This is the story behind the first episode of our podcast. Watch the full conversation here.

A year ago, Estrella Football Group was an idea and a LinkedIn post. Today we own four clubs across Europe. The number most people focus on is four. The number that taught us the most is the one we don't put in press releases: the deals we walked away from.

We want to talk about those openly, because the football industry doesn't do much of that. Everyone announces the wins. Nobody explains the eight-month negotiation that collapsed the week before signing, or what it cost to walk away. So here is our first year, honestly — the parts that worked and the parts that didn't.

We fell in love too fast

We started by posting openly that we were building a horizontal multi-club group and asking which clubs needed help. The response was a flood. In the early months, we chased everything, and we fell hard for two clubs in particular, one in Greece, one in Denmark. We ran full due diligence on both.

Both collapsed. Greek football got expensive in ways that broke our model. In Denmark, the co-investors around the table didn't share our vision, and we've learned that a shared vision isn't a nice-to-have; it's the deal. Losing both after a frantic summer stung. But we'd rather lose a deal in due diligence than lose money for three years after signing.

That's become a discipline we're almost proud of now: the willingness to stop. We closed out a nine-month process only recently because it no longer fit. It still hurts every time. As Xander puts it, you fall in love with a football club, they all look beautiful from the outside, and the hardest, most necessary skill is walking away anyway. You should never buy a club on emotion alone.

Discipline needs a system

You can't be selective on instinct at scale, not when five to ten clubs are coming to you every week. So we built a tool that scrapes and ranks roughly 2,200 European clubs every day against 35 hard criteria. When a club reaches out, we know within minutes whether it's worth a conversation. Over the past year, that funnel meant genuinely assessing around 350 clubs, four or five live at any moment, each at a different stage.

The point isn't the technology. It's that saying no to the wrong clubs is what lets us say yes, fast, to the right ones.

Pro Patria taught us how football really works

Some deals test your nerve rather than your model. Pro Patria, fourteen years of Serie A history, is the one that nearly got away in the most dramatic way possible.

We first spoke almost a year before we closed. The club was struggling, so we waited, because timing is its own criterion: move too slowly, and the air goes out of the balloon; move too fast, and you miss what's hidden. After they were relegated from Serie C to Serie D, they came back to us.

Then, the day before we were due to sign at the notary, one shareholder quietly sold her stake to a rival investor, a sale half the other shareholders knew nothing about. We walked into the notary's office to discover the club had effectively been sold out from under us the day before. So we fixed it: conversations with the mayor, with the other shareholders, with everyone around the club, until the deal came back over the line.

We're not sharing that to complain. We're sharing it because it's the reality of dealmaking in football, and pretending otherwise helps no one. Patience and conviction, held together, are what actually close deals here.

What we actually sell

Clubs always ask for money first. What they almost always need is operational help off the pitch, which is why we don't think of ourselves as investors but as operational partners. We turned down a conversation in under a minute once because someone wanted €500,000 to go buy a striker. That's not what we do.

We're not for everyone, and we've stopped trying to be. That's the real lesson of year one, and it's why year two is already busier than the first.

Hear the full conversation with David, Xander and Laura on the Estrella podcast on YouTube or Spotify.