FootBiz newsletter #189: Saudi Football’s Ownership Endgame

Good morning. Saudi Arabia's football privatisation project has entered another phase, Venezia have handed a surprisingly broad commercial mandate to an American agency, Serie A has found an interesting compromise in Britain, and Chelsea Women are about to conduct a rather useful experiment at Stamford Bridge. Plus: why the most interesting thing Venezia are selling this season might involve a boat. Let's get into it.

THE BIG STORY

Saudi Arabia isn't finished restructuring its clubs

Three years after Saudi Arabia began transferring control of its biggest football clubs, the ownership experiment is still evolving. The latest changes concern two of the country's giants: Al-Hilal and Al-Ahli. Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Sport has moved to transfer the remaining 25% stakes held through the clubs' non-profit foundations to the Public Investment Fund, with the existing boards of those foundations consequently dissolved. Given that PIF already owns 75% of the club companies following the original 2023 restructuring, what began as majority ownership is moving towards something considerably simpler. Saudi football's transformation isn't simply a story about buying players but a movement restructuring ownership of an entire football economy. The first phase was easy to understand. In 2023, Saudi Arabia announced one of the most extraordinary changes to club ownership anywhere in world football. PIF took 75% stakes in Al-Hilal, Al-Nassr, Al-Ittihad and Al-Ahli. The remaining 25% was held by each club's non-profit organisation. At roughly the same time, other Saudi clubs were allocated to different entities. Aramco took Al-Qadsiah, NEOM took Al-Suqoor, subsequently renamed NEOM SC, The Royal Commission for AlUla took Al-Ula, Diriyah Gate Development Authority took Al-Diriyah, and so on. More recently, the government has pushed into another phase – attracting private investors. The long-term Saudi project isn't supposed to require that the government owns football forever. Government involvement was supposed to restructure football, allowing clubs to become commercially stronger and ultimately attract private capital. Whether that final stage happens at scale is the really interesting part.

The FootBiz view

Saudi football should increasingly be watched through its ownership structures, not its transfer rumours. The first few years of the project naturally attracted attention because of the players – Ronaldo, Benzema, Neymar. Monster salaries and huge transfer fees. But player acquisition was always the most visible part of a much larger project – that of Saudi Arabia trying to create valuable football institutions. That requires considerably less glamorous things – governance, stadia, academies, commercial departments, media rights, sponsorship, corporate structures and eventually functioning markets for club equity. Moving Al-Hilal and Al-Ahli towards complete PIF ownership therefore looks like administrative housekeeping. Saudi Arabia is still working out what the ownership architecture of its football industry should actually look like. And with the 2034 World Cup approaching, that process is nowhere near finished.

Al-Hilal: one of the four clubs moving from a 75% PIF stake towards full ownership.

Photo: saudipics · CC BY-SA 4.0 · unmodified

ITALY

Venezia are outsourcing growth

Venezia have returned to Serie A and now comes the difficult bit. How does an iconic global city turn attention into money? The club announced yesterday that US sports and entertainment business Elevate has been appointed its Agency Operating Partner, a rather more expansive description than "commercial adviser". Elevate will work with Venezia across business strategy, hospitality, corporate partnerships and creative, effectively embedding itself into a substantial part of the club's commercial operation. This is an interesting model. Smaller and mid-sized football clubs face a basic problem – they want elite tier commercial departments but can rarely afford elite commercial departments. So instead of building every capability internally, why not rent the infrastructure? Agencies already have sponsorship sales teams, pricing data, hospitality expertise, international contacts, CRM capability, design departments and, crucially, relationships with brands. For a club such as Venezia, plugging into that network may be substantially quicker than trying to build it all from scratch.

And Venezia have something unusual to sell Most football clubs sell essentially the same premium inventory – a box, restaurant, tunnel experience, padded seat. Yawn. Venezia can offer something slightly different. Elevate's first activation includes a hospitality experience involving boats on the Grand Canal. This may sound gimmicky but Venezia's great advantage isn't scale, it is place. There are hundreds of professional football clubs but there is only one professional football club playing in Venice. The club’s commercial strategy shouldn't necessarily have to behave like everybody else but should rather monetise the thing nobody else can replicate – the city of Venice – rather than another LED-board package.

The Grand Canal in Venice—the setting Elevate is turning into a matchday hospitality proposition for Venezia.

Photo: Marc Ryckaert · CC BY-SA 4.0 · unmodified

MEDIA RIGHTS

Serie A chooses reach over exclusivity

Serie A has renewed its UK and Ireland broadcast agreement with DAZN for 2026/27. DAZN will continue to show all 380 Serie A matches. But there is an interesting alteration. Seven matches per round will now be exclusive to DAZN, compared with eight previously. This reflects one of the central arguments in modern sports broadcasting. How much exclusivity is too much exclusivity? A league naturally wants broadcasters to pay for scarce content. But if too much of the product disappears behind one subscription, the league risks reducing its visibility. That is particularly important for Serie A internationally. The Premier League doesn't really have an awareness problem in Britain. Italian football does. Serie A therefore needs two things which aren't always perfectly compatible – rights revenue and audience growth. Giving DAZN the complete product while freeing additional matches for broader distribution is an attempt to have a little of both.

