Sam Jacobs is a Head of Canadian M&A and Global Chief Marketing Officer at Ascension Advisory. Sam pursued graduate studies in Sport History at Western University, where he taught Olympic Sport History and worked with the International Centre for Olympic Studies. He also presented his academic research at Penn State University. His writing examines the intersection of sport, history, business and institutional ownership.
FIFA’s attempt to bring private investors into the commercial heart of international football lasted only a few days. The governing body proposed creating a subsidiary valued at approximately $20 billion to oversee commercial and event operations, including those associated with the World Cup, and selling outside investors a stake of up to 20%. The transaction could have raised roughly $4.2 billion, much of which FIFA proposed distributing through expanded development funding to its 211 member associations. Instead, the plan provoked an institutional revolt. UEFA threatened to consider withdrawing its national teams from FIFA competitions, regional confederations complained that they had learned about the proposal through media reports, and FIFA ultimately abandoned it.
The speed of the collapse was striking because private capital is hardly new to football. Investment firms own clubs, hold minority interests in multi-club groups, finance stadiums and participate in the commercial revenues of domestic leagues. American billionaires control some of Europe’s most prominent teams, while sovereign wealth has transformed clubs in Manchester, Paris and Newcastle. Broadcasting partners and sponsors have long converted football’s popularity into private profit. Yet the possibility that an institutional investor might acquire an interest in the business operating the World Cup produced a reaction that these other arrangements generally did not.
The controversy was initially described as another confrontation between football and private equity. That interpretation was not entirely wrong, but it was incomplete. Supporters have good reason to scrutinize investors whose returns may depend on leverage, aggressive commercialization or control of revenues extending decades into the future. The more revealing question, however, is why this particular proposal crossed a line. FIFA was not planning to sell national teams, determine results or transfer majority control of the governing body. It was proposing to sell a minority interest in a commercial subsidiary while retaining control. In another industry, the transaction might have been described as a conventional recapitalization. In international football, it was treated as an attempted sale of the game itself.
That difference arises because the legal ownership of football and its perceived ownership are not the same. A club may belong to an individual, company or member association, although supporters often regard themselves as its permanent custodians. International football goes further. England’s national team is administered by the Football Association, but few English supporters would say the team belongs to the FA. The Brazilian Football Confederation manages the Seleção, yet its authority is institutional rather than emotional. National teams are understood to represent their countries and, by extension, their people. Their governing bodies hold the contracts, but not the complete moral claim.
The World Cup magnifies that distinction. FIFA controls the tournament’s commercial rights and has built an extraordinarily valuable business around them, but the competition derives its meaning from national identities FIFA did not create and cannot own. Its audiences are not simply consumers selecting an entertainment product. They are citizens watching symbolic representatives of their countries. FIFA can sell broadcasting rights, sponsorship packages, tickets and hospitality, but the value of each depends on a collective attachment that exists beyond FIFA’s balance sheet. The organization may legally own the commercial platform, while the public continues to regard it as the steward of an institution belonging to everyone and no one at once.
This perceived separation between ownership and stewardship explains why football assigns legitimacy unevenly to different forms of capital. The average supporter is especially suspicious of two modern owners: the sovereign investor and the private-equity firm. Sovereign wealth is criticized because football may be used to soften a government’s reputation, project geopolitical influence or redirect attention from its conduct. Private equity is criticized for nearly the opposite reason: It appears to strip football of politics, history and community until only monetizable cash flows remain. One owner is suspected of using the game to produce political legitimacy; the other of using its accumulated legitimacy to produce a financial return.
Both criticisms contain elements of truth, but neither phenomenon is historically unique. Governments were using sport to project power long before the term “sportswashing” entered popular vocabulary. Fascist Italy used the 1934 World Cup as a national showcase, Nazi Germany carefully staged the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Argentina’s military dictatorship understood the political usefulness of hosting the 1978 World Cup. Private investors are likewise not the first owners to place objectives external to sporting competition ahead of supporters. Local industrialists sought civic standing, media companies sought content, billionaires sought prestige, and governments sought influence. Football has rarely been owned by people motivated only by football.
Private equity is therefore better understood as the latest phase in a much longer evolution. Its arrival does not mark the moment football became commercial, because professional clubs have sold tickets, paid players, borrowed money and negotiated transfers for well over a century. Nor does it mark the moment football became financialized. That occurred gradually as television rights, global sponsorships and international fan bases transformed clubs and competitions into businesses capable of producing forecastable revenue. Institutional investors did not discover an untouched public institution and turn it into an asset. They arrived because football’s existing owners and governing bodies had already built one.
