Women’s Soccer Investing, AI Disruption & Global Trends ft. Daniel Altman | Navigating Wealth
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We spoke to Daniel Altman on this week’s episode of Navigating Wealth. Dan is a Harvard-trained economist, founder, and bestselling author who’s written for The Economist, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Foreign Policy, advised the British government, and built a second career in professional sports investing.
In this conversation, Dan walks through how he structures sports investments (including a Canadian women’s soccer club), what generative AI might actually do to white-collar work, and why he thinks U.S. investors need to pay more attention to currency moves and foreign direct investment.
We also went deep on: how to turn the principal–agent problem in real estate to your advantage, why MLS club valuations might be frothy, what his Baseline Profitability Index says about where to invest globally, and how high debt-to-GDP ratios could flow through into inflation, gold, and the dollar.
Key Ideas from This Episode
Guest Snapshot
Name: Daniel Altman
Titles: Economist, founder, investor
Credentials: PhD in economics from Harvard; former economics correspondent at The Economist and columnist at The New York Times; economic advisor in the British government; adjunct professor at NYU Stern.
Current focus: Author of the High Yield Economics newsletter and creator of the Baseline Profitability Index, a tool for evaluating foreign direct investment opportunities around the world.
Additional areas of expertise: Professional sports analytics and club investing, early-stage investing in “unsexy” billion-dollar platform opportunities, and building a jazz performance space in Englewood, NJ.
How Dan Hacks the Principal–Agent Problem in Real Estate
The episode opens with Dan explaining why the standard realtor commission model can create misaligned incentives: the seller thinks they’re paying for top-dollar execution while the agent may, rationally, try to close quickly and move on to the next listing.
He shares two practical hacks to realign incentives and negotiate a lower commission rate, particularly on multi-million dollar homes:
1). Use a “rebate agent” as a buyer.
When Dan bought his current house, he used a boutique rebate agent whose base fee was $10,000 and passed the rest of the commission back to him. Dan did the search and most of the work himself; the agent stepped in at the end to capture and rebate the commission.
2). Exploit the commission split in competitive bids.
In a multi-bid situation, he shared his experince coming in without his own agent, so that if his offer wins, the seller’s agent keeps the full commission. That puts him “in pole position” relative to other buyers whose agents would require a split. He’s effectively co-opted the seller’s agent to also want his bid to win.
Dan notes that this whole incentive structure is a classic principal–agent problem—so much so that he’s writing about it in his upcoming book, Economics for the Win, which focuses on using economic tools to make better everyday decisions.
From Harvard Economist to Sports Investor
Dan’s career path is unusually non-linear for an economist, and that breadth is part of what makes his perspective so valuable to founders and investors. He went straight from his undergraduate degree into a PhD in economics at Harvard, where he even taught Tad in Principles of Economics. Instead of pursuing a traditional academic trajectory, he left the tenure track entirely and became the economics correspondent at The Economist in London. From there, he joined The New York Times, first on the editorial board and later in the newsroom as an economics writer.
After journalism, Dan moved into a series of roles that further expanded his view of how economies function in the real world. He served as an economic advisor in the British government, worked in global development consulting at Dalberg, and spent roughly a decade as an adjunct professor at NYU Stern. There, he taught courses ranging from macroeconomic forecasting to the role of private enterprise in poverty reduction to the emerging field of sports analytics.
Eventually, Dan made a significant pivot into professional sports. He began doing moneyball-style analytics for organizations such as City Football Group—the owners of Manchester City and several other clubs—as well as Premier League and MLS teams and U.S. Olympic programs in volleyball and weightlifting. He also built and later exited an online soccer scouting platform. Along the way, he and a partner began buying stakes in clubs, including a particularly successful English investment that more than doubled their money in just a couple of years.
All of these experiences inform Dan’s framework for investing in sports. He doesn’t approach clubs as a fan with a checkbook. He approaches them as an economist—analyzing cash flows, media economics, optionality, and the value created by promotion within league systems.
Why Women’s Soccer Is a Live-Content Goldmine
One of the most actionable parts of the conversation for people interested in alternative assets is Dan’s breakdown of women’s soccer as an investment.
He and his partner are investors in a club in the new Canadian women’s professional league. They see two big drivers:
Live content is the “emperor.” Streaming platforms can buy scripted shows from lots of places; what differentiates them is live content. Soccer has already proven itself as premium live content globally, and the appetite for women’s sports specifically is now “growing strongly” as well.
Relatability and story-driven fandom. Women’s soccer benefits from a huge existing base of girls who play, a long-dominant U.S. national team, and national teams like Canada that rank in the global top 5–10—but until recently, there was no domestic professional pathway or week-in, week-out league to follow. Dan frames this as “low-hanging fruit” finally being picked: the talent, fandom, and international prestige were all there; the domestic leagues were not.
He contrasts that with something like pickleball: lots of participation, real relatability, but no established culture of watching matches—so building a serious media rights business is much more speculative.
The Business Model Behind Buying Soccer Clubs
Dan also walks through several concrete ways that investors can make money in soccer, starting with what he calls the classic private equity-style “promotion play.” In their English club investment, he and his partner bought a third-division team with the intention of getting it promoted to the second division—the Championship—within five to seven years. Promotion alone would immediately increase the club’s broadcast revenues, and it would also move the team into a tier where ultra-wealthy buyers are more likely to pay a premium for an asset they believe they can push toward the Premier League.
He then explains the broader media economics that drive these valuations—and the risks that come with them. Moving up a division increases a club’s media revenue substantially. The Championship’s broadcast deals are far richer than those in League One, and the Premier League operates at an entirely different level.
