 solicitudes, de las cuales se seleccionaron 14 finalistas y tres ganadoras: Khalida Popal, Maria Tavares y Paula Regil.

Khalida Popal es ex capitana de la selección femenina de Afganistán. Además de deportista, es activista y fundadora de Girl Power Organisation, una asociación que tiene como objetivo empoderar a niñas y mujeres refugiadas y marginadas mediante el fútbol, el liderazgo y la educación.

“Estoy profundamente agradecida con Johan Cruyff Institute y World Football Summit por apoyar mi misión de usar el fútbol como herramienta de esperanza, empoderamiento y cambio”,

afirmó Khalida, que recibió una beca completa para el Máster en Administración y Dirección del Fútbol en colaboración con el FC Barcelona.

Maria Tavares es presidenta de Africa’s Global Football Management (AGFM), una agencia de gestión deportiva dedicada a acompañar a clubes, federaciones y talentos del fútbol africano en su desarrollo y proyección internacional. Maria, que recibió una beca que cubre el 50% del importe del Máster en Administración y Dirección del Fútbol Online, señaló:

“Me siento muy orgullosa de haber obtenido esta beca; recibirla significa mucho para mí y espero honrarla de la mejor manera posible”.

Paula Regil es una profesional del sector audiovisual con varios años de experiencia. A lo largo de su carrera ha trabajado en medios y centros educativos especializados como MEDIAPRO y la Escuela TAI.

“Tener la oportunidad de formarme en una entidad con el nombre de Johan Cruyff es un auténtico privilegio para mí”, afirmó Paula, que recibió una beca que cubre el 50% del importe del Máster en Sports Business Online.

That picture is completed by a clear strategic split. This season, MLS clubs chose between two roster construction models: the Designated Player pathway or the U22 Initiative. Fifteen clubs chose each, while squad values range from €83.3m at Inter Miami to €14.8m at San Jose Earthquakes.

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