In elite football, competitive advantage is pursued relentlessly. Big clubs invest heavily in performance data and tactical analysis in the pursuit of marginal gains.

Yet that desperate search for gains has now led to one club, Southampton FC, suffering an enormous loss. Southampton admitted to spying on their opponent’s training session and were charged by the English Football League. They have been expelled from a match that could have seen them win promotion to the Premier League.

That match, the Championship playoff final, is often described as the most lucrative in football. Promotion to the Premier League is worth around £200 million in increased revenue.

Hull and Middlesbrough (the club Southampton spied on) will now fight for that prize. Whether or not you agree with the punishment, the episode highlights the high financial stakes of English football. In an environment where a single result can materially alter a club’s economic trajectory, the pursuit of competitive advantage can take increasingly aggressive forms.

Beyond the specific case of Southampton and “spygate”, there is a bigger issue facing football and the incentives which drive it.

English football’s financial infrastructure does not simply reward success – it also amplifies the consequences of failure. Our research on the economics of English football has shown how the game’s financial structures can reduce competitive balance. The wealthiest sides dominate competitions and leagues. In this environment, clubs can often perceive promotion as transformational – and failure as existential.

This helps to explain why clubs sometimes behave the way they do. Decades of research into the finances of football show a strong relationship between spending and performance. Essentially, the more a team spends (particularly on players’ wages), the better it performs on the pitch.

Because of this, promotion to a higher league becomes more than a financial windfall. It creates a strategic imperative to invest quickly in the hope of staying in that league.

None of this can be used to excuse poor conduct. But it does help explain the environment in which these controversies emerge. Clubs are responding to the incentives the system creates.

And Southampton understands the reality of this system all too well.

Their 2022-23 season in the Premier League brought in revenue of £145.8 million. Immediate relegation back to the Championship reduced that figure to £85 million the following year, and promotion to the Premier League again in 2024-25 pushed it back up to £158.4 million.

Relegation means reduced revenues, strategic uncertainty and operational adjustment. Promotion offers relief and revenue, but not necessarily stability.

If anything, reaching the Premier League often introduces a different kind of pressure. There is an expectation to spend big, recruit aggressively and remain competitive. Any hint of under performance can be punished immediately.

The regulators

English football has repeatedly produced examples of clubs hunting competitive advantage, though normally through aggressive spending. This is a predictable consequence of a model that places extraordinary financial value on relatively narrow sporting outcomes.

This is precisely why regulation is becoming such a central issue in the game. Profit and Sustainability rules (PSR), ongoing debates around spending controls, and the emergence of an independent football regulator all point to a recognition that football’s economic model requires stronger governance.

But regulation alone cannot solve the deeper issue if the underlying incentives remain distorted. If the difference between success and failure continues to be measured in hundreds of millions of pounds, clubs will continue to seek every possible edge.

Seen through that lens, Southampton’s spygate story is more than football controversy. It is a case study in how financial incentives shape organisational behaviour. When there is money to be made, people will continue to break the rules. Perhaps that explains why the penalty of expulsion – which will affect fans, commercial partners and sponsors – was so severe.

Unfortunately, the football world often treats these episodes as isolated ethical failings, when they are actually symptoms of a wider structural problem. The Premier League’s commercial success has made English football richer than ever, but also more financially unforgiving.

The sport has become subject to economic conditions that make marginal advantage extremely valuable. The Southampton case is not just about sporting or non-sporting behaviour. It is about the business model that dominates and shapes modern football.

Natural geological processes have been regulating Earth’s climate for millions of years.

Accelerated versions of these processes are now being promoted as technologies to draw down carbon from the atmosphere – and some are rapidly moving from concept to real-world deployments.

Two such technologies are known as enhanced weathering, which speeds up the chemical breakdown of certain rocks, and ocean alkalinity enhancement, which increases the ocean’s natural ability to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

Startups backed by tech companies including Google and Microsoft are already applying these technologies in field trials. Investment in the sector is rising rapidly, with large-scale trials underway and carbon credits beginning to appear on voluntary markets.

