Everyone's got a hold-my-beer moment. Most end with a regrettable tattoo or a 3 AM DoorDash order you can't explain. But Rob Smethurst, a businessman from Macclesfield, England, took his to a different stratosphere.

Four days into a 2020 drinking binge, he stumbled across his local bankrupt football (soccer, if you're American) club listed for sale online. He bought it. Because it "sounded fun."

Then he sobered up.

But instead of doing what most of us would do, which is panic, call a lawyer, and pretend it never happened, he went all in. He relaunched the club as Macclesfield FC. Poured in millions. Brought in John Rooney (yes, Wayne's brother) to rebuild it from the ground up. 

A few years later, that drunken impulse buy became one of the greatest underdog stories in English football history.

How great? 

Macclesfield FC knocked defending FA Cup Champions and Premier League side Crystal Palace out of said tournament. A team over a hundred places ahead of them in the football pyramid.  

I love that story because it's a funhouse mirror of a conversation I have all the time, albeit a more sober one. I'm a fractional CFO in sports, and hardly a week goes by that someone doesn't hit me up about buying a soccer club.

And with the FIFA World Cup kicking off in less than four months, I’m expecting even more inquiries.  

That said, most people who reach out to me have done about as much due diligence as Smethurst did on night three. 

So this week, I'm breaking down the ownership model the way a CFO would: who owns these clubs, how the deals get done, where the money shows up, and where it doesn't.

Most of the time when people reach out to me about buying a soccer team, it’s always about vibes and valuations. Nobody ever leads with cash flow.

And I mean, I get it. The top-line numbers are sexy. Stateside, MLS franchises now price like major U.S. pro sports assets. The league is valued at $23 billion, the average club is worth $767 million (up 39% since 2021), and Inter Miami alone sits at $1.45 billion (thanks, Messi). 

Over in Europe, the top 20 clubs posted a record €12.4 billion ($13.9 billion) in combined revenue last season, with Real Madrid pulling in €1.16 billion ($1.3 billion) by itself. 

But when you open the balance sheet, reality sets in. It ain’t all rosy. 

Barcelona is dragging €2.5 billion ($2.8 billion) in liabilities, nearly half of English football clubs hold less than one month of cash reserves, and EPL and UEFA spending caps are about to tighten the screws further.

So, is it a good investment or a money pit? Honestly, both. If you underwrite a soccer club like a normal operating business, you'll hate it. But if you underwrite it like a scarce media, real estate, and brand platform, that's a different story. 

Once you accept that soccer clubs are priced like scarce platforms and run like money bonfires, the next logical question is: who's writing these checks? 

The answer used to be simple. A rich local guy who loved the club. 

Well, that guy still exists. But he's now sitting in ownership meetings next to a sovereign wealth fund, a private equity shop, and whatever you'd call the Snoop Dogg/Martha Stewart/Luka Modric ownership group at Swansea City.  

Control, ego, civic identity, optionality. Pick any two. Sheikh Mansour's Abu Dhabi United Group turned Manchester City into a global brand and a soft-power vehicle for the UAE. Todd Boehly's consortium at Chelsea has burned through cash at a pace that makes other owners sweat. And the Glazer family spent two decades treating Manchester United like a leveraged buyout, loading it with debt while pulling out dividends. Every one of these buyers wanted the same thing: the steering wheel. What they did once they got it is a whole different story.

A few of those billionaires answer to a flag, which changes everything. Qatar's Investment Authority owns 87.5% of Paris Saint-Germain. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund holds 80% of Newcastle United and 75% stakes in four Saudi Pro League clubs. The UAE's Mubadala backs an indirect stake in Chelsea. Love of the beautiful game has nothing to do with any of it. These are geopolitical chess moves with a jersey on.

Where sovereign money plants a flag, Wall Street runs a model. Silver Lake holds an 18% stake in Manchester City. Carlyle Group has pursued secondaries in AC Milan. KKR just paid $1.4 billion for Arctos Partners, a firm built entirely around minority stakes in sports franchises. That deal alone should tell you soccer has graduated from rich-guy hobby to legitimate asset class. The appeal for these funds is clean: yield, diversification, and cap table access. But zero interest in ever picking a starting eleven and active involvement.

Stretch that institutional logic across borders, and you get the multi-club model. City Football Group owns clubs on five continents (e.g., New York City FC, Girona), sharing scouting networks, player pipelines, and commercial deals between all of them. Red Bull does the same with RB Leipzig and Salzburg. The idea is to buy young talent cheaply at a lower-tier club, develop it, and then sell or promote upward. When you control the whole supply chain, the margins on player development get fat. UEFA has noticed, though. They've already flagged ownership conflicts in European competitions, and the scrutiny is only growing.

Then you've got the group that doesn't need the returns because they brought something Excel can't capture: eyeballs. 

Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought a low-tier English club Wrexham, for essentially nothing in 2020, promised to invest £2 million ($2.5 million), and proceeded to do something no English football club had ever done: earn three consecutive promotions. The club now sits one rung below the Premier League, with £26.7 million ($33.5 million) in revenue (up 155%) and over half its turnover coming from North America. Their Netflix docuseries Welcome to Wrexham didn't hurt, either.