The failed FIFA proposal matters because it exposed the limit of that transformation. Supporters have reluctantly accepted that clubs may be bought and sold, even when they object to the identity or conduct of the buyer. They have been less willing to accept that international football can be treated in the same way. The distinction is not economically tidy, but it is culturally powerful: Clubs may have owners, while national teams belong to nations. FIFA’s error was to assume that because it possessed the legal right to monetize the World Cup, it also possessed an uncontested mandate to sell an equity interest in the institution built around it.
The resulting argument is not simply about whether private equity is good or bad for football. It is about which forms of ownership supporters consider legitimate, how those judgments have changed over time, and whether the institutions governing the sport understand the difference between controlling its commercial rights and owning the allegiance that makes those rights valuable. To answer those questions requires looking beyond the abandoned FIFA transaction and tracing how football moved from local patronage to billionaire ownership, sovereign investment and, finally, institutional capital.
Football was not created to resolve this tension because it did not begin as a global entertainment business. Modern clubs emerged during the late 19th century from churches, factories, railway companies, schools and neighbourhood associations. Newton Heath, which became Manchester United, was established by railway employees. Arsenal originated among workers at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. PSV Eindhoven emerged through Philips, while Bayer Leverkusen grew from the sporting association of the Bayer company. Across Britain and continental Europe, clubs reflected the communities and institutions that created them.
These origins shaped how supporters understood ownership. The chairman was often a local businessman whose identity was closely connected to the town. He might employ people who attended matches, conduct business in the surrounding community and share in the civic consequences of the club’s fortunes. His ownership was private, but it was not distant. Capital, labour, identity and geography overlapped in a way that created a degree of informal accountability, even when supporters possessed no formal authority over decisions.
This arrangement should not be romanticized. Local owners could be incompetent, self-interested or exploitative. Clubs experienced financial distress, political disputes and conflicts between owners and supporters long before the arrival of global investors. Football was also commercial from an early stage. Clubs charged admission, negotiated transfers, paid wages, borrowed money and competed for revenue. The idea that football was once entirely untouched by commerce is historically implausible.
What changed was not the existence of commerce but the scale and distance of capital. A local industrialist could disappoint supporters, but he remained physically and socially connected to the club’s environment. A foreign billionaire, sovereign investment fund or New York private-equity firm occupies a different relationship to place. The investor may be better capitalized and more professionally managed, yet also more remote from the people who understand the club as a civic institution rather than an asset.
Television accelerated this separation. The formation of the Premier League in 1992 was not merely an administrative reorganization of English football. It helped convert a domestic sporting competition into a global media product. Broadcasting rights became an increasingly important source of revenue, allowing clubs to reach audiences that had no geographic connection to their cities. Sponsors sought international visibility, merchandise circulated globally, and clubs began to develop supporter bases extending far beyond the communities represented by their names.
The economics of football became global while its identity remained stubbornly local. Manchester United could attract supporters in Toronto, Singapore and Johannesburg while continuing to derive much of its meaning from Manchester. Liverpool became a global brand without ceasing to represent a particular city, history and social identity. This dual character created extraordinary commercial opportunity, but it also created lasting tension. Owners increasingly managed global entertainment businesses whose customers continued to think and speak like members of local communities.
Supporters benefited from much of this transformation. Broadcast revenue financed improved stadiums, better players and higher production standards. The Premier League developed into one of the world’s most commercially successful sporting competitions. European clubs acquired international profiles that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Yet these gains also changed how clubs were valued. Once media revenues became substantial and comparatively predictable, football acquired the characteristics institutional investors look for in other industries. Future cash flows could be forecast, sponsorship portfolios expanded, stadium operations optimized and intellectual property licensed across multiple markets.
Football had become an investable asset long before private equity arrived. This is one of the central contradictions in the current debate. Critics often describe institutional investors as though they are converting the sport into a business for the first time. In reality, private equity entered because decades of commercialization had already created assets with measurable revenues, defensible market positions and significant growth potential. Television, sponsorship and globalization financialized elite football before buyout firms appeared in club boardrooms or league negotiations.
The first major ownership era was dominated by local patrons, industrial families and civic businessmen. The second emerged as commercialization attracted public companies, media interests and foreign investors. The third was defined by global billionaires who treated football clubs as a mixture of business, status symbol and personal ambition. Roman Abramovich’s purchase of Chelsea in 2003 demonstrated how a vast private fortune could rapidly transform competitive balance. The Glazer family’s leveraged acquisition of Manchester United raised a different concern by showing how debt could be imposed on a club as part of an ownership transaction.
