Parm Sangha, co-founder
Broadcasting income is decelerating. Commercial sponsorship is approaching saturation. Match day capacity hasn't grown in a decade and it can't as you can't add seats to a sold-out stadium. Every lever a Premier League club has traditionally pulled is either maxed out or getting tighter under UEFA's Financial Sustainability Regulations, which cap squad costs at 70% of revenue from next season.
So we asked a different question: what if the revenue isn't in a lever the club already controls, but in an asset it's never priced at all?
Working from the Sangha SportsFramework, a diagnostic model Mimo built and had reviewed by Sheffield Hallam University's Sport Business team, we ran a modelled scenario against a top-six Premier League club. The club has a global fanbase roughly a thousand times the size of its stadium. Every one of those fans who ever recorded a goal, a chant, a walk-up to the ground on their phone, is sitting on original footage that has never been licensed, sold or counted as revenue by anyone.
Modelled conservatively, that single category, which is consented, verified fan-captured content, represents an estimated £57M a season in new commercial revenue for one club alone. Extrapolated across the Premier League's twenty clubs, the same modelling puts the conservative, uncaptured value of the category at over £500M a season.
To be clear about what that number is and isn't: it's Mimo's own modelling, built on our go-to-market assumptions about participation, pricing and licensing volume, which arethe same assumptions any new market has to start from before real transaction data exists. It hasn't been endorsed by the club it's modelled on and it isn't a Sheffield Hallam-authored figure as their review covers the structure of the diagnostic framework, not this specific commercial projection. We think it holds up under scrutiny if implemented the way we've designed it. We also think the only way to find out is to build it.
Three things have kept this category invisible.
First, incentive design: every fan-content platform to date has asked fans to pay to participate (NFTs, digital collectibles, metaverse tickets, prediction markets) rather than paying them. This is why adoption has stalled everywhere it's been tried.
Second, rights ambiguity: clubs don't currently have the infrastructure to verify, price and license fan-captured content without disrupting their existing broadcast and filming agreements.
Third, timing: the UK's proposed under-16 social media restrictions, expected in 2027, are about to close every off-platform route young fans currently use to build a following, except the one a club controls directly.
Put together, that's a commercial opportunity sitting inside a regulatory shift, at a moment when every traditional revenue line is under pressure simultaneously. We don't think that combination happens twice.
We're not saying this is easy or that £57M shows up without doing the work. The modelling assumes a specific implementation of a consent-first pipeline, forensic authentication, a rights framework that sits inside a club's existing filming policy rather than against it. Getting from a modelled number to a real one is exactly the part we don't put in a blog post.
We've written up the full modelling, the three revenue ceilings driving the pressure and the diagnostic framework behind it in the "Football Industry Review - a C-suite briefing" with a foreword from Kieran Maguire (author, The Price of Football) and reviewed methodology from Dr Plumley and Prof Wilson. It's free and it's the only place the assumptions behind the £57M are laid out in any detail.
Download the Football Industry Review here.
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