Football’s MCO crisis: How investors are changing the game

The growth in multi-club ownership (MCO) is beginning to slow, but the problems created by investors looking to build up portfolios of clubs, often simply for monetary gain, are not. Issues with MCO abound - from abuse of the transfer system to alienated fans and undisclosed ownership holdings.

Play the Game started tracking MCO in 2021 when 156 clubs from around the world were found in 60 MCO groups. That figure had grown to 366 clubs by May 2024, and nearly 400 clubs are now controlled by 147 different owners or ownership groups focusing on Europe. 

The 2009 Treaty of the European Union recognises sports' unique characteristics that distinguish them from other economic activities, but for many of the owners buying up football clubs, this distinctive feature is an opportunity to make money. 

Jason Stephens, a senior lecturer at the University Campus of Football Business in London, who has researched MCO says to Play the Game:

 “Clubs are seen as undervalued assets. Many experts believe that football clubs have only reached around 40 per cent of their commercial potential considering the global popularity of the sport.”

Table 1. Multi-club ownership - global breakdown

US investors look for an exit strategy from the start

Of the 147 different MCO groups identified by Play the Game, 128 have stakes in clubs in Europe and 44 in the USA. There are more clubs – 38 – in MCO in the USA than in any other country and North American investors are constantly looking for opportunities, but some of those appear to have mixed motivations.

“Every American [investor] will ask what the exit strategy is at the start,” says Tim Keech, a director at MRTK Insights, which advises sports investors.

He adds: “I’m not ideologically against MCOs as the theory of sharing resources is fine. It’s nice [for example] if you are an English club and you can put a player in Portugal and then get a work permit."

“But we are working on the investment side, and everyone has the same strategy of ‘we are going for a multi-club model’, and our question is always ‘how?’ There has to be a clear plan; you can’t just cannibalise a club. They are all just saying they are going to run things really well, but the plan appears to be ‘buy up a load of clubs and flip them’. Some US groups buy three clubs in three countries, and in six months, two have failed.”

Table 2. Size of MCO groups

Investors often fail clubs they have invested in

Financially weak clubs were further weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic, which created opportunities for investors who appeared to offer clubs salvation. However, there are many examples of how clubs in MCO fail to benefit.

In France, where at least 21 clubs are in MCO, Bordeaux and Nancy were relegated to the fourth and fifth tier, respectively, due to financial problems. In Belgium, there are 16 clubs in MCO and repeated examples of these teams running into problems, including KV Oostende going bust in 2024.

Another Belgian club, KMSK Deinze, would have been a century old next year but was let down by two sets of MCO investors. The Flanders-based club was one of three clubs in a portfolio assembled by ACA Partners, but in November 2024, the Singaporean investment group walked away. Another investment group, AAD Invest, stepped in promising to save Deinze, but these promises came to nothing, and Deinze folded.

Despite this failure, AAD Invest were subsequently able to acquire an 80% stake in Italian third-tier club, ACR Messina, which had been put up for sale by its owners for one euro in 2022.

Tim Keech says that without player trading, the amount of investment needed for a football club just to exist is incredible and some investors looking to buy into clubs do not realise this. He adds:

“You see ridiculous people coming from all over the world with no proof of funds. Football has the ability to attract strange people, who will come along and make promises. It’s very difficult [for existing club owners] to say no to large amounts of money if you are losing money every year.”

Supporters are worried about MCO

The impact of MCO ownership and its potential consequences continues to generate regular fan protests across the board from Reading in England to Troyes in France and Silkeborg in Denmark.

For supporters, the concerns lay in their clubs losing their identity as a small part of a large group of clubs and a mistrust of investors looking for a deal and making undertakings that are not always kept.

“Fans [from clubs] at the top of the model are not so bothered but lower down they are,” says Niamh O'Mahony, chief operating officer and head of governance at Football Supporters Europe, which is researching the experience of supporters at clubs in MCO in conjunction with the Football Supporters Association in England.