Dan remains cautious about investing in MLS. He notes that some MLS teams now have enterprise values higher than storied European clubs such as Ajax or Milan. In his view, that pricing reflects a mix of extremely valuable stadium real estate, municipally subsidized facilities worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and investor belief that soccer will eventually become as large as football or baseball in the United States. The result is what he views as frothy valuations—stakes are expensive even in some second- and third-division U.S. clubs—so he has chosen to stay on the sidelines.
What Gen AI Really Means for Blue-Collar vs White-Collar Work
Dan’s experience as the chief economist at Instawork, a marketplace for in-person hourly work, shapes the way he thinks about generative AI. He makes a clear distinction between types of jobs and how exposed they are to automation. In his view, “standing jobs” are largely insulated. Instawork already uses AI to help match workers to shifts and reduce friction across the marketplace, but generative AI itself is not going to load pallets, serve catered meals, or perform other forms of physical, in-person labor. AI might offer useful tools around these jobs, but it is not a substitute for them.
Where Dan sees real vulnerability is in a broad band of white-collar roles. He notes research showing that about half of consumer spending comes from a relatively small group of high-income households. The people at the very top may be able to use AI as leverage, but he worries about what he calls the “middle swath” of high-income sitting and white-collar workers, whose tasks may be more directly automatable.
To make sense of what could happen next, Dan draws a parallel to the last 30 to 40 years of globalization and technological change. During that period, blue-collar workers were often the ones displaced, and many countries—particularly the United States—did not offer effective retraining or support during those transitions. He believes that the political environment today reflects the consequences of that failure, with large groups of people feeling left out and frustrated.
His concern is that the same pattern could repeat, but this time with white-collar workers. As he puts it, “What if we had that again, but this time with those white collar workers? … I shudder to think what our politics would look like then.”
Because of this, Dan argues that the United States needs something akin to a modern GI Bill for people affected by technological and trade shocks. He points out that the U.S. has what he describes as a “terrible market for training,” where companies have little incentive to invest in workers who can easily leave or be let go, and where there is no robust apprenticeship system comparable to countries like Germany.
Are We in a New Gilded Age? Debt, Inflation, and the Dollar
When the conversation turns to macroeconomic trends, Dan reaches for historical parallels to make sense of the current moment. He says that aspects of today’s U.S. economy remind him of the Gilded Age, a period when a small group of people became extraordinarily wealthy and closely connected to government, while many others experienced stagnant or declining living standards. Historically, he notes, this combination has led to revolution in some countries and, in the United States, to intense political backlash and major reforms.
He also makes a more provocative comparison between the United States today and Argentina during the Peronist years, drawing specifically on the period under Cristina Kirchner. The policies experienced during that time period—such as high tariffs, large fiscal deficits, taxes on exports, government involvement in companies, and the threat of currency devaluation—feel familiar to him when he looks at aspects of U.S. economic policy now.
These analogies lead Dan into a discussion of the Baseline Profitability Index (BPI), the tool he developed to assess the attractiveness of foreign direct investment in different countries. The index pulls together public data on factors such as economic growth, the risk of expropriation, corruption, capital controls, past financial crises, insecurity, and real exchange rate risk. Some countries, including Singapore and parts of Scandinavia, tend to perform well on governance and safety measures. Others—such as India, several African markets, and some Eastern European countries—can rank highly once their expected real exchange rate appreciation is taken into account. By contrast, Dan notes that the United States currently lands somewhere in the middle of the pack on his index.
From there, he explains why currency exposure matters more than many U.S. investors assume. He points out that Americans once held roughly 90 percent of their portfolios in U.S. assets, but that figure has fallen closer to 60 percent. As an example of how currency moves can affect returns, he describes buying German government bonds to gain exposure to the euro. Because the dollar has weakened by about 10 to 15 percent against the euro this year, that foreign-exchange move alone has produced returns similar to the S&P 500, in addition to the bonds’ yield. He also notes that roughly 10 to 11 percent of U.S. consumer spending goes toward imports—not only luxury goods but also everyday items like clothing. When the dollar depreciates, Americans effectively become poorer in global terms, even if their domestic portfolios look healthy.
Dan adds that, in his view, gold has outperformed U.S. markets since the Great Recession. He ties this to the high debt-to-GDP ratios seen across many major economies—levels he identifies as being above 100 percent—which he believes are driving investors toward inflation hedges such as gold, real estate, and certain currencies like the Swiss franc.
For him, the overall message is straightforward: for high-net-worth U.S. investors, ignoring foreign direct investment and currency exposure is no longer as low-risk—or as harmless—as it once seemed.
Other Quotes Worth Sitting With
A few lines that capture Dan’s worldview:
“Content is king and live content is really the emperor.” (on why live sports sit at the top of the media food chain)
“We bought a third division team thinking if we could get it to the second division, then we would have a three X or four X on our hands easily.” (on treating promotion like a PE play)
“Generative AI is not going to load a pallet for you.” (on why standing jobs are insulated from gen AI)
“We are going to get poorer as Americans because of the depreciation of the dollar. We can’t avoid that.” (on currency moves showing up in real life)
“I’m always looking for companies that do things that are kind of unsexy and yet have the possibility to grow into a billion dollar platform.” (on his early-stage investing lens)
Links You Might Find Valuable
All of these came up directly in the episode:
Join Long Angle Community - A private, vetted community of accomplished wealth builders.
High Yield Economics – Dan’s free weekly economics newsletter on LinkedIn.
Baseline Profitability Index – Dan’s tool for evaluating foreign direct investment opportunities across countries.
Gross Domestic Provocation – Dan’s new podcast with hedge fund investor Jason Freeman and marketing operator Jeremy Hudson, unpacking what economic news means for real people.
Economics for the Win: Practical Principles to Help with 30 Life Decisions – Dan’s upcoming book.
