Who Owns Spanish Football: Apollo, Peter Lim and the Four Unsellable Clubs

Every Spanish first-division club can be bought except four, and by 2026 most of the rest had been. American private equity, a Gulf entertainment minister, a Singaporean billionaire, a Mexican telecoms group and an English club-owning fund now control clubs from A Coruña to Almería. This article explains the 1990 law that made it possible, what each investor bought and why the two biggest clubs in the country are structurally off the market. It is part of the Spain Company Stories hub.

What did the 1990 Sports Law do?

It converted Spanish football clubs from member associations into companies. By the late 1980s clubs owed hundreds of millions of pesetas to the tax authority and social security, and the state had guaranteed some of the debt. Ley 10/1990 del Deporte required every club playing professionally to become a Sociedad Anónima Deportiva — a share-issuing company with directors personally liable for losses — by 1992.

The exemption was a test of solvency. Clubs that had recorded positive net equity in the audits of the preceding seasons since 1985-86 could remain associations. Four qualified: Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, Athletic Club and Osasuna. Everyone else, including Atlético, Valencia and Sevilla, converted, with shares initially sold to members and local businessmen.

The law was written to enforce discipline, not to attract foreign capital. But shares that can be sold can be bought. Through the 1990s and 2000s the shares of most SADs concentrated in the hands of local presidents — Jesús Gil at Atlético, José María del Nido at Sevilla, the Roig family at Villarreal — and from the 2010s those presidents began to sell to outsiders.

The four exempt clubs are, by law, unsellable. Their members elect presidents, who post personal guarantees against losses. The consequence for how Real Madrid financed a €1.4bn stadium is examined in our piece on Real Madrid’s business model; the consequence for Barcelona’s debt is in our article on its economic levers.

What did Apollo buy at Atlético de Madrid?

Control of Spain’s third club and of a large piece of land next to its stadium. In November 2025 Apollo Sports Capital, a unit of the $800bn US asset manager, agreed to buy 55% of Atlético HoldCo at a reported valuation of around €2.5bn. The deal closed on 12 March 2026.

The sellers were the club’s long-standing controllers. Chief executive Miguel Ángel Gil Marín, son of the former president, held about half the shares; chairman Enrique Cerezo about 15%; and Idan Ofer’s Quantum Pacific, which had bought in from 2018, roughly a quarter. Ares Management had provided capital in 2024. All four remain as minority shareholders; Gil Marín and Cerezo stay in post.

The reason for the sale is the balance sheet. Atlético earned roughly €450m in 2024-25, half of Real Madrid, with a LaLiga salary limit of €327m and debt built up through the Metropolitano move and squad investment. Apollo’s board approved an equity injection of up to €100m on closing, earmarked for the squad and for infrastructure.

The infrastructure is the Ciudad del Deporte, a sports and entertainment district on land around the Riyadh Air Metropolitano, with a surf park, arena, training facilities and commercial space, budgeted at roughly €800m and intended to give the club the kind of non-football income the rebuilt Bernabéu now delivers to its neighbour. The comparison with how Spanish contractors monetise concession land is drawn in our piece on Spain’s concession model.

How did City Football Group turn Girona into a Champions League club?

By treating a second-division Catalan club as a node in a network. In August 2017 City Football Group, the Abu Dhabi-owned parent of Manchester City, bought 44.3% of Girona alongside Pere Guardiola’s Girona Football Group, which took the same stake. CFG later raised its holding to 47%; Bolivian-American investor Marcelo Claure bought 35% in 2020 and Guardiola’s group holds the rest.

The model is loans and shared scouting. Girona has fielded players on loan or transferred from Manchester City — Savinho, Yan Couto, Pablo Maffeo — and buys through CFG’s global scouting. The results were a third-place finish in 2023-24 and a first Champions League campaign in 2024-25, from a stadium of 14,600 seats and a salary limit around a tenth of Barcelona’s.

UEFA’s multi-club rules bit in 2024. Because Manchester City and Girona both qualified for the Champions League, CFG had to place its Girona shares in a blind trust and reduce its influence for the season. The case is now the template every multi-club group in Spain is measured against, and one reason Apollo structured Atlético as a standalone holding.

Girona’s value to CFG is not profit. It is a Spanish licence, a pipeline for South American players who need EU registration, and a first-division shop window a short drive from Barcelona. The club’s annual revenue remains below €100m; its function is worth more than its accounts.

Why has Peter Lim’s ownership of Valencia been so contested?

Because the club has gone backwards under him while the promised stadium stood unfinished. Singaporean investor Lim bought a controlling stake in Valencia in October 2014 through his vehicle Meriton Holdings, taking on debts to Bankia and paying a reported €100m for around 70% of the shares, with a commitment to finish the Nou Mestalla stadium, on which construction had stopped in 2009.