But as our new assessment published in Science highlights, some estimates of carbon removal through these technologies may be too optimistic.

Current models assume carbon captured on land or in coastal waters will reliably make its way into long-term storage in the ocean. However, these models don’t replicate all Earth processes.

In reality, part of the engineered capture of carbon can be reversed as water moves through soils, rivers, estuaries and coastal environments. Dissolved elements can become trapped again in new minerals such as clays, reducing how much carbon ultimately remains stored over long timescales.

The true additional carbon removed from the atmosphere may be smaller than headline estimates suggest.

How enhanced weathering is supposed to work

Enhanced weathering works by accelerating chemical reactions that already occur naturally between rocks, water and carbon dioxide.

When rainwater mixes with carbon dioxide held in the atmosphere and soil, it forms an acid that slowly dissolves rocks that contain the minerals calcium and magnesium. This includes volcanic rocks such as basalt and ultramafic rocks such as dunite.

In nature, the dissolved minerals increase the capactiy of water to store carbon dioxide and these chemical products can then be transported by rivers to the ocean, where the carbon may remain stored for thousands of years.

Enhanced weathering attempts to speed up this natural process. Finely crushed rocks and minerals are spread across landscapes such as agricultural soils, increasing the surface area available for reactions.

Ocean alkalinity enhancement uses similar principles, but aims to increase the ocean’s ability to absorb and store atmospheric carbon dioxide directly.

Carbon losses along the way

Many enhanced weathering assessments assume that once minerals dissolve, the resulting alkalinity and carbon will eventually make their way into the ocean for long-term storage.

However, different materials dissolve at different rates. Climate, rainfall, soil chemistry and biological activity also influence how quickly reactions occur. This means carbon removal can vary enormously between environments.

Earth systems also contain many opportunities for the flow of carbon to weaken before it ever reaches the open ocean.

As alkalinity moves through the environment, dissolved elements released during weathering can become trapped again in new minerals. These reactions can consume alkalinity and reduce the amount of carbon ultimately stored long term.

These challenges are not limited to enhanced weathering on land. Ocean alkalinity enhancement may also experience losses as dissolved elements interact with sediments and seawater chemistry, recycling alkalinity back into solid minerals before it contributes to long-term storage.

The challenge of durable carbon removal

In natural systems, weathering, transport and mineral formation are tightly linked parts of a much larger Earth-system cycle.

While naturally occurring warm and wet environments may accelerate weathering, using a rapid-dissolution model to replicate this does not necessarily guarantee durable carbon storage.

There is also another problem: some enhanced weathering and alkalinity approaches may interfere with natural carbon removal pathways that would have occurred anyway.

For example, increasing alkalinity in one part of the Earth system may reduce natural dissolution or weathering processes elsewhere. This means the amount of truly additional carbon removed from the atmosphere may be smaller.

Many field trials focus on changes occurring at the application site itself, but much of the long-term carbon storage depends on what happens downstream – across entire catchments, rivers and coastal oceans.

As enhanced weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement move toward larger-scale deployment, the central question is how much carbon remains removed from the atmosphere over decades to centuries – and whether that removal is truly additional.

None of this means these technologies don’t contribute to climate mitigation.

The challenge is whether Earth systems can keep the captured carbon stored or whether we are simply moving carbon across time and space instead of durably removing it from the atmosphere.

New Zealand may offer an opportunity to better understand these questions because volcanic rocks, high rainfall and strong land-to-sea connectivity create ideal conditions for tracking how alkalinity and carbon move through the Earth system.

If these approaches are going to play a major role in future carbon removal strategies – and generate carbon credits at global scale – we need to understand not only how quickly minerals dissolve, but whether carbon is stored durably without weakening natural carbon removal pathways at the same time.