In Focus/ Miagen- SportsGen -The New Game Plan for Football Finance
With regulations tightening and revenue streams growing and diversifying, financial planning has become as vital to a club’s future as its next marquee signing. Enter SportsGen, a purpose-built platform from Irish firm Miagen, designed to give football club owners command over their finances.
The Risky Business of Football Ownership
Owning a football club has never been riskier or more complex and the margin for error is razor-thin. Miss a forecast, overspend on a transfer, or breach financial rules and the consequences are swift: points deductions, sanctions, even relegation.
Reactive decision-making just doesn’t cut it anymore. SportsGen tackles this head-on. Instead of relying on scattered spreadsheets, it offers a unified, real-time view of a club’s financial health and more importantly, its future. It pulls live data from ticket sales, sponsorships, matchday operations, merchandising and media rights, transforming it into actionable insights.
From Data to Decisions
SportsGen doesn’t just show where clubs are overspending or missing revenue opportunities. It allows executives to model out scenarios from a top-six finish to a disappointing cup exit and see the full financial consequences before they happen. For clubs operating near UEFA or domestic financial sustainability limits, this kind of foresight could be the difference between strategic growth and regulatory disaster.
“The motto of the company is to ‘enable better decision-making,’ and that is our ultimate goal,” says Brian Byrne, COO at Miagen. “We’re trying to make it as easy as possible to make the best decisions in the quickest time.”
Built for Clarity and Control
Developed to gather and analyse data in real-time, SportsGen gives executive teams the clarity to approve investments in infrastructure or player signings with full visibility into long-term cash flow and valuation impact.
“It’s built to be dynamic,” Byrne adds. “You can quickly play with key drivers and see what the impact will be. The dashboarding isn’t just a tick box for compliance, it’s built for foresight.”
But the platform’s success depends on the club’s leadership engaging with the numbers. The quality of decisions hinges on the quality of data and SportsGen shifts clubs from making reactive, emotionally driven choices to forward-looking, strategy led leadership.
Behind the Scenes: How It Works
Miagen’s journey into football began with a simple question: how could their success in aviation and aircraft leasing — where they model 1 out of every 5 aircraft globally — translate to sport?
“There’s a lot of football fans in the office and they’re all financial modellers,” Byrne recalls. The result is a platform that integrates with existing club systems — ticketing, HR, contract management, treasury — and pulls everything into a central model.
Clubs can simulate scenarios such as finishing 6th versus 17th, triggering changes in revenue, player contracts and loan rates. The system even models player replacements based on contract expirations, whether purchased or loaned.
Matchday revenue, stadium details and ticketing assumptions all feed into a powerful backend that calculates profit/loss and cash flow down to the fixture level.
“You can see what happened in the game at the weekend, roll it up to the season and pivot between competitions or teams,” Byrne further explains. “It’s like a pivot table on steroids.”
Integration and Support
SportsGen is designed to replace Excel, but it doesn’t ignore it. Clubs can use an Excel add-in called Office Connect to flow data directly from SportsGen into their familiar reporting formats.
Change a league position in SportsGen, hit save and the Excel sheet updates instantly. Support doesn’t end at implementation. Miagen offers ongoing training and projectbased enhancements as clubs evolve.
“Most clients are very capable,” Byrne says. “But if they need something new, we’re there.”
The Bottom Line
Football may still be decided on the pitch, but increasingly, it’s the decisions made off it that determine which clubs thrive. Ownership today means running a highly visible, emotionally charged business — with all the scrutiny of a public company and none of the safety nets.
SportsGen doesn’t promise to make the pressure go away. But it does promise better tools to handle it with confidence, discipline and foresight. SportsGen might just be the smartest signing you make this season.
WHY CFOS SHOULD PAY ATTENTION
For CFOs, SportsGen is more than a reporting tool — it’s a strategic control centre. Financial missteps don’t just mean red ink, they can mean relegation, point deductions, or regulatory bans.
Here’s what makes SportsGen essential:
Regulatory Risk Management: With domestic and UEFA rules tightening, even well-run clubs face penalties for overspending. SportsGen offers proactive alerts and compliance simulations.
Precision Forecasting: Static spreadsheets are out; real-time planning is in — especially during transfer windows or performance swings.
Smarter Transfers: Player deals are financial liabilities. SportsGen can model their impact on cash flow, balance sheets and long-term ROI.
Operational Efficiency: From attendance trends to pricing models, the platform helps CFOs course-correct in real-time.
ABOUT MIAGEN
Miagen are a boutique consultancy firm focused on agile business planning. They empower finance to lead by enabling them to better model their business using real-time business and industry insights. Customers love the sector-specific solutions because they are proven to unlock a sustainable competitive edge that seriously enhances business performance.
Tel: +353 1 969 5900
Email: info@miagen.com
Web: www.miagen.com
