FootBiz newsletter #197: Lazio takeover rumours face a market-manipulation probe

Did someone try to force Claudio Lotito to sell Lazio?

There have been rumours about Claudio Lotito selling Lazio for years. Italian prosecutors now want to know whether some of them were deliberately invented.

An investigation in Rome is examining allegations that false information about Lazio, Lotito and a possible takeover of the club was circulated as part of a coordinated attempt to influence the share price and ultimately pressure the owner into selling.

Carabinieri have searched properties connected to Mauro Masi, president of Banca del Fucino, the bank's chief executive Francesco Maiolini and Luigi Bisignani, a former journalist and long-time figure in Italian political and business circles.

All three are under investigation and the allegations are extraordinary.

According to documents from the investigation reported in the Italian media, prosecutors believe false stories may have been circulated through social media, online publications and the press as part of what they are examining as a broader coordinated campaign against Lotito.

Among them was a report that JPMorgan was prepared to offer €450 million to acquire Lazio. Prosecutors consider that information false.

There were also reports concerning financial difficulties at companies connected to Lotito and even an extraordinary suggestion that he wanted Lazio relegated so the club could collect a €35 million parachute payment.

Again, investigators allege that information was false.

You may be wondering why any of this matters financially. It does because Lazio isn't simply a football club. It is a publicly traded company.

Its shares are listed in Milan, meaning information about a potential change of control, the financial health of its controlling shareholder or the future economic prospects of the club can potentially move the value of a security people can actually buy and sell.

The investigation is therefore examining possible market manipulation.

Prosecutors say the alleged conduct stretches back to June 2024 and is continuing. Their theory is that the circulation of false information was capable of producing a significant movement in Lazio's share price while simultaneously increasing pressure on Lotito to relinquish control.

Investigators are also examining the timing of communications between some of those involved and the publication of stories concerning Lazio.

One article published in Il Tempo on May 31 claimed JPMorgan was ready to put €450 million on the table for the club.

The same article reportedly suggested that Lotito could turn to Masi and Maiolini as financial figures capable of helping usher in a new era at Lazio.

Investigators have subsequently examined phone contacts involving the men around the dates on which some of the articles appeared.

There is another layer to all of this. FootBiz recently covered how Lotito has faced a sustained and increasingly hostile campaign from sections of Lazio's support demanding that he sell the club.

That protest is real and prosecutors explicitly distinguish legitimate supporter protests from the conduct they are investigating.

But investigators are examining whether individuals outside the ordinary supporter movement sought to exploit that dissatisfaction, including allegations that some anti-Lotito activity on social media was financed.

Masi has categorically rejected the accusations, describing them as completely false and saying his only involvement is as a Lazio supporter. He has said he intends to file his own complaint for defamation.

Nothing alleged by prosecutors has yet been established in court but the case demonstrates one of the stranger consequences of Lazio's ownership structure.

Football takeover rumours normally move supporters but at Lazio, they can move a stock price.

Prosecutors now want to establish whether somebody understood that well enough to try to use one to influence the other.

Barcelona need another €510m

Barcelona's bet on the new Camp Nou is getting bigger.

The club's members have approved another €510 million of financing as Barcelona attempts to complete its stadium redevelopment and deal with the financial consequences of delays to the project.

The new money comes in two parts.

Barcelona has authorised €300 million of additional financing to complete construction of the Spotify Camp Nou, adding to the enormous financing package already assembled around Espai Barça.

Another €210 million will come through two €105 million Media Notes, backed by Barcelona's future audiovisual revenues, to provide liquidity against the economic impact of delays to the stadium project.

The numbers are extraordinary.

Barcelona originally arranged €1.485 billion of financing for Espai Barça. The new financing could take Barcelona's overall debt to around €2.68 billion, with approximately €1.8 billion connected to the stadium redevelopment.

But that only tells half the story.

Barcelona is effectively using the stadium to rebuild the economic engine of the club. The completed Camp Nou is supposed to hold around 105,000 supporters while dramatically expanding hospitality, VIP seating, retail, museum and other commercial revenues.

