World Football Summit in Madrid.
World Football Summit
In 2016, soccer’s governance was in the middle of an institutional crisis, with a number of new challenges on the horizon. Streaming had not yet fully impacted broadcasting, women’s soccer barely registered as a commercial conversation, and the idea of a club functioning as a global intellectual property platform was still purely theoretical.
A decade on, the sport looks almost unrecognizable against that starting point. FIFA has redirected $200 million back into development after attempting to rebuild its legitimacy, Gulf capital has moved from headline transfers to a structural presence in leagues, broadcasting and club ownership, American investors now control half the Premier League and have rewritten how a club is valued and women’s football has transformed from a CSR talking point to a core part of clubs’ business strategies.
World Football Summit has spent that same decade as a front-row witness to the shift, growing from a single event in Madrid in 2016 to 33 events across Riyadh, Mexico City, New York and Hong Kong. As it marks its tenth anniversary at its flagship Madrid event this month, its co-founders, Jan Alessie and Marian Otamendi, have hosted almost every side of the sport’s power struggles on the same stage.
A transition from headline-grabbing transfers to nation-building
Alessie identifies the moment he felt the sport’s centre of gravity shift by pointing to a single weekend: World Football Summit’s first edition in Saudi Arabia, held in Jeddah on December 12 and 13, 2023, the same city and week as the Club World Cup, the first FIFA tournament ever staged in the country. “65 % of our attendees flew in from abroad for it, a far higher share than we are used to,” Alessie told me. “Nobody was passing through. They were making the trip specifically to understand what was happening there.”
What struck him wasn’t the scale of the event but who was on stage and what they were discussing. It was opened by Adwa Al-Arifi, Saudi Arabia’s Assistant Minister for Sports Affairs, a woman holding that brief, in that country, in that year. Hammad Albalawi, then leading the kingdom’s bid for the 2034 World Cup, was in the room too, a year before FIFA confirmed it, when almost nobody outside Saudi Arabia knew his name. “What changed my thinking was not the scale of it,” Alessie says. “It was that the conversation had stopped being about signing players.” People were discussing privatizing clubs, building academies, and getting an entire population to play sport, all of it benchmarked against 2034. “Sitting there, it was fairly clear the center of gravity had already moved.”
That shift, from transfer fees to nation-building, is one way of describing a decade in which soccer changed across different aspects. Asked what a 2016 audience would have refused to believe about 2026, Alessie points to the combination of record attendances and broadcast figures for the women’s game, Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema anchoring the Saudi Pro League and automated offside technology deciding outcomes in real time.
For him, the 2026 World Cup was the moment all of it converged in a single tournament. The introduction of dynamic ticket pricing, halftime shows, mandatory hydration breaks, referees wearing point-of-view cameras, all would have been almost beyond the imagination of the audience in 2016. “In a single tournament you could see the whole transition from mass-participation competition to global entertainment property,” he explains.
That reframing reflects the decade’s headline storylines, Gulf money, American ownership, governance reform, not as isolated trends but as signals of a sport becoming, deliberately and simultaneously, more professionalized, more commercialized and far more contested than the one Alessie and Otamendi first set out to cover.
Jan Alessie (Co-Founder and Managing Director of World Football Summit) and Marian Otamendi (Co-founder and CEO of World Football Summit).
World Football Summit
The Gulf as an example
The clearest thread running through ten years of change reflects how the game spent the last decade negotiating the terms of a seat at the table, and that negotiation is still going on today. Nowhere is that clearer than in Gulf investment. “Gulf capital is no longer an outside force in football,” Alessie says. “It is infrastructure.” He points to numbers that go well beyond marquee signings, such as the Saudi Pro League tripling its revenues in three years and bringing in more than 235 international players, while the federation sanctioned around 12,000 matches last year, 80 of them at youth representative level, and private academies grew from 88 to 189 in twelve months. Weekly sports participation in Saudi Arabia climbed from 13% to 59% of the population in nine years, reflecting what Alessie calls “a system being built, not a spending spree”.
Asked whether that makes Gulf capital powerful enough that nobody can afford to say no to it, Alessie pushes back on the framing more than the premise. “On individual deals, sometimes. But that is true of any large pool of capital in any industry, and it says as much about the discipline of the seller as the power of the buyer.” The industry, he argues, stopped debating whether to engage some time ago. “The conversation now is about the terms, and that is what normalisation actually means.”
