Vault Partners brush mark
The credit risk specialist for professional football

Specialist credit intelligence for the business of football.

A specialist practice that assesses, analyses and rates the credit quality of football clubs, structuring credit views built for the realities of the sector.

At a glance A decade of practice, a tested model
01 — Experience
10+
Years of experience in football finance
02 — The model
20+
Variables in the Vault Credit Risk Model
03 — Tested
1,000+
Clubs the model has been tested across
I — The gap

Standard credit analysis falls short.

Football is a sector where standard credit analysis falls short. A club's solvency answers to a logic of its own, one that generalist credit models are not built to read.

The thesis

Vault was built to close that gap.

Vault Partners · Credit risk specialism Football, through a corporate credit lens
II — The approach

A framework that holds two worlds at once.

More than twenty variables, weighed across financial fundamentals and football-specific realities, resolve into a single, consistent credit rating. The corporate credit lens, applied to a sector that plays by its own rules.

i.

Financial fundamentals

The corporate credit lens applied with rigour: the balance-sheet, liquidity and solvency signals that determine whether a club can meet its obligations.

ii.

Football-specific drivers

Transfer exposure, European competition dependency and the governance pressures specific to the sector: the realities that generalist models leave out, read as credit factors.

iii.

Disciplined, consistent ratings

More than twenty variables resolve into data-driven credit ratings, applied consistently to support robust underwriting decisions.

The credit-quality bands · Vault CRM Illustrative scale · not a club or score
Illustrative Vault CRM credit-quality scale A generic, illustrative rating scale with bands labelled investment grade, speculative and sub-investment. It is an illustration of the Vault CRM method, not a real club, score or official rating. INVESTMENT GRADE SPECULATIVE SUB-INVESTMENT Highest quality Distressed
III — Carol Mykita

The author of the method.

Carol Mykita, Founder and Chief Underwriting Officer of Vault Partners
Carol Mykita Founder & CUO

Founder Carol Mykita brings more than ten years of experience in football finance. In 2021, he authored How to Analyze Football Clubs, a guide to evaluating football transactions through a corporate credit lens.

In 2025, after a decade of research and underwriting practice, he developed the Vault Credit Risk Model: a proprietary rating framework designed to assess the credit quality and solvency of football clubs with a high level of accuracy.

As Founder and Chief Underwriting Officer, Carol sets Vault's underwriting philosophy, risk appetite and portfolio construction principles: disciplined, specialist risk selection designed for carrier partners.

Vault currently underwrites football credit risk on secondment within a registered Lloyd's broker and London market underwriting business, as Vault builds towards its own regulatory permissions.

2021How to Analyze Football Clubs 2025Vault Credit Risk Model
Start the conversation

Let's talk football credit risk.

For brokers and carrier partners in the London market. Tell us what you are looking at, and we will bring the credit view.