My family moved recently. A change of address occasions much administrative work, one task of which was to calculate the value of the art collection my husband and I have cobbled together. Seems likely I was displacing some emotion — leaving our home of 14 years was not easy — but this exercise made me philosophical. I could enumerate the prices I had paid for various works; I could extrapolate about the current art market by checking recent auction results. But what did that tell me? The insurance company wanted to know about dollar amounts, but I was stuck on the thornier question of value.

Seven years ago, I saw a retrospective of the artist Agnes Martin, at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. I was familiar with Martin’s minimalist paintings, which I admired, and was unprepared to be surprised by the exhibition, let alone deeply moved. I love the experience of communion with films, books, canvases on the wall, but I am rarely overcome by it, and certainly did not expect to cry over an artist known for her cool geometries. But there we were, my companion and I, considering Martin’s final finished painting with tears in our eyes. 

I’ve tried to make sense of my state on this day. I was hungry, or tired, or thirsty, or some combination of these — my diagnosis when dealing with my children’s emotional outbursts. Maybe Frank Lloyd Wright’s building had something to do with it, the pitch of the floor making me feel unsteady, the open rotunda making me feel dizzy. Or my response was purely emotional — I’d have to be made of stone to feel nothing after hearing the sobering facts of Martin’s life. Perhaps all this is true, or a factor, anyway, in my tears. 

It’s also possible that I experienced something too rare in my secular life in our profane culture — call it the sacred. Already a cliché to say museums are modern cathedrals, built to dwarf the body and awe the senses; worth pointing out that quiet contemplation of anything that’s not my iPhone feels profound, and that the progress I made up the ramp of the Guggenheim was rather like the devout Catholic’s observation of the Stations of the Cross.

I think art is one of the last provinces of the sacred for me, maybe for most of us. A work of art’s price can’t tell us anything about it, and there’s no point in talking about art in terms of dollars or euro or yen, but perhaps there’s no other metric available to us.

The most expensive thing I’ve ever bought is a painting. It’s a small work, a minor effort by one of the world’s most celebrated artists. I bought it at auction, spending far more than I had intended to, caught up in the competitive fervour, my desire for this work somehow apart from what I would pay for it, by the magical thinking that governs most of my shopping. The way my insurance company judges this untitled painting’s worth is by referring to the record of what I spent on it. That’s the market in a nutshell; things are worth what someone is willing to pay.

When I look at this painting, I don’t think about that number. I think about what a genius can do with paint, and I think about this particular genius’s ability to make images that are at once horrific and beautiful, and I think about the hands of this particular genius touching this artefact that I now possess. But I’m not an underwriter. 

This is the most expensive painting in our collection, but I don’t know if it follows that it is also the most valuable. I have a framed watercolour that my older son did when he was three — bless the Montessori teachers who wrote the date on it. It’s a splash of light blue and is, according to the artist, a whale. Children’s art rarely looks like what it’s meant to depict, but in this case, the thing, perhaps only accidentally, truly resembles a breaching whale. Obviously, there’s no way to convert sentimental value into actual currency. 

It’s a great privilege that I’m in a position to spend any money on art, though I possess more sentiment than currency. It’s still possible to buy the work of artists at the start of their career, or editions by more well-known names at small auction houses, or even minor work by true masters.

I think about the money, because I’m working within the constraints of a budget, but only when I’m in the act of transaction. Then I forget that altogether. I cannot, as George Lucas did, spend $15mn on a painting by Robert Colescott. I could, though, spend about one month’s rent on a small, early work by the same artist. Living with it affords me a pleasure to which I cannot affix a price tag, even though my insurer has asked me to.

Sometimes a work of art is described as priceless. In my imagination this implies more zeroes than one can count, but it’s more accurate to say that with art, numbers aren’t salient. We should call a masterpiece unpriceable instead. 

Still, money is so essential a factor of contemporary existence that we cannot help but bring it in. Money borders — even if it should not enter — some of life’s most serious provinces. Family life, religious faith and romantic love may be all that are left to us that are exempt from the logic of buying and selling. 

Sometimes a work of art is described as ‘priceless’, but with art, numbers aren’t salient. We should call a masterpiece ‘unpriceable’ instead 

The art market is one matter, but even the urge to photograph or otherwise document a museum visit, very common at the moment, is, I think, an economic activity. We reach for our phones from some insipid urge to participate in a culture too attuned to pointless connectivity, yes. But to Instagram a Pollock or a Van Gogh transforms that moment of pleasure into work. We think this ennobling; it’s sadly debased. 

I don’t know whether it’s fair to consider faith a realm wholly uncorrupted by money — it’s certainly possible to enumerate the assets of, say, the Catholic Church (some of which are what we would call priceless). Nevertheless, art can provide an encounter with the mysterious, a territory that borders the mystical. Perhaps that is why I so often find it a balm. 

Only a few months ago, on a day I found personally difficult, I fled to the Museum of Modern Art in need of distraction or solace. I saw an exhibition by the video and performance artist Joan Jonas. I spent a surprisingly long time watching black-and-white footage of a performance she’d staged decades ago, in the then-wasteland of lower Manhattan. In those minutes, I truly forgot the worries that had sent me to the museum in the first place.

