How a 100-Person Firm Built the Champions League: Yasuhide Okabe on Football as a Brand Business

Contents

1. How does a firm of a hundred people carry an event that big?
2. How were the star ball, the anthem and the trophy designed?
3. Where does the money come from?
4. If the ceiling is there, where is the way out?
5. So what can I do with this?
6. Further reading
7. One thing to take with you

When the name is fixed, the substance can be told apart; when the way is walked, intent gets through.

—— Xunzi, “On the Correct Use of Names” (Warring States period; my own translation)

The 1 November 2026 episode of Investor’s Sunday hosts Yasuhide Okabe, who spent close to twenty years at TEAM Marketing, the commercial agency behind the UEFA Champions League, and was the first Asian there to reach the executive level. Okabe says the firm — a little over a hundred people — proposed the competition to UEFA’s then-president in 1991 and grew it into an event he sizes at roughly ¥900 billion, short of a trillion. He calls the core of it a brand business: the star ball, the pre-match anthem and the big-eared trophy were all designed so you recognise the competition in one second. He also states the limit: the same playbook stalls in Japan, because Japan’s TV advertising market and pay-TV subscriber base are flat, which caps broadcast rights fees.

How does a firm of a hundred people carry an event that big?

They sell one bundled package: the broadcast and sponsorship rights of every participating club, pooled and sold together, which removes the headcount that club-by-club retail would need. TEAM Marketing took the idea to UEFA’s president in 1991, the two sides built it together, the competition kicked off in 1992, and this firm ran the commercial side for the next thirty-five years. Okabe calls it a legendary sports marketing agency in Europe, at a hundred-odd people.

The mandate ends this year. Okabe says America is pushing into European football now, their rights were taken away, and he himself left last year. He still speaks as one of them, calling it an agency he loves.

How he got in is worth telling. The 2002 World Cup was held in Japan; after watching it he decided he wanted Japan to win one at home someday. He could not be a player, and on the business and federation-politics side — what he calls off the pitch — there were no Asians at all, so he set out to be the first. He was thirty, living in America, with no connections. Everyone in Europe and America wants those jobs too; it is the dream job, in his words. His plan was to put himself where the circle physically is, so he went to Europe for an MBA. Admitted to both Oxford and Cambridge, he picked Cambridge for one rule: find a job yourself and you may take a year out to work it, visa included. That year he pitched clubs, federations and marketing firms across England, France, Spain, Italy and Germany, and collected more than a hundred rejections. At graduation, classmates envied his Champions League offer; he told them none of them had failed as much as he had. There is no such thing as failure, he says — only success and learning.

How were the star ball, the anthem and the trophy designed?

Backwards, from the broadcast slot. Champions League matches sit on Tuesday and Wednesday nights because that is prime time in central Europe and the UK, where rights sell highest and sponsorship prices follow. Night football, therefore a deep navy palette and a star as the mark. The star ball did not exist before that, Okabe says; the founders wanted a brand you grasp at a glance.

The anthem follows the same logic. He points at a marketing fundamental called instant recognition — the Apple logo, the Nike logo. Flipping through broadcasts you cannot tell one league from another until you spot a crest; the Champions League dresses the pitch surround with star balls, so a single camera sweep tells you. Bringing luxury-grade branding into the football business, he says, was something they did first.

What stayed with me was another line of his: God is in the details. He did Apple work in Silicon Valley and describes the obsession with detail inherited from Steve Jobs as near-pathological, which is how the product comes out the way it does. Hermès-grade brands run on the same refusal to compromise on cut and marketing. He files the Champions League in that category.

Where does the money come from?

Okabe splits a club’s revenue into four. First, league distributions: the league pools every club’s broadcast rights plus league-level sponsorship, sells it centrally, and shares it out by standings. Second, sponsorship and licensing the club sells itself — the shirt front, the boards inside its own ground. Third, matchday revenue, which breaks into tickets, hospitality, food and drink, and merchandise; merchandise sells best on matchday, and hospitality carries a far higher unit price than tickets, which is how America and Europe earn, and where Japan underperforms. Fourth, player transfer fees — a major line in European football, a small one in Japan.

The host pressed the real question: if broadcast and sponsorship do not earn enough, where is the money for branding? Okabe grants the sequencing, then traces broadcast rights one layer up. That money has two possible sources, the free-to-air TV advertising market or pay-TV subscribers — the Netflix and SKY PerfecTV tier. So in a country where the TV ad market is not growing and pay subscribers are not increasing, rights fees for leagues and federations have a ceiling. Japan since the 1989 bubble has had what people call the lost thirty-five years, with a flat ad market; internet advertising grew by taking budget from newspapers and radio. Sponsorship works the same way — corporate revenue flat, sponsorship fees do not rise on their own. Stack population on top: he says Japan’s population halves over sixty years, so doubling the price per head only holds the line.

