For all the brand awareness, the human element in decision making in the most emotional of sports is undervalued

When William Goldman wrote in his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade that in Hollywood “nobody knows anything”, he coined a phrase that spoke directly to the chaos at the heart of the movie industry. It was a remark made in 1983, the year of classic movies such as Tootsie, Trading Places and Local Hero and an era when the box office was booming.

The phrase came to mind this past week in the ballroom of the Peninsula hotel in London, where the great and the good and the rest of the global football industry gathered for the latest FT Business of Football Summit.