Last summer, I pulled some strings and was invited behind the scenes at Christie’s Rockefeller Center outpost. I was writing a book in which one character, a billionaire, buys a painting by Helen Frankenthaler. (No deeper meaning in choosing this artist than the personal, as she’s one of my favourite abstract expressionists.) I wanted to see the rooms to which serious collectors are sometimes invited to kick the tyres of the masterpieces they might buy. 

A Christie’s staffer led me down a long hall, threw open massive doors to intimate, soundless rooms, simply but strongly lit, containing nothing at all. I thought they felt like chapels. I loved imagining the Warhols and Picassos that had once stood there, ready for inspection. 

My guide seemed surprised to discover that the last room we entered was not empty at all. In my recall, it, too, was bright and silent, but there, on the wall, was a painting. It sounds like something out of fiction but it’s true; it was by Frankenthaler. There are many words applicable: happenstance, coincidence, luck, kismet.

I find that when I’m immersed in the writing of a novel there will be uncanny resonances in my real life. I’ll be served a meal like one I imagined, or meet someone with the same name as a character I invented. There’s no deeper meaning in it, just a funny thing that has happened to me often enough that I understand it as part of the novel-writing process. Maybe this is part of the experience of seeing art, too. There’s some frisson that can’t be put into words, a sense of recognition or kinship. 

I don’t know what happened to the Frankenthaler I saw that day. (Christie’s sold a Frankenthaler this spring for more than $4mn, but that’s a detail of interest mostly, I think, to insurance companies.) I like to imagine the person who bought it: that they went into the very room I did, that they smiled with some private pleasure at the thought of being alone with this painting. I like to imagine that they knew and cared about Frankenthaler, that they were tempted to touch the painting, that they had questions about its provenance, that they got close enough to the canvas to smell the paint itself.

I like to imagine that moment brought them joy, a joy they feel every time they glimpse the painting, wherever they’ve chosen to hang it. I cannot bear to think that it went into storage, or hangs in a guest bedroom in a rarely visited vacation home. I prefer to imagine it is with someone who would agree with me that art’s value is not calculable, albeit someone with enough money to say something like this and still be taken seriously. I’d like to tell that painting’s owner how I stole two minutes alone with their painting, and I like to imagine they’d know that is worth everything.

Rumaan Alam’s new novel ‘Entitlement’ is published by Bloomsbury

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen

Unlock the US Election Countdown newsletter for free

The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will press Joe Biden for binding security guarantees before the US president leaves office to bolster Ukraine’s position and compel Russia to join peace talks.

The Ukrainian leader has in recent months stepped up preparations for possible negotiations with Moscow in anticipation of a shift in US policy following November’s presidential election.

Zelenskyy ordered an invasion of the Kursk region of Russia in August to gain territory as leverage in future talks and has said he is ready for a peace conference with Moscow’s involvement.

Speaking to journalists ahead of a US trip next week where he will attend the UN General Assembly and hold talks with Biden, Zelenskyy said he would present a “victory plan” to the US president that he hoped would end the war.

Zelenskyy said the plan, which he wants to be implemented by the end of December, would strengthen Ukraine and force Russia to the negotiating table.

“The victory plan, this bridge to strengthening Ukraine, can contribute to more productive future diplomatic meetings with Russia,” said Zelenskyy on Friday afternoon in Kyiv.

He described the initiative as Biden’s opportunity to go down in history as the president who secured Ukrainian independence. He emphasised that the plan needed to be implemented before Biden left office in January.

“I think this is a historical mission,” said Zelenskyy. “Let’s do all this today, while all the officials who want the victory of Ukraine are in official positions.”

Ukraine has lost territory daily to Russia this year and Moscow has shown no sign that it was willing to negotiate.

The Ukrainian leader outlined the four points of the “victory plan” but declined to go into detail.

The first point, he said, were further security guarantees. Ukraine has recently signed long-term commitments with the US and other western allies but wants harder assurances akin to the mutual defence guarantee that comes with Nato membership.

The second was Ukraine’s Kursk operation, which he said was “fulfilling” its task of diverting Russian offensive power.

Zelenskyy’s third request was for “specific” advanced weapons. He did not elaborate on the type of weapons system he wanted. The fourth was the joint development of Ukraine’s economy together with its partners.

“Today you help us in the implementation of this plan and in the future Ukraine will save you a lot of your resources,” said Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy does not view the “victory plan” as a replacement for his “peace formula”, a 10-point initiative based on the UN Charter that lays out a framework for a lasting settlement.

Rather, it will give Ukraine what it needs to get Russia to the negotiating table where the peace formula would be discussed, he said.

Zelenskyy again ruled out a Minsk-style peace agreement where the conflict would be frozen, stating that Russia would only invade again. “We need a just and stable peace,” said Zelenskyy.

Both Brazil and China have put forward alternative peace plans to Ukraine’s peace formula. Zelenskyy said these plans lacked detail and worked as “political icebreakers” against the UN Charter.

After speaking at the UN on Wednesday in New York, Zelenskyy will travel to Washington to present the plan to Biden and Vice-president Kamala Harris, who is running against Donald Trump in November’s election.

He plans to meet Trump after his visit to Washington, he said.

