Hi {{first_name}},

I was in Kansas City a few weeks ago for the Argentina-Switzerland World Cup quarterfinal. My brother-in-law and I were walking back from the concession stand, doing the kind of math you do when you're holding a plastic cup in one hand and a receipt in the other. A Michelob Ultra was $27. Tequila and soda ran $29.

"Tequila's only two bucks more," I said. "That's the value play." He laughed, and that kicked off the next ninety minutes. We priced the whole building: the jerseys, the parking, tickets that cost just shy of what I paid for my first car.

FIFA set those ticket prices, and took a cut of every seat in the house. Twenty years of buying companies taught me to ask one question about anything in front of me: where does the value actually sit, and who's positioned to capture it. Standing in that stadium, I ran the same question on FIFA. Then, half-joking, on the lady selling the tequila.

Mac Allister got the first one. Switzerland leveled it, then played the last third of the match down a man and somehow hung on. Into extra time. Martinez put Argentina back ahead. Alvarez finished it late. Final score, 3-1.

The place erupted, the guy in front of us screaming until his voice gave out. Eighty thousand people on their feet. My brother-in-law had my shoulder in his hand, and we yelled right along with the Argentinian fans. Eighty thousand people losing their minds at the same moment is its own kind of unhinged. Worth every overpriced dollar.

I hadn't told my brother-in-law something yet. I own a small piece of the company that produced the video game riding on this World Cup, FIFA 2026. Sitting in that noise, I thought about that deal: a company I have a small stake in used FIFA's name to land a distribution deal with Netflix Games.

He turned to me at one point and asked the question I'd been expecting: "Can you invest in any of this?"

He meant the whole roaring, $15 billion machine.

There's a gap between what everyone in that stadium can see and what any of us can actually own. I used to think about buying one small business at a time. Now I think about which piece of a machine like FIFA I can actually own.

This week:

— Walker Deibel
WSJ & USA Today Bestselling Author of Buy Then Build
Founder, Build Wealth

FIFA cleared a record $9+ billion in revenue at this summer’s World Cup and is on pace for roughly $15 billion across the full four-year cycle. No brand reaches more people or attaches this much money to a single property.

As an investor, you can't own any of it. You can't reach it through a broker or a fund. FIFA is registered under Article 60 of the Swiss Civil Code, the same non-profit designation available to a neighborhood chess club. That designation places no cap on what FIFA earns. It only governs where the money lands once it arrives: operations, the next tournament, the member federations. None of it ever becomes a share you could buy.

Now compare that to another sports property, Formula 1. Same class of global spectacle, comparable economics, but a completely different ownership path.

For decades F1 was a private asset passed between owners. Bernie Ecclestone ran its commercial engine, the private-equity firm CVC controlled it, and in 2017 Liberty Media bought it outright and folded it into a public company. Today it's listed on the Nasdaq under FWONK. You can own a piece of it this afternoon, the same shares large institutions already hold, Berkshire Hathaway among them.

Two nearly identical machines for turning global attention into money. What decides whether you can touch one of them is a series of decisions, made and remade over decades, about how each would be owned. F1's owners cut a path for outside capital. FIFA never did.

Why the brand you recognize is the wrong one to chase

When a brand is that big, the instinct is to chase proximity and take a little piece of its greatness. In public markets that's fine, because greatness is sold by the share. In private markets it's expensive, because the asset you know by name is rarely the asset that pays you well.

By the time something is famous enough that you've heard of it, capital has usually already found a way to package it and sell it to everyone. The edge is the small, single-purpose, unglamorous companies that aren't aiming for a household name, at least not yet.

Reaching those opportunities is the job of private market investors. Owning the part of the flow the public markets can't access.

The Screen Test

Before you wire money into any private or alternative deal, you run a check. Could you buy this exact position off a public brokerage screen? Anything that trades there is already priced and available to anyone with a brokerage account.

Two types of entities can fail that test. You need to develop the skill to identify them.

FIFA makes an ideal teacher because it holds both kinds in one picture. At the center sits the closed kind, a brand no one will ever own a share of, at any price. Close to $3.9 billion of this year's revenue came from broadcasting rights alone, more than $3 billion from hospitality and ticketing, and every dollar of it landed with an entity someone could buy into. The money flows outward from an unownable center, and downstream sit the companies you can own.

