This article is a summary of Chapter 8 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.
At the start of the 2010s, football’s power sat where it had sat for decades. Europe wrote the rules, controlled the confederations that mattered, and hosted the competitions every country aspired to reach. South America supplied the talent that filled Europe’s leagues. Gulf states had taken their first steps into the sport by then: Abu Dhabi bought Manchester City in 2008, Qatar won the right to host the 2022 World Cup in 2010, and Qatar Sports Investments bought Paris Saint-Germain seven months later. Major League Soccer had begun building a commercial base of its own around the same time. None of it signalled yet how far it would reach. Within the decade that followed, those same moves redrew football’s map and shifted the balance of power across the sport, a process still running its course by 2026.
A cautionary precedent
China moved first, and moved the fastest. A 2015 government plan to build a football superpower by 2050 turned into a spending spree: Chinese clubs paid Chelsea 60 million dollars for Oscar and Zenit St Petersburg the same fee for Hulk in 2016. By 2017 Chinese investors held stakes in twenty European clubs. The government that had encouraged the spending reversed course soon after: a 100 per cent tax on big transfers, then a pandemic, then a wave of club collapses, Jiangsu Suning among them. By 2026, one club from that entire wave remained in Chinese hands. Spending alone bought nothing that lasted.
Saudi Arabia avoided that mistake by relying on more than one lever. Its Public Investment Fund took controlling stakes in four of the Saudi Pro League’s biggest clubs in 2023 and brought in more than thirty established players in a single window, Karim Benzema and N’Golo Kanté among them. But the league is only one part of Vision 2030’s football strategy. Since 2019, the country has hosted more than one hundred international sporting events across forty disciplines. Its 2034 World Cup bid scored 49.8 out of 50 in FIFA’s own evaluation, the highest mark any bid has received. And the Fund’s sports arm bought close to a billion dollars of DAZN, the platform that streams FIFA’s Club World Cup worldwide, folding broadcasting into the same strategy as the league and the bid.
A seat at the table that writes the rules
The clearest sign of how far the map has moved came from neither a stadium nor a broadcast deal. Nasser Al-Khelaifi, president of Qatar-owned Paris Saint-Germain since 2011, chairs European Football Clubs, the body representing more than 850 European clubs, and sits on UEFA’s executive committee. In the summer of 2026, amid FIFA’s own governance crisis, several UEFA member federations lobbied him to challenge Gianni Infantino for the FIFA presidency. He declined. The fact that European football’s own institutions considered a Gulf-owned club’s president capable of leading the game’s governing body is a consequence no transfer fee could have bought on its own, and one China’s spending never produced.
MLS took a different route to the same shift in relevance, using a single rule three times over sixteen years: David Beckham in 2007, Zlatan Ibrahimović in 2018, and Lionel Messi in 2023, whose arrival pushed Inter Miami’s valuation from 585 million dollars to 1.45 billion in two years and the average MLS franchise value up 39 per cent since 2021. American capital moved in the other direction too, buying into Europe directly: half of the Premier League’s twenty clubs were under American ownership by 2026. In 2018, Relevent Sports signed a fifteen-year partnership with LALIGA to bring an actual competitive fixture onto American soil, not a preseason friendly, extending the same market logic that had already reshaped MLS itself.
What the decade actually redrew
Football’s power map moved on three fronts over the decade: who hosts its biggest tournaments, who sits inside the institutions that govern it, and how investors price a football club as an asset. Where the sport’s talent gets developed sits apart from that shift. Saudi Arabia has built the coaching pipelines and training centres a talent factory requires, without yet producing players good enough to export, and South America continues to supply the world’s leading footballing talent. Whether that changes by 2034, and whether MLS’s valuation growth survives once the attention from Messi and the World Cup fades, will decide how much of this decade’s redrawn map holds for the one that follows.
Read the full Chapter 8 of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules here.
Download Chapter 7: Commercial Strategy & Intellectual Property
Download Chapter 6: Competition Formats & Alternative Models here
Download Chapter 5: Broadcasting, Rights and Distribution here
Download Chapter 4: The Business Case for Women’s Football here
Download Chapter 3: The Stadium Economy here