Late one afternoon in October 2023, as the sun slipped down over Tokyo Bay, Masayoshi Son was sitting in his private office at SoftBank headquarters, at the head of a wooden table almost as long as Vladimir Putin’s in the Kremlin. A diminutive, balding figure dressed casually in a jacket and slacks, Son was recounting to me the low point of his career, a year earlier, when he announced he was disappearing from public view.

“What a shitty life!” he exclaimed, with a trace of self-pity. “You know on my Zoom call, I see my face often on the video screen and I hate looking at my face. What an ugly face. I’m just getting old . . . What have I achieved? . . . I have done nothing that I can be proud of.”

At face value, it was an astonishing admission. Son, then 66, ranked among the world’s most renowned investors. He invested in ecommerce giants Yahoo and Alibaba before they became household names. At the height of the dotcom bubble in early 2000, he was briefly the richest man in the world. When it burst, he lost 97 per cent of his fortune, around $70bn. 

But he bounced back, launching a successful broadband and mobile phone business in Japan, propelled by an exclusive deal to distribute Apple’s iPhone. Then he disrupted Silicon Valley with the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund, and ended up making the biggest swing and miss in the history of investing. (Hence his temporary vanishing act.)

As editor of the Financial Times, I’d met Son twice and he intrigued me as a subject for a biography. A compulsive risk taker, his story was a classic entrepreneur’s tale of survival and perpetual reinvention. But was Son a tech visionary or simply an inveterate gambler who got lucky? Why was SoftBank, the company he founded in 1981 as a pioneering software distribution business in Japan, so often described as a house of cards?

Answering those questions proved more difficult than I anticipated. Twice I flew to Tokyo, only to be informed that the boss was too busy to see me. When I complained that my subject was more elusive than a Bengal tiger, an ex-SoftBank executive, Indian by birth, replied: “In that case, I suggest you bring a goat.”

In western media Son often comes across as a cartoon character. He has compared himself to Yoda in Star Wars; Napoleon (of which more later); and Jesus Christ (who was equally misunderstood, apparently). Obsessed by longevity, he has told friends that he hopes to live past 120, and that SoftBank should be built to last 300 years.

After four sit-downs with Son, as well as interviewing more than 150 people who know or have worked with him, I have concluded there’s a lot more to this restless character than meets the eye. While Son did not invent, control or own a breakthrough technology, he is the archetypal middleman. He has ridden the technological wave which has created untold wealth and penetrated every corner of our society. 

His is a story of our times.

Masayoshi Son is a quintessential outsider. This may explain his bottomless risk appetite and his desire to prove himself, over and over again. He was born in 1957 to poverty-stricken second-generation Korean immigrants on the island of Kyushu in the western Japanese archipelago. The family home was the equivalent of a cowshed, one of dozens of makeshift dwellings on a plot of unregistered land near the railway station.

Years later, Son confessed to a friend that he suffered from a recurring dream, waking up to the stench of pig faeces in his nostrils. His friend told him it wasn’t a nightmare but a childhood memory. “We started at the bottom of society,” Son told me. “I didn’t even know what nationality I was.”

As Korean-Japanese, the Son family followed tradition and lived under a Japanese name, Yasumoto. (Son later persuaded the authorities to let him combine his Japanese first name and Korean surname — a notable breakthrough.) His father Mitsunori was a bootlegger at the age of 14, later diversifying into pig breeding, loan sharking and pachinko, a form of low-stakes gambling that offered a livelihood to Koreans shut out of the Japanese economy. 

In April 2023, Mitsunori, 87, sitting in the family home adorned with photographs of his favoured second son, described how he rearranged the pins on his pachinko slot machines so that everybody in town thought they were a winner. His upfront losses were eye-watering. Then he moved the pins back into place — and started making serious money. 

Watching his father, Son learnt how to hustle. But the boy’s ambitions went way beyond pachinko gambling. He wanted to escape Japan and a lifetime of discrimination. Aged 16, he announced he wanted to learn English and study in the US. His family were dismayed, but soon relented. 

Son’s six years in California, which included three years as a student at the University of California at Berkeley, were a life-changing experience. He saw first-hand the PC revolution. He read about Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs. He also made his first fortune, developing a pocket speech synthesiser with the help of a team of UC Berkeley engineers led by Professor Forrest Mozer, a nuclear particle physicist.

I tracked down Professor Mozer, then aged 92, during a visit to Berkeley in October 2021. He described Son as a modest student with little technical background but a businessman with a capital B. “That guy is going to own Japan one day,” he told his wife. 

Later Mozer claimed that Son had gone behind his back and contracted with Japanese companies to sell American microchips (for the speech translator) that did not exist and for prices that he’d invented. He said he was not told Son was due to earn almost $1mn in fees. “I was his first business partner,” Mozer told me, “and on his first business deal he lied and cheated me.”

When questioned, Son rejected that, and insisted he had wrongly assumed he had permission to do what he did. (Mozer himself concedes there was no written contract between the two, just a gentleman’s agreement.) Son unravelled the Japanese deals and vowed to take more care in future. Perhaps the episode marks Son’s “original sin”, a short-cut on the way to the top that many entrepreneurs would recognise.

After his sojourn in California, Son returned home. In 1980, Japan seemed destined to be the world’s number-one economic power. Son was perfectly placed to act as a gateway for US tech businesses seeking to penetrate the Japanese market.

