When the season comes to an end — like now — the script is predictable. The fan turns his eyes to the market: who stays, who leaves, which reinforcements arrive, which coach takes over, what promises emerge from the base. The headlines multiply, the networks are buzzing and football seems, once again, to be limited to the decisions visible within the four lines.
But while public attention focuses on this familiar cycle, another decisive transformation is advancing far from the spotlight. A less noisy, but more structural, change has been redesigning contemporary football: the reorganization behind the scenes, with the rise of new manager profiles and governance models that redefine how clubs are managed, financed and economically evaluated. It is in this gap between seasons — when the game seems suspended — that the true revolution becomes more evident to those who know where to look.
Numbers help to measure this change. In the 2023–24 season, Real Madrid became the first club in the world to surpass the €1 billion mark in revenue, a direct reflection of the combination of sporting performance and professional commercial management. In Brazil, the 20 biggest clubs earned around R$10.5 billion in 2024, a historic record.
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Football has definitively ceased to be just a cultural phenomenon and has become a large-scale economic sector — and, as such, it has started to require more sophisticated administrative and strategic skills.
In this new scenario, the most decisive decisions are no longer limited to the field or the technical area. They are concentrated in spaces where long-term projects are designed, financial risks are managed and sporting, economic and institutional interests are integrated.
As football asserts itself as a global industry intensive in intangible assets — brand, reputation, human capital and future rights — the appreciation of a new type of leadership becomes inevitable: the hybrid executive.
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Another notable aspect of this revolution is that, among this new crop of hybrid executives that begin to occupy central positions in football decisions, there is a growing contingent of women. This occurs despite the fact that it is a historically — and still mostly — male field.
The increase in diversity at the top of structures is not just a symbolic fact: it reflects the professionalization of the sector, the valorization of technical skills and the progressive replacement of informal logics with criteria of training, experience and performance.
The consolidation of SAFs in Brazil is a central part of this process. Since the law was approved in 2021, more than 120 clubs have already adopted the model, creating new conditions for the entry of private capital, debt restructuring and greater transparency in management.
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The effects are beginning to appear: clubs like Cruzeiro and Botafogo registered significant growth in revenue and greater investment capacity, including in the transfer market — which broke a record in 2024, with Brazilian clubs spending 353 million euros, an increase of 141% compared to the previous year.
This environment of greater complexity and financial pressure makes management based solely on sporting experience or personal decisions insufficient. What sets professionals apart is their ability to integrate different knowledge — legal, financial, strategic, sporting and relational — around a coherent project.
This is why trajectories previously seen as lateral have come to be valued. Football begins to reward careers that span more than one area, transforming the baggage accumulated off the field into a strategic asset. The trajectory of Erkut Sögüt, German, son of Turkish immigrants and raised in an environment with a strong work ethic, is exemplary in this sense.
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With a solid background in law and international experience as an agent, he built a career dealing with contracts, regulations and global markets before taking over the management of sports operations at DC United, in the MLS. His appointment signals a football that incorporates methodology, metrics and accountabilitycombining European relational intuition with the organizational rationality of the North American model.
This logic also helps explain the migration of experienced intermediaries to executive positions in traditional clubs. Carlos Bucero, Spanish, today general director of football at Atlético de Madrid, brought to the club the experience he accumulated in major negotiations and in understanding the human and financial dynamics of the market.
By formally abandoning his career as an agent upon taking office, he symbolizes a new institutional standard: less informality, more clarity of roles and greater fiduciary responsibility.
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At the same time, there is a growing space for managers coming from administration, economics and people management, capable of structuring processes and aligning sports performance with financial sustainability. Tiago Pinto, Portuguese**, has a degree in Educational Sciences, a master’s degree in Economics and Human Resources Management at the University of Porto, represents this profile.
Without a career as a professional player, he built his career within Benfica, established himself at Roma in a context of budget restrictions — typical of a football in which operational costs consume around 80% of revenue — and today leads operations in a multi-club project in the Premier League. Its path highlights a profound change: sporting success is now treated less as an event and more as a result of consistent organizational processes.
Even when the former athlete occupies a central position, the criterion is no longer automatic. Contemporary football values those who can expand their experience on the field and translate it into strategic decisions.
Deco, a Brazilian naturalized Portuguese, current football director at Barcelona**, has** a successful career in Europe, which combines sporting credibility, experience as a businessman and sophisticated reading of the market. His performance reveals how experience within the four lines can be converted into economic rationality and long-term planning, especially in clubs subject to strong financial scrutiny.
In Brazil, this transformation takes on its own contours, especially due to the combination of SAFs, budget restrictions and a historical deficit in executive training. The trajectories of Fábio Mello and André Rocha exemplify this movement.
Former athlete, agent, businessman and educator, Fábio Mello invested in the creation of training platforms aimed at the football industry, contributing to the construction of teams capable of understanding sport as an integrated system of people, business and governance.
André Rocha, with an established career in the corporate world before assuming the position of CEO of Red Bull Bragantino, represents the direct incorporation of financial, operational and strategic skills at the center of sporting decisions, in a club model guided by governance, efficiency and long-term vision.
The common thread behind these trajectories is clear: football is no longer managed as a sequence of episodic decisions and is now treated as a complex economic system, in which governance failures increase risks, increase costs and compromise long-term value. Hybrid executives thus emerge as a rational response to an environment of greater financial pressure, greater public scrutiny and a greater need for planning.
This revolution is silent because it does not appear in the reinforcement presentation photos or in the headlines the day after the classic. It manifests itself right now, when the season ends and the game seems suspended. In addition to speculation about signings, it is behind the scenes that decisions are made on who will, in fact, be able to compete when the ball rolls again.
