Why would anyone buy a football club?

The paradox, stated properly

If you judged football clubs the way you would judge any other company, almost nobody would buy one. The industry spends nearly every euro it earns on wages, and much of the rest on transfer fees. Profits are rare, irregular and usually come from selling players. Dividends are close to non-existent. A club that tried to pay its owner a return every year would be spending money that its rivals are putting into their squads, and would soon stop winning.

A fund knows all this before it signs. The reason it buys anyway is that its return does not come from the annual accounts. It comes from the difference between the price paid on the way in and the price received on the way out.

Football is not bought as an income-producing business. It is bought as an asset expected to appreciate — closer to a building in a prime location than to a factory.

Which raises the real question: why should that asset keep appreciating?

Of the five, the valuation gap deserves a moment, because it explains the nationality of most of the buyers. An American investor who has watched NFL and NBA franchises multiply in value over two decades looks at a European club and sees a similar product, with a global audience, trading at half the multiple. The bet is not that the club will become profitable. It is that the market will eventually price it more like an American franchise.

There is a structural reason to be careful with that comparison. American leagues are closed, with no relegation, a salary cap and revenue shared equally — the model described in the piece on how clubs make money. Their franchises are valuable precisely because they cannot fail sportingly. A European club can be relegated, and its value can halve in a single afternoon in May. Part of the valuation gap is not a mispricing. It is the price of that risk.

How a fund makes its return

Put those drivers together and the logic of a fund's investment looks like the bridge below. The figures are illustrative, but the mechanics are the ones every buyer models before bidding.

Notice what is missing. There is no bar for annual profit, because there usually isn't one. Losses along the way are simply added to the cost of entry — which is why a club that loses €30m a year for six years needs its exit price to rise by considerably more than the headline numbers suggest just to break even.

Three ways in

Funds do not all buy clubs in the same way. The structure they choose says a great deal about the risk they are willing to carry.

Buying control

The most visible route. Clearlake's consortium paid £4.25bn for Chelsea in 2022. RedBird bought AC Milan the same year for €1.2bn. In March 2026, Apollo completed the purchase of a majority stake in Atlético Madrid, in a deal valuing the club at around €2.5bn including debt — with the club's planned sports city around its stadium placed at the centre of the thesis. Control means the fund owns the upside and the losses, and has to fund both.

Buying a minority stake

A quieter route with a better risk profile. Arctos took 12.5% of Paris Saint-Germain in 2023. Minority investors get exposure to the club's rising value without running it, without funding its deficits beyond their share, and usually with contractual rights on the eventual exit. They are betting on the asset, not on themselves.

Lending

The least glamorous route, and historically one of the most profitable. A fund lends to an owner who needs cash, secured on the club. If the loan is repaid, the fund earns a high interest rate. If it is not, the fund takes the club.

Or skipping the clubs entirely

A fourth route avoids the sporting risk altogether: buying into the league rather than a club. CVC's deals with LaLiga and France's LFP, and the stake Serie A is now trying to sell in its international media business, give investors a share of every club's broadcast income without any exposure to relegation. It is the same logic as lending — take the income, avoid the pitch.

What can go wrong

The funds that do well in football are the ones who remember that sport is the only industry in which the product can be relegated.

The collapse of 777 Partners is the cautionary example the whole industry now cites. Between 2021 and 2023, the American firm assembled stakes in Genoa, Standard Liège, Red Star, Vasco da Gama, Hertha Berlin and others, and agreed to buy Everton. The Everton deal fell apart in 2024 as the firm's finances unravelled, its UK entity was declared bankrupt that October, and its clubs were left looking for new owners mid-season. Its co-founder has since been indicted in the United States on fraud charges. Few investors were as reckless — but every club in that portfolio learned the same lesson: the owner's balance sheet is part of the club's risk, whether the club chose it or not.