Bill Gates describes Son as a cultural interpreter as much as a commercial middleman. “Whenever you’ve been three or four days in Japan, and have had nothing but polite things to say to each other, invariably through an interpreter. . . then there’s this guy who speaks perfect English. It was such a relief. Masa was easy to talk to. He was an insider but an outsider too.”

After software distribution, Son pivoted to investing in internet-related business, placing two spectacular bets: on Yahoo, which earned him a six-fold return ($3.5bn), and on Alibaba, which gave a 1,310-fold return ($97bn). While he built a successful Japanese affiliate, Yahoo Japan, he never took his eye off the US market. 

In the mid-1990s, he acquired Las Vegas-based Comdex, then the number-one tech trade fair, the Ziff Davis computer publishing empire and a host of dotcom properties. In 2013, he went one better and bought Sprint, the lossmaking US telecoms operator, finally pulling off a merger with T-Mobile that created a “third force” alongside Verizon and AT&T.

Throughout, SoftBank took advantage of the almost three decades of near zero interest rates in Japan. Son borrowed cheaply to pay generous prices for US assets, raising billions on the corporate bond market. “You don’t understand,” he once told a fretting colleague, “in Japan, money is free.”

In assessing Son’s track record, it is important to distinguish between SoftBank Corp, the listed company responsible for the operating companies, and SoftBank Group, the publicly quoted group holding company and major investor.

Businesses such as Yahoo Japan and SoftBank Mobile have proved highly successful and profitable. The Sprint acquisition, initially a dud, proved a winner after the T-Mobile merger. But Son has always cared more about growth than profits. SoftBank Group has long been highly leveraged, meaning it has a lot of debt in its capital structure. At times, it has ranked as one of the world’s top 10 indebted companies — not a comfortable position when inflation roared back in 2021. 

Son is a major shareholder and a major borrower, using his SoftBank shares as collateral. Risk is built in. Suppose SoftBank shares fall sharply, lowering the value of the collateral, as has occurred many times during Son’s wild ride. Then panicky banks might demand the loans be repaid, destabilising the entire corporate structure. 

Son bristles when challenged, emphasising that as a co-investor he has “skin in the game” and therefore an incentive to invest responsibly. Nevertheless, some associates believe SoftBank’s founder is “addicted” to leverage. They told me he became hooked after the $20bn bid in 2006 to buy Vodafone Japan, the largest leveraged buyout in Asia at the time. He succeeded thanks to a financial magician by the name of Rajeev Misra, a former Deutsche Bank debt trader whose reward was to be put in charge of the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund in 2017.

Misra was one of several talented executives trained as mathematicians, who applied their engineering skills to finance rather than academia. Over time, they lent a mercenary streak to SoftBank, stoking their boss’s appetite for dealmaking. 

To some degree, the cultural shift was inevitable as SoftBank evolved from a Japanese technology conglomerate to a global investment group. But it was also a recipe for infighting at the top, latterly between Misra and Marcelo Claure, a 6ft 6in Bolivian-American who led the Sprint turnaround. Often the spats played out in the media. “They leaked like septic tanks,” says a SoftBank colleague.

Although Son adopts an abstemious public profile, his private consumption is more extravagant (albeit drawing on his own money rather than the company’s). He pays for his private plane and his favourite red wine (from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, at a minimum $6,000 a bottle). He has extensive properties around the world, including three conjoining houses in central Tokyo likened by one visitor to Wayne Manor, fictional home of Batman. 

The basement features an artificial golf course where Son and guests can play in all-weather conditions on any course in the world. One portion of the house is decorated in the Empire style, the period between 1800 and 1815 when Napoleon modernised France and redrew the map of Europe. I discovered Son has a fascination with the Corsican Little Corporal, a fellow outsider.

In early 2020, a team from Elliott Management, the New York activist investor, paid a visit to Japan. Having bought a 3 per cent stake in SoftBank, their goal was to persuade Son to improve corporate governance, thereby boosting the share price. When an Elliott executive invoked the example of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, or Bill Gates of Microsoft, Son erupted in frustration.

“These are one-business guys. I am involved in 100 businesses and I control the entire [tech] ecosystem,” he remonstrated. “The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin [who built the Great Wall]. I am not a CEO. I am building an empire.”

Delusional? Not if you believe that Son is bent on “Making Japan Great Again”. After the collapse of the bubble economy in 1989-90, Japan entered a “lost decade” characterised by deflation and tepid growth. Son, the outlier, remains an object of suspicion among the Japanese business establishment. He counters by playing the patriot, claiming he wants to revive the country’s animal spirits. But his vision of a resurgent Japan contains a megalomaniacal streak. 

When Son launched the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund, an arms race in the world of venture capital ensued, leading to wholesale value destruction. Doling out sums of between $100mn and $200mn would have meant Son meeting hundreds of individual founders to check their credentials. Even with his legendary stamina, working 20-hour days, often flying on his private jet through multiple time zones, that was a physical impossibility. 

Crucially, much larger sums — $500mn or more — were required to move the needle in a giant fund like the Vision Fund. The target companies couldn’t be start-ups as such; they were “later-stage” companies, turbocharged for growth by the injection of SoftBank capital. One of these companies was WeWork, founded by Adam Neumann, a tall Israeli with a planet-sized ego.

