Over the last decade, the number of groups controlling several football clubs at once has multiplied. From a handful of isolated cases, the industry has moved to more than a hundred conglomerates spread across hundreds of clubs worldwide. That leap does not tell the whole story, because inside that multiplication two very different animals coexist. One wants control. The other just wants to get paid.
The first is the one everyone knows, the one that makes the front pages. City Football Group with its network of clubs across several continents, Red Bull planting its flag in Germany, Austria, the United States and Japan. They buy majorities, impose tactical philosophy, unify scouting, sell bundled sponsorship to Puma, Etihad or OKX and talk up synergies. Manchester City posts commercial revenues that outstrip any rival thanks to that machine. Total control, total risk, family photo with the sheikh.
The second model is more boring and therefore more dangerous for everyone else. American private equity funds no longer aspire to run dressing rooms. Arctos, Ares, Silver Lake, Dynasty Equity, Sixth Street. They inject capital, take minority stakes, preferred shares or private credit, and deliberately step back from day-to-day sporting management. They do not want to pick the starting eleven. They want a percentage of the business and a clean exit when the time comes. They account for a growing share of multi-club investment groups and transactions in European football. They have applied portfolio theory to the ball and it is working.
The logic is that of any fund manager who has read Markowitz. A standalone club is a terrible asset. Relegation wipes out between 25% and 50% of revenues in one blow through television rights, gate receipts and sponsorship penalties. Missing out on Europe throws the budget off balance and makes it harder to comply with salary limits. Transfer income arrives when it arrives, on no fixed schedule. And domestic audiovisual revenues across Europe are already showing signs of saturation. Buying a single team means betting everything on eleven men staying fit and the referee not having a bad day.
The Portfolio-LP model's answer is to diversify until the sporting result stops mattering. If you hold minority stakes in clubs across several leagues, a relegation in one is offset by commercial appreciation in another, or a transfer profit from a third, or the growth of MLS and the J-League, or the explosion in women's football valuations. The pitch becomes statistical noise. And there is research to back that up. Studies comparing clubs affiliated to multi-club structures with independent clubs across many seasons and leagues find no evidence that belonging to a multi-club group systematically or statistically significantly improves league performance. The magic synergy does not show up in the numbers. The advantage is on the balance sheet, not the scoreboard.
All of this rests on an army of lawyers and bankers paid to make the impossible legal. UEFA's competition regulations prohibit two clubs under the control or decisive influence of the same owner from playing in the same European competition. Manchester City and Girona, AC Milan and Toulouse, Aston Villa and Vitória Guimarães all hit that wall. Governance engineering solved the problem with blind trusts, voluntary reductions in board seats and agreements that sever voting rights on sporting matters. The Court of Arbitration for Sport and UEFA's financial control body signed off. Add the Squad Cost Ratio, which caps spending on the squad, coaching staff and agents' fees at 70% of operating revenues, and the rules on related-party transactions that require any intra-group sponsorship to be valued at market rates. Every structure needs its audit, its independent report, its payment waterfall where the fund gets paid first whatever happens on the pitch.
This is where the members' model starts to sweat. Real Madrid, Barça, Athletic and Osasuna are not sports limited companies. They belong entirely to their members. That sounds noble until you need capital. You cannot issue new shares without destroying your own internal democracy. When the global market fills up with funds capable of injecting hundreds of millions without blinking, the members' club is left standing there empty-handed. Both Spanish giants found a way through and, curiously, both ended up sitting across the table from the same fund: Sixth Street.
Barça chose the defensive route, the one taken by someone putting out a fire with the neighbour's hose. It sold Sixth Street a portion of its LaLiga audiovisual rights for twenty-five years. A first tranche of just over two hundred million euros that generated a meaningful accounting gain in the 2021/22 financial year, followed by an additional tranche. It added the sale of stakes in Barça Studios and Barça Vision and authorised the partial transfer of Barça Licensing & Merchandising.
But it mortgaged a structural slice of its recurring television income for twenty-five years. The fund diversifies its risk across twenty assets. Barça sold a structural piece of its cash flow well into the next decade with no safety net underneath.
Madrid played a different game. Rather than touching television rights, it monetised the bricks. It agreed a long-term alliance with Sixth Street and operator Legends worth hundreds of millions of euros, ceding a share of the returns from the new business lines at the refurbished Bernabéu. Concerts, corporate events, trade fairs, commercial exploitation on non-matchdays. It financed the stadium's technological overhaul without touching the membership base or television. And on top of that, Florentino put a corporate reorganisation on the table as a shield. A commercial subsidiary open to minority institutional investors, or with those shares distributed free to members to consolidate them as owners. Football, the academy and institutional decisions remain 100% under the general assembly, in the spirit of the German 50+1 rule. You raise capital for the business and leave the dressing room untouched.
The honest objection is that the LP model is no paradise either. It depends on low interest rates and benign economic cycles, and the recent liquidity crises at firms that were too aggressive with leverage showed that a fund with no real integration strategy breaks when money gets expensive. The 70% Squad Cost Ratio also squeezes everyone equally and reduces the margin for creative accounting, so private capital can no longer survive purely by inflating valuations. It will have to generate real cash flow. The terrain where the smart fund moves better than anyone is precisely there, and on that ground the members' club, shackled to its governance, is running on one leg.
The question that remains open is not whether the money will come in, because it already has and it signed twenty-five-year contracts. It is how much of its own innards a club can sell before it stops belonging to whoever thought they were its owner.