Barcelona's financial future is therefore increasingly tied to the stadium working, and working extremely well.

The club has spent years trying to compete with Europe's richest clubs while operating from a stadium whose commercial potential had fallen behind many of its competitors. The redevelopment is designed to change that.

Delays matter enormously when the asset being delayed is supposed to generate the money that helps pay for it, hence the latest financing.

Barcelona is now borrowing more money to finish the asset that is supposed to allow Barcelona to generate more money. It is an enormous bet.

And increasingly, there isn't much alternative to seeing it through.

The Lewis family keep putting money into Tottenham. Daniel Levy keeps being diluted.

The Lewis family has injected another £120 million into Tottenham Hotspur, taking the amount it has put into Spurs over the past 12 months to £320 million, and more than £450 million since May 2022.

Some of that money is fairly easy to explain. Tottenham committed around £380 million to new players this summer, while simultaneously loosening a wage structure which had historically been one of the more disciplined in the Premier League.

But the money is also gradually changing who owns Tottenham. Daniel Levy, who stepped down as executive chairman last year after almost a quarter of a century running the club, remains economically invested through ENIC.

When the Lewis family injected £100 million in June, Levy had the opportunity to contribute proportionately and maintain his position. He didn't.

As a result, his effective interest was diluted, while the Lewis family's position strengthened. And now another £120 million is going in.

If Levy doesn't participate again, his economic interest could be diluted further.

For most of the 21st century, it was almost impossible to separate Tottenham from Levy. He became the longest-serving chairman in the Premier League, oversaw the construction of one of the world's most expensive football stadiums and transformed Spurs from a club with revenues of £48 million in his first full season into one of the richest teams in world football.

The criticism was always that Tottenham sometimes appeared to be a brilliantly run business that happened to contain a football team. The Lewis family appears determined to change that equation.

Since Levy's departure, its involvement in major decisions has increased substantially. Vivienne Lewis and Nick Beucher have assumed greater influence, while former Arsenal executive Vinai Venkatesham runs the club as chief executive.

Most significantly, the owners are putting their own capital into the football operation. This is significant because Tottenham's stadium was supposed to transform the club's ability to compete without requiring repeated injections from its shareholders.

It has certainly transformed the revenue base but competing at the very top of the Premier League has become extraordinarily expensive.

So expensive, in fact, that one of the league's richest clubs, operating one of the most commercially productive stadiums in world football, is receiving hundreds of millions of pounds from its owners to accelerate the football project.

There are therefore two stories taking place simultaneously at Tottenham.

The first is an attempt to build a team capable of competing at the top of the Premier League.

The second is a quieter transfer of economic power.

As the Lewis family keeps putting money in, Daniel Levy's relative position keeps getting smaller.

For the first time in a generation, Tottenham increasingly looks like the Lewis family's club rather than Daniel Levy's.

Peter Lim converts Valencia debt into equity

Valencia may have signed players during the summer window but La Liga's financial rules meant it couldn't register all of them.

So Peter Lim intervened and converted money the club already owed him into equity.

Valencia owed Lim's Meriton vehicle money from loans previously made to the club. By capitalising some of that debt, Lim effectively exchanged his position as a creditor for additional equity.

No new cash arrived in Valencia's bank account. Instead, debt disappeared from the balance sheet and was replaced by share capital.

That strengthened Valencia's balance sheet and, crucially, created additional room under La Liga's squad-cost controls. The result was that Valencia could register its late summer arrivals.

It is an excellent example of just how intertwined football operations and finance have become. A decade ago, supporters wondering whether their club could register a new signing might reasonably have looked at whether it could afford the transfer fee and wages.

Today, the answer can depend upon the accounting treatment of a shareholder loan.

Valencia's situation had become particularly tight because the club generated very little from player sales during the summer.

Its squad-cost limit ultimately came in at €98.8 million, only slightly above the previous figure, and the club is already understood to be using almost all of it.

Lim’s capitalisation provided breathing room but not much.

Debt-to-equity conversions are perfectly normal corporate-finance transactions. For football clubs operating under financial controls, however, they can have sporting consequences almost immediately.