“MCO is a real worry for League of Ireland clubs right now because there’s good value to be had and clubs don’t have much money. Denmark is also a fruitful area for MCOs, and we’re being contacted by a lot of supporters there. MCO is going to be a major topic at our congress this summer in Malmo.”

“Where there is money to be made, you have people with all these mad ideas about where you can make money, but where is their return on investment? We still haven’t seen any data that shows it works out yet.”

Significant movements between clubs is a myth

Proponents argue that MCO creates an interlinked group based on shared operations but clubs still operate commercially within their own national borders, which can limit some economies of scale created by being part of a portfolio.

“Pay systems are different in different countries so the synergies are limited,” says Niamh O'Mahony. 

Tim Keech agrees, adding: “If you speak to people at MCOs, they don’t know the people in the other clubs [with the same owner], it’s just common ownership.”

The movement of players is championed at sports business conferences and by some academics as a key driver for MCO. There are now more than 14,000 players attached to clubs in MCO, including 8,500 in Europe. However, significant movements between clubs were exposed as a myth in research covering the 2024 summer transfer window by James Corbett for Off The Pitch.

This research found only six permanent and 15 loan moves between 33 clubs in MCO in the Big Five leagues of England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. This represented just 0.33 per cent of all permanent moves—and 1.03 per cent of transfer spending—that took place in Europe and just 1.49 per cent of all loan moves.

Loan of players challenges governance rules

Where clubs in MCO are moving players around, their owners are challenging regulations brought in by governing bodies for the good of the game.

In 2016, City Football Group subsidiary Manchester City signed Anthony Caceres from Central Coast Mariners for 300,000 Australian dollars and then immediately loaned the Australian midfielder to another CFG subsidiary, Melbourne City, before he had played a game. 

What became known as the Caceres Clause was subsequently introduced by Football Australia to prevent a repeat with clubs in the same MCO. The clause meant that clubs in MOC were not allowed to buy and loan back any player within the next two periods when transfers between clubs in the competition are allowed.

In June 2024, this rule was then challenged by another MCO, the Black Knights, after their main club, English Premier League club AFC Bournemouth, signed Alex Paulsen for a reported 4 million Australian dollars, then immediately loaned the goalkeeper to another subsidiary Auckland FC before he had played a game. 

Auckland also played in the A-League, which subsequently allowed Paulsen to play and agreed to scrap the clause completely by 2025/26.

Ownership structures are often opaque

One reason for the slowdown in MCO's growth has been an increasing trend of large groups of investors forming consortia, which can take time to put together and are often opaque.

The high-profile nature of investors can, however, generate more transparency. US actor Will Ferrell, for example, has a stake in US group 49ers Enterprises and a minority holding in English Championship club, Leeds United, which 49ers Enterprises has owned since 2023. Ferrell is also a part-owner of the US Major League Soccer team, Los Angeles FC. 

In contrast, publicity-shy investment firms get far less attention and the motivations of these investors, while driven by money, are not always related to turning a profit at an underperforming European club that costs far less to buy than a sports franchise in the USA. 

Tim Keech adds:

“There’s a lot of rich people in their 30-40s who want to own a club, but I don’t think they understand what it takes to run a club."

“The networking opportunities are unbelievable. It’s a great opportunity to get access to very rich people as a loss leader. If you are a money manager, you can tap into that when you need money in your next money-raising round, that’s a great opportunity. It’s a very expensive club to be part of, but [as a fan] do you want that for your football club? Probably not.”

Establishing the size and scope of ownership structures across different countries is not always easy.

Fernando Roitman, founder of CIES Sports Intelligence, which also tracks MCO, says:

 “A significant recent evolution in the MCO landscape is that several groups have been expanding in size, concentrating even more clubs in the hands of a small group of owners. Many of these investors are also connected with each other through other investments in football and sports in general. The result is a scenario whereby direct and indirect links between clubs are becoming increasingly intricate and perhaps complex to appreciate in their entirety.”

Premier League holdings comprised of large networks

More than half of the clubs in Italy’s Serie A are majority foreign-owned, and nine are controlled by North American investors, but the English Premier League has proved the most attractive for investors. In 2013, the league’s broadcast deals totalled around 1.7 billion GBP. Six years later, they were worth about 5.1 billion GPB.