Somewhere in that flow, this year, sat exactly the kind of company the Screen Test says to look for. Unlisted, real, and standing on a permission it never owned.

Delphi Interactive is the kind of company the Screen Test points to. No one can buy a share of FIFA. Someone can own a piece of the studio FIFA handed a ten-year license to build its games. That studio is Delphi, and it sits right at the edge where the money flows out of the brand.

Delphi's model is easy to describe and hard to pull off. License a franchise the whole world knows, then build a top-notch product on top of it. Their first real license was 007, six years before the 2026 FIFA game launched. Winning it took more than money. Delphi convinced both the rights holder and the developer that it was the right home for a new James Bond title, then raised tens of millions around the agreement.

The bet paid off in public. 007 First Light shipped on May 26 and sold roughly 3 million copies in two weeks, landing in the top 2% of premium game launches ever. Delphi licensed the game and brought in IO Interactive, the studio behind the Hitman franchise, to build it.

That finished game, and the work behind it, is what got Delphi into the room for FIFA. The two signed a ten-year partnership, rare for a brand that guards its name as tightly as FIFA does. The FIFA game, an exclusive title on Netflix's own gaming platform, playable by subscribers straight from their phones, to coincide with the World Cup.

Each finished license becomes the credential that wins the next one. 007 earned the room for FIFA. Delphi's CEO, Casper Daugaard, has said publicly the company is now in talks with what he's called some of the most iconic brands in the world.

A licensing model

It's a Buy Then Build model applied to licenses instead of businesses, an engine built to run the same play again.

And this is where the edge turns into ownership. As an early investor, I took a position in Delphi before either game shipped, back when the licenses were signed and the outcomes were still unwritten. FIFA stayed unownable the entire time. Delphi, the studio building on top of it, was mine to own from the start.

That's what investing at the edge of a brand looks like. Owning the companies a giant brand pays, while the brand itself stays permanently out of reach.

Find the small, lucrative deals that live off a brand that big, and you own the part no screen can sell you.

100 BuildInteractive investors were able to invest in Delphi before either title had launched. For them it was personal. Watching two licensed bets, signed years apart, both land with real audiences in the same year was the closest thing to watching a thesis prove itself in real time.

A license can look like the whole business, but it's really just the starting point. It works like buying a company with good bones and a tired owner. You're not paying for a finished thing, you're paying for the room to build one.

Here's what these five tests can check for and what gets built once you're inside.

Test 1: How much renewal term is left. 

Count the years remaining, on a date you can write down. That number is your runway to build before the deal is back on the table.

Test 2: Exclusivity or shared-licensee status. 

A sole licensee gets better economics and full exposure to one relationship. A shared licensee gets thinner economics and more cover if that relationship sours. What matters is what you plan to do with the time either one buys.

Test 3: What's been built since the license was granted.

Rights change hands. This year Amazon's MGM deal moved the 007 rights under new ownership. For a one-license company, that kind of shift is the whole story. Delphi started on that same 007 license, then added a second title and a ten-year FIFA deal, so no single franchise holds its fate. The question is what a company builds while the clock runs.

Test 4: What's left if the license disappears.

Pull the license out tomorrow. What's left, a real studio with a pipeline and a team that's shipped before, or an office and a logo.

Test 5: Contracted revenue versus portable skill. 

Measure how much of the top line carries one license's name against how much capability the team keeps regardless. Could they relicense elsewhere tomorrow, new rights holder, same team, same tools?

Run the five and the question flips. You stop asking how exposed a company is and start asking what it built while it had the access. 

Because the license is the soul of a business like this. It's the borrowed name that gives an ordinary company the right to build something the world actually wants, and the whole bet rides on what the team makes of that permission while they hold it.

"Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world."

— Archimedes

An average business without IP is… average. 

The right IP, however, gives it permission to invest heavily to engineer a world class product. Whenever possible, start with a built in audience.

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This is not financial advice. Illustrative output of a reasoned thought experiment. Not a backtest, guarantee, or prospectus. Actual results vary based on market conditions, fund selection, timing, fees, taxes, and factors not modeled. Private credit, CRE, and leveraged strategies involve significant risk including loss of principal. Consult a qualified financial advisor.