This article is a summary of Chapter 2 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.
In 2016, football was not an industry that institutional investors took seriously. Clubs were owned by benefactors and families. Debt was opaque, revenue models were fragile, and sustainability was secondary to winning. The consequences were visible: by 2012, 23 of the 42 clubs in Spain’s top two divisions were in insolvency proceedings, with accumulated tax debt exceeding €650 million. Across European football as a whole, aggregate losses among clubs exceeded €1.7 billion.
Chapter 2 of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules traces how the game was rebuilt around the logic of capital — and what that transformation has left unresolved.
The value was in the rights, not the club
At WFS Madrid 2017, Gregory Carey, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, put a number on what the market had been missing: sports franchise investment had delivered a compound average return of 15 per cent annually over the preceding 25 years. Clubs were destroying capital through their income statements while their underlying value appreciated steadily.
Jason Traub, co-founder of 23 Capital, explained what capturing that value required:
“The markets hate uncertainty. You need to be able to demonstrate why there is value on those rights despite any issues with the going concern, the stadium performance, and how that’s decoupled from the performance of the actual club financially.”
The structural innovation that made this possible was the special purpose vehicle, ring-fencing broadcasting rights, shirt sponsorship and kit intellectual property into a separate financing entity, isolating those income streams from the operational risk of the club itself.
From clubs to networks
Once investors understood that the value sat in the rights rather than the individual club, the next move was to build networks. Don Dransfield, of City Football Group described the logic at the same WFS panel:
“We see every additional acquisition as adding more to the group than just the individual sum of the parts.”
CFG’s original £200 million acquisition of Manchester City in 2008 had been valued at more than ten times that figure within a decade.
Multi-club ownership shifted from a peripheral practice to a deliberate investment strategy. At WFS Seville 2023, Michael Broughton put the clearest taxonomy on record: “City Football Group is playing a game of statehood — going into countries where they’re trying to do trade deals. Red Bull’s logic is entirely different: it’s about selling cans of drink.” Between those two poles, hundreds of smaller MCOs were writing a playbook with no precedent to follow. Since 2019, the number of clubs in MCO structures has tripled, from roughly 100 to more than 400. The governance frameworks designed to manage them have not kept pace.
A third category of owner
Alongside institutional investors and multi-club networks, a third category of owner had entered the game. Its objectives were not financial returns. They were geopolitical. When Qatar Sports Investments acquired PSG in 2011, the club was generating revenues of around €40 million. By the mid-2020s, its valuation had reached €5 billion. The financial transformation was real, but it was a consequence rather than a purpose.
The clubs were instruments of diplomatic positioning, not investment vehicles. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund made the logic explicit: its acquisition of four major clubs in 2022, extending to eleven through a broader privatisation programme, was designed to build the conditions under which private capital might eventually follow. As Jordan Gardner noted at WFS Seville 2023:
“Ideally in the long run it’s how do we divest from that, how do we diversify the ownership pool, and how do we get American investors interested.”
An asset class with unresolved questions
The pandemic exposed how fragile many of these models remained. Transfer fees collapsed from €6.6 billion globally in 2019 to €4.9 billion in 2020. Club revenues across Europe fell by between 12 and 13 per cent. Clubs with diversified income streams came through. Those dependent on matchday revenues or owner funding did not. A decade on, institutional capital is structural to the game. Multi-club networks span more than 400 clubs. States have taken ownership positions that no private investor could match. The industry that in 2016 was destroying capital while generating cultural value has been rebuilt into something far more sophisticated — and far more complex to govern.
This is a summary of Chapter 2 of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules. Download the full chapter here.