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Belgian football has broken its transfer record this summer, with clubs in the Jupiler Pro League and Challenger Pro League generating 381 million euros from outgoing transfers, exceeding last year’s figure of 314 million euros. The Pro League announced these figures on Monday evening, shortly before the closure of the transfer window, reports 24brussels.
Belgium’s status as a talent exporter has reached new heights. European top-tier clubs are increasingly eyeing Belgian clubs and academies, willing to invest substantial amounts for their players. Club Brugge’s transfer of Swiss midfielder Ardon Jashari to AC Milan for 36 million euros stands out as the priciest outgoing transaction in Belgian football history.
English clubs were particularly active in the Belgian market this summer. Players such as Maxime De Cuyper, Chemsdine Talbi, Tolu Arokodare, and Senne Lammens all joined Premier League teams, each commanding transfer fees exceeding 20 million euros.
Pro League CEO Lorin Parys noted, “The provisional balance sheet for the transfer period shows a positive balance of 234 million euros. That is higher than the combined total of the two previous transfer windows. It demonstrates the strength of our training model. This is not luck, but the result of years of investment in youth development and coaching.”
The Belgian record comes amid a thriving international football transfer market. A FIFA report revealed that clubs globally spent 9.76 billion dollars (8.38 billion euros) between June 1 and September 2, a surge of over 50 percent compared to 2024. There were nearly 12,000 registered transfers, marking yet another record high.
English clubs again led the spending spree, with expenditures exceeding 3 billion dollars (2.57 billion euros). The most significant move occurred on transfer deadline day when Liverpool acquired Alexander Isak from Newcastle United for 145 million euros.
Women’s football also experienced remarkable growth, with transfer spending reaching 12.3 million dollars (10.56 million euros), reflecting an 80 percent increase from the previous year. Over 1,100 transfers were recorded, with the United States at the forefront of both investment and player movement.
Ardon Jashari. © BELGA PHOTO KURT DESPLENTER
Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for SXSW London
ElevenLabs may have a few hundred employees, but its CEO said the voice-cloning AI startup isn’t scaling like a typical tech firm.
Instead of sprawling departments, ElevenLabs’ employees are split into about 20 micro-teams of five to 10 people each, CEO and cofounder Mati Staniszewski said on an episode of the “Twenty Minute VC” podcast published Monday.
Each team owns a product area — from the studio interface to enterprise voice agents — and is designed to move fast without layers of bureaucracy, he added.
“More people frequently doesn’t fix the problem,” Staniszewski said. “You don’t need that many people to do something special.”
ElevenLabs said in a blog post on Monday that it has 330 employees and surpassed $200 million in revenue, with expectations to top $300 million by year’s end. The company had been pacing to reach $100 million in annual revenue by the end of 2024, Business Insider reported last year.
Staniszewski also said ElevenLabs has managed to outperform larger rivals like OpenAI in voice-AI benchmarks and win multimillion-dollar enterprise contracts, thanks to its “mighty” team.
“We now have a very small and mighty team that can learn from each other and move pretty quickly,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a guarantee you get that in some of the other companies.”
Staniszewski said the company plans to expand head count to around 400 this year while sticking with its micro-team model. Even with hundreds of employees, he and his cofounder still interview every candidate themselves.
“It’s a good signal of who we bring into the company,” Staniszewski said, adding that he wants to keep interviewing every hire for as long as he can.
ElevenLabs lists dozens of open roles on its website, from research engineers and data scientists to sales executives and customer success managers worldwide.
It also announced on Monday a $100 million tender offer that will allow employees to cash out some of their shares. The deal, led by Sequoia and Iconiq, values the startup at $6.6 billion — double its Series C valuation from nine months ago.
Staniszewski and ElevanLabs did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Startups and even Big Tech have been touting the gospel of lean, fast-moving teams.
Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s latest earnings call that he has “gotten a little bit more convinced around the ability for small, talent-dense teams to be the optimal configuration for driving frontier research.”
“It’s a bit of a different setup,” the Meta CEO said of its new superintelligence AI unit. The team includes a secretive group of hot-shot hires called TBD Lab, meant to develop the most advanced artificial intelligence models, a recent internal memo shows.
The unit represents a fraction of Meta’s total workforce of over 70,000 employees. Many of its members, including its leader, Alexandr Wang, were hired away from buzzy AI startups.
Startups are also embracing the small teams approach.
Kashish Gupta, the cofounder of Hightouch, a San Francisco–based AI marketing startup, said in a Business Insider report last month that the company has raised over $132 million while keeping its head count at about 55 engineers.
The startup, valued earlier this year at $1.2 billion, expects engineers to be self-starters who build products without requiring micromanagement from their bosses. For example, a major new AI agent launch has only four engineers working on it.
“Ultimately, the people prioritizing work are the engineers themselves or the people they work with,” Gupta said.