Club Debt: Bonds, Stadium Loans and Who Lends to Sport

Club debt is the least glamorous and most consequential number in sports finance. It decides whether a stadium gets built, whether a transfer window is funded and, in the worst cases, who owns the club when the music stops. This article, part of the Sports Economy hub, explains how clubs borrow, who lends, what leagues allow and where leverage has gone wrong. It sits alongside our guide to private equity in sport and our explainer on why franchise valuations keep rising.

Why do sports clubs borrow money at all?

Because the big capital items, stadiums above all, cost many years of profit, and because cash flow in sport is lumpy: broadcast money arrives in instalments, transfer fees are paid over years and a bad season can remove a third of income. Debt bridges contracted future revenue and today’s bills.

Club borrowing falls into four buckets. Infrastructure debt funds stadiums and training grounds and is secured on the asset and its future revenue. Working-capital debt, usually a revolving credit facility, smooths the calendar: clubs draw down in summer when transfer fees are due and repay when broadcast instalments land. Acquisition debt is the owner’s problem, except when, as with the Glazers’ 2005 purchase of Manchester United, it is pushed onto the club. And transfer-receivable financing, where a club sells future instalments on a player sale at a discount, is the quiet workhorse of European football.

Lenders care about predictability. The CFA Institute’s 2025 review of sport as an investment notes that media-rights contracts typically run seven to eleven years and season-ticket renewal rates commonly exceed 80%. A stadium whose premium seats are pre-sold on multi-year contracts and whose team receives an equal share of a national television deal is, to a banker, an infrastructure asset rather than an entertainment business.

The counter-argument is relegation. An NFL team cannot be relegated and its national revenue is guaranteed; a Championship club can lose its Premier League income in one bad spring. That is why American franchises borrow at corporate rates while European clubs pay more, pledge more and turn to specialist funds. Our article on closed and open leagues covers the structural gap.

How are modern stadiums financed?

With layers: long-dated bank loans or bonds secured on the venue, tax-backed municipal bonds in North America, league loan programmes, seat licence sales and naming rights. Real Madrid, Tottenham and the Las Vegas Raiders show three distinct recipes.

Real Madrid chose cheap, long bank debt. According to the club’s own disclosures, it borrowed €575m in 2019 over 30 years at a fixed 2.5%, €225m in 2021 over 27 years at 1.53%, and €370m in 2023 to cover overruns, taking the financing to €1.17bn against a renovation that cost €1.76bn. The combined annual repayment is about €60m, which the club says is less than half the additional profit the rebuilt Bernabéu generates. Sixth Street also paid roughly €360m in 2022 for a 20-year share of non-football stadium revenue, a sale of future income rather than a loan.

Tottenham used banks first and bonds second. The club arranged a £200m interim facility in 2015, replaced it with a £400m loan in 2017, extended that to £637m, then refinanced £525m into bonds maturing over 15 to 30 years, arranged by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which also lent a further £112m. During the pandemic it added a £175m Bank of England loan. The stadium cost around £1.2bn, by chairman Daniel Levy’s 2020 estimate, and a 2021 analysis put total club debt at about £1.18bn, structured to be repaid over 23 years at roughly £30m a season. The club has still not sold naming rights it once priced at more than £20m a year.

The Raiders used the American recipe. Allegiant Stadium cost $1.9bn. Clark County issued $750m of municipal bonds backed by a hotel-room tax; the Raiders contributed $1.1bn, made up of a $650m Bank of America loan, $200m from the NFL’s stadium loan programme and $300m from personal seat licences, naming rights and sponsorship. SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles was built privately at a reported $5bn to $6bn, with NFL loans of $700m and SoFi paying more than $30m a year for naming rights. Our piece on public versus private stadium financing examines who ends up paying.

What is a club bond, and who buys it?

A club bond is a loan sliced into tradable notes, sold publicly or by private placement to insurers, pension funds and credit investors. Manchester United’s 2010 issue, Tottenham’s stadium notes and Barcelona’s Espai Barça financing are the best-known examples; the buyers want long, secured income.

Manchester United’s bonds are the cautionary origin story. The Glazers’ 2005 buyout loaded the club with roughly £660m of hedge-fund debt costing about £62m a year, plus payment-in-kind notes at 14.25% and later 16.25% at the holding company. In January 2010 the club refinanced with a £504m bond in two tranches, £250m at 8.75% and $425m at 8.375%, paying around £45m a year in interest. Refinancings cut the cost, but the club’s filings record £37m of interest paid in 2024 and total debt still above £1bn in 2025. Acquisition debt does not generate revenue; it only consumes it.

Stadium bonds are the healthier species. Tottenham’s £525m of 15-to-30-year notes are secured on a venue that hosts NFL games, concerts and up to 30 non-football events a year, and the repayment of about £30m a season is small relative to club revenue above £500m. Barcelona’s Espai Barça financing, structured with Goldman Sachs, was approved by members in December 2021 at up to €1.5bn and is to be repaid from the extra revenue the rebuilt Camp Nou produces over about 25 years; a September 2026 vote added €510m to finish the ground and absorb a year’s delay. The buyers of such paper are the insurers and pension funds that buy toll-road debt.

In Türkiye, club debt has been a bank problem rather than a bond-market one: Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe, Beşiktaş and Trabzonspor, all listed on Borsa Istanbul, carried bank debt so large that the Turkish Banks Association coordinated a restructuring in 2019. Our Türkiye sports economy playbook sets out how the Süper Lig’s finances work.

