Football Club Valuations and the Rise of Multi-Club Ownership

Football club valuations have become a serious asset-pricing question rather than a vanity ranking. Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, private equity and American sports dynasties are buying clubs or stakes in them, and increasingly buying several at once. This article explains how clubs are valued, what recent transactions tell us about the multiples investors will pay, why multi-club ownership (MCO) has spread so fast and how regulators are trying to keep up. It sits in the Sports Economy hub and pairs with our breakdown of Premier League economics and revenue distribution, which explains the income streams these valuations capitalise.

How are football club valuations calculated?

Most published valuations start with revenue and apply a multiple that reflects league, brand, stadium ownership and debt. Forbes, Sportico and CNBC each use their own adjustments, which is why Real Madrid can be worth $6.5bn on one list and $9.5bn on another within twelve months.

The logic is closer to media or luxury-brand valuation than to a conventional discounted cash flow, because most clubs do not generate free cash. A buyer is paying for a scarce asset with a captive audience, growing international media rights and the option value of future revenue streams (stadium redevelopment, women’s teams, content). Forbes’ 2026 methodology considers 2024/25 revenue, operating income, stadium economics and debt, and it rounds each value to the nearest million dollars. Sportico’s 2025 list of the 50 most valuable clubs, published in May 2025, totalled roughly $86bn and included 14 Premier League and 19 MLS clubs; its Real Madrid figure of $6.53bn was about 5.5 times the club’s then revenue.

Transactions are the only true test. The 2023/24 sale of 27.7% of Manchester United to Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS implied an enterprise value of about $6.3bn, or around 8 times revenue at the time. Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly paid £2.5bn for Chelsea in 2022, roughly 5 times revenue, plus a commitment to invest a further £1.75bn. By contrast, Dan Friedkin’s purchase of Everton in late 2024 was priced closer to the club’s debt than to any multiple of its revenue, and many Serie A and Ligue 1 clubs have changed hands at 1–2 times revenue.

Revenue itself comes from Deloitte’s Football Money League, which for the 2024/25 season put Real Madrid at €1.16bn, Barcelona at €975m, Bayern Munich at €861m and Paris Saint-Germain at €837m, with nine Premier League clubs in the top 20. Multiply those figures by the relevant multiple and the Forbes ranking, shown in the table below, falls into place.

Sources: Forbes, 29 May 2026 (via Sports Illustrated); Deloitte Football Money League 2026. Revenue multiples range from roughly 5x (Chelsea, Tottenham) to 8x (Real Madrid, Manchester United).

Why have club valuations risen so much faster than revenue?

Because the buyer base has changed. Ten years ago clubs were bought by individuals; now sovereign funds, institutional private equity and American franchise owners compete for a fixed supply of elite teams, and they price football against NFL and NBA franchises rather than against its own cash flows.

The reference points come from American sport, where franchises are scarce, cannot be relegated and sit inside hard salary caps. When the Boston Celtics sold for $6.1bn in 2025 and the Los Angeles Lakers for $10bn, investors re-rated the European clubs with comparable global audiences. Forbes now puts Aston Villa at $1.4bn after 56% growth in a year, and Newcastle at $1.25bn, levels that would have bought a top-six club in 2015. The mechanism is explored in our article on why sports franchise valuations keep rising.

Three structural factors support the multiples. First, international media rights for the biggest leagues keep growing even as domestic rights stall, so the revenue line most relevant to a global brand is still compounding. Second, club revenue across Europe grew about 80% in a decade, according to UEFA’s 2026 European Club Finance and Investment Landscape report, with total revenue expected to pass €30bn in 2025 and clubs forecast to reach operating break-even that year after four years of losses. Third, there is scarcity: only around 30 clubs worldwide have the brand reach to justify a billion-dollar price, and few of them are for sale.

Liverpool is the clearest case. Fenway Sports Group paid £300m in 2010. In August 2026 it sold a stake of roughly a third to 1892 Holdings, a consortium led by Amit Bhatia that includes the Mittal family trusts and K5 Sports, in which Jeff Bezos is the lead investor, at an implied valuation above £5bn with an option to increase the holding. That is a 17-fold increase in sixteen years, during which the club’s revenue rose roughly fourfold. The rest is multiple expansion.

What does multi-club ownership mean and who does it?