Son was utterly sold on Neumann, a fellow dreamer who spoke about world domination. When WeWork’s losses piled up, colleagues pleaded with Son to stop. The boss refused to budge.  

“As you all object, I am becoming more and more interested in this company,” he said. “I am looking at Alibaba and only he [Neumann] looks like Alibaba today.”

The initial Alibaba investment in 2000 — two bets of $20mn and $80mn — turns out to have been a curse as much as a blessing. Eager to prove his success wasn’t a one-off, Son talked about creating 10 SoftBank Vision Funds with a total war chest of $1tn dollars. These were castles in the air — the stuff of hubris. 

Those who know Son say he is a brilliant operator (when he focuses), an average investor and a terrible trader. Between 2019-21, as markets turned down, Son suffered heavy losses on Vision Funds 1 and 2. He tried to recover by speculating wildly on options trading, using an in-house hedge fund called Northstar. SoftBank was left nursing multibillion-dollar losses. 

For 18 months, he withdrew from public view, ostensibly serving penance but in reality plotting a comeback. Today, he is betting the house on artificial intelligence in order to reclaim his position as one of the world’s leading entrepreneur futurists.

To date, his record is fitful at best. Between 2017 and 2022, he mentioned “AI” more than 500 times in quarterly and annual results presentations. Yet when it came to OpenAI and its breakthrough product ChatGPT, the lead investor was Microsoft. Son never got a look in.

Part of the problem was timing. In the Vision Fund years, AI businesses were either small scale, early in development or out of the public eye. During the Covid pandemic, Son was grounded in Tokyo. In early 2022, when travel restrictions were finally lifted, with the exception of China, SoftBank was sandbagged by record losses. 

Had Son conserved his firepower rather than splurging money on more than 500 separate companies in the Vision Funds, he would have been perfectly placed. With company valuations beaten down by higher interest rates, Son could have acquired stakes in promising AI-related businesses at bargain prices. In hindsight, he admits, “Timing-wise maybe we were a little too early.”

It’s a familiar story: right instincts, wrong timing. (If he’d held on to his 5 per cent stake in advanced chipmaker Nvidia in 2019, he could have made another fortune.) Yet one of Son’s AI bets has paid off handsomely. UK chip designer Arm — acquired in 2016 — is at the centre of yet another super-vision: a $64bn plan to transform SoftBank Group into a sprawling AI powerhouse, including a foray into the development of artificial-intelligence chips, announced in May. The goal is to build a prototype by 2025, with each chip being able to process vast volumes of data. This hugely ambitious venture aims to create SoftBank Group’s own vertically integrated AI ecosystem, from manufacturing chips and operating data centres to industrial robots and power generation.

True, SoftBank cannot touch the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but Son is a customer and supplier to the hyperscalers. His new chipmaking venture involves billions of dollars of investment. Once a mass-production system is established, the AI chip business could be spun off, realising billions of dollars of value to its parent SoftBank. 

How does this movie end? Those betting on a financial apocalypse have been disappointed. Call Son lucky, call SoftBank too big to fail. After four years studying the world’s greatest disrupter, my message is unequivocal. 

Don’t ever count him out. 

‘Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Masayoshi Son’ by Lionel Barber is published by Allen Lane on October 3 

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen

Saudi Arabia’s grand boxing project is going global. At London’s Wembley Stadium tonight, British fighters Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois face off in the first European showdown organised by Riyadh Season. It follows last month’s fight night in Los Angeles also under the Riyadh Season brand, which began life as a programme of cultural events in the Saudi capital.

This is a sign of things to come. Unlike golf, those leading Saudi Arabia’s sporting push have found a rhythm in the world of boxing, bringing rival promoters together under the Riyadh Season umbrella so that fans and broadcasters get the fights they’ve been craving. Boxers and promoters, meanwhile, get bumper paydays.

Boxing is one of the most biddable sports with a global audience, but the Saudis have had recent success in tennis too. Perhaps this is the big lesson drawn from the expensive LIV Golf experiment — it’s much cheaper to join forces with the establishment than to upend it.

This week we’re looking at the latest big news from Nike, where the chief executive is out. And we ask if football fans are reaching breaking point in the face of rising prices. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor

How outgoing Nike CEO John Donahoe lost the plot

On June 27th, Nike chief executive John Donahoe presided over one of the bleakest earnings calls in the history of the sportswear maker. Not only was the company still trying to find its level between online and brick-and-mortar sales, he said, but consumer demand for the brand’s trainers and athletic apparel was slowing.

The company made its name outfitting world-record runners, but the swoosh earned a dubious distinction of its own that day: the worst stock drop in Nike’s nearly 44-year history as a public company. So swift was the market reaction that co-founder Phil Knight issued a rare statement saying “I am optimistic in Nike’s future and John Donahoe has my unwavering confidence and full support.”

Barely three months later, Knight yanked that support away. On Thursday, the board of directors announced Donahoe will retire next month, to be succeeded by Nike veteran Elliott Hill. 

Donahoe, 64, leaves a mixed record at the world’s largest athletic brand. He ably steered the company through the pandemic, despite only taking the helm in January 2020, accelerating a push towards higher-margin online sales that padded profits. He pulled the company to its overdue revenue goal of $50bn just last year. But while Donahoe proved adept at tech and sales — he was poached by Nike from software company ServiceNow after a career spent at consultancy Bain and online retailer eBay — he lacked an essential component for a shoe brand: knowing what’s cool.