He applies the same logic to American ownership, and to MLS’s own valuation run, built on three marquee signings across sixteen years in David Beckham, Zlatan Ibrahimović and finally Lionel Messi, whose 2023 arrival helped push Inter Miami’s valuation from $585 million to $1.45 billion in two years, but he resists calling it American dominance. “US private equity sets the benchmark for commercial efficiency and pricing,” he states. “Gulf sovereign capital provides liquidity and long-horizon infrastructure investment that nobody else offers. European heritage remains the thing that gives these clubs cultural weight and a global audience in the first place.” Today’s valuations, he says, come out of the interaction between all three, not the dominance of any one.
That same tension between progress and unfinished business runs through Otamendi’s view of governance. FIFA’s redirection of $200 million back into development after its worst institutional crisis is real progress, she says that “financial corruption of the old kind has been dealt with systematically”. But the deeper problem, in her view, has been exposed rather than solved. “The industry has not built a governance framework capable of representing everyone in a hyper-commercialised ecosystem”, pointing to the range of parties from federations, competition organizers, clubs carrying the financial burden, players facing an increasingly punishing calendar, to fans nowhere near the rooms where decisions get made. The complication is structural, she says, because ownership has shifted toward private equity, sovereign capital and multi-club networks faster than regulation can track it. “Capital moves faster than regulation, and closing that gap is the governance task of this decade,” she believes.
Even South America’s enduring hold on talent supply fits the same pattern of contested, unresolved terrain. Alessie is candid that Gulf states, Saudi Arabia especially, are making a genuine attempt to build development infrastructure rather than simply import finished players, and expects that investment to close much of the gap in sports science and coaching by 2034. but he doesn’t expect it to dislodge South America’s core advantage. “Talent pipelines depend on cultural density and competitive friction, and those take generations,” he insists. “The Gulf will produce a far higher standard of domestic player. South America will still be the engine.”
The challenge of rapid growth
If the last decade’s biggest miscalculation was underpricing women’s soccer, both founders think today’s industry is making the same mistake somewhere else. Otamendi draws a direct line between the two. “Ten years ago the industry looked at women’s football through a CSR lens, it was something you supported, not something you sold,” she remembers. Nobody, she says, was modelling it as a commercial asset with its own margins.
She sees the same blind spot now sitting over everything below soccer’s elite tier with grassroots technology, non-elite stadium infrastructure, regional multi-sport venues, inclusive formats such as disability soccer, all still treated as social initiatives rather than businesses. What changes it, she argues, is the same shift that changed the women’s game. Localized streaming and cheap data capture no longer require a traditional broadcast deal to prove an audience exists or measure what it’s worth. “By 2036 I would expect the non-elite ecosystem to be a core part of the sports economy rather than the part everyone funds out of goodwill,” she claims.
“If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that with things changing at the current speed, anticipating the future is absolutely impossible,” Alessie argues. What he will commit to is the shape of the challenge ahead in balancing the scaling of soccer as a business with preserving what makes it unique in the first place. That uniqueness, in his telling, comes down to identity, lived emotional connection, and the way the sport pulls people from entirely different backgrounds into the same thing. “If we get that wrong, we don’t just risk the sport’s culture, we risk the very thing the business itself is built on,” he warns.
It’s a tension the two have tried to write into how they describe their own work. World Football Summit holds no allegiance to any confederation, league or clubs, and Otamendi sees that neutrality, along with a simple rule that no participant can veto who else appears on the programme, as pivotal to attracting both institutions and their critics. One meeting the platform helped facilitate illustrates the point, as at the Jeddah edition in 2023, Ben Harburg, owner of Spanish club Cádiz, met someone from Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Sport, a conversation that eventually led to Harburg acquiring Al-Kholood in 2025 as the first, and still only, foreign private investor in a Saudi club. “We did not broker that deal and we take no credit for it,” Otamendi says. “We put two people in the same building on the same afternoon.”
In the middle of its fastest decade of commercial change yet, soccer’s balancing act between growth and identity is, in Alessie’s view, the real story being written. It’s the reasoning behind World Football Summit’s own new mission statement, “expanding the business, honoring the essence”. Whether soccer manages that balance will likely define how the next decade unfolds.
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