Thibaut Courtois has won two Champions League titles with Real Madrid and league titles in Spain and England. Off the pitch, the Real Madrid and Belgium goalkeeper is building a second career as an investor, as Co-Founder of NXTPLAY, a platform that already holds stakes in three European football clubs.
Speaking at WFS Madrid 2026 alongside Gonzalo Vila, his fellow Co-Founder and CEO of NXTPLAY Capital, he set out the difference between lending his name and putting it to work: “One thing is having your name as a goalkeeper, hopefully a good one, but other thing is also that you use that name for investment, for finding opportunities and helping other brands grow together with your name.”
Based in Madrid, NXTPLAY invests across sport, media and technology, with the aim of helping elite athletes become shareholders in the businesses around them. For Courtois, the idea grew with age: “when you get older you also think about the life after football, about investments.” The three clubs are Le Mans FC, promoted to Ligue 1; CD Extremadura, back in Primera Federación after four consecutive promotions; and KRC Genk, the club where Courtois began his career, where NXTPLAY took a minority stake and a seat on the board in June.
AI can’t replace sport
Vila traced the model back to the US: “Everything came basically from one vision that the players were seeing, especially in the US, where they were starting to do media for equity deals.” Every investment has to pass two filters, he explained: the global reach of the brand and the value the athletes can add beyond capital, through media exposure. “The IP has to be global and has to move audience that are convertible to other assets that we are implementing,” he said.
He chose sport, he explained, because AI cannot replace it the way it is starting to replace parts of film and music: “You can put robots to play football, but it will never be the same experience.” At the event, Vila anticipated the next steps: padel before the end of the year, and esports, where NXTPLAY wants to build “a kind of a multi-club ownership” as in football. Two weeks later, it announced an investment in Fusion Esports Group, owner of Astralis.
Courtois brings to investment the same approach he takes to the pitch. Not every deal works, he admits, but the intent is the same. “I think the ambition to make the projects work, that’s for me the main goal. The same as when I join a team I want to win, I want to win trophies.” His playing career still comes first, yet he insists on more than a name on the cap table: “I like to be involved in decision making, to know why we invest in certain things, also in the football teams we own.” In those decisions, he argues, he can offer the point of view of a player.
The value of an owned community
For Courtois, follower counts on social platforms prove little, because many of those accounts may be bots or passive followers. “You don’t know exactly how many of those followers exactly engage in what you do and what you tell,” he said. On Instagram, Facebook or X, he said, many of his followers may be between 16 and 20, and there he does not feel he is talking to them about the business he wants to build.
Telling NXTPLAY’s story on Substack and LinkedIn produced a different kind of connection. “When we told our story more on Substack, on LinkedIn, eventually there you felt that more connections were growing because people understand better what you’re doing,” he said. That community, he said, is “also an asset that you can use in conversation with brands and teams and bring it all together.”
Building a group of athlete investors
Asked what success would look like in ten years, Courtois joked that he would be 44 by then and doubted he would still be playing. His answer focused on scale: to keep adding value to the company and “to create some funds where we can raise more money to make more investments,” and to see the clubs NXTPLAY has invested in succeed.
He also wants other athletes on board. “That we can have a big group also of other athletes joining us into this story and maybe teaching them also for the future,” he said. The reason is the money now circulating in football, more than when he started at Genk and Atlético de Madrid. “Younger players earn quicker, more money, and there’s a risk of burning that money really fast on cars, on watches, on things that you’re not sure it will give the best investment.”
The next big dream: the NBA or the NFL
His biggest dream lies outside football. Courtois would like NXTPLAY to reach the NBA or the NFL: “If in 10 years we can own or partially own one of those big teams, I would love that also.” He added a caveat of his own: “I don’t know if it’s possible, but we can dream big.”
He linked that goal to his own career. At 14 or 15, he recalled, he could not imagine being at Real Madrid in his ninth season with Champions League titles behind him. “As a kid you dream about those moments so why not also in the investment world to dream that we can achieve those kind of things,” he said. The condition, for Courtois, is to keep that ambition under control: “With a good head and a good mindset, obviously not going crazy, but in a good mindset, I think we can achieve those dreams.”