Every time a big group buys a modest club, the same scene plays out. Supporters imagine that resources arrive which the club never had: a global scouting network, data analysts, players on loan from the big club and the expertise of people who run some of the best teams in the world. Girona inside the City Football Group, Union Saint-Gilloise with Tony Bloom or Strasbourg with the Chelsea owners all feed that illusion. Today more than a hundred top-flight clubs across Europe belong to one of these groups, so the question matters to a great many supporters: does a small club become more competitive when a big one buys it?
The general answer is no. A study published this year in European Sport Management Quarterly compared how clubs evolved before and after joining a multi-club group with how similar independent clubs evolved. It found no systematic improvement in league performance. Nor did it find any when distinguishing between types of owner, from sporting groups to investment funds, or according to the role each club played within the network.
That does not mean nobody does well. It means that joining a group does not improve a club on its own, and that what happens to it depends on the role the group assigns it. That is the key to understanding why some win and others lose.
Troyes and Girona, both part of the City Football Group, illustrate this better than any model. In 2022 Troyes signed Savinho from Atlético Mineiro for 6.5 million plus add-ons. The Brazilian never played a single official match for the French club. He spent one season on loan at PSV and another at Girona, where he was one of the pieces that led the Catalan side to qualify for the Champions League. In the summer of 2024 Manchester City signed him for several times what he had originally cost. Troyes received the transfer fee, but by then had already been relegated to the French second division. One club paid and pocketed the money; another enjoyed the player; and the final destination was always the group's main club.
For Girona, the role was that of showcase: receive young talent on loan, make it shine in a major league and send it back ready for Manchester. That worked out well on the pitch. For Troyes, the role was that of formal owner of a player it never saw. Being part of the network benefited one club and barely benefited the other, with the same owner and the same information.
Union Saint-Gilloise illustrates a third function: the waiting room. Brighton signed Kaoru Mitoma in 2021, but the Japanese winger did not meet the requirements for a British work permit, so he spent the season at the Belgian club, which at the time also belonged to Bloom. The following year he moved to Brighton. Union had a great player for a year, but not to build a project around him. Where they did gain was in the market: they bought Victor Boniface from Bodø/Glimt for around 2 million and sold him to Leverkusen a year later for around 20. For a small club, those capital gains are a real benefit it would have struggled to achieve on its own.
There is also a limit that supporters rarely factor in: when the small club grows enough to meet the big one in Europe, the group has to step back from it. UEFA prohibits two clubs with the same owner competing in the same competition from transferring players to each other, sharing databases or collaborating on scouting. For Girona to play in the 2024/25 Champions League alongside City, the group had to hand control to a blind trust for the entire season. Just when the small club reaches the level it had dreamed of, the advantages of belonging to the group are frozen.
And there is the risk that few people calculate: if the group collapses, it takes its clubs down with it. 777 Partners bought stakes in Standard Liège, Hertha Berlin, Genoa and Vasco da Gama with the promise of building a network with economies of scale. In 2024 it entered a severe financial crisis and its clubs ended up in the hands of creditors. Eagle Football, John Textor's group, won the Copa Libertadores with Botafogo and a year later had stopped servicing around 450 million dollars in loans; Lyon was administratively relegated to the second division in 2025 and only survived on appeal. An independent club answers for its own mistakes. A club inside a group answers for its owner's mistakes too.
That is why the question of whether it benefits a small club to be bought has no single answer. It benefits them if the role they are assigned within the network matches what they want to be: if the group needs them as a showcase in a major league, they can live through seasons they would never have reached alone, like Girona; if it needs them as a seller, they can make money in the market, like Union. But if it needs them as a player warehouse or an accounting piece, the club stops playing for itself. What a multi-club group buys is not just a club. It is the right to decide what that club is for.