What do leagues allow teams to borrow?

North American leagues cap ownership-group debt and run their own stadium loan programmes; European leagues set no borrowing limit but police the result through licensing and cost-control rules. The NFL’s ceiling is $1.5bn per ownership group: $700m of acquisition debt and $800m of operating debt.

The NFL figures come from Front Office Sports’ September 2026 summary of the league’s ownership policy. The ceiling forces equity into every transaction: Vinod Khosla’s group paid $9.612bn for the Seattle Seahawks in 2026 with, at most, $700m of acquisition borrowing, which is why private equity funds appeared in the cap table. The league’s stadium programme is the other half of the system: a league-approved loan, $200m for Allegiant and $700m for SoFi, is repaid from the new venue’s premium income.

The NBA, MLB and NHL run comparable ceilings and league-wide credit facilities that let teams borrow at the league’s rating. The Arctos analysis cited by Alternatives Watch in September 2025 puts median franchise EBITDA at about $44m on median revenue of $442m; a $1bn debt load on such a team would be absurd, and the rules make it impossible.

Europe polices outcomes instead of inputs. UEFA’s squad-cost rule limits player spending to 70% of revenue from 2025/26, and its earlier break-even test penalised losses, but neither caps debt directly; the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules work the same way. European leverage is therefore whatever lenders will tolerate, which is why Inter Milan could carry a holding-company loan until it defaulted. Our explainer on UEFA’s financial rules covers how the regime has changed.

Who are the new lenders to sport?

Private credit funds. Apollo, Ares, Oaktree, Sixth Street and others now lend to clubs, leagues and owners against media contracts, stadium revenue and franchise equity, often with the right to convert to ownership. Apollo’s $2.6bn Yankees package and Oaktree’s seizure of Inter Milan show both ends of the spectrum.

The Yankees deal, reported by Sportcal in August 2026, mixed debt and equity in an undisclosed split, refinanced the remaining borrowing from the 2009 Yankee Stadium build, reported at under $100m, and gave Apollo Sports Capital’s chief executive Al Tylis a board seat. Apollo’s sports arm, launched in 2025 and reportedly targeting $5bn to $6bn of permanent capital, wants to provide “bespoke capital solutions”: loans, preferred equity and hybrids that banks cannot write because of leverage rules and that league caps keep private equity from writing as ordinary equity. Ares, which holds 10% of the Miami Dolphins, is raising a second sports finance fund targeting $2bn.

Oaktree’s experience at Inter is the other outcome. The fund lent to Suning’s holding company in May 2021 to cover pandemic losses; when the loan, reported at €395m by maturity, was not repaid, Oaktree took 99.6% of the club on 22 May 2024 and installed Giuseppe Marotta as chairman. The club reached the 2025 Champions League final, but the episode is the clearest modern loan-to-own structure in sport. Elliott Management’s 2018 takeover of AC Milan followed the same script; Elliott sold the club to RedBird in 2022 for about €1.2bn.

The quieter growth area is receivables finance: clubs sell future transfer instalments, sponsorship receipts and even UEFA prize money to lenders at a discount. Barcelona’s 2022 sale of 25 years of a quarter of its LaLiga television income to Sixth Street for roughly €517m is the largest example; such deals often do not appear as debt, but they commit the same future revenue a bond would.

What happens when a club’s debt goes wrong?

One of four things: the owner recapitalises, as Juventus’s shareholders have done; a lender takes the keys, as Oaktree did at Inter; the club sells future income to stay afloat, as Barcelona did; or it enters insolvency and faces points deductions, as several English clubs have.

Recapitalisation is the privileged route. Juventus, listed in Milan since 2001 and controlled by the Agnelli family’s Exor, raised roughly €400m from shareholders in 2021 and about €200m in 2024 to absorb pandemic losses; Exor underwrote both. Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich wrote off about £1.5bn of loans when the club was sold in 2022, the extreme form of the same thing: debt never meant to be repaid.

The asset-sale route is Barcelona’s. Having run up a wage bill it could not fund, the club sold future television income, a stake in its media business and a share of its merchandising to raise more than €700m in 2022 and 2023, booked the proceeds as revenue and used them to register players under LaLiga’s cost controls. The audit disputes that followed, and the growth of the Espai Barça budget to around €2bn, show the cost of borrowing from the future.

Insolvency is the English speciality. Because English clubs are companies and the Football League imposes an automatic points deduction for administration, a lender’s security is a wasting asset the moment the club starts losing. Bury were expelled in 2019; Derby County and Wigan Athletic went through administration after owner promises evaporated. The independent football regulator established in 2025 exists because of these cases, and it asks the lender’s first question: can this owner fund the losses?

How does club debt compare across leagues?

American franchises carry modest, league-capped debt against guaranteed national revenue; the biggest European clubs carry large but long-dated stadium debt; mid-table European clubs carry the riskiest debt of all, short-term and dependent on results. What the debt is secured on matters more than its form.

Manchester United and Real Madrid sit side by side in Forbes’ 2026 valuation table at $7.2bn and $9.5bn, yet their balance sheets could not differ more: United carries more than £1bn of largely acquisition-derived debt on revenue that fell after a season without the Champions League, while Madrid’s similar quantum is 30-year money at about 3% against a venue whose revenue has already risen. The Raiders’ $650m bank loan sits against a franchise Forbes values at $10.3bn. Our article on Premier League economics shows what happens when broadcast money is shared less equally.

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