The Free Dream XI: The Price Nobody Has Declared

The image has only eleven squares. Red with white trim, unmistakably Arsenal. In the middle, a withdrawn second striker in a 4-4-2 — a small detail most people scroll past. In the bottom right corner, a faint line of text that everyone sees and nobody reads. I received it in a seven-person chat group, all of them people who have followed football for more than twenty years. Forty seconds later, the image was forwarded three more times. Forty minutes later, it sat inside a post with over four hundred comments arguing about whether Roy Keane should line up alongside Patrick Vieira. Nobody asked where the picture came from. Nobody asked who built the tool that made it, or who is paying to keep it alive. That is where I stopped. At forty-eight, I have learned one thing: whatever is handed out free to the many is usually the most expensive item in the accounting room — the invoice simply has not reached the right person yet. Over the past eighteen months, lineup-building tools have sprouted like mushrooms. The structure is almost identical: an empty pitch, a library of classic formations — 4-4-2, 3-5-2 and 5-3-2 — drag-and-drop players, squad-number editing, kit colours matched to club identity, then download or share straight to social media. Some versions support small-sided pitches, down to five-a-side. Their cultural anchor is obvious. EA Sports FC and Football Manager taught two generations of fans to read a match through a formation. Viewers no longer say "this team plays well"; they say "this team plays 3-2-5 in possession." The diagram has become a common language, a technical dialect that anyone who has held a controller can speak. Based on my experience covering matches across three decades, this is the mark of a mature market: once the public already owns the technical grammar, the product only needs to supply the pen. A lineup builder does not create demand — it harvests demand that was cultivated long before. But the formation library says more than the menu does. 4-4-2, 3-5-2, 5-3-2 are classic shapes, the kind taught in every Level C coaching course. They do not reflect how modern football operates: no in-possession/out-of-possession shape splitting, no box midfield, no 3-2-5 in possession. That absence is a positioning choice — aimed at casual fans, not at a club's analysis room. And when a product chooses to target the many, the accounting question arrives right behind the feature question. I opened that tool's page three times, at three different moments across four months. No pricing table. No subscription tier. No visible owner. Not one small slot marked "sponsor." No commercial terms stated. An empty stadium, but the books are never short of visitors. A free product with no visible advertising, no subscription fee, no sponsor — what does it live on, and for whom does it live. I do not speculate. I simply record three gaps: no price, no owner, no disclosed cash flow. But one thing is disclosed very clearly — people just do not read it. The player names. In those images, Patrick Vieira, Roy Keane, Cristiano Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane are placed side by side like labels. Add to that a colour palette tied to club identity: red and white for Arsenal, all white for Real Madrid, orange for the Netherlands national team. This is where I want to linger longest, because it touches exactly what I have pursued for years: intangible assets. Those names, and those colour palettes, are not decoration. They are intellectual property. In markets with clear law, the right to use a player's name and likeness is a real cost line, with contracts, sellers and buyers. EA Sports pays for it through a FIFPro-style collective licensing mechanism. Kit manufacturers pay for it through technical sponsorship deals. Shirt sponsors pay for it through club commercial contracts. That lineup tool uses exactly those names, exactly those colour palettes — and discloses not a single line about its legal basis. Perhaps it holds licences and simply does not say so. Perhaps it leans on the gap between "illustrative use" and "commercial exploitation." I draw no conclusion. I only say: that gap is real, and it carries real risk. There is another, subtler layer. The player list is not random. Vieira, Keane, Zidane — retired. Ronaldo — late career. Not one name sits in the category of active elite players, the category with communications teams that actively protect their image and respond quickly. That is brand-safety strategy. Choose legends to capture the full recognition value without carrying media risk. An active player can pick up an injury, a scandal, a ban — and the image bearing his name ages along with the scandal. A retired legend stands still. He is a non-depreciating asset. Zinedine Zidane once named Patrick Vieira in his personal All-Time Premier League XI — a contested pick, and also a verifiable data point. Placed in the right spot, that detail becomes kindling for a debate scheduled in advance. And then comes the smallest detail, and the most expensive one: Vieira and Keane side by side. Those two were famous adversaries, facing off in iconic Manchester derbies. Putting them in the same midfield is a calculated provocation. Users download the image, post it, and immediately someone objects. Argument generates engagement. Engagement generates impressions. Impressions generate value. This is a growth model built on provocation, not features. The tool does not need to be distinctive. It only needs to be easy enough to produce a controversial image within thirty seconds. I sat down with a digital product person in the industry who has shipped several free fan tools. He said one thing I recorded verbatim: when the stadium lights go