So naturally, others followed. Tom Brady took a minority stake in Birmingham City. JJ Watt invested in both Burnley and Espanyol. LeBron James holds Liverpool stakes through Fenway Sports Group. David Beckham fully owns Inter Miami. And of course, there’s the Snoop/Modric/Martha Stewart trio at Swansea. 

Cool. So now you know who owns these clubs. But knowing the guest list doesn't tell you how they got through the door. The deal mechanics are where most buyers either prove they belong at the table or reveal they prompted deep research on ChatGPT "how to buy a soccer team" 48 hours ago.

A majority stake buys you control. A minority stake buys you access, upside, and plausible deniability when things go wrong. 

The key here is that the control premium is real, and it's priced accordingly. Look at Sporting Kansas City as evidence. Peter Mallouk just bought a 71% stake in a roughly $700 million valuation. That's not "I love soccer." That's someone buying a governed scarcity asset with upside optionality. 

Meanwhile, every celebrity deal we just talked about? Minority stakes. Big names, small checks, zero accountability for results on the pitch.

Most headlines get this wrong, and most buyers don't correct them. 

Enterprise value is what the whole club is worth, the total price tag including debt. Equity value is what the buyer's ownership stake is actually worth after you subtract what the club owes. 

Think of it like buying a house. A place listed at $700,000 sounds great until you find out it comes with a $200,000 mortgage that you're now responsible for. Your equity on day one is $500,000. 

The same thing happens with soccer clubs all the time. A deal gets announced at $700 million, everyone writes the big number, and nobody mentions the $200 million in liabilities sitting underneath it.  

Here's where amateurs get smoked. 

MLS is a closed system. A traditional type of U.S. sports league. You buy in, you stay in. 

English football and most European leagues, on the other hand, are a different beast. Because they run on promotion and relegation, it means your club can literally drop a division if it has a bad season. 

That risk changes the entire underwriting model. 

A club worth £200 million ($250 million) in the Premier League might be worth a fraction of that if it gets relegated. Literally overnight. Broadcast distribution and competitive balance rules drive stability (or chaos) far more than most buyers realize.

Finally, the purchase price is just the starting line. The real deal lives in the details: 

Skip any of those line items, and you'll find out the hard way what you actually bought.

The next question every caller asks is the one that matters most and frankly should be the first question: Where does the money come from? The answer is surprisingly robust. It’s the follow-up question, though, "so are these clubs profitable?", where the conversation gets uncomfortable.

The biggest check most clubs cash every year comes from TV. Europe's top 20 clubs pulled in €4.7 billion ($5.3 billion) from broadcast deals last season, up 10%. UEFA distributed €3.3 billion ($3.7 billion) across its competitions, up 22%. The Premier League's new cycle starting in 2025/26 comes in at £3.84 billion ($4.8 billion), with roughly 80% distributed centrally. For most clubs outside the elite, broadcast money is the entire financial foundation.

Sponsorships, merch, partnerships, and stadium monetization beyond matchday. Europe's top 20 generated €5.3 billion ($5.9 billion) here, making commercial the single largest revenue line at 43% of total income. Real Madrid alone banked €594 million ($666 million) from partners and retail. The clubs pulling the biggest commercial numbers have figured out how to reduce their dependence on broadcast, which gives them a cushion the smaller clubs don't have.

Tickets, hospitality, premium seating, dynamic pricing. The top 20 posted €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion), up 16% year over year, the fastest-growing bucket. Real Madrid led at €233 million ($261 million), followed by Manchester United at €191 million ($214 million). Barcelona added €70 million ($78 million) from personal seat licenses alone, even with their stadium under construction. Old buildings with new revenue tricks.

This one confuses people not involved in this world. Clubs buy players, develop them, and sell them at a markup. Global transfer spending hit a record in 2025 at roughly €11 billion ($12.3 billion)- a whopping 50% surge from 2024. Nearly 80% of FIFA member associations also turned a net profit on transfers. 

The CFO catch: transfer fees hit the balance sheet like capex and get amortized over the contract. Profits can look great on paper until you layer in the wages and cash timing.

FIFA approved a record $727 million for the 2026 World Cup, with $655 million in prize money alone. Zoom out further, and FIFA's full 2023-2026 budget assumes $11 billion in revenue across TV rights, marketing, hospitality, and ticketing. Every new tournament expands the pie.

With all that money flowing in, you'd think the answer is obvious. It's not. Clubs historically pour 85% of revenue back into player wages and transfers. Owner returns, on average, are a paltry negative 22%. Soccer clubs can be terrible businesses and phenomenal assets, and any CFO who can't hold both of those ideas at the same time will never survive in this space.

I just spent a lot of words on ownership models, deal mechanics, revenue lines, and why profitability is basically a suggestion in international soccer. All of that should make you a sharper buyer. But none of it will protect you from the thing that kills most deals: your own blind spots. So here are the mistakes I keep seeing and the questions I use to stress-test whether someone is serious or just excited.

Rob Smethurst bought a football club on a bender and somehow made it work. Some of the people calling me are stone-cold sober and less prepared than he was. 

That should tell you something.

People don't keep calling me about soccer teams because the margins are great. They call because the asset behaves like a media platform with scarcity and optionality, especially heading into the 2026 World Cup window. 

Fair enough. But before you wire anything:

If someone pitches you a club and can't answer the wage bill question in one sentence, save yourself the time.