Real Madrid: The Members’ Club That Built a €1.2 Billion Business

Real Madrid is the only sports organisation in the world that earns more than €1.2bn a year without a single shareholder. It is owned by its members, run by a president who also chairs a €40bn construction group, and financed a stadium the size of a small city with debt and a stake sale to a US private-equity firm. This article explains how the business works, where the money comes from and what the 2026 ownership vote may change. It is part of the Spain Company Stories hub.

How big is Real Madrid as a business?

Larger than any other football club, by a clear margin. In the 2025-26 season the club reported operating revenue of €1,221m, up 3.1% on the €1,185m of 2024-25, which was itself the first time any club had passed €1.1bn. EBITDA rose 18% to €287m and net profit after tax was €26m.

Since 2018-19, when revenue was €757m, the top line has grown 61%. Almost all of that growth came from one asset. Stadium income more than doubled, from around €175m before the works to €363m in 2025-26. Marketing and commercial income was €539m and broadcasting plus international competitions contributed €319m.

The balance sheet is unusually clean for a club that has just spent well over a billion euros. Net debt at 30 June 2026 was €8.7m, net equity was €624m, and the club had €475m of undrawn credit lines. The stadium loans do not count in that net debt figure under the club’s presentation because they are matched against the stadium’s own cash flows and treated separately, which is a point critics raise and the club defends.

For scale, Real Madrid pays more in tax and social security — €355m in 2025-26 — than most LaLiga clubs earn in total. Only FC Barcelona, which crossed €1bn for the first time in 2025-26, operates at anything like the same level in Spain.

Why does member ownership matter?

Because it removes the two levers most big clubs use: an owner’s cheque book and an equity sale. Real Madrid cannot be bought, cannot issue shares and cannot be rescued by a benefactor. Every euro of the Bernabéu had to come from debt, operating cash flow or a contractual sale of future income.

Spain’s 1990 Sports Law forced most clubs to convert into limited companies (Sociedades Anónimas Deportivas). Four were exempt because they had positive net equity over the preceding years: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Athletic Club and Osasuna. The full story of that law and the investors who have since bought the converted clubs is in our piece on foreign capital in Spanish football.

The model has consequences the club rarely advertises. Presidents must post personal bank guarantees to stand for election, which in practice limits candidates to the very wealthy. The club must run a surplus every year because there is nobody to absorb a loss. And any structural change — like the 2026 subsidiary plan — needs a members’ vote.

It also gives Real Madrid a moral argument it uses constantly in negotiations with LaLiga and UEFA: it is, by its own account, a club owned by fans, not a franchise owned by a fund. Whether that survives a minority stake sale is the question hanging over the club in September 2026.

How was the Bernabéu redevelopment financed?

With long-term bank debt and a sale of future stadium income. In 2019 the club borrowed €575m over 30 years at a fixed rate of around 2.5%, arranged by JP Morgan and Bank of America. As costs rose it added further tranches, taking stadium borrowing to roughly €1.17bn by 2023, with about €1.13bn outstanding at June 2025.

The second source was a 2022 agreement with Sixth Street and Legends. The US investor and the stadium-operations company paid €360m up front in return for a share — reported at around 30% — of the new non-football revenue the stadium generates for 20 years. The club booked most of that as income in 2021-22, which is why that season’s accounts showed an unusual profit.

The budget did not hold. The original €575m became €1,347m by 2025, and the cumulative investment recorded in the 2025-26 accounts was €1,408m. Inflation and the war in Ukraine explain part of the overrun; so does scope. The retractable pitch alone, which stores the turf in an underground greenhouse so the floor can host concerts and American football, cost around €225m. Acoustic panelling added later for concerts cost more.

The logic was always that a 30-year loan at 2.5% is cheap money if the asset roughly doubles the club’s stadium income. On the 2025-26 numbers it has: €363m of stadium revenue against a pre-works run rate of under €180m comfortably covers annual debt service of roughly €50–60m.

What does the new stadium actually earn from?

Four things: matchday hospitality, the tour and museum, sponsorship attached to the building, and third-party events. The first two existed before but at much lower prices. The last two are the reason the roof, the pitch and the wraparound screen were built.

Hospitality is the biggest single change. The rebuilt stadium has far more premium seating, and a season-long VIP package sells at multiples of the old price. The museum and tour, already the most visited in Madrid before the works, now include the new roof and 360-degree screen and run every day the pitch is not in use.

Events have been harder than planned. The first concerts in 2024 — Taylor Swift in May, then Karol G and others — generated noise complaints from the Chamberí neighbourhood and a formal complaint process at Madrid city hall. In September 2024 the club suspended concerts until acoustic work was completed, a costly pause for the revenue line Sixth Street had bought into. American football fared better: on 16 November 2025 the NFL played its first regular-season game in Spain at the Bernabéu, Miami Dolphins against Washington Commanders, in front of a sold-out crowd.