These cases introduced many of the criticisms now directed at private equity. Supporters objected to leverage, remote ownership and the extraction of value long before PE became a prominent participant in football. American ownership groups later brought sophisticated commercial strategies and, in many cases, a portfolio approach influenced by North American professional sports. Their methods helped grow revenues but also intensified fears that clubs were becoming franchises, supporters were becoming customers and competitions were being reorganized around commercial efficiency rather than sporting tradition.
The arrival of sovereign wealth added a political dimension to those economic anxieties. Abu Dhabi’s ownership of Manchester City, Qatar’s acquisition of Paris Saint-Germain and the Saudi-backed takeover of Newcastle United demonstrated that clubs could provide states with global audiences, diplomatic relationships and reputational benefits. The owner was no longer merely a rich individual seeking prestige or financial appreciation. Ownership could form part of a broader national strategy.
Private equity represents the next phase in this chronology, but it is not simply another version of billionaire ownership. Institutional investors generally have defined investment periods, formal return requirements and obligations to their own limited partners. They may invest directly in clubs, acquire minority stakes, finance stadiums or purchase interests in the commercial entities established by leagues and governing bodies. Their presence makes explicit what football has often preferred to leave ambiguous: The asset is expected to produce a financial return, and the investor will eventually require liquidity.
That explicitness helps explain the hostility. A billionaire may claim to love the club, and a sovereign fund may present itself as a long-term partner in a city’s renewal. Private equity arrives with less romantic language. It discusses revenue growth, governance, operating performance and exit value. To supporters, this vocabulary can sound like evidence that the investor does not understand football. To investors, it may simply describe the economic system football has already become.
The central issue is therefore not whether money belongs in football. Money has always been present, and modern elite competition could not operate without it. The more difficult question is which objectives the institutions of football are strong enough to contain. An owner may seek profit, political legitimacy, personal prestige or competitive success, and often some combination of all four. The task of governance is to ensure that none of those objectives overwhelms the sporting and cultural foundations from which the asset derives its value.
That challenge becomes especially difficult when the discussion moves from clubs to international football. A club may have a recognized owner even when supporters contest how that owner behaves. A national team is perceived to belong to the nation, while the World Cup is understood as a shared international institution. Any proposal that appears to transfer part of that institution to a financial investor will therefore provoke a reaction out of proportion to the legal rights being considered. The public is not simply worried that private equity may earn a return. It is asking whether FIFA has the moral authority to sell an interest in something supporters never believed was FIFA’s to own outright.
That concern is not imaginary, even if the language used to express it is sometimes imprecise. Private equity is not a single ownership model, and its involvement in football has not followed a single path. Some firms have acquired controlling interests in clubs, while others have purchased minority stakes in ownership groups, provided private credit, financed stadium developments or invested in commercial subsidiaries that receive portions of future media and sponsorship revenue. These structures carry different risks, but supporters often group them together under the broad category of financial ownership. The result is a debate in which a minority investment in a commercial business may be described as though a fund had purchased the rules of the sport itself. That distinction should not be dismissed as a technicality. It determines what the investor owns, what decisions it may influence and how its returns will ultimately be generated.
The present institutional phase became unmistakable in 2019, when Silver Lake invested $500 million for slightly more than 10% of City Football Group, valuing the owner of Manchester City and a growing portfolio of clubs at $4.8 billion. The transaction was notable because it joined two forms of capital that supporters often view with suspicion: Abu Dhabi-backed ownership and American private equity. It also demonstrated why football had become attractive to institutional investors. City Football Group was no longer merely the corporate parent of a successful English club. It was a global platform combining teams, media, technology, commercial partnerships, talent development and international fan bases. The investment thesis depended not only on match results but on the convergence of sports, entertainment and technology, as well as the possibility of generating revenue across a network rather than from one club alone.
The next major development moved institutional capital from club ownership into league economics. In 2021, CVC Capital Partners agreed to provide LaLiga and participating clubs with nearly €2 billion through a structure intended to finance technology, international expansion, infrastructure and commercial development. Thirty-seven of 42 eligible clubs supported the final agreement, while prominent opponents including Real Madrid and Barcelona declined to participate. In 2022, CVC invested another €1.5 billion for a 13% interest in the newly created commercial subsidiary responsible for the media-rights business of France’s Ligue 1. These arrangements did not give CVC control over team selection or the results of matches. They exchanged immediate capital for participation in commercial revenues that football expected to generate over many years.
