Conspicuous consumption runs through soccer’s billion-dollar transfer market. Club executives hold meetings in deluxe suites in the finest hotels in London, Monte Carlo and Milan: the Connaught, the Méridien, the Palazzo Parigi. There, they haggle with agents in tailored suits over eye-watering transfer fees, lavish salaries and towering commissions.
The players being traded sink into the plush leather seats of private jets to travel between clubs, before signing contracts worth tens of millions of dollars in sumptuous, state-of-the-art training facilities.
Many of the numbers that make that world go around, though — the vast sums that change hands in exchange for a player, the fees due to an agent, the money that will make an athlete rich — can be traced back to a place far removed from all that glamour and wealth: an unremarkable office building on a quiet, suburban street in Hamburg, Germany.