out, the accountant turns on the desk lamp. No product is free at the accounting layer. There are only products whose invoice the user has not yet seen. He laid out four common monetisation paths for this kind of tool. Advertising — but advertising must be visible, and here it is not. Paid tiers — which require a price list, and here there is none. Selling behavioural data — which needs no price list, only enough users. Raise capital and figure it out later — meaning value sits in user numbers, not revenue. I have no evidence for the first three paths. But I have evidence for something else: this tool is engineered to spread, and spreading always leaves a data trail. Every time a user drags a player, they are telling the system whom they like. Every time they pick Arsenal's colours, they are declaring an identity they follow. Every time they download, they plant a behavioural marker on a timeline. One person doing this means nothing. A million people doing it is a preference map of an entire market. The advertising industry calls that intent signal. I call it the reading diary of the many, written in their own hand, without anyone knowing they are writing it. But I must be fair. The data-selling hypothesis is a hypothesis, not a finding. It does not hold without evidence. And in this case, the evidence tilts toward a different, plainer direction: value sits in reach. Market density tells the rest of the story. Dozens of free lineup builders coexist. The features are near-identical: drag, number, colour, download. Switching costs between one tool and another are close to zero — a user only needs to open another tab. When switching costs are low and features are uniform, a product loses its ability to defend itself. Nothing retains users except habit. And habit is not protected by patent. In such a market, only two paths survive. One is to become the largest by reach, so that value sits in scale rather than in the product. The other is to climb a tier — integrating real data, real metrics, real transfer values. The second path is what interests me, because it touches the core of my trade. If a lineup builder integrates xG data, minutes played, and player market value, it crosses into a different tier entirely. It is no longer a toy. It becomes an analysis tool, and the person paying for it will not be a casual fan but a professional. At that tier, data must be bought. And at that tier, player names must be licensed. Two invoices will appear at the same time. I have cross-checked this industry's transmission path over years of watching. Fan culture upstream produces the technical grammar. Tools and content creators in the middle turn that grammar into product. Downstream is social sharing, video games, and commercial money. A lineup builder sits neatly in the middle tier, and it survives because the tier below is thirsty for content. But the middle tier is the thinnest. There, margins are squeezed from both sides: users pay nothing, while data suppliers always demand a higher price than last season. There is one more detail I do not want to skip, because it says a lot about strategy: the tool supports small-sided pitches, down to five-a-side. That is not a minor technical detail. It is a door into grassroots football — millions of players, hundreds of thousands of amateur teams, and a vast reservoir of usage time not yet tapped. Grassroots football has no broadcast rights money. It has only presence. And presence, in the content economy, is the only thing that can be traded for something else. Here, I have to say the part many will not want to hear. There is a reasonable case for these tools, and it is stronger than it looks. A lineup builder teaches fans to read a formation. It forces users to decide who plays where, who drops, who pushes, who holds the line. That is a tactical-thinking exercise, even in its simplest form. For a twelve-year-old dragging a midfielder into the pivot for the first time, that is a first lesson in squad structure. And it is free. In an industry where ticket prices, broadcast packages and shirt prices all rise, a free tool letting fans build their own team by hand is a small, real democratisation. But precisely because it is reasonable, people stop asking questions. That is the blind spot. First blind spot: people argue about whether the tool is good, and not about who owns it. A product without a named owner is a product without anyone accountable. When an image-rights dispute arises, nobody knows whose door to knock on. Second blind spot, in the opposite direction: people worry about data, but the trail points elsewhere. The existing evidence is not about data selling. It is about using intellectual property without disclosing a basis. Those two risks differ in nature, in who bears the loss, and in how they are handled. Swapping them just blurs the picture. People call it a free tool. I call it an unsigned contract, being performed every day. I do not conclude that this tool violates anything. I do not yet have three independent sources for any accusation, and in a small market like Vietnam, an unverified piece would burn down both a career and a reader's trust. But I record two things verifiable today. First: the product's pricing structure has never been disclosed. Second: the legal basis for using player names and club colour palettes has never been disclosed. Those gaps are not evidence. But they are the right questions, and the right questions always precede the answers. On that tactics board, eleven squares have been filled with names. Only one square remains empty, unfilled by anyone: the one marked payer. Perhaps nobody has paid yet. Or perhaps the payer is the person holding the phone, downloading the image, believing they were just given something for free.