MarginalThinking
Finance and Economics

An empty stadium is still worth billions In March 2026, a private equity fund took majority control of Atletico Madrid. In June, a cryptocurrency exchange became an official partner of the FIFA World Cup. And investors are now pricing women's football the way venture capitalists price a Series B startup, not the way anyone prices a mature sports league. Football did not get more popular this year. It got financialised. The real story of football in 2026 is not on the pitch. F

What is a company that has doubled its revenue two years running, and still lost almost six thousand crore rupees this year, actually worth? That was the question I sat down to answer a few weeks before Zepto's IPO, armed with nothing but a discounted cash flow model and the numbers in its own prospectus. I thought it would take an afternoon. It took a week, and at the end of it, I didn't have an answer. I had a range so wide it barely qualified as one: a floor under $4 billi

India announced ₹1.96 lakh crore in PLI incentives to build world-class factories. The same year, every major PLI sector spent less on R&D than a mid-sized Korean firm does in one quarter. The factories are going up. The ideas aren't. This isn't a critique of industrial policy. It's a critique of this industrial policy, and of the quiet assumption embedded in its design, that if you build enough capacity, capability will follow. It won't. And the historical evidence is clear