Op-Ed: The Liquidity Sport Lacks — and the Scrutiny Its Money Demands

Nuno Perestrelo0

Launched on 4 June 2026 in Record, Portugal’s leading sports newspaper, SIGA’s weekly opinion column Linha da Frente (Front Line, in Portuguese) provides a dedicated platform to address issues at the heart of SIGA’s global agenda, including Sport Integrity, good governance, transparency, accountability, financial integrity, sports betting integrity, sustainability, youth development and protection, and the future of sport.

Click to read this week’s article in Portuguese.

The Liquidity Sport Lacks — and the Scrutiny Its Money Demands

By João Paulo Almeida

Co-Chair, SIGA Permanent Committee on Sports Betting Integrity

Professional sport lives with an uncomfortable contradiction: it moves ever-larger sums of money, yet relies on structurally unstable revenues. Television rights renegotiated with each cycle, sponsorships dependent on sporting results, ticket revenues subject to the season and the calendar, transfers whose value fluctuates with the market — none of this guarantees a club or federation what any organisation needs to survive: predictable liquidity. And it is precisely here, in managing cash flow between one revenue cycle and the next, that the most serious governance problem the sector still refuses to confront lies.

Where Cash Shortages Open the Door to Crime

When liquidity is scarce, sports organisations turn to external financing — and do not always ask where it comes from. Opaque investment structures, loans from poorly identified intermediaries, disproportionate agents’ commissions, sponsorships with no commercial substance: these are all mechanisms that solve a short-term cash-flow problem while, in return, opening the door to money laundering. This is not an abstract suspicion. Europol and the FATF have repeatedly identified sport, and football in particular, as a high-risk sector for illicit financial flows, precisely because of its scale, cross-border volume and opaque ownership structures.

The European Union has already acted on this. The 2024 anti-money laundering package — Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, Directive 2024/1640 and the regulation establishing the European Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) — will bring football clubs and sports agents within the scope of “obliged entities” from 2029, with risk-assessment obligations covering transfers, agents’ commissions, sponsorships and investor structures. It is a belated but unequivocal recognition that sport can no longer manage its money without qualified external oversight.

The English Example: Regulate First, Rather Than Remedy Later

No country has gone as far as the United Kingdom. The Football Governance Act 2025 created the Independent Football Regulator (IFR), with licensing powers, rigorous fitness and propriety tests for owners and directors, requirements for detailed financial plans, and investigative powers comparable to those of financial regulators such as the FCA. The IFR does not run football; it scrutinises who finances it and how. This is the distinction that is largely missing across continental Europe: the difference between a sports body that regulates itself and an independent regulator, with real powers, accountable to the State rather than to those it regulates.

Dependence on volatile revenues is not a minor management issue — it is the engine driving clubs and federations towards opaque financing. The risk is even greater the more dependent a federation is on public funding and the more fragile its governance model, sustained, in most cases, by volunteer officials without the risk-management mechanisms that the scale of the problem demands. And opaque financing, without independent scrutiny, is criminality by another name. The answer is not another voluntary code of conduct. It is a qualified regulator, with investigative powers, authority to assess the fitness and propriety of those who finance sport, and genuine independence from the bodies it supervises. Without that, we will con.tinue to discuss financial sustainability after the damage has already been done.

– THE END –

Previous Front Line articles

ABOUT SIGA

SIGA is the world’s leading organisation for Sport Integrity. We are creating a whole new landscape for the sports industry by delivering independent global rating and certification for world Sport to ensure it is governed and operates under the highest integrity standards: The SIGA Universal Standards.

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