Who Owns European Football?

The celebratory end-of-season atmosphere of Girona was conspicuously absent in the Champagne region as Troyes suffered the indignity of relegation for a second successive season. The campaign came to a close marked by anger and frustration, the match against Valenciennes being halted as disgruntled fans threw flares onto the pitch – several players throwing them back – and chanting an ironic “Thank you, City”, in reference to the group that in 2020 bought a majority stake in a team that at the time was playing in the top flight. 

Historically bankrolled by supporters’ associations or local businessmen, European football has seen a huge shift in ownership. Two decades ago Russian oligarchs and US and Chinese investors began acquiring teams. Today’s new owners are mostly backed by private capital from American investment funds or billions of petro-dollars flowing from Gulf states. 

City Football Group has amassed 13 clubs across five continents. It’s owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and vice president of the United Arab Emirates. Other groups with multiple clubs under their name are Red Bull, 777 Partners, Pacific Media Group, the Saudi Public Investment Fund and American businessmen John Textor and David Blitzer. Together with CFG, they own 43 clubs worldwide, according to public business records. 

“A first risk is an even greater domination by these big structures, that through these strategies control a swarm of talent and are very influential on the transfer market. They have control over many more players than they really need”, says Raffaele Poli, head of CIES Football Observatory, pointing out that player transactions exceeded 10 billion euros last year. “But it also clips the wings of the competition, not an ideal situation. And in any case there are risks of conflict of interest, even of fairness in competitions, especially in international club competitions where these clubs could come up against each other”. 

The new ownership systems are changing football in Europe. Financial data and interviews with more than two dozen experts in several countries reveal concerns around financial fair play and the integrity of sport competitions. Governing bodies UEFA and FIFA are dealing only with individual cases when they can impact particular matches or competitions, while governments are allowing market logic to rule an industry with staggering numbers.

In 2023, the aggregate enterprise value of Europe's 32 most prominent football clubs was estimated at 51.7 billion euros, by the data and analytics platform Football Benchmark. This figure is higher than the gross domestic product of several countries, including Estonia and Latvia. Despite the setbacks inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, European club football revenues have grown at a rate of more than a billion euros a year over the last decade, according to data from UEFA. Returns from international competitions grew by 122 percent and domestic football TV revenues by 80 percent.

“You’re talking about industrial assets”, says Simon Chadwick, professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy at SKEMA Business School Paris. “This year Manchester City became the first football club in the world to turn over one billion pounds' worth of business. These industrial assets generate export earnings, tax contributions, and create jobs. So you would imagine we want to protect those outcomes. I would ask the question, not just the European Union, but which government in Europe is doing anything to protect these assets?”. 

 Meanwhile, the local fan bases, the heart and soul of the game, say they are finding it increasingly difficult to connect with teams that are deeply rooted in the continent’s social fabric. “Before, you could take your daughter, your son to a football match, with your grandfather or grandmother, and it was a family outing”, says Alejandro Requeijo, a sports journalist and author, and a die-hard fan of Atlético de Madrid. “I’d like people to ask themselves how much it costs to do that today in one of the big stadiums. Often it has nothing to do with supply and demand. It’s just that some clubs have realised that it’s more profitable for an Indian, a Mexican or a Chinese tourist to occupy that seat than it is for the lifelong fan who has created a particular ecosystem, a personality in the stands. The fixtures are more and more inexplicable. Matches on Mondays, matches on Fridays, matches at ungodly hours when it’s very difficult for people to go. I think there are a lot of people who are leaving because they can’t find their emotional or identity roots.” According to data from UEFA, gate revenues have increased by 48 percent in the past 10 years.

The New Money

Can sports and business goals coexist?

Foreign individuals or entities hold equity shares in 43 percent of European clubs, according to a study by the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES), which looked at the ownership of 341 football clubs in the first and second divisions across 10 European countries. In 84 percent of the cases these are majority stakes: a total of 122 European clubs are as of today majority-owned by foreign investors.  

“Sport is an industry unlike any other, it has cultural value to the countries, and is very much connected to things like education, development, youth programs,” says law professor Katarina Pijetlovic, an expert in European Sports Law. 

“Can we really leave a public interest objective, and the cultural values of European football, in the hands of these privately-owned entities strictly interested in commercial success, return of profits, who have no interest in protecting any of the other values of European football?  Clearly not. The European Union itself doesn’t have interest in stepping in as a regulator here or even as a proper supervisor.  And that is unfortunate, of course, but it does correspond to reality.  So we need the regulators, such as UEFA. But UEFA itself has to reform the way it works because it’s under the heavy influence of elite clubs and elite clubs are under influence of their owners. That’s the vicious circle.” 

European football’s governing body UEFA declined to participate in the reporting of this story, and the European Commission never replied to repeated approaches by one member of the EBU Investigative Journalism Network. 

