The Football Universe – The Rise of the Multi-club Ownership Model in Modern Football
Last month, reigning Premier League champions Manchester City made their first signing of the summer, signing Brazilian winger Savio from French 3rd division side Troyes for an estimated £31 million. Anyone signing for City or swapping the French 3rd division for the top of English football raises eyebrows, but this one was different.
Why, you might ask? Because the young winger has just become the unwitting poster boy for football’s newest ownership trend.
Signed from his native Brazil by City Football Group (CFG) club Troyes for a club record €6m, the Brazilian never actually played for the French side. Instead, he spent two seasons on loan at PSV before a productive loan spell at CFG’s La Liga side Girona (19 G+A) put his name on the map and earned him a move to Manchester City.
To the casual eye, it looks like a good player progressing up the ladder. What it actually is, is a carefully curated conveyor belt of talent designed to drive the success of a stable of clubs instead of just one.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the era of the Multi-club Model.
It’s a simple concept, why own one football club when you can own several and use them all to work together? But it’s likely to change the face of the beautiful game forever.
Multi-club ownership – Gaming the system – New idea?
As stated in the previous point, the concept is very simple. If you can own multiple clubs, preferably in different continents, there are endless benefits. You have: More buying power, better scouting of players, better scouting of rivals (think potential champions league opponents), can swap players between clubs (more on this later) and of course lots and lots of money. What’s not to love?
The concept isn’t new:
- Ken Bates (Leeds fans look away) owned 4 different teams between 1960-2013
- Spurs chairman Daniel Levy owned a stake in as many as 6 teams in the early 2000s.
- Under Ferran Soriano, Barcelona considered starting a MLS team in Miami.
But this was all just investing, it wasn’t until 2009 that someone went one step further. In 2009, Giampaolo Pozzo, owner of Serie A side Udinese agreed to buy struggling Spanish side Granada, sending 9 Udinese players there on loan in the process. This, combined with the family’s purchase of Watford in 2012, was the first time clubs had worked together to create their own ecosystem.
The policy was simple. All three clubs would act as one entity, buying players and distributing them across the network to where they’d drive the most success. It was effective too. Between 2011-2020 the Pozzo family controlled 3 topflight teams while the two clubs they still own, Watford and Udinese, have combined transfer earnings of £114m over the last ten years. Not bad, right?
How Watford Went From FA Cup Finalists to Midtable in the Championship
Other owners didn’t think so. According to UEFA, 40 clubs were involved in a multi-club model before 2012, this has now risen to nearly 200. But was doing it with three clubs thinking big enough? No, while the Pozzo family had blazed the trail, now the stage was set for the idea to be expanded on, all it needed was someone with deeper pockets. Now, where can we get someone like that?
Multi-club Ownership – Modern Football
Deeper pockets, you say? How about bottomless? Enter Sheikh Mansour, founder of the City Football Group, and Dietrich Mateschitz, founder of energy drink giant Red Bull. While these two men don’t have a lot in common, their companies are the figureheads of the multi-club model.
We’ll look at the City Football Group (CFG) first. When Manchester City hired former Barcelona executive Ferran Soriano to be their CEO in 2013, they wanted a good decision maker. What they got was a mastermind behind world domination. With the backing of the limitless wealth of Sheikh Mansour, Soriano set to work building his dream, a global football brand.
Starting with the founding of MLS franchise New York City FC in 2013, City started buying or founding clubs quicker than you buy useless technology on Black Friday; they now have at least a partial stake in 13 teams on 5 continents, including five in Europe. While Red Bull haven’t quite had the same momentum, they’ve been doing it a lot longer.
The company, started by Dietrich Mateschitz in 1987, broke into football in 2005 when they purchased SV Austria Salzburg and promptly changed their name to Red Bull Salzburg. They then purchased a New York team in 2006 (NY Red Bulls) and followed this up by purchasing German 5th division team SSV Markranstädt in 2009, before promptly renaming it and turning it into one of the best teams in Germany, the new name? RB Leipzig.
Finally, they bought Brazilian side Clube Atlético Bragantino in 2019, renaming it to… you guessed it, RB Bragantino. So, what’s the point?
