And so, to the disco beat of YMCA, Donald Trump got his peace prize, courtesy of Fifa president Gianni Infantino. At a bizarre ceremony at Washington’s Kennedy Center yesterday afternoon, football’s global governing body bestowed its new — and apparently annual — accolade for those helping to foster world peace.

“This is truly one of the great honours of my life”, Trump said on stage with Infantino after putting on the Fifa peace prize medal. Fifa said the award was given on behalf of the billions of football fans all over the world, but has offered no details of how the decision was made.

Formula 1’s grand finale in Abu Dhabi this weekend offers a far less predictable outcome. Red Bull’s Max Verstappen has closed what once looked like an unsurmountable gap to give himself a chance of winning the drivers’ championship.

That would be a blow to McLaren Racing, led by former marketing man Zak Brown, who appears on the FT Influence List 2025. McLaren’s Lando Norris leads the table by 12 points. His teammate Oscar Piastri is four points behind second-placed Verstappen.

Red Bull, sponsored by Larry Ellison’s Oracle, will hope to break out of the McLaren sandwich.

The real winners? Liberty Media and F1, who have another last-day title showdown to commercialise. And don’t forget Abu Dhabi, shareholders in the McLaren team and hosts of the finale.

Elsewhere, the FT scooped that US private capital group KKR is in talks to acquire Arctos Partners, one of the pioneers of the private equity industry’s push into professional sports. Arctos owns stakes in more than a dozen franchises, including European football giants Liverpool and Paris Saint-Germain.

On that note, we look this week at Bayern Munich’s recent discussions with private equity firm EQT and what it tells us about European football. Plus, women’s sport is growing fast, but athlete pay is not. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor

Liquid football: Bayern Munich’s investment talks

This week the FT revealed that Bayern Munich had recently held talks with private equity firm EQT about a possible stake sale. While those discussions appear to have fizzled out with the departure of Bayern CFO Michael Diederich, it is nonetheless a sign of the times.

German football is largely immune to foreign ownership. The 50+1 rule prevents the majority of clubs from being controlled by anyone other than members, while more general hostility to private equity (expressed through fan protests) has derailed past efforts to bring investment in at the league level.

Bayern already has a group of private minority shareholders. Adidas, Audi and Allianz each own just over 8 per cent of the Bavarian side. Members are guaranteed control of at least 70 per cent, leaving 5 per cent for the club to play with.

Selling such a little slice at a valuation of about €4bn would have brought in around €200mn, a nice boost to the coffers as the German team looks to keep up with its wealthy rivals elsewhere.

There is a precedent. Liverpool sold a tiny sliver to Dynasty Equity in 2023, around the same time Arctos took a roughly 12 per cent stake in Paris Saint-Germain. Real Madrid is exploring its own structural revamp so that it too can sell a small slice of equity to an outside investor.

This model of a private equity investor taking a small, passive stake in a sports team is also what’s been happening in the US. Several NFL teams have sold small stakes to outside investors this year thanks to rule changes that allow a handful of private equity firms to buy up to 10 per cent in a franchise.

Such investments do away with the long-pushed notion that European football teams need new management and fresh thinking in order to become commercially successful. They are, in effect, an endorsement of the current owners, who get a handy liquidity boost to help them keep doing what they are doing.

It’s a different approach to, say, Clearlake at Chelsea or RedBird at AC Milan, where controlling the club and overhauling its operations is key to the investment thesis.

Bayern Munich has won 12 league titles in 13 years, regularly makes the latter stages of the Champions League and has the fifth-highest revenue in global football. If you want exposure to European football, there are surely fewer more attractive opportunities out there.

With Champions League TV money continuing to grow, teams with a near guaranteed spot in the competition are going to become more and more attractive for investors. These small, hands-off deals could soon become the norm.

Female athlete pay: an uphill climb

Women’s sport has been growing rapidly in recent years, driving a wave of investment and soaring team valuations. Yet the athletes themselves have not been enjoying much of the spoils.

This week Sportico published its annual list of the highest-paid female athletes, with Coco Gauff leading the table with estimated earnings of $31mn. The American is one of 10 tennis players in the top 15.

When compared to earnings in men’s sport, the gulf is pretty stark. Sportico’s 2024 ranking of the top 100 best-paid athletes did not include a single woman. Only Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams have made it into top 50 in recent years.

The lowest ranked men’s player in Sportico’s list — NFL quarterback Daniel Jones — was paid $37.5mn. Gauff would need a 20 per cent pay increase next year to hit that level. It’s not implausible — a run of Grand Slam wins would deliver that sort of uplift. In fact, prize money accounted for less than $8mn of her earnings this year. But competition in the women’s game is so fierce as to make it unlikely.

What about Caitlin Clark, the breakout basketball star of the WNBA? Clark was the only team sport athlete to make the top 15, with $16.1mn in earnings this year. Her massive popularity has landed her a signature shoe with Nike and endorsement deals with Gatorade and State Farm. But she earned just $119,000 from her WNBA salary and bonuses. 

Player pay is front and centre amid ongoing WNBA collective bargaining negotiations, which come as the league is experiencing significant growth. The WNBA has offered players salary increases — the current minimum salary is just $66,079 while the average is $150,000. But players are pushing for a revenue-sharing model similar to the NBA, where the salary cap is more directly tied to the growth of the business. 

While WNBA players have long gone overseas to complement their earnings, today’s stars have more lucrative opportunities. Project B, a new F1-inspired global basketball competition, has offered WNBA players multimillion dollar salaries. Unrivaled, a 3-on-3 league founded by WNBA players, paid an average salary of $220,000 last season. Both leagues also offer players equity.

In another case of growing pains, the National Women’s Soccer League is at risk of losing one of its most popular players, Trinity Rodman, to overseas bidders. The 23-year-old free agent has reportedly received multiple offers from European clubs that exceeded what NWSL teams could pay her due to the league’s salary cap. 

Pressure to increase salaries and prize money across women’s sport is likely to keep growing. But competing on pay with men will require endorsements built on something very hard to achieve: global icon status.

Special Report: The Business of F1

• Under US ownership, Formula 1 is just as much about spectacle as it is sport. Promoters need to invest significantly in making their circuits ready not just for race day, but entertainment around the grand prix. A new approach to contracts is justifying the cost.

• F1 veteran Jonathan Wheatley is hoping to help Audi challenge Red Bull, Mercedes and McLaren for world championships, as the German automaker gears up to join the grid next year. He explains how.

• If there’s a lesson for business executives from F1, it’s how to manage jet lag. This is how the chief mechanic for Williams driver Carlos Sainz copes with the 24-race calendar.

• It’s been a steep learning curve for Kimi Antonelli, 19, at Mercedes F1. The Italian driver is seventh in the drivers’ standings going into Abu Dhabi. He can finish as high as sixth, if he can get the better of his predecessor at Mercedes, Sir Lewis Hamilton, who is just two points ahead.

• And engineer Dan Fallows breaks down the regulatory upheaval coming into play next year.

• You can read the FT’s F1 special report in full here.

Final Worksheet

Las Vegas has established itself as one of the world’s top host cities for sport — from the biggest boxing bouts to last year’s Super Bowl. So it was a natural choice to stage another big contest this week — the Microsoft Excel World Championship.

The three-day event whittled 256 entrants down to 24 finalists, who enjoyed pumped up entrances at the high production event. Diarmuid Early was crowned the winner, receiving $5,000 in prize money and a WWE-style championship belt. In his post-match interview, he attributed his victory to being “deep down the rabbit hole of lambdas and single cell formulas”.