By James Deller
For most of the sport’s modern history, owning a football club was a passion purchase — a wealthy individual’s trophy asset, justified by prestige rather than returns. That era is ending. What’s replacing it is something I recognize immediately from every other sector I’ve invested in: an asset class in its early institutionalization phase, where valuations are re-rating faster than the underlying fundamentals alone would justify, precisely because sophisticated capital is finally showing up in volume.
The valuation re-rating is not subtle
Forbes’ 2026 valuation of the world’s most valuable soccer clubs puts the average value of the top 30 clubs at $2.9 billion — a 21% increase from the record $2.4 billion average just one year earlier. Real Madrid now sits at an estimated $9.5 billion, roughly $2 billion clear of Barcelona in second place. Revenue multiples on recent transactions tell the same story from a different angle: Atlético de Madrid’s sale to Apollo Sports Capital closed at roughly $2.95 billion including debt — about six times the club’s prior-season revenue. An unsolicited approach for Napoli reportedly valued the club at approximately 11 times revenue, a multiple Forbes itself called an “extreme anomaly,” yet the fact that a private equity firm focused on sports was willing to float that number at all tells you something about how aggressively institutional capital now believes in the category’s growth ceiling.
I don’t think a 21% single-year re-rating in the average valuation of an already-mature asset category happens by accident. It happens when a new class of buyer — with a different cost of capital, different return expectations, and a different time horizon than the traditional owner — enters a market at scale. That’s precisely what’s happened in football over the past three years.
Institutional capital is choosing structure over control
The most telling data point in the entire asset-class transition isn’t the size of any single transaction — it’s the shape of the transactions. UEFA’s European Club Finance and Investment Landscape report recorded an all-time high of 123 football club investment transactions across Europe in 2025. But rather than pursuing full acquisitions, investors are increasingly accessing the sector through minority stakes, structured equity, and private credit — a textbook signal of a maturing asset class, where sophisticated capital prefers exposure to an asset’s upside without taking on full operational control and its associated governance burden. The same report notes that US investors accounted for roughly a third of all top-division club takeovers in 2025, and dedicated sports investment funds have launched specifically to capture this thesis at scale — evidence of a long-term, institutionalized approach to capital allocation rather than opportunistic, one-off purchases.
This is exactly the pattern I look for when deciding whether an emerging category has crossed from “collectible” to genuine “asset class”: when capital starts arriving through structured vehicles built by repeat, professional allocators — rather than one-off purchases by wealthy individuals — you’re no longer looking at a hobby market. You’re looking at a category institutional finance has decided is investable at scale.
Multi-club ownership is the sector’s portfolio-theory moment
Football’s most distinctive structural innovation — multi-club ownership — is best understood as the sport’s version of portfolio diversification. The number of clubs embedded in multi-club ownership structures rose from 62 in 2015 to over 300 within a decade, with MCO groups themselves more than doubling since 2018. Academic analysis of the trend is now explicit about the framing: football investments, whether single-club or portfolio-style, “increasingly resemble structured alternative assets,” with returns generated through both financial mechanisms (broadcasting revenue, sponsorship synergies, capital appreciation) and intangible value (brand equity, global fan engagement, talent-development systems).
That framing — football clubs as structured alternative assets with both financial and intangible return drivers — is precisely how I’d describe any maturing alternative asset category in its institutionalization phase, whether that’s early-stage venture, structured credit, or real assets. The specific mechanics differ; the underlying capital-markets logic doesn’t. Notably, recent data suggests the MCO expansion phase itself may be entering a more disciplined, selective stage — growth in new MCO-affiliated clubs has slowed from a peak of roughly 30% annual growth in 2022/23 to under 4% in 2025/26 — which reads less like the model failing and more like a young asset class moving past its speculative land-grab phase into a more measured, returns-disciplined one. That’s a healthy sign, not a warning sign, for anyone with a genuine long-term thesis rather than a momentum trade.
Why the returns profile looks structurally different from public equities
One dataset worth sitting with: analysis comparing football franchise valuations to major public equity indices has found that sports franchise valuations have consistently outperformed benchmarks like the S&P 500 over the past several years, with resilience that held up even through periods of broader market volatility. That’s a genuinely distinctive property for an asset class to have, and it’s the property institutional allocators care about most — not just absolute return, but a return stream with low correlation to traditional financial markets. An asset that grows in value based on global fan engagement, sponsorship monetization, and scarcity of top-tier competitive assets is, almost by construction, going to have a very different risk factor exposure than an asset priced primarily off interest rates and corporate earnings cycles.
The risks nobody should paper over
None of this means football is a frictionless asset class, and I’d be doing readers a disservice pretending otherwise. Regulatory risk is real and actively evolving — UEFA’s tightening enforcement of ownership-influence rules under Article 5 has already forced restructurings and, in at least one high-profile case, cost a club its European competition slot entirely. Operating losses remain the norm rather than the exception at the club level, even among historically dominant institutions — City Football Group’s cumulative losses across its 13-club portfolio have reportedly approached £1 billion, excluding acquisition costs. And valuation multiples on recent high-profile deals suggest at least some transactions are being priced on narrative and scarcity rather than defensible cash-flow fundamentals — a pattern familiar from every other asset class in an early re-rating phase.
The thesis, plainly stated
Football is transitioning from a passion-purchase category into a genuine, institutionally-investable asset class, and the transition is happening faster than most participants in the sport itself have internalized. The capital flowing in now is structured, professional, and increasingly disciplined about how it accesses exposure — through minority stakes and structured equity rather than blunt full-control acquisitions. That’s precisely the signature of an asset class in the early stages of institutionalization, and precisely the phase where the most attractive risk-adjusted opportunities exist — before pricing fully reflects the category’s long-term commercial ceiling, and before every allocator with capital to deploy has already arrived.
James Deller is a technology entrepreneur, operator-consultant, and active global investor across technology, consumer, and emerging industries, including sport. He writes periodically on capital markets and organizational performance, with a particular focus on football’s transition into an institutionally-investable asset class.
