What's Coming Next

Hey! Now is a very good time to give us your feedback. We will read everything you say about our podcast and newsletter, I promise. Like… we already do, but this is your chance to have a say on what you loved/hated about TTF, and what you’d like to see more of in the next 12 months. Also, tell us what you thought of the Season Previews simply by replying to this email.

Thanks! —TK

I hate this international break. Just when the season gets started, UEFA and FIFA butt their noses in for the most annoying pause in the football calendar. However, as someone who just spent a VERY busy summer working through the transfer window on TTF and football projects… maybe it’s not so bad!

Given the lack of club football, I figured this was a good time to update all of you on what we’ve done as a business across our first 15 months, and what we plan to do over the next year.

Some of you might just be like “I only care about football!” and I kinda get that… but given the state of the media and content landscape, us being here year after year to provide you things to read and listen to is probably something you’re interested in.

Now We’re Here

I started The Transfer Flow in June 2024. By the end of this month, our little “transfer analysis” newsletter will be at 30,000 subscribers, which feels pretty good having started from zero. We also have a podcast that’s crossed about 15,000 downloads per episode without doing anything special other than being great.

That’s all a testament to the quality of the content and contributors, as well as a real desire from smart fans to read something beyond the usual rumour nonsense. I made a guess about whether it existed when we started, and I’m really pleased to see that it’s true.

Smart people want smarter football content, especially about transfers. And there are a lot of smart football fans.

Year 1 was entirely funded by me, while in year 2 we’re going to be focused on both adding happy fans and new revenue streams. This includes some ads across the newsletter and podcast (as was foretold from the beginning), as we look to build partnerships with interesting brands we actually like. Or with brands who pay us a lot — sometimes we’ll do both.

Note: If you work for a company that might be interested in sponsoring our content, reply to this email to get in touch.

Note 2: There are over 1000 of you that work in football, from owners down to the most junior of analysts. If you want us to work on your PAID football projects, ALSO reply to this email. We did a couple of successful football projects this summer, and have capacity to continue doing so.

New Faces

One of the things I’m very proud of is our top tier cast of characters. TTF is not a one- or two-person show — the team as a whole is great and incredibly insightful.

Kim has carried the biggest load on the free newsletter, but this season we’re adding MoeSquared and Neel as weekly columnists. Meanwhile Patrick has been the brilliant anchor of our podcast, and while Ravi Ramineni left for a job back in the football world, we’ve now got Neel, Hayden, and yours truly (AKA “the bald, arrogant guy” … thanks YouTube) continuing to provide consistent insights across the big European leagues.

We’ll continue to seek out new voices and expertise as the year goes on, but honestly, everyone seems very happy with what we’ve produced so far.

New Content Blocks

The Season Previews were a big hit, and the Variance Betting analysis has also been a resounding success, not least because we’re winning at a hefty clip.

I know some of you dislike gambling... but I have literally been a professional gambler for most of the past 20 years. My “gambling” is more like picking stocks, and sometimes to my surprise, results have mostly been consistent for me during that time. Successfully betting on sports is a skill set that seems to lend itself very well to transfer analysis or running football teams. camera pans to Brighton and Brentford

One of the things we did not get to this past year that is still on the list was creating educational courses. We have a high level of expertise in various topics around the business (football analytics, data visualisation for sport and business, smarter betting, gambling models, etc), and many of you have emailed me asking if we can produce that stuff for the masses. That’s going to be a priority for year 2, and everything but Set Pieces is potentially on the docket. My set pieces course is probably too valuable to see the public light of day again, though we occasionally work with select teams during a season.

We’re also looking at a third podcast episode per week, powered by a small monthly Patreon subscription. The format and topic is slightly in flux, but my guess is it ends up as weekend previews plus a ton of B-roll content, and obviously it would ad free. At this point, the pods are the most expensive things we create, and to this point, we have done zero monetisation. This would represent a way for podcast fans to support the work in exchange for additional content.

Thank You for Your Support

I just wanted to say a genuine thank you to everyone who has supported us thus far. We are an entity that loves what we do, but also really appreciates the ecosystem and fanbase that we live in. That’s why we promote other people’s great work on Fridays. That’s why we scour the internet for new voices that deserve your attention. And that’s why we’re going to continue doing this until tens of thousands of you stop finding it interesting… or until Man United pony up £10M* a year and ask us to focus exclusively on fixing all of their bullshit.

The growth and continued support from all of you makes it easy to justify adding more content to the TTF umbrella, and we’re just scratching the surface for what’s possible.

Don’t believe me?

Fabrizio has 40M IG followers, 26M followers on Twitter, and 2 million+ YouTube subscribers. We have 9000.

If you love the content, tell your friends.

—TK

*I promise I would save the club that much money simply in the first year of negotiating.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, we’d appreciate it if you would forward it to a friend. If you’re that friend, welcome! You can subscribe to The Transfer Flow here. We also have a podcast where we go in depth on transfer news and rumours every week. We’re on YouTube here, and you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify by searching for “The Transfer Flow Podcast.”