Multi-club ownership is one investor or group holding controlling or significant stakes in two or more clubs, usually in different countries. UEFA’s 2026 finance report counts 345 clubs inside such networks; Clifford Chance’s February 2026 briefing cites about 147 groups controlling nearly 400 clubs worldwide, up from 60 groups and 156 clubs in 2021.

The model has three main forms. The platform model, pioneered by City Football Group (Manchester City, Girona, Palermo, Lommel, Troyes, New York City FC, Yokohama F. Marinos, Melbourne City, Montevideo City Torque and others), spreads scouting, data, coaching methodology and commercial deals across a dozen clubs; its ten-year Puma partnership covering the group is reported at around $860m. The springboard model, built by Red Bull, moves players from FC Liefering to Salzburg to Leipzig (Dayot Upamecano and Konrad Laimer are textbook cases), with the group’s New York, Brazil and, since 2024, Leeds United holdings as further rungs. The portfolio model treats clubs as financial assets: Eagle Football (Lyon, Botafogo, RWD Molenbeek and until 2025 Crystal Palace), 777 Partners (Genoa, Standard Liège, Hertha Berlin and Vasco da Gama before its collapse in 2024) and the Friedkin Group (Roma, Cannes, Everton) are examples.

PitchBook’s August 2025 research on private capital in European football found that 47.9% of “big five” league clubs belonged to an MCO structure, up from 41.7% two seasons earlier, that 39.6% had US-based capital at ownership level and that 36.5% had private equity, venture or private-debt participation. Seventeen of the 20 Premier League clubs were in a multi-club group of some kind. Other notable pairings include INEOS (Manchester United and Nice), RedBird (AC Milan and Toulouse), V Sports (Aston Villa and Vitória de Guimarães), BlueCo (Chelsea and Strasbourg), Brighton’s Tony Bloom (Union Saint-Gilloise and, since 2025, Hearts), and the Pozzo family (Udinese and Watford). In Türkiye, foreign MCO groups have so far stayed away from Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe, which remain association-controlled with listed subsidiaries, but Turkish clubs have become a regular stop in the player pipelines of groups such as City Football Group and Eagle.

Why do investors build multi-club groups?

Four reasons: player trading margins, shared overheads, diversification across leagues and media markets, and access to competitions that one club alone cannot reach. The financial case is that a network can develop and sell talent at lower cost than the open transfer market charges.

Player trading is the core. A group can sign a 19-year-old in Belgium or Uruguay, give him first-team minutes at a feeder club, and move him up the chain at an internal valuation rather than paying a market premium. Red Bull’s route from Salzburg to Leipzig produced Erling Haaland’s and Naby Keïta’s early development and multiple nine-figure sales; City Football Group’s Girona has become a reliable supplier to Manchester City and a profitable seller to others. The scale of the wider market, in which the transfer economy moves more than $9bn a year, makes even modest cost savings worth hundreds of millions over a decade.

Shared overheads are real but smaller than advertised. A group can run one data science team, one scouting platform and one commercial sales force. City Football Group’s group-wide Puma deal, and its practice of negotiating airline and betting partnerships across clubs, are the clearest examples. Diversification is partly a hedge against relegation and partly a media strategy: owning clubs in the Premier League, Ligue 1, Serie A and MLS gives a group exposure to four separate rights cycles.

The weakest argument is the fourth. Owning two clubs that qualify for the same UEFA competition does not double your European income; under Article 5 of the UEFA regulations it may halve it, as Crystal Palace discovered. And the model has failed spectacularly when leveraged: 777 Partners’ collapse in 2024 left Genoa, Standard Liège and Hertha Berlin scrambling for new owners, and Eagle Football’s Lyon was provisionally relegated by France’s DNCG in 2025 before a last-minute recapitalisation. For a wider view of the capital behind these structures, see private equity in sport: the funds, the deals and the rules.

What happened in the Crystal Palace and Lyon case?

Crystal Palace won the 2025 FA Cup and qualified for the Europa League, but Eagle Football, which held about 43% of Palace, also controlled Lyon, which had qualified for the same competition. UEFA’s assessment date was 1 March 2025; Palace missed it, was demoted to the Conference League in July 2025 and lost its appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in August.