Jason Stephens's research found that 54 people from 13 different countries had stakes of 10% or more in the 20 Premier League clubs in 2024/25. Those 54 people have stakes in 52 different clubs in 25 countries around the world, but establishing the exact ownership of clubs in the world’s richest football competition is not always possible.

A study by Peter Duncan and Nicholas Lord from the University of Manchester on clubs in the 2023/24 English Premier League found many club ownership structures were comprised of large networks of holding companies with more than 10 corporate entities between clubs and owners.

In the Premier League, anyone buying a stake of 25% or more in a club must submit to an Owners & Directors Test, but in 2023/24, seven clubs also used multiple overseas jurisdictions in the overall ownership chain.

“A 25% threshold can be very easily circumvented to make it look like 3-4 people have stakes in a club when that’s not really the case, and it’s really one person,” says Nick Lord.

With a rise in minority investors, the threshold of ownership should be increased Peter Duncan suggests:

“It should be less than 25%, more like 10% because 10% of a Premier League club is still an awful lot of money.”

UEFA and FIFA lack regulations for MCO

Many national federations have rules barring ownership of more than one club, but some do not. Even when federations do have rules, these stop at national borders.

Continentally, UEFA has provided ad hoc regulation when clubs in MCO are likely to meet in European competition. In 2023, UEFA barred three pairs of clubs, Brighton and Union Saint-Gilloise, Toulouse and Milan, and Aston Villa and Vitória Guimarães, from exchanging players via sales or loans between each linked club until the end of the next year’s summer transfer window. 

Subsequently, UEFA clarified the rules which essentially means that one investor or group can own clubs playing in each of the three European competitions, but that has done little to deter investors.

INEOS owns minority stakes in three clubs: Manchester United, French team Nice, and Lausanne in Switzerland. These clubs are all in contention to qualify for either the Champions League, Europa League, or Conference League and potentially meet.

To avoid a problem and try to comply with UEFA’s rules, INEOS placed its ownership of Lausanne into a blind trust in Britain. This arrangement is supposed to prevent owners from using their shareholding to exert control over clubs in their portfolio that could provide an advantage if they played each other. 

Play the Game asked UEFA whether the existing rules on MCO would be updated to reflect abuse of transfer embargoes. UEFA simply referred Play the Game to its regulations on MCO in the Champions League, Article 5, which is the same for the Europa and Conference Leagues and offered no further comment.

Fernando Roitman adds:

“Notwithstanding the implications it has on the individual clubs in MCO, I think it is a matter that, now more than ever, concerns the governance of the game as a whole.”

The problems posed by MCO have now reached a global level with conflicts of interest created by two Mexican clubs, León and Pachuca, under the same ownership group and due to take part in FIFA’s new Club World Cup. 

FIFA knew all about this and has ignored Play the Game’s request for a comment. Only after Costa Rican club Alajuelense appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, saying that León and Pachucah taking part contravened FIFA’s own rules, was action belatedly taken. In late March - just three months before the tournament was due to start - that León was to be excluded.

EU legislation for top-tier football clubs on the way

With sports bodies slow to act, the European Union is bringing in new rules that may provide some transparency. 

From 2029, top-tier professional football clubs involved in high-value financial transactions with investors or sponsors - including advertisers and player transfers -must verify their customers’ identities, monitor transactions, and report any suspicious transactions to domestic financial intelligence units.

This would provide some clarity and regulation but Play the Game’s research found that 48 per cent of clubs known to be in MCOs are outside their domestic top tiers. Bigger clubs with stronger, more engaged supporter bases are likely to create more transparency, whereas smaller clubs are often the subject of less attention.

Not all MCO connections are known and only greater transparency throughout the game can tackle the threat of MCO. 

Jason Stephens concludes: “Regulators not having clear guidelines or the foresight to see where this is leading means that more groups can manipulate the operating space bypassing any integrity or ethical issues.”