If the ceiling is there, where is the way out?

Reach the people outside the core fan base, and that work is called branding. Okabe uses Paris: the French who used to look down on America and barely spoke English now wear New York Yankees caps, some without knowing it is a baseball team, wearing it as a good-looking accessory — and the Yankees side put out muted, cute colourways for it. Japan is not doing this.

His own example: wear your favourite club’s shirt to meet friends or do business in Japan and someone asks whether there is a match today; walk around abroad in a Lakers or Manchester United shirt and nobody asks. The day Japanese women start calling a club cap or a club shirt cute and wearing it out, he says, is the day Japan’s sports business grows. The host brought up golf as a parallel: an older men’s game until the women’s apparel got attractive, after which participation climbed.

The next question is the best one in the episode: why are J.League shirts so often unattractive? The answer sits in the decision chain. Sportswear makers put up a few options, a director or the responsible manager picks one by personal taste, nobody thinks about who wears it, and the question never loops back to which customers we want more of. The host called it a sense of looking after the fans we already have, and Okabe agreed, then tied it back to his starting point: know where you stand today. Japan’s macro picture is flat, so running the traditional sports business will not grow, and that reality has to be accepted first; once it is, a club goes and builds hooks for casual fans and for people with no interest in football, instead of sitting under the distribution pot waiting for it to fall.

So what can I do with this?

The pain this episode actually answers is: the product is good, the people work hard, so why will revenue not grow? Okabe’s answer is to measure the upstream pool first. Japanese clubs cannot grow rights fees much because the TV advertising and pay-subscriber pools are not growing, and no amount of effort pushes through that.

I moved the move onto how I read a holding, as a sequence: ask whose budget this company’s revenue ultimately comes out of, ask whether that budget has been growing these last few years, and only then look at what the company itself can do. With a flat pool, a strong company can still only take share, so growth has to come from changing the category — the Champions League’s chosen change was branding, out toward non-core fans. I used to run this backwards, pulled in by gross margin and new products, and later found that the names with shrinking upstream pools were the ones whose stories sounded better than their statements.

One layer down: how do you test a brand? The word leaves no trace in the financials, yet it decides whether you can raise prices and widen the customer base. I turned Okabe’s instant recognition into two questions and ran my holdings through them. One, put this company’s product in a row of competitors — do you pick it out in a second? Two, will its customers carry it on a day they have no need for it, the way people wear a shirt when there is no match. A few names gave me no answer. I did not sell those; I rewrote the reason I had been giving for the moat.

The third layer is people. Okabe says European and American clubs are now run by consultants, lawyers, MBAs and big-tech alumni, paid properly, while Japanese clubs are mostly corporate welfare teams renamed professional, managed like group subsidiaries, paying little, so good young people do not go. He named two leading cases. Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Hawks, where the finance chief who stands in for Son at shareholder meetings also serves as club president — a signature executive of a trillion-yen company running a sports club, which he says you do not see at other corporate-owned teams, and that club earns ¥50 billion a year, the top in Asia. The other is ESCON, where Shohei Ohtani played, run by a Mr Maezawa he respects, with revenue taken from ¥15 billion to around ¥33 billion. Same fans, same market, different operator, numbers that far apart.

Further reading

• Investor’s Sunday, 1 November 2026, with Yasuhide Okabe; the conversation on football-centred sports business continues next week
• UEFA’s annual Club Licensing Benchmarking Report, for the revenue mix of European clubs
• Dentsu’s annual “Advertising Expenditures in Japan”, for the size and growth of the Japanese ad market
• Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs population projections, against Okabe’s sixty-year halving

One thing to take with you

One idea: measure the pool before you measure the skill. Whether something can grow starts with whether the pool feeding it is growing; with a flat pool, effort only moves share around.

Here is a thing I tried. Pick something you currently spend time on — a job, a side project, a club, the activity your child is learning — and write down which pool its money or its people ultimately come from: which line of a company budget, which age bracket of parents, which district’s residents. Then go look up whether that pool grew or shrank over the last three years, write the number down if you find one, and write “could not find” if you cannot. If it is flat or shrinking, swap the question you ask yourself from “should I work harder” to “should I change pools, or change category”.

Raw Markdown

This article is an educational discussion of investment method. It is not advice to buy or sell any individual security, offers no target prices, and does not analyze any current holding. Investing carries risk; make your own decisions or consult a qualified professional.