Three out of four top-tier football clubs in England and Belgium had some degree of ownership by foreign investors at the end of 2023. The corresponding figure is 50 percent for Portugal and Spain, 47 percent for France, and 38 percent for Italy, according to CIES. Investors navigate the European market looking for opportunities in an industry that according to financial services company Deloitte grew a healthy 7 percent and generated 29.5 billion euros in revenue in 2022, but there’s more at stake than economic assets.  

 “European football is now governed by a market logic, which means that it is the owners who now dominate European football, and in particular the owners of the big European clubs'', says Raphaël Le Magoariec, analyst in Geopolitics of the Gulf States and Sport at the University François Rabelais. “Among these, there are still clubs dominated by Europeans who are trying to protect their interests against the new investors, in particular the investors from the Gulf, who, unlike the American funds, are much more precise in sports terms.”

In 2023 alone there were 14 foreign majority takeovers of top-tier clubs, according to CIES, and nine in the second divisions. More than half of all foreign investment in the last five years came from the United States, and this increased to two-thirds in 2023.

“Investment funds are private players with a purely lucrative, short-term rationale, with the aim of generating liquidity quickly via the acceleration of multi-club ownership models, via the acceleration of player trading”, says Pierre Rondeau, professor of economics at the Sports Management School. “They are applying trading and market logic in the football economy via ticketing, via the spectacle, via all the entertainment that surrounds football. These funds are arriving all over Europe, a lot in France, but everywhere in Europe except Germany. These are the new players, and that’s why we talk about the financialisation of football.” 

Goal Diggers

The Gulf billions and the EU market

The international investment and sponsoring of European clubs by Gulf states is usually done through their sovereign wealth funds, or individual members of their large royal families. The United Arab Emirates arrived first, when Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group bought a majority stake in English club Manchester City in 2008. Others soon followed, and in 2011 Qatari Sports Investment (QSI), a subsidiary of sovereign fund Qatari Investment Authority, purchased French team Paris Saint Germain (PSG) for a reported 70 million euros. QSI  immediately bankrolled a player shopping spree that allowed the French club to acquire some of the best footballers in the world. They have since become the undisputed kings of the French competition, winning 10 of the last 12 French league titles. 

“PSG is a monster, and it’s very dominant. It has a budget of 800 million euros when the average budget in the French league is 140 million euros'', says Pierre Rondeau, adding that because top performing teams take a bigger share of the TV rights, PSG can also benefit from some questionable accounting strategies. 

“PSG takes almost 30 percent of the total TV rights. But who pays for the international TV rights? It’s Al-Jazeera, it’s beIN Sport: it’s Qatar. So you have Qatar, which owns PSG, investing in the TV rights of the French league, so that these TV rights can be redistributed directly to PSG. Some would say that this is a form of financial doping. It’s been legalised. There were no sanctions, no bans. French justice didn’t consider it a form of cheating. It was accepted.” 

Regulators at national and international level have been reluctant to sanction or even examine the huge investments coming from the Gulf monarchies. In July 2023 the EU’s Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) came into force, aiming to provide “new tools to effectively tackle foreign subsidies that cause distortions and undermine the level playing field in the internal market”, according to the European Commission. 

“We have been denouncing PSG and (Manchester) City for years”, says Javier Tebas, president of Spain’s La Liga. The FSR could be interpreted as applying to clubs based outside the EU. In previous State aid law decisions, the EU Commission considered football to have cross-border impact, as players are sold between countries, and it viewed as integrated the markets for “broadcasting rights, merchandising and sponsoring”. “Now that there is a new regulation, it has given us a new way in the EU to denounce this situation", says Tebas, "because it applies to companies that receive public aid from states outside the European Union. It’s a way and let’s hope that the European Union (takes action). Although it’s not very important in itself economically, it’s the economic sector of football, which is a sector of general interest for Europe.” 

The EU has exclusive jurisdiction over the new regulation, and it can decide whether or not to open ex officio investigations or follow up on complaints. So far, it has only acted to investigate Chinese companies and their bids for public tenders in strategic sectors such as energy and railroads. It recently carried out dawn raids in several countries, following tip-offs that the companies inspected were benefiting from distortive subsidies from China. But a second-division Belgian club, Royal Excelsior Virton, was the first to publicly ask the Commission to initiate an investigation under the FSR, when in May 2023 it raised issues with the financing of a competing club owned by the City Football Group. 

Guarding the Game

The challenges of football market oversight

At the national level, lawmakers are starting to look into the oversight of a market that has huge financial and social implications.

The Football Governance Bill was introduced to the UK Parliament in March of this year by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government, noting  that “for too long some clubs have been abused by unscrupulous owners who get away with financial mismanagement, which at worst can lead to complete collapse.” 

