This article is a summary of Chapter 3, The Stadium Economy, of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules, a report produced by World Football Summit documenting how the global football industry has changed over the past decade. A new chapter will be published each week. Download the full chapter free of charge at worldfootballsummit.com.
A decade ago, a football stadium did one job: it opened its doors for a couple of hours on a matchday, filled up, emptied out, and sat there unused for the rest of the week. Ticket sales were the only revenue a stadium generated, and clubs ran their grounds as a sporting necessity, not a business.
From venue to business
Atlético de Madrid was among the first to decide otherwise. In 2017, needing to almost double its operating budget to stay competitive, Chief Executive Officer, Miguel Ángel Gil took the case to World Football Summit: the money wouldn’t come from the transfer market, it would come from the stadium itself, financed through real estate and hospitality deals signed before the Wanda Metropolitano (now Riyadh Air Metropolitano) had hosted a single match.
Three years later, the pandemic forced the rest of the industry to catch up regardless of how far Atlético’s own project had progressed, and Goldman Sachs’ Gregory Carey summed up why at a WFS session in 2021: the stadium had become the only lever most clubs had left to pull. Tottenham had already shown, at its new stadium in 2019, what that lever could do, converting matchdays into a year-round business through concerts and NFL fixtures, with the surplus, Chief Commercial Officer Todd Kline later confirmed, now funding the men’s team, the women’s team and the academy alike. Everton went further still in 2024, selling premium seats in a stadium that hadn’t finished being built yet, priced down to the individual seat rather than the section.
By the 2023-24 season, Atlético’s strategy had delivered: its revenues had more than doubled since the stadium opened, and in 2026 a private equity firm valued the club in the billions, on the strength of the stadium as much as the team. Real Madrid pushed that same conviction to its limit when it began the Santiago Bernabéu’s renovation in 2019, starting demolition the day the project was announced, before the architectural plans were even finished, a project engineering firm Sener’s Jorge Vizcaya later summed up at WFS Mexico City: the commercial case had been settled before the structural questions were. By the time the rebuilt stadium reopened in 2023, that same confidence had already been vindicated.
The ownership divide
What made all of this possible, in every case, was ownership. Each of these clubs controlled the ground it was rebuilding, and could borrow against it, redesign it and monetise it however they chose. Once that model proved itself, more clubs followed, and the logic behind it only got stronger with each new project.
Not every part of the game has been able to move at the same pace. Owning the ground, rather than renting it, is still the exception rather than the rule across most of world football. Across Asia, for instance, it’s rare for a club to own its own stadium at all, which means no way to borrow against it, programme it, or run it as anything more than a venue. The same principle plays out closer to home, inside single clubs: Lewes FC’s Maggie Murphy has pointed out that women’s teams renting a men’s club’s ground don’t control the food, the security, or anything else about matchday, only the cost of meeting someone else’s standards. As stadium ownership becomes more valuable, the gap between clubs that hold it and clubs that don’t, including most of women’s football, is one of the things worth watching closely over the next decade.
That’s the shift this decade has delivered: the stadium moved from the least interesting line on a club’s balance sheet to one of the most valuable assets it owns, and the momentum behind that shift shows no sign of slowing down.
This is a summary of Chapter 3 of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules. Download the full chapter free of charge here.