The case turned on timing rather than substance. John Textor sold his Palace stake to New York Jets owner Woody Johnson for about £190m in July 2025, resolving the conflict, but UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body ruled that compliance is assessed as at 1 March and that later changes cannot cure a breach. CAS agreed, as it did in the parallel Drogheda United (Ireland) and DAC Dunajská Streda (Slovakia) cases that summer. Nottingham Forest, which had finished seventh in the Premier League, took Palace’s Europa League place, and Palace estimated its loss at around €25m.

The ruling forced two changes. UEFA has signalled a dual-deadline system, keeping 1 March for reporting conflicts but allowing until June to resolve them, and it continues to approve blind-trust structures as a workaround: Manchester City and Girona, and Manchester United and Nice, used such trusts for the 2024/25 season, and Juventus’ minority owner Tether reportedly replaced a board appointee in 2025 to avoid overlap with Monaco. In May 2025 CAS also upheld FIFA’s exclusion of Club León from the Club World Cup because of its common ownership with Pachuca, finding the trust offered insufficient separation. Palace, now valued by its owners at around £900m according to City AM’s October 2026 report, hired the Raine Group to seek new investment, a reminder that the episode did not dent its price.

How are regulators responding to multi-club ownership?

UEFA bans anyone from controlling or having decisive influence over two clubs in the same competition, FIFA applied the same rule at the 2025 Club World Cup, Italy is phasing out domestic multi-club control by 2028, and England’s Owners’ and Directors’ Test now scrutinises anyone with 25% or more. None of them bans cross-border groups outright.

UEFA’s rule dates from the 1998 ENIC case, when the owners of Slavia Prague, AEK Athens and Vicenza qualified more than one club for the UEFA Cup. The modern version, Article 5 of the competition regulations, uses a list of indicators of “decisive influence” set out in a Club Financial Control Body letter of May 2024. Since May 2024, when two related clubs qualify, only one is admitted to a given competition and the other may be moved down a tier, which is what happened to Palace. Beyond admission, UEFA’s financial sustainability rules require related-party transactions to be at fair value and cap the squad cost ratio at 70%, both of which bite harder on groups that trade internally; our guide to UEFA’s financial rules covers the detail.

National rules vary. Italy’s federation (Article 16-bis of its NOIF) prohibits controlling two professional clubs and gave existing cases, such as Claudio Lotito’s Lazio and Salernitana, a trust-based transition. France’s DNCG scrutinises group liquidity, which is why Lyon’s status depended on Eagle’s wider balance sheet. In England, the Premier League requires full disclosure of related clubs, caps acquisition debt at 65% of equity value and runs associated-party transaction tests on sponsorships; the new Independent Football Regulator, operational from 2026, adds a licensing regime that can look through to ultimate owners. FIFA’s transfer regulations (Article 10 of the RSTP, 2022) also limit the number of loans between related clubs, closing the loophole that let groups park players at affiliates indefinitely.

How do football club valuations compare with other sports?

Elite football clubs are now valued like NBA and NFL franchises, but the average club is worth far less. Forbes’ top 30 football clubs total roughly $87bn, a sum that 32 NFL franchises exceed comfortably, and only ten football clubs are worth more than the least valuable NFL team.

The comparison exposes the structure of each sport. NFL franchises are worth $5bn–$10bn each because of a shared $20bn-plus media contract, a hard cap and no relegation; the risk-adjusted cash flow is predictable. Football’s value is concentrated in a few global brands with unpredictable cash flows and a long tail of clubs that cannot be valued on earnings at all. Seven MLS clubs appear in Forbes’ top 30, led by Inter Miami at $1.35bn, despite revenues that would not reach the Deloitte top 40, precisely because MLS is a closed league with franchise scarcity and a central Apple TV deal. Our comparison of closed and open league models explains why that gap persists.

For investors, the practical lesson is to price by league structure, not sport. A Premier League club has a protected share of a £6.7bn domestic deal and growing overseas income; a Championship club has a 96% wage-to-revenue ratio and a dependency on promotion; a Serie A club has a stadium it usually does not own. Multi-club groups exist partly to arbitrage these differences, buying cheap feeder clubs in Belgium, Portugal or South America and using them to feed an expensive club in England or Italy. Whether that arbitrage survives tighter related-party rules and the regulatory precedents of 2025 is the question that will determine what the next decade of club valuations looks like.

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