Institutional capital also moved directly into historic clubs. RedBird Capital Partners acquired AC Milan in 2022 and has applied a strategy centred on sponsorships, media, merchandising, infrastructure and international fan engagement. Sixth Street entered a long-term partnership involving the commercial operation of events at Real Madrid’s renovated Santiago Bernabéu, illustrating how investors could gain exposure to football-related revenue without acquiring the club itself. Elsewhere, investment firms have pursued multi-club portfolios, minority stakes and private-credit structures secured against football assets or future income. The resulting landscape is less a coordinated takeover of the sport than a varied market in which investors seek exposure to clubs, rights, venues and related commercial platforms.
The appeal is understandable. Elite football offers scarce content, loyal audiences and brands that are difficult to replicate. The number of historically important clubs is fixed, while global demand for live sports remains substantial. Stadiums can be redeveloped into year-round entertainment venues, digital products can reach supporters far beyond local markets, and sponsorship operations can be professionalized. Multi-club ownership may offer shared scouting, data, recruitment and commercial capabilities. These characteristics resemble the qualities investors seek in other forms of media and infrastructure: durable intellectual property, recurring consumer attention and opportunities to improve underdeveloped revenue streams.
Football, however, also frustrates the assumptions on which conventional investment models depend. Sporting performance is volatile, player wages can absorb revenue growth, and relegation may impair cash flow with a speed rarely encountered in ordinary businesses. Supporters can resist price increases, scheduling changes, stadium relocations or alterations to club identity even when those measures appear financially rational. The investor cannot fully control the product because much of the product is competition, uncertainty and inherited tradition. A football club whose management maximizes every available revenue stream may become more valuable on paper while simultaneously weakening the emotional relationship that made the revenue possible.
This is the paradox that financial analysis alone struggles to capture. Football’s most valuable asset does not appear on its balance sheet. It is the accumulated loyalty of supporters who have attached family history, geography and identity to an institution they do not legally own. That loyalty produces pricing power, media audiences and sponsorship value, but it is not infinitely exploitable. Supporters may tolerate commercialization when the proceeds appear to strengthen the team or improve the stadium. They become less accommodating when the same decisions are interpreted as extraction, particularly when the owner is distant, highly leveraged or expected to exit after a defined investment period.
Private equity therefore becomes a symbol of a broader anxiety about the distance between the people who finance football and the people who give it meaning. The fear is not merely that an investor will earn a return. Clubs have long enriched players, agents, broadcasters, executives and owners. The fear is that an investor with no permanent attachment to the institution will monetize decades of accumulated loyalty and leave before the cultural consequences become apparent. This concern is not an argument against every institutional investment, but it explains why promises of operational improvement are often received with suspicion. In football, efficiency does not automatically confer legitimacy.
FIFA’s proposed commercial transaction pushed this anxiety beyond the club game. The plan contemplated creating FIFA Forward Enterprise, a subsidiary valued at approximately $20 billion that would consolidate revenue-generating activities including broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing, licensing and event delivery. FIFA would have retained majority control while selling up to 20% to outside investors, potentially raising roughly $4.2 billion. In return for member support, each of FIFA’s 211 associations could have received as much as $40 million during the 2027-30 cycle, considerably more than under the existing development-funding plan.
From a transaction perspective, the rationale was recognizable. FIFA possessed valuable commercial rights, predictable global demand and an opportunity to obtain capital immediately against future growth. Smaller associations could receive funds for facilities, coaching, women’s football and youth development. FIFA would retain a controlling interest, while the investor would own a minority stake in a commercial entity rather than the national teams themselves. On those terms, the proposal could be presented as a recapitalization designed to accelerate investment throughout the global game.
The proposal nevertheless failed because its architects underestimated the importance of process and perceived ownership. Regional confederations and national associations said they had not been properly consulted before details became public. The funding offer was accompanied by a deadline, which created the impression that associations were being asked to exchange long-term rights for immediate distributions before the governance consequences had been fully examined. UEFA’s members unanimously rejected the proposal and threatened to withhold their national teams from FIFA competitions while it remained active. The criticism was framed not simply as opposition to valuation or deal structure but as a defence of FIFA’s custodial obligations. The World Cup, UEFA argued in substance, could not be treated as an ordinary investment product.
