Season 5, Episode 13. The IP Legal Playbook Behind Football’s Billion-Dollar Empire

The beautiful game has transformed into something far more complex than 22 players chasing a ball. Today’s football exists as a sophisticated intellectual property ecosystem worth billions, where legal battles off the pitch often carry stakes as high as championship finals.

From broadcasting rights that form the financial lifeblood of leagues worldwide to domain name disputes protecting women’s tournaments, this episode takes you behind the scenes of football’s invisible legal infrastructure. We explore landmark cases including Spain’s €31.6 million judgment against streaming platform Roja Directa, the surprising $40 million award to the inventors of referee’s vanishing spray, and Manchester United’s curious lawsuit against Football Manager for using their name but not their logo.

The player perspective receives special attention through cases involving Messi, Neymar, and Ronaldo’s fights to control their own names as valuable commercial assets. We also examine Project Red Card’s groundbreaking challenge to the uncompensated commercialization of player performance data, potentially reshaping how personal statistics are treated across all sports.

Whether you’re fascinated by sports business, intellectual property, or simply curious about the legal machinery powering the world’s favorite sport, this episode delivers five essential takeaways that extend far beyond football. Discover why exclusivity isn’t about ego but economics, how small innovations can yield massive legal victories, and why your name is only truly yours if you claim it through proper legal channels. Subscribe now and join our exploration of how IP shapes not just football, but entertainment, technology and culture worldwide.

Jean Marc Seigneur – In Trust We Build: Designing the Future of Digital Reputation Intangiblia™

What if your glasses could spot a deepfake before your gut does? We sit down with Jean Marc Seigneur, a veteran researcher of decentralized trust, to map where security failed, where it’s catching up, and how proof—not vibes—will anchor the next decade of digital life. From central bank digital currencies to NFTs that carry qualified electronic signatures, we unpack how legal recognition and cryptography can finally meet in the middle, turning tokens into enforceable rights and payments into reliable public infrastructure.We also go beyond buzzwords to the missing pieces: education and design. Friendly apps hide sharp edges, so we talk about why countries need their own experts, not just imported tech, and how wallets must evolve with safer recovery, better defaults, and interfaces that explain risk without slowing you down. AI raises the stakes, so we explore signed videos, verifiable identities, and provenance trails that help you tell a real voice from a cloned one at a glance. Reputation won’t live on a web page for long; it’s moving into the physical world as augmented overlays that can help or harm depending on what they reveal and to whom.Bias won’t vanish either, because human trust is social and local. We discuss how to balance peer signals with regulators’ oversight, why transparency about AI use will give way to tracking human effort, and what a time-based “work token” could add to creative markets. The red thread across it all—payments, NFTs, augmented humans, and AI media—is simple and demanding: protect freedom while proving claims. If we want technology that empowers rather than deceives, we have to design, debate, and defend the trust layer itself.Enjoy the conversation? Subscribe, share with a friend who cares about digital trust, and leave a review to help more curious minds find the show.Send us a textCheck out "Protection for the Inventive Mind" – available now on Amazon in print and Kindle formats. The views and opinions expressed (by the host and guest(s)) in this podcast are strictly their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the entities with which they may be affiliated. This podcast should in no way be construed as promoting or criticizing any particular government policy, institutional position, private interest or commercial entity. Any content provided is for informational and educational purposes only.
  1. Jean Marc Seigneur – In Trust We Build: Designing the Future of Digital Reputation
  2. Vlada Mentink – Lean, Smart, and Automated: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Working with AI
  3. Heidrun Wechter-Essig – The Board Whisperer: Power, Pivots, and Playing the Long Game
  4. Anna Aseeva – Sustainable by Code: Rethinking Tech Governance from IP to AI
  5. Vipin Saroha – Beyond the Dashboard: How Data and AI Are Rewiring Public Value

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