The stadium also anchors the club’s commercial push in ways that do not show up in the stadium line. Real Madrid’s tour, retail and sponsorship business — the €539m marketing figure — is the largest of any club, and partners such as Adidas, Emirates and HP pay in part for the building as a backdrop.

Who is Florentino Pérez and why does his dual role matter?

He is president of Real Madrid, a post he has held since 2000 with a three-year gap, and executive chairman of ACS, one of the world’s largest construction groups. The two roles are formally separate. In practice they explain why a members’ club could plan and finance a €1.4bn infrastructure project like a listed contractor.

ACS is not the contractor for the Bernabéu; that work went to FCC, whose largest shareholder is Carlos Slim. But Pérez’s familiarity with project finance, bank syndicates and 30-year fixed-rate debt shaped the entire funding structure. Our profile of ACS and its US business shows the same instinct for long-dated infrastructure returns.

He was elected unopposed for two decades because the personal-guarantee rule deters challengers. That changed in 2026, when businessman Enrique Riquelme stood against him. Pérez won with 65% of the vote, a large majority but the first time a sitting president had been meaningfully tested since 2006.

Pérez’s critics argue that concentrating the presidency, the stadium financing and the Super League project in one person makes the club dependent on him. His supporters point to fifteen Champions League titles and €1.2bn of revenue and say the results settle the argument.

What is the 2026 plan to sell a stake?

A proposal to move the club’s commercial and stadium business into a new company, keep the sporting association member-owned, and sell a minority of the new entity — Pérez has talked about 5%, reports have suggested up to 10% — to a private investor. Estimates of the proceeds range from €500m to €1bn.

Pérez first floated the idea at the November 2024 general assembly, arguing that member ownership should be made explicit so the club could never be sold in full, and that a small sale would establish an objective valuation above the roughly $6.5–7bn that Forbes assigns. The plan was the central issue of the 2026 election, and he said before the vote that the referendum would follow “immediately after” it.

The mechanics matter. Members would become formal owners of the parent for the first time, with their stake potentially transferable or inheritable. A fund buying 5% would own a slice of the commercial subsidiary, not of the football club, and would have no say over the team. That is closer to what FC Barcelona did with its economic levers in 2022 than either club likes to admit.

Opponents inside the membership worry about the precedent: once 5% is sold, 10% follows, and the club drifts towards the investor-owned model of Atlético or Manchester City. The vote had not been held at the time of writing.

Where does the Super League fit?

It is the commercial strategy that did not happen, and the reason Real Madrid’s relationship with LaLiga and UEFA is permanently strained. The April 2021 launch collapsed within 72 hours when the English clubs withdrew. Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus persisted; Juventus later dropped out, leaving the two Spanish clubs.

The legal track went their way. In December 2023 the Court of Justice of the EU ruled that UEFA and FIFA had abused a dominant position by blocking the project. The promoter, A22, then proposed a multi-division “Unify League” with free-to-air streaming, and the Spanish courts largely upheld the ruling on appeal in 2025.

Commercially the project has still not produced a competition, and in 2025 A22 and Real Madrid shifted to negotiating with UEFA rather than fighting it. The business case remains the same: the club believes it is underpaid by a Champions League that distributes revenue across 36 clubs and a LaLiga whose central rights it did not want to share. Our analysis of LaLiga’s broadcast economics explains why Real Madrid also refused the league’s CVC deal and sued over it.

How does the revenue mix compare with rivals?

Real Madrid is less dependent on broadcasting than almost any big club. Television and UEFA money was around a quarter of 2025-26 revenue; at most Premier League clubs it is half or more. Stadium and commercial income together were roughly three-quarters.

That is a strategic choice as much as a result. Central LaLiga rights are worth around €1.05bn a season domestically under the 2027-32 deal, a fraction of the Premier League’s. A Spanish club that wants to match English budgets has to earn the difference itself, and only two can. Barcelona took the same view and rebuilt Camp Nou; Atlético, unable to fund a comparable programme, sold a majority to Apollo in 2025.

The comparison that flatters the club most is profitability. On revenue of €1.2bn Real Madrid generates EBITDA of nearly €290m and carries almost no net debt outside the stadium. Barcelona, at similar revenue, still carried total liabilities of about €2.4bn in mid-2025. That gap, more than any trophy, is the argument for the Pérez model.

What are the risks to the model?

Three. The first is the events business, which is contractually shared with Sixth Street and exposed to municipal politics. The second is squad cost: the club spent €161m on signings in 2025-26 and pays the largest wage bill in Spain under a LaLiga salary limit of €761m, so a season without deep Champions League progress cuts income while costs stay fixed.

The third is governance. The 2026 election showed that Pérez, 79, has no obvious successor, and the subsidiary plan will outlast him. A structure designed around one president’s credibility with banks and investors is only as strong as the next president’s.

Against that, the club enters the 2026-27 season with record revenue, a stadium that has repaid its logic, and a membership that just voted two-to-one for the strategy. Few businesses of any kind in Spain can say the same. For a comparison with how the state-owned airports operator turns a monopoly asset into similar margins, see Aena’s business model.

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