Daniel Hart covers the business of football for FootyGazette. He writes about money, power, ownership, regulation, and the long-form consequences of both — the part of the game that happens in chairmen's offices, courtrooms, and Companies House filings, and which determines, more often than supporters care to admit, what they will end up watching on a Saturday afternoon. He breaks news rather than analyses tactics, and he reports the transfer market not as a parade of shirt-holding photographs but as a complex, opaque, and often legally fragile global capital flow.

Hart is based in London. He read Economics at the University of Loughborough between 2010 and 2013, and completed an MA in Financial Journalism at City, University of London, in 2014. He spent his first six post-graduate years at the Financial Times, where he worked on the Companies desk and, later, the Media and Sport beat, covering broadcasting rights, club ownership structures, and the early days of the Premier League's owners' and directors' test reforms. It was at the FT that he learned the habit of mind that still defines his work: the assumption that, in any football story involving large sums of money, the press release is at best a partial account, and at worst the opposite of what is happening.

He left the FT in 2021 to cover football full time, joining a daily financial wire as its football business correspondent before going freelance in 2024. His work has appeared in The Athletic, Off The Pitch, Tifo Football, and The Guardian's sports business vertical, where he co-bylined a 2024 investigation into multi-club ownership structures in the Championship that prompted a follow-up inquiry from the EFL.

His areas of expertise include Profit and Sustainability Rules, UEFA Financial Fair Play and the new squad cost ratio framework, multi-club ownership, broadcasting rights cycles, club valuations and private equity in football, Companies House and corporate filings analysis, transfer structuring, and the regulatory architecture of the proposed English football regulator. He is unusually fluent in reading a set of audited accounts and unusually patient at explaining what they show.

His sources network, built across a decade of careful, low-key reporting, runs through agents, intermediaries, finance directors, club lawyers, broadcast executives, and former regulators on both sides of the Channel. He does not name them publicly, and he prefers, where the law and the source allow, to put names on the page.

Hart writes for FootyGazette because, in his view, football's financial reporting has historically been split between trade publications that assume too much and consumer outlets that assume too little. He is sceptical, evidence-led, and instinctively distrustful of the phrase "sources close to the club." He supports West Ham, a fact he discloses where relevant and pretends not to mind where it isn't. He lives in Walthamstow with his wife and a young son whose first complete sentence was reportedly "Daddy, what's amortisation?"

You can reach Daniel at [email protected].