Lim did not need to write another cheque to change what the club was capable of doing in the transfer market.

He needed to change what the money he had already provided was called.

Chelsea’s £5 billion reset

Though Chelsea's ownership structure for much of the past four years has felt like one of the more complicated experiments in European football, it has just become considerably simpler.

Todd Boehly and Mark Walter have agreed to sell their interests in Chelsea to Clearlake Capital, giving the private equity firm full control of the Premier League club and bringing Boehly's time as chairman to an end. Hansjörg Wyss remains a stakeholder.

The deal reportedly values Chelsea at around £5 billion including debt, with Boehly and Walter receiving approximately £950 million for their combined interests.

When the consortium acquired Chelsea from Roman Abramovich in 2022, Boehly became the public face of the ownership group despite Clearlake providing the majority of the capital and holding 61.5 per cent of the club.

Behind Clearlake sit co-founders Behdad Eghbali and José E. Feliciano.

Four years later, the ambiguity has gone and Clearlake is in control.

Chelsea says there will be no change to the club's day-to-day operations, leadership or strategy. That is important because it now feels more like a consolidation than a rebuild.

Chelsea was bought in 2022 as part of a £4.25 billion transaction which included commitments to further investment. Since then, enormous amounts of capital have gone into the playing squad, Cobham and the wider football operation while the club has attempted to construct something very different from the Abramovich-era model.

A £5 billion valuation would put Chelsea comfortably above the price attached to the club four years ago, despite the extraordinary expenditure required in between.

That is why private capital keeps coming back to football. The operating economics can be difficult. The sporting outcomes are unpredictable. The regulatory environment is becoming more complicated but scarcity has a value of its own.

There are only 20 Premier League clubs and there is only one Chelsea.

Who wants to buy €100m of Benfica?

One of the largest privately held stakes in Benfica is for sale.

While finding somebody who wants it doesn't appear to be the problem, agreeing what Benfica is worth might be.

José António dos Santos, the Portuguese businessman universally known as the “Rei dos Frangos” – the Chicken King – owns 16.38 per cent of Benfica SAD, making him the company's second-largest shareholder.

He wants out and claims he already has “two or three” investors interested in buying his position of at least €15 per share.

There is a slight discrepancy. Benfica shares were recently trading at around €6.50.

In other words, dos Santos wants more than twice the price the public market is currently attaching to them.

Normally, that might suggest a seller with unrealistic expectations, except Benfica itself thinks the stock market is undervaluing the club.

Nuno Catarino, Benfica's vice-president and chief financial officer, recently argued that conventional valuation methodologies would put the business at more than €1 billion.

Benfica is even theoretically interested in acquiring dos Santos's position itself but the problem is how.

Buying such a large stake at the sort of valuation being discussed could force Benfica into a wider mandatory takeover offer and, according to Catarino, potentially require the club to find around €100 million.

So what is 16.38 per cent of Benfica actually worth?

We already know at least one answer. Earlier this year, dos Santos agreed to sell his shares for €12 each to Entrepreneur Equity Partners, the investment group led by former Oak View Group chief executive Tim Leiweke.

The deal didn't happen. Not because the buyer disappeared, but because Benfica stopped it.

The club's statutes give it the power to veto acquisitions above 2 per cent in circumstances where it believes the transaction could threaten the club's independence or create conflicts of interest.

Benfica concluded that Leiweke's other football interests created precisely that problem.

His investment group has links to Venezia in Italy, where Leiweke became co-chairman of the operating committee and his daughter Francesca Bodie was appointed president.

Benfica intervened under its statutes, requiring EEP to demonstrate compliance with its ownership rules. EEP ultimately abandoned the transaction.

If this feels familiar, it is. In 2021 the club also prevented John Textor from acquiring a substantial position in Benfica SAD. Eagle Football Holdings Bidco, the company at the heart of Textor's multi-club structure, has since entered administration.

That makes the dos Santos stake an unusually complicated football asset.

It is large enough to be strategically important and provides exposure to one of Europe's great football institutions. Multiple investors want it, at least according to the seller.

But owning the shares doesn't mean controlling Benfica. Far from it.

