In this interview, Mark Finn talks with us about international accounting with international sports teams and how this affects financial statements. Mark Finn. I'm a professor of accounting, Clinical Professor of Accounting at the Kellogg. School of Management at Northwestern University. I teach overseas, and so my specialty is international accounting and I teach in India, Thailand. I had been a visiting faculty in Japan and China, some other countries. I would say that basically, it's different simply because the business itself is somewhat different. So, the accounting principles that get invoked have a lot to do with companies with a lot of intangible value. But in particular, what really set sports teams at part is the value of human capital, especially like players, coaches, and managers, and trainers, and the senior executives who make very sophisticated calls about the direction of the organization. We know that accounting systems don't handle those issues particularly well, okay? So, those are some of the issues that bedevil modern companies generally. So, in that sense, sports organizations resembled a tech sector. But I would say, whereas the tech sector is very much about technology and cutting-edge business processes, sports organizations have that as well but they have this incredible reliance on human resources, the human resources assets. It's the main driver I would say. If you look at any of these large, first of all, the clubs have a long story or history. They're playing in stadiums that have been around for a long time. The stadiums, I'm sure they come and go but at a very slow pace. So, there are basically three sources of revenue. Match day revenue, which is basically the gate receipts connected to the, actually playing the games attendance. So, that's driven by just the size of the stadium, that ticket prices. Broadcasting revenue, which is the cut of the broadcasting rights that each club gets, and then commercial or they call commercial revenue, which is sponsorships. It's simply the case that commercial revenues growing the fastest. Part of that, in soccer is connected to the importance of the brands internationally. So, there's one comment that I like to make that I'll just interject at this point because it's important. I've been traveling to Asia for decades and leading Northwestern groups to Asia since 1990s. If you go back into say the mid 1990s, if you visited a village in Vietnam, you would see sports brands. They were often American MBA in particular, and the one that just jumped out was the Chicago Bulls. During the era of Michael Jordan, Chicago Bulls was everywhere in the world. I've gone back every year and watch that slowly get displace. So, now the premier brands are the international soccer brands. They're just dominant globally. Everyone in every country knows about them. Young people have a passion for those teams. They face challenges of profitability internationally. The American sports teams, the challenge for me is transparency and disclosure because it's very difficult to get public information about their finances. They're very guarded about that. Not so with the foreign teams, in particular the soccer clubs around the world. But to be honest, they tend not to be so profitable. So, one thing that's very specific to the soccer world or the financial fair play rules that were enacted to try to, and it sounds weird from an American contexts, but they require the companies to be profitable. Because there is a history of rich billionaire is buying soccer clubs as trophy properties, and then essentially outcompeting other clubs for players and managerial talent and doing so at losses, so that they actually have rules against that. There's actually a whole legislation and a whole court body. Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City, some of the clubs that rose allegedly through wealthy owners essentially opening their checkbook up to spend hugely on players have been called before that body and essentially admitted guilt or promise not to do it without admitting guilt.