The current champion of the English Premier League, Manchester City, owned by multi-club ownership (MCO) group City Football Group, was charged in February 2023 with 115 various breaches of financial rules after a four-year investigation, including charges for lack of financial information regarding “revenue (including sponsorship revenue), its related parties and its operating costs”, according to the Premier League statement. A hearing is expected later this year. 

“Up until fairly recently City Football Group’s registered headquarters was in the Jebel Ali Free Zone, a free trade port in Dubai, with very little scrutiny. Interestingly, if you ever go there, you’re going to be met by armed guards,” says Chadwick. “How can the British government, how can UEFA, how can the European Union, or the Spanish government in the case of Girona, effectively govern or regulate institutions that, for example, are registered in very secretive free trade zones in Middle Eastern countries. In governance terms, we need to start again because it isn’t working. The governing bodies have turned into just kind of guardians of competition. They make sure that the Champions League works and the Europa League works. But in terms of being able to effectively regulate or moderate the behaviour of these transnational corporations, they’re not succeeding in doing that.”

The European Court of Justice ruled in December 2023 that UEFA and FIFA had broken EU law in blocking the formation of a rival Super League competition. Buried in that decision, however, was also the confirmation of the authority these bodies have to regulate football at international level. “It confirmed UEFA’s right to regulate the market”, says Pijetlovic “It confirmed UEFA’s right to regulate players, clubs, competitions and so on.  If UEFA doesn’t do it, who will? ”

Another MCO group under suspicion of financial irregularities is 777 partners, which owns several clubs in Europe and America, and in the spring of 2022 purchased a historic Belgian club, Standard Liège. Two weeks ago, a Belgian court ruled that all assets in the country belonging to the group could be seized, agreeing to the request of creditors who said 777 had defaulted on a payment. The team’s legal and financial worries have resulted in a temporary transfer embargo, and supporters are not happy. A league game in May had to be postponed when Standard fans blocked the team coach from reaching the stadium, in protest against 777’s management of the club.

The Miami-based investment company is also facing a multi-million dollar fraud lawsuit in a federal court in New York, according to reports by Bloomberg and the New York Times, and its Australian airline, Bonza, is currently grounded and close to collapse. Last year 777 started the process of buying English club Everton, but the Premier League never gave the green light to the deal amid doubts over the financial performance of the group, which was also preemptively removed by a judge from the administration of its Brazilian club Vasco da Gama in early May. 

“When you own five, six, seven clubs in different states there could be chain bankruptcies that could really penalise different clubs and avoid competition in different countries,” says Raffaele Poli from the CIES sports intelligence institute. “777 partners, which owns clubs in Belgium, in Germany, in Italy, in the United States, all of them have financial difficulties, and you have them taking players as assets in one club and moving them to the other in purely accounting and financial manoeuvres that are to the detriment of any sporting logic, but also often, unfortunately, to the detriment of the solidity and sustainability of the clubs.” 

When 777 partners bought one of France’s oldest clubs, Red Star, in 2022, its fan base was immediately alarmed, and they contacted French MP Eric Coquerel, who heads the Finance Committee in the National Assembly.

“There was some concern on the part of the fans because it was a bit at odds with the club’s values. There were doubts about the origin of their funds and about their objective, which remains above all speculative. And today there are clear financial problems”, says Coquerel.

The French MP has put forward legislation to ban multi-club ownership in France, where almost half of first and second-league clubs are majority-owned by MCOs. “I think the football ecosystem is going off the rails and we need to restore order, and the best way is to regulate. We need to go back to a strict ban on multi-club ownership, that’s the first thing. The second way is to give more power back to the sporting entity. Ultimately, football should be the same as the cultural exception in France.” The French state considers culture to be different from other commercial products, a doctrine aimed at protecting its artists and their products in national legislation and international treaties. 

The Football Factory

The strategic role of feeding clubs in modern football networks

Banning multi-club ownership could have a paralysing effect on the world of football, if it is even possible given its prevalence throughout the sport. CIES Sports Intelligence unit estimates that there are 340 clubs worldwide who are part of a multi-club ownership (MCO) group. More than 100 top-division clubs in Europe have a “cross-investment relationship” with at least one other club, according to UEFA’s annual report, and 112 more in lower divisions. Taking a conservative average of 25 players per team, the MCOs would control at least 5,400 players in Europe’s first and second divisions. 

The transfer of players within the same MCO, and its reflection in clubs’ accounting,  has been the subject of scrutiny for the past few years. UEFA says that “transfer activity within multi-club investment groups is dominated by loans”, but concludes that “transfers do not seem to be the focus of every multi-club structure”. 

A close look at player transfer activity within MCOs, however, shows a flurry of activity, with some teams acting as “feeder clubs” for other squads in the same ownership ecosystem. 

