Capology, website that shows how much players of all teams earn

In football, the reality is very different. In the vast majority of clubs, the salary of the players is the institution’s best kept secret. First of all, if for some reason it is not so important to know. That’s why cases like Gerard Piqué’s case, which shows on his social networks half the income of his file in Barcelona, ​​are so striking and unusual.

“this football players They don’t want you to know how much they charge, but they want to know how much others are charging.. It benefits them when it comes to benchmarking and being able to demand higher salaries from their clubs. And the fans are also interested, which makes them curious. And of course to clubs and managers for their own benefit”, Eric Luna and Federico PasquettiCo-founders of Capology.com, a project that sheds light on the endless darkness of football players’ salaries.

10,000 players

Capology (the free translation into Spanish would be ‘sueldología’, since ‘cap’ means ‘salary cap’ or salary cap) is a project that was born in 2017 and has moved itself from the NBA to football, which is already a sport. 100 percent focused. Currently, according to its founders, it is collecting information about it. Contracts of approximately 10,000 football players from European and American leagues: gross and net salaries, total money amount of your contracts, duration, transfer and renewal dates…

Before explaining how they did it, it is useful to review the origins of the project. Luna, an American from Colorado, and Pasquetti, an Italian from Milan, met in Barcelona in 2015 and both earned master’s degrees in business management and analysis. “We became good friends and bonded with each other thanks to our shared love for the sport. After finishing my studies, I returned to the USA. I was aiming to work for a team. NBA” describes Luna in a video call with EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA, a newspaper owned by the Prensa Ibérica group and this media.

The Capology co-founder wanted to steer his professional career towards managing a franchise’s salary structures, and for this he developed software that is the core of the website today. “I’ve interviewed a lot of them, but they’re interested in it as an internal tool and it’s had the potential to create a company that would support different clubs from different sports. “I didn’t have a deep knowledge of the football industry, but Federico was there and we saw an opportunity at that point,” he continues.

Already in 2019, along with Pasquetti and Luna, they decided to throw themselves into football, and two years later, they chose to put the rest of the sport aside last summer. “In the US, almost everyone has access to the data, but that doesn’t happen in football, and we found that there is an open market niche, although it is a huge challenge to get the information. Now there is something else, but it’s three years away.” first, when we started, it was really scarce,” the founders continue.

Two types of fonts

And now yes, the answer to the big question. How do they do this? Since there are several pages on the Internet that claim to collect salary data for football players, but these are unreliable, these are just rough estimates. But none (or almost none) why clubs, agents, brokers and tech companies pay subscriptionsAs in Capology.

“We have two types of information sources. One is publicly accessible, media-provided, that we have verified to be fairly reliable when a high percentage of cases are present in the case of the major leagues. .from several different sources. Another type of resource is the private contacts we have with clubs, managers, agents and other players.“Pasquetti’s comments.

Continually increasing this network of dedicated resources is one of the main tasks of the three full-time employees Capology currently has. Because there is data that they can’t access, as it makes sense, covering 100,000 players. This is where the technology explained with an example by Pasquetti comes into play.

“Let’s say we know the salaries of 10 players for a team and we don’t know the salaries of 15. Since we know the total cost of that club’s annual salaries, we subtract the amount we know and make an estimate of how the rest is distributed. It’s not arbitrary, an algorithm that we have perfected and that takes into account the different variables and characteristics of football players“, they comment. Currently, they only consider fixed salaries, excluding variables that try to simplify the work.

Also, the web makes it clear which data comes from their source (marked with a green ‘tick’) that is real and which comes from predictions made by the algorithm. In any case, Capology a section where any user can report potential bugs. “We appreciate, correct and apologize when this happens, but overall we are confident that our data is reliable and of the highest possible quality,” says its founders.

LaLiga’s three clients

As Capology’s client, three clubs from the English Premier League and Championship, the Belgian League, the American MLS and LaLiga cannot be named for confidentiality reasons. They also use their services. agents, brokers, and consulting and technology companies that provide external services to clubs. However, most of the data is freely accessible to anyone accessing the website.

In addition to information regarding player contracts, Capology also collects data about: club finance. “It was information we had and used internally, and we realized it was interesting to journalists and students, so we added it to our software in recent months. We followed the market and realized that there was only one application that was providing access to this data in a compiled form,” says Luna.

Summer is, of course, the most challenging time for the company, given the volume of new contracts filed daily. Therefore, the information update takes several weeks to complete. In parallel, they are expanding their database: “South American leagues are an interesting market for many of our customers, so we are working to increase the knowledge we have about them and get more of our own resources to work with.”

And all this to ease the silence of the main actors of the football industry regarding their salaries: “We believe that in 10 years clubs will make themselves public.. In the end, all parties want to know this data for their own benefit. Sooner or later that will change.”

Meanwhile, according to Capology data, the highest paid actress in the world is Kylian Mbappé with her net annual salary. 50 million €. And in LaLiga the record belongs to Eden Hazard (15 million), followed by Frenkie de Jong (14) and Karim Benzema (11.5).