Valencia reached the Champions League and won the Copa del Rey in 2019, then sacked the coach who won it, sold its best players and spent the next five seasons in the bottom half. Supporters organised through the Libertad VCF platform and mass protests; matches at Mestalla regularly feature demands for Lim to sell. Successive local presidents installed by Meriton, from Anil Murthy to Layhoon Chan, became the public face of a distant owner.

The stadium is the financial core of the dispute. Nou Mestalla, a 70,000-seat shell in the city’s north, sat idle for 15 years while the club retained planning rights that the city council threatened to revoke. Work resumed in January 2025 with financing that includes the club’s CVC allocation, with completion targeted for 2027 at a reduced capacity.

In February 2025 reports emerged that Lim was seeking a buyer at around €400m, a price most analysts considered high for a club with Valencia’s debt and salary limit. No sale had closed by September 2026. The case is the counter-example to Apollo: an owner who bought a big club cheaply, invested little, and found that Spanish supporters can make an asset very hard to run.

Who owns the rest of the first division?

A mix of American funds, individual billionaires and a few surviving local families. Espanyol was sold in 2025 by Chinese owner Chen Yansheng, who had held it since 2016, to Velocity Sport Limited, the vehicle of ALK Capital’s Alan Pace that also owns Burnley, for about €130m; completion came in October 2025.

Mallorca is owned by a US group led by Robert Sarver, the former Phoenix Suns owner, with Steve Nash and Andy Kohlberg, since 2016. Almería has been owned since 2019 by Turki Al-Sheikh, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority. Leganés was bought in 2022 by Blue Crow Sports, the group of former Houston Astros executive Jeff Luhnow, which also owns Cancun FC. Real Oviedo is controlled by Grupo Pachuca of Mexico’s Jesús Martínez, with Carlos Slim as a long-standing shareholder. Real Valladolid was sold by Ronaldo Nazario in 2025 to a North American group after relegation.

Sevilla is the exception that proves the local rule. Its shares are held by Spanish families whose feud — former president José María del Nido against his son, José María del Nido Carrasco, and the Castro family — has paralysed governance while the salary limit collapsed to €22m for 2025-26. Several US funds have circled; no sale has closed because no faction can deliver a majority.

Villarreal remains owned by Fernando Roig, brother of Mercadona’s Juan Roig; Getafe by Ángel Torres; Real Betis and Real Sociedad by broad local shareholdings; Alavés by the Baskonia basketball group. The pattern is clear enough: where a single family controls the SAD and needs capital, it sells abroad.

Why can nobody buy Real Madrid, Barcelona, Athletic or Osasuna?

Because they are not companies. The 1990 law left the four as associations whose members hold no transferable equity. There is nothing to purchase: no share register, no controlling stake, no board that can accept an offer. Converting to an SAD would require a members’ vote that none of the four has ever come close to holding.

The model has costs. The four cannot raise equity, so they finance investment with debt, operating surplus or contracts that sell future income. Real Madrid’s stadium debt and its Sixth Street deal, and Barcelona’s sale of TV rights, are both substitutes for the capital increase an SAD would simply have done. Athletic and Osasuna, smaller and more conservative, fund themselves from operations and their own stadium rebuilds.

The Real Madrid proposal of 2026 — to create a commercial subsidiary and sell a minority of it while the association remains member-owned — is the first time one of the four has tried to get equity capital in through the side door. If members approve it, the line between the exempt clubs and the SADs becomes thinner than the 1990 law intended.

The model also has a value that markets recognise. Forbes and others put Real Madrid and Barcelona among the most valuable sports properties in the world precisely because their brands are not diluted by an owner’s other interests, and because the members cannot be bought out by a state or a fund. Whether that premium survives a stake sale is the open question.

What does the ownership map mean for Spanish football as an industry?

It splits the league into three tiers with different capital structures. At the top, two members’ clubs earn over €1bn each and cannot be bought. In the middle, investor-owned clubs such as Atlético, Girona and Espanyol are recapitalised by funds that want land, licences and network value. At the bottom, family-controlled SADs either sell abroad or, like Sevilla, stagnate.

For LaLiga, whose economics we set out in our analysis of its broadcast and CVC model, foreign capital is welcome so long as it accepts the salary limit. The league’s cost controls were designed to stop presidents overspending; they apply equally to Apollo and to Peter Lim, which is why owners invest in stadiums and districts rather than wages.

For Spain more broadly, the football register mirrors the corporate one. Naturgy, Telefónica and MasOrange all show how foreign funds and sovereign investors have moved into Spanish assets that were once locally controlled; our profile of Naturgy’s ownership saga tells that story in energy. Football arrived later and, in Atlético’s case, at a higher valuation than most Spanish listed companies.

Frequently Asked Questions