“It’s up to each league and to the organisations, UEFA and FIFA, to make sure that they are monitoring," says Jeffrey Luhnow, CEO of Blue Crow Sports Group and president of the Spanish club Leganés and Cancún FC in Mexico. “You can see loopholes. If your idea as a multi-club group is to feed one team or to subsidise another team, you could, for example, loan players to that team for no cost and the team can benefit by having players they couldn’t otherwise afford. That needs to be constantly monitored. The only counterbalance to that is the local fan base and the local media and the league rules in those countries”. 

But the leagues themselves may be powerless, their governance structures in the hands of the very clubs they are supposed to supervise. In late 2023, the English Premier League, which has 70 percent of its clubs under multi-property structures, attempted to introduce a temporary ban on loan deals between clubs with the same ownership for the January transfer window, amid suggestions that teams in financial difficulties could increase their income by selling players at inflated prices to clubs overseas within the same multi-club ownership (MCO) structure. 

Fourteen votes were needed to pass the ban, but only 12 clubs voted in favour, with eight voting against. The eight – Chelsea, Manchester City, Newcastle, Everton, Nottingham Forest, Sheffield United, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Burnley – were all either involved in, or about to become part of, MCO structures.

“Who owns European football? Possibly those multi-owners of football clubs. Who rules European football? Possibly elite clubs”, says Pijetlovic. “This has changed. Before it was UEFA, and when UEFA was ruling European football we had champions like Red Star from Belgrade in ‘91 or (Steaua) Bucharest in ‘86 winning the top European championship. And then all of it changed. Now we cannot even imagine these clubs reaching even the quarterfinals of the top European Championship. Now that elite clubs rule football they are tilting every single rule in their favour. And there is no surprise, then, that the top is becoming more and more exclusive, that nobody is able to break any more into the final stages of championships, and that it's always the same clubs.” 

The Integrity Issue

Is fair play sustainable in the new era?

The dangers of multi-club ownership can also be felt at the competition level. UEFA itself has warned in its 2023 European Club Footballing Landscape report that “the rise of multi-club investment has the potential to pose a material threat to the integrity of European club competitions, with a growing risk of seeing two clubs with the same owner or investor facing each other on the pitch”. 

Article 5 of UEFA's club competition regulations prohibits individuals or entities from exerting control or influence over multiple clubs participating in the same tournament. The introduction next season of a new 'Swiss Model' format in European club competitions will raise unprecedented conflicts of interest. There will be more teams, 36 instead of 32, more games, more chances for clubs to cross paths during the competition. 

“The idea of multi-club ownership has to do with integrity from the legal point of view”, says  Pijetlovic. “We are not saying that you need to have clubs fix matches between themselves in order to obtain best results for the owner.  But we are saying that there has to be a public perception of a clean game.  The EU Commission just said that even the mere perception that the games can be rigged is problem enough, and it has to be addressed, and the same thing was said by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. This is why these rules prohibiting multi-club ownership exist, to manage the public perception that the game is not rigged.”

Critics argue that Article 5's vague language leaves room for interpretation, making it challenging to implement effectively. 

The European competitions starting this summer will become the litmus test for sporting fair play regulation, and UEFA’s ability and willingness to enforce Article 5. Manchester United and OGC Nice, both under the control of British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, have both qualified for Europa League, where they could be scheduled to play each other. "We are aware of the position of both clubs and are in direct dialogue with UEFA”, said a statement put out by Ratcliffe’s petrochemical company INEOS as soon as Manchester United qualified for the tournament. "We are confident we have a route forward for next season in Europe." 

As the UEFA Champions League kicks off again, players worth hundreds of millions of euros will battle across the continent. Savio is one such player, who having won the hearts of the Girona faithful, will in all likelihood make his Champions League debut this summer. Whether he is wearing the sky blue of Manchester City or the red and white of Girona, he will carry the same sponsor name on his shirt, Etihad Airways, and will ultimately be representing MCO City Football Group, the parent company for both clubs. Another side that is part of an MCO structure, RB Salzburg, will be competing for a spot in the European tournament in the qualifying round starting in July. If the Austrian club makes it to the league stage, UEFA will have to rule again on a conflict of interest, as German sister club RB Leipzig will also be playing in the 2024-25 Champions League.

Away from the bright lights of European cup competitions, Liefering fans will be left to wonder what might have been, as they watch their former players bid for European glory, while the club nurtures the next crop of Red Bull talent in Austria’s second tier. 

Reporting by Pilar Requena (RTVE), Guillaume Woelfle (RTBF), John Robbiani (RSI), Georg Döller (ZDF), Derek Bowler (EBU), Lili Rutai (EBU) and Belén López Garrido (EBU) for the EBU Investigative Journalism Network.
Sub-editor Eoghan Sweeney (EBU)
Web design by Derek Bowler (EBU)
Project Management Belén López Garrido (EBU)
Cover photo by Emilio Garcia
Published on 4 June 2024