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Disclaimer/disclosure: I work for a sports tech company, and am a bad board game player.

It may not be number one, but in the running for 'greatest ironies of our existence' has to be the fact that the inspiration for the board game Monopoly was as a playable critique of capitalism.

The premise of Elizabeth Magie's The Landlord's Game was, more or less, 'the extraction of wealth by the already-wealthy is bad'. 'What if', went Charles Darrow's spin on it, 'it's actually fun'. Monopoly was born.

And why does 'Monopoly' come to mind, in a month where data company Impect has been acquired by Catapult and Hudl have swept Athletic Data Innovations into the fold, its fifth acquisition of the year*? Last year's acquisitions added StatsBomb to their portfolio, bringing together a football data blended family that already included InStat and Wyscout (although neither of them as focused on their event data as event data as StatsBomb).

*(Sports Business Journal described the acquisition of Titan Sport as their 16th in total and the third of the year, and ADI as the 18th in total)

Don't send me to Jail for the comparison. Neither Catapult nor Hudl are monopolies of course, but Get Goalside has long been a chronicle of "huh, what's goin' on around here at the moment?". And what's going on at the moment is that football tech - and sports tech more broadly - is firmly in an Institutional Money era.

You see this in some of Catapult and Hudl's data provider buddies: there's Stats perform (Opta**, RunningBall), Sony (Hawk-Eye), and Electronic Arts (TRACAB).

**The Opta branding now incorporates the event and tracking data together.

Also at play is the amount of players (past and present) who are investing in companies and clubs themselves, either directly or via venture funds. The way some players talk about it, dressing rooms sound like MBA break-out sessions. Elite sport is one of the few areas where TV companies can still rely on hefty subscription fees (although even that is wavering), and one of the few industries minting millionaires upon millionaires.

You can't mention portfolio management and football players without mentioning multi-club models too. The modern age has an increasing amount of transfer rumours phrased like "Player has agreed deal with Multi-Club Ownership Group" (see: Julian Enciso).

This isn't just an "ah, capitalism" comparison. In its 'squad management' guises, football tech has long been in the 'asset management' game. What is the search for wonderkids on Football Manager if not an early introduction to the football tech industry and a forerunner for the transfer strategy of certain MCOs.

Really, the surprise is not so much that the football landscape is where it is now, but that a certain kind of nerd was ever considered an outsider in the first place. Somehow, The Man was punk. Not anymore.

So what, if anything, is punk nowadays?

The thing that comes closest might be the sub-industry going direct to players. Contract negotiation, personalised coaching and analysis, a hub to track your own progression - like some kind of forest plant, companies are sprouting up in some of the more fertile niches that larger trunks aren't making use of.

From a business development perspective this can have awkward challenges though. It's enough of a struggle to keep up with the different needs and quirks of individual clubs. Individual players with all of their different positions and skillsets multiplies that 30-fold. And, annoyingly, the most cost-effective use of football data - as a layer in the player scouting process - isn't something that players need to concern themselves with.

There's also the fact that Big Money is only a one part of town. Some players are millionaires, some players - in the precarious career of being an athlete - are able to set aside some of their income for extracurricular learning rather than savings. (And this might be why player agencies are making steps into data use).

If you want to focus on in-match data, it can also be extraordinarily expensive, and big companies are under little incentive to let other people create products that they could be creating (and owning the IP for) themselves.

But the giants aren't the only supermarkets in town. There are smaller companies that can be found with FIFA-accredited tracking data systems: BePro, Footovision, ReSpo.Vision [please make your name more conducive to a style guide], Skillcorner, and more.***

***There's no equivalent to the FIFA EPTS scheme, which seems a reasonably good accreditation system, for event data. In terms of FIFA-certificated optical and broadcast tracking data systems there is also EVS, primarily a TV production company; and Sportlogiq, who've renewed their EPTS status this year but are predominantly in the ice hockey world.

There's no real through-line of this post, other than 'something is happening'. Something generational - not in the sense of 'rare', but in the sense that the current landscape is the result of an accumulation of the past few decades.

In the mid-2000s, the record men's transfer fee had settled, unchanged since Real Madrid's purchase of Zinedine Zidane in 2001. It stayed there for eight years, a stability unheard of during the '90s. In 2009, Madrid broke the record it once again for Kaká and then for Cristiano Ronaldo in the same transfer window. Four years later they broke it for Gareth Bale. At a similar time across the eastern fringe of the Atlantic Ocean, the Premier League domestic TV rights almost doubled to £1.7billion for the start of the 2007/08 rights cycle, and then again to just over £3billion for the start of 2013/14.

Amidst that, in 2011, Gary Neville retired from his playing career. He may have been unusually business-minded among his cohort, but he was also only catching the beginnings of elite football's (latest) mega-boom. His final contract at Manchester United was £2.3million per year [around £45k per week, or £67k after inflation], a middling amount by the standards of today's Premier League, particularly at big clubs.

It's not exactly new for football to usher people past 'Go' from the working class to the landlord class, whatever Elizabeth Magie may have thought of that, but Neville is probably the best showcase of what has changed. In the old days, the English football tradition was for players to buy pubs as an investment for their future. He is developing Manchester skyscrapers and co-owning lower-league football clubs.

The number of Gary Neville-level wage-earners in football will have grown exponentially. I'm not sure that I - or the tech conglomerates who will presumably want to lock clubs into using their ecosystem and their ecosystem alone - will know what to do with that.