Several of Nike’s shoe “drops”, or limited edition releases, either missed the mark or reeked of desperation, such as an announcement this summer of the commercial sale of a once, collector-only Wu Tang dunk. Partner retailers which sell Nike shoes like JD Sports and Foot Locker praised rival brands like Adidas, New Balance, and On, for “newness”. 

In selecting Hill, 60, as the next CEO, Nike’s board is going back to the future. Texas native Hill was once an assistant athletic trainer for the Dallas Cowboys and later started at Nike as an intern after business school. He has 32 years experience at the swoosh, including five years at European HQ in the Netherlands, and oversaw all of Nike’s commercial and marketing operations before his retirement in 2020.

“I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Elliott back to the team. His experience, understanding of Nike and leadership is exactly what’s needed at this moment”, said Knight in a statement issued on Thursday. “We’ve got a lot of work to do but I’m looking forward to seeing Nike back on its pace”.

Price hikes: have football fans lost patience?

When the European Super League launched (briefly) in 2021, one of the main arguments for tearing down football’s status quo was that fans were being deprived of exciting matches between elite teams.

Evidence this week suggests that argument was built on sand. When Liverpool visited AC Milan in the opening game of this season’s Champions League, one of the main talking points was of empty seats inside the San Siro. While the Italian club had an average home attendance for league matches last season of just under 72,000, local estimates put Tuesday’s turnout at around 60,000. So what’s going on?

Milan have started the season slowly — and lost the game against Liverpool 3-1. But more than 71,000 showed up a few days earlier to see the Rossoneri host Venezia in an Italian league match.

The main culprit for Tuesday night’s empty seats appears to be rising ticket prices — seats in the lower tier of the San Siro began at more than €120.

The issue of rising costs for football fans has been creeping up the agenda across Europe in recent months.

This year 19 of the 20 English Premier League teams announced increased season ticket prices, while some did away with certain discounts for concessions.

At Nottingham Forest, for example, a child’s ticket in one part of its home ground more than doubled. Fans of Wolverhampton Wanderers urged the club to reconsider price hikes in order to “preserve the very lifeblood of this famous old club”. Fulham supporters held up yellow cards to protest against the £3,000 rate for a season ticket in some sections of the new Riverside Stand.

“Ticket prices are a ticking time bomb and club executives have their hands over their ears. Something has to give”, the Football Supporters Association said last month.

And it’s not just ticket prices. The cost of replica shirts has also been rising fast. The new Manchester United home shirt starts at £85, but will set you back over £100 if you want a name and number on the back, or if you want an exact copy of the match-worn version. (Although that’s still some way off the £900 options outlined in this weekend’s HTSI.)

Price rises are being propelled by various factors. Inflation across the globe has driven costs for everything from electricity to wages and food. Ticket prices are a quick and easy lever to pull in response — effectively passing on rising costs to the end consumer.

But there are other pressures at work. Tighter spending rules both at European and domestic level are pushing clubs to focus relentlessly on maximising revenue.

The globalisation of the game also means there is a growing pool of football-mad tourists only too willing to pay whatever it takes for a chance to see a top team in the flesh, especially in holiday hotspots like Rome, Paris and London.

In the Milan example, it’s hard to ignore the influence of institutional investors. After private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners bought the club in 2022, revenue generated on matchdays rose to €73mn from €33mn a year earlier and €34mn pre-pandemic. Commercial, TV and sponsorship income all rose considerably too — helping the club to its first annual profit in 17 years.

Tuesday night’s empty seats may prove a one-off. The issues could also be specific to club and competition.

But as the pull from new regulation and the need to generate investment returns leads more clubs to raise prices wherever they think they can, executives will face increasingly tough choices — and less forgiving supporters.

Highlights

• Cricket has been booming thanks to the Indian Premier League gold rush. But are we reaching saturation point? And is there now a bubble? Those are some of the questions we look to answer in this Big Read.

• Lord Sebastian Coe is one of seven candidates to replace Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee who steps down in March next year.

• Adrian Wojnarowski, veteran NBA journalist for ESPN who single-handedly transformed sports reporting for the social media era, announced his retirement from the industry and will become the general manager of the men’s basketball team at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University.

• Glasgow has agreed to stage a slimmed down Commonwealth Games in 2026, which will be partially funded by Australian taxpayers. The state of Victoria had previously been lined up as hosts, but pulled out after deciding it was too expensive.

• Raj Sports has paid $125mn to bring a new WNBA team to Portland, Oregon, the latest step in raising the total number of teams in the league from 12 to 15. Raj Sports also owns the Portland Thorns women’s football team.

• The Diamond League has announced an increase in prize money, the latest salvo in the battle for the future of athletics.

• Qatar Airways has replaced Turkish Airlines as a main sponsor of the Uefa Champions League. The six-year deal is worth up to €500mn, according to SportBusiness.