This has international resonance. Football's international rights strategy used to be relatively straightforward, essentially finding the broadcaster willing to pay the most, award them the rights and upsell next cycle. Streaming has complicated that enormously. Leagues now have to think about money, reach, discoverability, subscriber friction, highlights, social distribution and younger audiences. The highest bidder isn't necessarily the partner which creates the most valuable league five years from now and Serie A knows this particularly well. The league has enormous historic brands — Juventus, Milan, Inter, Roma, Napoli — but competes internationally against a Premier League product with vastly greater commercial distribution. Sometimes scarcity increases value. Sometimes scarcity just makes people watch something else.

OWNERSHIP

Sheffield United's old deal isn't quite finished

The ownership transaction which took Sheffield United away from Prince Abdullah bin Mosaad has returned in rather spectacular fashion. A High Court judge last week granted a winding-up petition against COH Sports Bidco Limited, the company which bought the club in 2024. The dispute concerns an alleged £35m debt owed to Prince Abdullah's United World Holding Limited. Sheffield United have stressed that the ruling does not directly affect the football club or its day-to-day operations but the EFL is reviewing the situation. Football ownership transactions rarely end when the press release announcing them is published. Deferred consideration, shareholder loans, guarantees, earn-outs and holding-company structures can leave relationships between buyers and sellers running for years. Sometimes harmoniously. Sometimes through the High Court.

BOARDROOM

Bayern have a Max Eberl decision to make

Bayern Munich's supervisory board meets today with Max Eberl's future among the items under consideration. The club's board member for sport has a contract running until 2027, but German reports suggest an extension through 2029 is increasingly likely. Bayern have spent much of the post-Salihamidžić/Kahn era trying to re-establish clarity around sporting decision-making. Eberl has increasingly become the central figure in that structure, working alongside sporting director Christoph Freund. At Europe's biggest clubs, the sporting executive is becoming almost as strategically important — and occasionally as exposed — as the head coach. Squad-cost regulation only accelerates that whilst recruitment decisions are no longer simply decisions about footballers but are now about wages, amortisation, resale value, contract duration and regulatory headroom. The sporting director increasingly needs to understand the spreadsheet as well as the scout report.

Wrexham hire a banker

Wrexham have added Elis Wyn Jones to their board of directors. Whilst that announcement won't generate as many TikTok views as Ryan Reynolds walking through the Racecourse Ground, it tells us considerably more about where Wrexham are going. Jones previously worked at Goldman Sachs, where his background included global sports advisory and European gaming-sector coverage. He joins a board which already includes representation following Apollo Sports Capital's minority investment in Wrexham last December. Shaun Harvey, meanwhile, will continue as a non-executive director on a new three-year term. This is what institutionalisation looks like. Whereas the Hollywood phase of Wrexham was about attention, the next phase is about building an organisation capable of handling the value created by that attention. When Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham, the essential challenge was making the club bigger, something which has been achieved.  Now the club must focus on how to finance growth, structure outside investment, expand the stadium and manage increasingly sophisticated commercial operations. The governance suitable for a club whose enterprise value and ambitions have changed dramatically needs attention. Hence the Wyn Jones appointment. Wrexham remain a fascinating experiment because we rarely get to watch a football club move through the stages of corporate development this quickly. The executive structure is now catching up with the story.

The Racecourse Ground—where Wrexham’s commercial attention is now being matched by a more institutional board structure.

Photo: Paul Gillett · CC BY-SA 2.0 · unmodified

AROUND THE WORLD

A few other things worth having on your radar.

Italy: Inter and Como have both extended commercial partnerships heading into the new season, another indication of how aggressively Serie A clubs are trying to improve commercial income outside domestic broadcasting. England: DAZN's Serie A renewal means British football viewers continue to face an increasingly fragmented subscription landscape — excellent news if your hobby is maintaining passwords. Saudi Arabia: The Al-Hilal and Al-Ahli changes are part of the second phase of the Kingdom's club ownership programme. The next genuinely important milestone will be further sales to independent private investors. Women's football: Chelsea taking every WSL home fixture to Stamford Bridge should give the industry useful evidence on whether permanent use of larger stadiums materially changes sponsorship, hospitality and matchday economics. Italy again: Venezia's return to Serie A is worth watching commercially. Few clubs have a globally recognisable city brand as powerful as the football brand itself. Turning tourists into customers may be just as important as turning supporters into customers.

Stamford Bridge, where Chelsea Women’s permanent WSL home-fixture experiment will test the economics of larger venues.

Photo: Razzairpina · public domain · unmodified

ONE MORE THING

Football may be one of the businesses AI can't replace

There was an interesting argument in the FT this weekend about sport's potential resilience to artificial intelligence. AI can change ticketing, scouting, content production, analytics, customer service and probably half the jobs currently performed inside a football club. What it can't manufacture is the thing being sold. Nobody wants to watch Grok play Arsenal. Twenty-two elite athletes, a stadium full of supporters and an outcome nobody knows in advance will become increasingly valuable if AI commoditises enormous amounts of entertainment and digital content. The irony, then, is that the more technology transforms everything surrounding sport, the more valuable the fundamentally analogue bit in the middle may become. Football's great competitive advantage might ultimately be remarkably simple, namely that you still have to play the game.

That's all for today.

Tomorrow we'll presumably discover that somebody has purchased a minority stake in a Belgian second-division club because they liked its expected player-trading yield. Until then.

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