About Trust Capital

Trust Capital started as a question in a football podcast's comment section — does any of this actually work? — and turned into a dissertation, then a piece of research worth building something real around.

The research

I'm Frederick Porter. I hold an MSc (Hons) in Football Business from UCFB, in partnership with the University of East London, where I researched how independent football podcasts actually convert listeners into customers for their sponsors — not how the industry assumes they do, but what 111 real listeners said and did.

The headline finding surprised me as much as anyone: engagement — likes, comments, shares, the whole vanity-metric toolkit the industry is built around — had almost no relationship with whether someone bought a sponsor's product. Trust in the brand did, overwhelmingly. That gap between what the industry measures and what actually predicts a sale is the entire reason Trust Capital exists.

Why build this

Independent podcasts without agency backing are usually stuck pitching sponsors on the only evidence anyone's taught them to use — downloads and followers — even when that evidence doesn't hold up. Meanwhile brands are buying reach that, on this data, doesn't reliably convert. Somebody needed to build the missing middle: a way to actually show trust, not just claim it.

Trust Capital is that attempt — a playbook, a self-assessment tool, and a certification standard, all built directly on the research rather than on industry convention.

Where it's headed

This site, and the certification process behind it, is designed to keep testing itself. Every podcast that goes through the Scorecard and certification adds a real data point against the original 2025 findings — which means Trust Capital gets more accurate over time, not just bigger.

Get in touch

Trust Capital is the applied, commercial extension of dissertation research conducted at UCFB/University of East London (2025). See How We Know This for full methodology and limitations.