Final Out

Shohei Ohtani had the single best game by a baseball player in the history of the sport on Thursday night: three home runs, two stolen bases, ten runs batted in for the Los Angeles Dodgers in their 20-4 rout of the Miami Marlins. Even wilder, he became the first player in more than a century of Major League Baseball to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season, establishing the so-called 50/50 club. (Non-baseball fans may be familiar with the 40/40 club, the previous benchmark of a power player, as it inspired the name of Jay-Z’s exclusive Manhattan lounge.)

“That has to be the greatest baseball game of all time”, Ohtani’s teammate Gavin Lux said Thursday night. “I’ve never seen anybody do that even in little leagues.”

Watch the incredible performance here.

A few years ago, the UK’s National Theatre staged an exceptionally moving Christmas show. Among the characters were a pregnant woman and her partner, searching for a place to rest. So far, so seasonal. But Love, by Alexander Zeldin, wasn’t set in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago — it took place in a temporary accommodation hostel in modern Britain.

One of three plays — The Inequalities trilogy — focusing on those sorely affected by austerity, the government’s programme for cutting public spending in the 2010s, Love used painstaking naturalism to envelop the audience in the world of the drama. Key to it were the quiet dignity and compassion Zeldin accorded his characters. The ending, in which a middle-aged man tenderly washed his elderly mother’s hair in the communal kitchen sink, would have made a concrete slab weep.

Now Zeldin is back at the National Theatre with a very different project — at least on the surface of it. The Other Place comes with the subtitle After Antigone, so you might expect an updating of Sophocles’s great tragedy. But Zeldin, 39, has barely arrived in a small room in the theatre before he’s emphasising that that is not the case: there’s no Theban princess — or modern equivalent — facing down her royal uncle over the burial of her disgraced brother. Instead, he has gone back to what he feels is the engine of the original and reworked it in a contemporary domestic setting.

“Antigone is a play about the aftermath,” he says. “It’s not about someone resisting arrest or something: it’s [about] two forms of grief.” In his version, a man who was left looking after his two nieces following his brother’s suicide has, 10 years later, decided to remodel the house, move his new wife and child in and scatter his brother’s ashes — thereby going back on his promise to his niece, Annie. That and Annie’s fragile state prompt a family crisis. “So it’s a modern tragedy around one person wanting to erase the past and one person wanting to preserve it,” says the playwright. “We have radically different ways of dealing with grief.”

Zeldin is not the only writer and director grappling with Sophocles this winter. London is about to embrace two high-profile productions of Oedipus, one staged by Robert Icke, one by Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter, while Hollywood star Brie Larson will play Elektra in January. For Zeldin, the tragedian throws down a gauntlet to a modern writer.

“The challenge of a contemporary tragedy is really exciting for a playwright,” he says. “Antigone takes place in less than 24 hours: it’s one action, one place. It’s a real test to write something that has the mechanism of inevitability . . . There are situations in life when there is no resolution possible and acknowledging that has a great value.”

Zeldin, a warm, friendly presence, looks tired but wired after the week’s rehearsals. He leans across the table, intent on clarity, bringing the same restless honesty to the conversation as he does to his work. His new play is funny, he says — “I like laughing a lot in theatre” — but it is also an attempt to face up to difficult questions without flinching.

Is theatre something that can get into the marrow of our world and make stories out of it?

“At the centre of the play is somebody who has been in crisis for a long time,” he says. “The question that is central to it, and to our time, is: what to do in the face of the suffering of others? Because we know about suffering everywhere. It’s very hard to live with. But that’s where theatre has a space. It can bring us into something that we don’t normally see and that’s essential to live — to really live.”

His 2023 play The Confessions turned that eye on his own family, inspired by the experiences of his Australian mother and her generation. But it also touched on Zeldin’s own childhood trauma: he lost his father, a Russian-Jewish refugee, when he was 15. In essence, it was that tragedy that propelled him towards theatre.

“When someone dies you want to live,” he says. “So I lived hard. I had a bit of a rough time as a teenager. Theatre for me was a space where it was possible to say anything. And it still is . . . That’s the purpose of art — to make the unsayable sayable. And inside that it’s an act of kindness, it’s a moral act. We need it.”

Still in his teens, he took a production to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it received the accolade of “worst play of the year” from one critic. “It was a real badge of honour,” he grins. But where many might have slunk off, defeated, Zeldin was hooked. He knew he had found something in which he really believed. “I realised theatre was a way of cutting through the bullshit and getting at what is essential.”

That urge to bottle truth came out in his Inequalities trilogy, which he began working on in his mid-twenties. His own time doing temp jobs left him determined to find a way to honour onstage the experiences of people often ignored. The first of that trilogy, Beyond Caring, focused on factory cleaners on zero-hours contracts.

“The question was whether you can carve a story out of just life,” he says. “Is theatre something that can get into the marrow of our world and make stories out of it? I’m interested in empathy. I’m interested in dignity.”

After university, Zeldin travelled extensively, seeking out different ways of making theatre. He worked with the great director Peter Brook in Paris, where he still lives (though he’s considering moving back to the UK), and in 2019 set up the A Zeldin company, partly with the intention of touring. An outward looking theatre culture is “very valuable” he suggests.

Fourteen years after falling in love with the stage, he remains besotted. But, in a sense, it’s a tough love. “I always ask myself the question, why theatre? What do people need to see? What’s useful?” he says. “I remember hearing a Greek director say, ‘I want this play to travel in you.’ I love that.”