The plan collapsed within days, ending FIFA’s attempt to raise outside capital through the proposed structure and shifting scrutiny toward Gianni Infantino’s leadership. The speed of the retreat was itself significant. Private equity had already entered clubs, multi-club groups, stadium businesses and league commercial entities without provoking a comparable institutional revolt. FIFA’s proposal encountered a different boundary because it appeared to place an ownership interest around the commercial heart of international football. Whether investors would have gained direct influence over competitions became less important than the public perception that the World Cup had been converted into equity.
International football is distinct because its legitimacy is national rather than contractual. A supporter may choose a club or inherit one through family and geography, but membership in a national community carries a different political and emotional weight. The national team becomes a representation of the country even for citizens who otherwise have little interest in the domestic game. During a World Cup, people who disagree about politics, class, religion and region temporarily attach themselves to the same colours and symbols. The team’s authority does not flow from its governing association alone. It comes from the public’s willingness to see eleven players as representatives of a collective identity.
This helps explain why international football has so often been used by governments seeking legitimacy. The same quality that makes a national team emotionally powerful makes it politically useful. Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Argentina’s military dictatorship each understood that hosting successful international sport could project strength, modernity and unity. Contemporary states use different institutions and communicate through a vastly larger media system, but the underlying logic remains familiar. Sportswashing works, to the extent that it works at all, because supporters already treat sport as an expression of collective identity. Political power does not create that attachment; it attempts to borrow it.
Private equity provokes a parallel concern from the opposite direction. Sovereign owners are criticized for converting sporting legitimacy into political influence. Financial investors are criticized for converting it into private return. Both forms of capital seek access to value created by supporters, but neither can own the underlying allegiance in the same way that it can own shares, stadium rights or sponsorship income. The resentment arises when the transaction appears to confuse legal ownership with moral ownership.
None of this means that FIFA’s commercial operations should remain unsophisticated or insulated from outside expertise. The organization manages competitions of extraordinary scale and should be expected to improve broadcasting, ticketing, sponsorship, technology and distribution. Nor does it mean that external capital can never participate in international football. It means that any such participation must begin from the recognition that FIFA is both a commercial rights holder and a governing institution. Combining those roles creates an inherent conflict because decisions that increase commercial value may also alter the competitions FIFA is obligated to protect.
The appropriate response is not to declare football off-limits to capital but to impose clearer boundaries on what capital may control. An investor in a commercial subsidiary should not possess authority over tournament formats, qualification rules, host selection or the competitive calendar. Transactions should be presented to member associations before they are announced publicly, and the identity, economics and governance rights of investors should be disclosed in full. Independent oversight should examine whether immediate distributions compromise future revenue, while player, supporter and confederation interests should be considered before long-term commercial rights are transferred. Above all, FIFA must preserve a credible separation between its responsibility to regulate football and its incentive to maximize the value of the competitions it sells.
Private equity was not the first outside force to challenge football’s conception of itself, and it will not be the last. Local industrialists, public companies, foreign billionaires and sovereign wealth funds have each altered the sport. Television expanded its audience, while globalization separated capital from geography. Institutional investors are the logical consequence of that evolution, not an interruption of it. Football became investable because generations of supporters made it valuable and because governing bodies learned to commercialize their attention.
The failed FIFA proposal nevertheless demonstrates that international football retains a boundary the club game has largely surrendered. A club may belong to an owner under law, even while supporters insist that it belongs culturally to them. A national team is understood to belong to the nation, and the World Cup is understood to belong collectively to the countries that contest it and the people who sustain it. FIFA holds the contracts, but it does not hold the entire claim.
The central question is therefore not whether private equity belongs in football. That question has already been answered by the market. Institutional capital is present across clubs, leagues, media rights, stadiums and financing arrangements, and it will continue to seek opportunities wherever valuable but underdeveloped commercial assets exist. The more important question is whether football’s governing institutions are strong enough to ensure that every form of capital remains subordinate to the game’s competitive and cultural foundations.
Football does not need to choose between purity and investment, because the era of commercial purity never existed. It must instead distinguish between ownership and stewardship, between monetizing a competition and surrendering authority over it, and between creating value from supporters and exhausting the trust on which that value depends. The backlash against FIFA was not simply a rejection of private equity. It was a reminder that the world’s most popular sport derives its legitimacy from people who possess no shares, hold no board seats and sign none of its commercial agreements, but who nevertheless believe that football belongs to them. In the only sense that ultimately sustains the business, they are right.