Why Multi-club Models are Genius
There’s several great reasons. I’ll explain.
Talent Funnel
Owning multiple teams at different levels on the pyramid allows you to create a conveyor belt. You can use the smaller teams in your system to develop players then either sell them to third parties for a profit or sell them up the ladder to the better team(s) in the stable. You can generate massive profits and get great players, win win. Red Bull are masters of this.
- Since 2013, RB Salzburg have made a transfer profit of £436m while also winning 10 league titles.
- In that period, they’ve sold 19 players, worth £191m, to RB Leipzig.
- The group who’ve moved from Salzburg to Leipzig fall into one of two groups. They’ve either been sold (For a profit of around £210m) or become valuable first team regulars, helping Leipzig to successive top 6 finishes in the Bundesliga since 2016.
Global Scouting
It’s physically impossible for one club to scout everyone, even with blank cheques and new technology. The solution? Use all the teams in the stable to scout clubs in their own country. CFG uses all of its teams to scout players in their respective countries and now boasts detailed scouting profiles on half a million players.
Club collaboration
CFG owns 13 different teams, with Manchester City and Pep Guardiola firmly at the top of the tree. One of their key principles is to develop the ‘City Way’. This means all 13 teams will use the same tactics and playing style as Pep in the hope they can create a own conveyor belt of world class coaches. Imagine that 13 Peps?!
That’s great, but surely there’s negatives?
Well, yes and no. It depends on your perspective.
Competition issues
UEFA regulations state that if multiple clubs are too closely interlinked then some can be banned from playing in Europe. However, not only did at least 8 multi-club teams play in Europe in 2023/24, UEFA announced in July 2024 that Manchester United, Nice, Manchester City and Girona will all be cleared to play in the Champions League despite being at least part owned by the same entities. This is in line with the opinion of UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, who thinks rules need to be looked into to make more allowances for the model.
Not being the top of the pile
Not all clubs are created equal and for a multi-club system to work, there needs to be a hierarchy. This means some clubs suffer from a controlled slide into mediocrity as their resources are diverted to the club at the top. The Pozzo family often face allegations of this, in 2015 Udinese president Franco Soldati told supporters that “Watford will be our engine room. The very best young players will go to England, where they will gain the experience that will eventually bear fruit in Friuli.”
Now, everyone wants their team to win, but knowing your team exists as a glorified player development facility for another team is one of the single most depressing football related things I’ve ever heard.
Disneyfication
Modern life is controlled by conglomerates who standardise everything for consistency of experience, the result? It’s mundane. Sport represents the last great escape, where variability and unexpected outcomes are what make it fun. Unfortunately, as the Multi-club Model becomes more prevalent, so does standardisation.
It’s something we’re already starting to see as the flair players are bred out of the game in favour of rigid positional drills and tactics, a trend that even top managers like Marcelo Bielsa are starting to acknowledge, “More and more people are watching this sport, but it is becoming less and less attractive.” If this carries on, how long before people start turning it off in favour of something else?
So how does this model help the little guy?
Whether it’s beneficial or not depends on how well run your club is. Well-run clubs like Luton Town are never going to need to become part of a stable, they’re too financially secure.
That being said, not every club has that luxury. As part of a 2022 survey, only 18% of Football League clubs believe their financial position is ‘healthy’ while 55% of clubs believe their finances ‘need attention’. If being a feeder club is the difference between extinction and success, can that ever be a bad thing?
The future of the model
So what does the future hold? What the Multi-club model represents is a successful attempt to remove unknown variables from sports. This, combined with its impact on global revenue and talent development means it’s not going to go anywhere, the idea is too valuable. But, does it spell the end of what made football the beautiful game? If you think so, you’re not alone.
As more clubs become part of stables, the backlash against the idea increases as fans try to keep the game safe. When asked about Chelsea’s rumoured purchase of Sporting, Belenenses president William Carvalho responded, “I think it is a plan and an intention that offends Portugal.”
By: Kieran Alder / @The_Own_Goal
Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Alex Caparros / Getty Images