September 27-November 9, nationaltheatre.org.uk

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen

The winds of change blowing through the financial world mean more of us feel under pressure to make big money decisions — yet many feel ill-equipped to make the right choices.

Warnings of painful tax rises in October’s Budget have prompted readers to give away inheritances early, sell shares and property and, depending on their age, pay in or withdraw large sums from their pensions. But have we done the right thing? Added to this is the uncertainty of how our investments might perform in a turning interest rate cycle, what size of cash buffer to hold and when the optimum time to remortgage might be.

Decisions, decisions! So, when I saw that HSBC had researched how more than 17,000 people in 12 countries went about making different calls with their cash, I was intrigued to learn more.

The study found the best financial decisions involved mindset and method. Having optimism about the outcome, an openness to change and the opportunities this might bring, while acknowledging that things might not go to plan was the optimal mindset, researchers concluded. So, a bit different from the Budget-induced panic of recent months.

As for the process, your head, heart and network are all important, the study found. Planning, research and hard-headed analysis of the facts are obviously key. It may be awkward, but talking about potential decisions with a wider network of people — including those who might disagree with us — was vital. And while our emotions should not be the sole guide of financial decisions, imagining how we’d feel if we did or didn’t make a certain decision had particular value.

If you’re grappling with a decision of your own, the researchers told me that a big predictor of having the confidence to act is if your plans are adaptable: I’ve weighed up the risks, I think this is the best option but, if X happens, I’ll do Y.

What I noticed was that there was nothing different that you or I could see in the [good or bad] classes of decision

It all sounds so easy. However, the current climate of uncertainty is making financial decisions so difficult, we might risk putting them off for even longer. That also carries a cost.

A conundrum that’s occupying UK financial regulators is why Britons are hoarding an estimated £430bn of “excess cash” rather than investing it in the stock market.

So, what mindset would get more of us investing? And what lessons can those who are invested but nervous take from this?

“The key thing about making decisions under uncertainty is that you have to accept that you cannot know [the outcome],” says Professor David Tuckett, who acted as an academic adviser to HSBC on the project.

In his 2008 book Minding the Markets, he asked more than 50 active fund managers to list three examples of investment decisions they were happy with, and three they were not.

“What I noticed was that there was nothing different that you or I could see in the two classes of decision,” he says. An equal amount of research, discussion and tyre-kicking had gone into both. “The only thing that was different was the outcome. And that is because, fundamentally, the outcome is uncertain.”

Even managers who had made the right investment calls admitted that sometimes their outperformance was powered by a factor they hadn’t originally considered.

However, when he asked managers why they thought certain investments had failed, they tended to blame themselves: “They said things like I didn’t work hard enough, that’s why I didn’t succeed.” Interesting — though you can be sure they were still rewarded handsomely for trying.

For retail investors, accepting that not all of our investment decisions are going to work out can be hard to do (especially when we start out). Experience, taking a long-term view, being diversified and having a strategy in place to regularly review your portfolio all help. And as every index investor knows, while some active managers beat the market, it’s virtually impossible for them to outperform consistently.

Feeling remorseful undermines confidence and adds to the self-limiting belief that you are bad with money

We’re all finding it hard to make financial decisions but the HSBC study identified one group who found it even harder — the neurodiverse. Some readers might dismiss this as just the latest buzz term but, if you or a family member have autism, ADHD, dyslexia or dyspraxia, then you will know the struggle is real.

Nearly two-thirds of neurodivergent respondents felt ill-equipped to manage financial decision-making, and more than half often regretted decisions they’d made about money — significantly higher than the neurotypical respondents.

Clare Seal, the author of Real Life Money, uses the term “the ADHD tax” to describe how being neurodivergent has had an impact on her own finances. She says being indecisive about money management has a cost — such as late fees if you don’t pay on time, and higher interest rates on debt if you damage your credit score.

Plus, impulsive spending is a very common issue. If you can’t budget effectively, there’s less chance of having so-called “excess cash” to invest. She has introduced more friction in her own finances to counter this. “If all you need to do is tap or click one button to buy something, you’re much more likely to give in to that impulse.”

Harbouring regret about poor decisions is the flip side of this coin. “Feeling remorseful undermines confidence and adds to the self-limiting belief that you are bad with money,” she says. This can contribute to what’s called pathological demand avoidance, which she describes as feeling like “a concrete barrier” has prevented her from engaging with her finances in the past.

We are both hugely encouraged that banks are finally showing more interest in this very under-researched issue. What’s more, some are developing new services to help neurodivergent customers.

Monzo, the digital bank, promotes a suite of digital budgeting tools to customers with ADHD, including its automated salary sorter, plus the ability to opt out of borrowing entirely and set custom daily limits for ATM withdrawals and card transactions. Its business account offers the ability to set up a “tax pot” to automatically hive off a set percentage of payments and save towards future bills.

Of course, you don’t have to be neurodivergent to make use of these features. But thinking about the needs of different customers is what’s resulting in the kind of innovations that can help everyone feel more confident managing their money.

As the financial regulator moves closer to enabling simplified financial advice and targeted support, I’m hopeful that much more will follow in the investment world too.

Claer Barrett is the FT’s consumer editor and the author of ‘What They Don’t Teach You About Money’. claer.barrett@ft.com; Instagram @Claerb