Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner may spend the next ten or fifteen years deciding who ultimately owns this generation of men’s tennis. The strange part is that collectors don’t seem interested in waiting. The market has already started leaning towards Alcaraz. High-end trading cards sell for several thousand dollars, signed cards attract strong prices almost … Read more
The tennis GOAT debate is strange because sport and market do not seem to answer it in the same way. If you look only at titles, Novak Djokovic has the strongest case. He broke the numbers, lasted longer than almost anyone expected, kept chasing records while Federer and Nadal had already become memory, and turned … Read more
Carl Lewis should be a much bigger name in memorabilia than he is. Nine Olympic gold medals, Olympic dominance across sprint and long jump, one of the defining athletes of the 1980s and early 1990s, and still you can find signed items from him at prices that feel almost absurdly low for a figure of … Read more
Lothar Matthäus belongs in almost every serious discussion about the greatest midfielders football has ever produced. That sounds like a bold statement until you actually think about what he achieved. World Cup winner, Ballon d’Or winner, the driving force behind West Germany for more than a decade and one of the few players who could … Read more
There are athletes whose careers can be explained with statistics, and then there are athletes whose careers can almost be reduced to a single image. For Boris Becker, that image is still Wimbledon in 1985. Seventeen years old, completely fearless, diving across the grass and suddenly becoming the youngest Wimbledon champion the men’s game had … Read more
One of my favourite stories in sports business has surprisingly little to do with the NFL itself. Years ago, Uli Hoeneß travelled to the United States because Bayern Munich was financially trying to reinvent itself. German soccer still thought primarily about football. The Americans were already thinking about entertainment, merchandising, stadiums and everything happening before … Read more
Watching Serena Williams at Wimbledon 2026 felt slightly surreal. Not because she lost—that was almost the least interesting part—but because it reminded you how quickly elite sport moves on. Serena is 44 years old, a mother and one of the greatest tennis players the sport has ever produced. There was a time when the entire … Read more
There are very few athletes who completely change the economics of their sport. Michael Jordan did it for basketball. Muhammad Ali did it for boxing. Tom Brady turned the NFL quarterback into a global commercial brand. In golf, that player is unquestionably Tiger Woods. Before Tiger, golf was already successful, particularly in the United States, … Read more
There was a time when the final whistle almost automatically led to the same scene. Two players met somewhere near the centre circle, pulled their jerseys over their heads, exchanged them with a smile and walked back to the dressing room wearing somebody else’s colours. It never felt organised. Nobody announced it. Nobody asked where … Read more
One thing I keep coming back to is what actually happens after a player’s career is over. We spend so much time talking about Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Munetaka Murakami or the next rookie that we almost forget the hobby has already answered this question several times. Retirement is almost like a second draft. Suddenly … Read more