The football club retains majority influence over the SAD and, crucially, possesses mechanisms capable of stopping an outside investor it doesn't want.

An investor might look at Benfica and see an enormous global brand, one of Europe's most productive player-trading operations, a 68,100-seat stadium and a business which its own management believes is worth more than €1 billion.

The stock market currently says something very different and dos Santos says something different again.

At €15 per share, he believes his stake is worth roughly €100 million.

Even if somebody may eventually agree with him, at Benfica deciding you want to buy 16 per cent of the club is only the first problem because Benfica also has to decide whether it wants you to.

Amanda Staveley isn’t buying West Ham after all

Amanda Staveley's attempt to buy into West Ham is over.

The way it ended tells us considerably more about the club's future ownership.

The Gold family had agreed to sell its 24.9 per cent interest in WH Holding Limited, West Ham's parent company, to a consortium comprising Staveley and Mehrdad Ghodoussi's PCP Capital Partners and Ashland Forest Capital Partners.

But there was a catch. West Ham's existing shareholders held pre-emption rights giving them the opportunity to acquire those shares themselves.

These pre-emptions were used and the Gold family's lawyers have now confirmed that the existing shareholders exercised their rights in full and subsequently completed the acquisition.

The biggest beneficiary is Daniel Křetínský. The Czech billionaire first bought into West Ham in 2021 and had subsequently held roughly 27 per cent of the club.

His stake is now reported to have risen to around 46 per cent, moving him ahead of David Sullivan and making him West Ham's largest shareholder.

For years, the question around Křetínský's investment was whether his minority position was ultimately a staging point towards control or simply a passive investment in a Premier League asset.

We may now be getting an answer. Staveley's attempted entry effectively presented West Ham's existing owners with a choice of whether to allow a significant new shareholder onto the cap table or buy the shares themselves.

Not only have they chosen the latter, Křetínský has emerged with considerably more influence as a result.

Although the Gold family sale was supposed to bring a new investor into West Ham, it may have accelerated the consolidation of the club around an existing one.

Football’s owners want to stop the arms race

European football has spent years trying to control how much clubs lose. Now some owners want to discuss controlling how much they can spend.

Leading European club owners are pushing for the possibility of salary caps and restrictions on agents' fees to be explored amid concern about the escalating cost of assembling football teams.

The issue was reportedly raised at a recent European Football Clubs board meeting in Monaco, with some clubs interested in establishing what restrictions might actually be legally possible.

Even if nobody is introducing a European salary cap tomorrow, the fact that club owners are seriously discussing one tells us something about where the economics of football are heading.

Premier League clubs paid more than £460 million to agents during the 2025/26 reporting period, according to the FA, which was up 13 per cent in a year. Chelsea alone paid £65.1 million.

Across international transfers in the men's professional game, FIFA recorded $1.37 billion in club agent service fees during 2025, more than 90 per cent higher than the previous year.

Wages remain the largest expense at most major clubs. Football has responded by trying to link squad expenditure to revenue.

UEFA's squad-cost rule limits expenditure on player and coach wages, transfers and agents to 70 per cent of revenue for clubs in its competitions.

But that doesn't necessarily stop the arms race. If revenues rise, permitted expenditure rises with them and if one club finds another £50 million of commercial revenue, it can spend more. Its competitors then have another incentive to find another £50 million themselves.

That is fantastic if you are selling something to football clubs but rather less attractive if you own one, which explains why the debate is beginning to change.

The fundamental tension in football is that clubs compete collectively as businesses and individually as football teams.

Collectively, owners have an interest in controlling costs but individually, every owner has an incentive to spend another pound if it might mean Champions League qualification, promotion or avoiding relegation.

American sports largely address that problem through collectively agreed mechanisms including salary caps, luxury taxes, drafts and revenue sharing.

Trying to introduce a hard salary cap in Europe would also encounter serious legal and labour questions and attempts to restrict agents' fees are already the subject of legal battles.

Owners even asking the question is significant in itself. For decades, European football's economic story has been about generating more revenue.

Now the owners are asking who is actually keeping it.

See you on Friday

FootBiz