FootBiz newsletter #194: Chelsea’s Civil War May Finally Have a Winner

The uneasy marriage at Chelsea may be approaching its conclusion.

Todd Boehly at SXSW London, June 2026.

Photo: DavidPMaynard · CC BY-SA 4.0

Clearlake Capital is closing in on an agreement to buy out Todd Boehly and Mark Walter, in a transaction that would reportedly value Chelsea at around £5 billion.

Clearlake already owns 61.5% of the club. Boehly, Walter and Hansjörg Wyss each hold 12.8%, having invested alongside the private-equity firm when Chelsea was bought from Roman Abramovich for £2.5 billion in 2022.

But almost from the beginning, this has been an unusual ownership structure. Boehly became the public face of the takeover. Clearlake, principally Behdad Eghbali, increasingly became the driving force behind the football operation. Eventually, disagreements over strategy and, notably, Chelsea’s stadium plans became public.

Now there appears to be an exit route. Under Chelsea’s shareholder agreement, the existing owners have protections restricting stakes from simply being sold to outsiders. Clearlake therefore has an obvious route to consolidate its position.

And the valuation is worth dwelling on. Whatever anyone thinks about the enormous sums spent on players since 2022, £5 billion would represent a doubling of Chelsea’s headline acquisition price in four years.

It is another illustration of the strange economics of elite football ownership – clubs can lose substantial amounts of money, require enormous continuing investment and still appreciate dramatically as scarce global sports assets.

If Clearlake emerges with even greater control, Chelsea will finally lose one of the ambiguities hanging over the club since the takeover – that of who is actually in charge. That may matter most when Chelsea turns to the biggest unresolved project of all… Stamford Bridge.

Lionel Messi is building a football empire

Lionel Messi isn't even retired yet but is already becoming a football-club owner.

Lionel Messi playing for Inter Miami against New York City FC, September 2025.

Photo: Bryan Berlin · CC BY-SA 4.0

The 39-year-old has reached an agreement in principle to acquire CD Eldense, currently playing in Spain's Segunda División. The transaction remains subject to due diligence and regulatory approval, but would see Messi purchase the shares held by Colombian investment group TH Soluciones Group.

On its own, that's interesting, even more so because Eldense isn't Messi's first club. In April, he acquired UE Cornellà, the Catalan club renowned for its academy, which currently plays in Spain's fifth tier. Messi is also involved alongside Luis Suárez in Deportivo LSM in Uruguay and is due to receive an ownership stake in Inter Miami after his playing contract ends.

Suddenly, something resembling a portfolio is emerging and perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the type of clubs Messi is buying.

This isn't David Beckham buying Manchester United. Cornellà and Eldense are relatively small football businesses whose global profiles bear little resemblance to that of their prospective owner.

Messi therefore brings distribution, something unusually valuable to the equation. Put his name behind a club and its potential audience changes overnight. So does its attractiveness to sponsors, its ability to recruit players, its academy proposition, its appeal to international partners and so forth.

The mayor of Elda has already spoken about the international attention Messi could bring to the city and suggested future projects involving youth development.

There is also an interesting football logic. Cornellà has an established reputation for developing young players while Eldense offers access to the professional game in Spain. Deportivo LSM provides a presence in Uruguay and Inter Miami provides a foothold in one of football's fastest-growing commercial markets.

It is too early to describe this as a conventional multi-club group but Messi is beginning to assemble some of the pieces of one.

MCO enthusiasts amongst you will ask how Messi is able to own two clubs within the same country.

Messi acquired 85.05% of Cornellà in April 2026, with the transaction approved by Spain's Consejo Superior de Deportes (CSD). Cornellà play in Tercera Federación, the fifth tier, which is outside Spain's professional leagues.

His agreement to acquire the shares held by TH Soluciones in Eldense would make him the majority owner of a Segunda División professional club as well.

The crucial provision is Spain's sports law. Broadly, a person holding 5% or more of the voting rights in one Sociedad Anónima Deportiva cannot simultaneously hold 5%+ in another SAD participating in the same professional competition, or another professional competition in the same sport under the relevant prohibition. But Cornellà's current competition is non-professional, so Messi's Cornellà ownership doesn't presently prevent him from acquiring Eldense.

Maybe Lionel Messi's greatest advantage as a football owner isn't his money, but being Lionel Messi.

Private equity has found Lens

One of French football's most interesting ownership structures has quietly become more interesting.

RC Lens supporters at Stade Bollaert-Delelis, December 2019.

Photo: Supporterhéninois · CC0

Entrepreneur Equity Partners has acquired 13.93% of RC Lens, joining majority owner Joseph Oughourlian and the club's other minority investors. Jean-Paul Lempereur has separately acquired 2.79%. Oughourlian retains 69.10%.

EEP is particularly notable. The investment firm has already been involved with Venezia and Bolton Wanderers, meaning Lens adds another piece to a growing cross-border football portfolio. Tim Leiweke will represent EEP on the Lens board.

But this doesn't look primarily like a transfer-market cash injection. The capital is intended for infrastructure projects around Stade Bollaert-Delelis, designed to increase commercial activity and make the stadium more productive outside matchdays.

The collapse in French domestic broadcasting economics has made the old Ligue 1 model, essentially television income plus player trading, considerably less comfortable.

Clubs need revenue they can control themselves and Lens is effectively trying to manufacture more of it.

One of Brazil's biggest clubs is effectively going to auction

On September 25, investors will have the opportunity to bid for control of Vasco da Gama's football operation.

A Rio de Janeiro court has scheduled a public hearing for proposals to acquire 90% of the shares in Vasco's new SAF, the corporate structure that will operate the club's football business.

São Januário and its surrounding neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro, December 2016.

Photo: Diego Baravelli · CC BY-SA 4.0

The circumstances are extraordinary. Vasco's previous ownership experiment with 777 Partners ended in acrimony. The club subsequently entered judicial restructuring and has been trying to stabilise its finances. Now it needs money again.

The court has authorised Vasco's SAF to borrow up to R$150 million from Almirante Participações, controlled by businessman Marcos Lamacchia, after financial projections indicated a potential cash deficit of around R$200 million by the end of 2026 without additional funding.

Lamacchia isn't merely providing emergency capital, his company will enter the sale process as the stalking-horse bidder.

That means other investors can bid for the club, but Almirante has the right to match the best competing offer and the barriers to entry aren't trivial.

Prospective buyers will need to lodge R$27 million with the court and provide a bank guarantee covering the restructured debts. The eventual owner will also have obligations to financially support the original Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama association.

Lamacchia's proposal reportedly includes R$500 million of investment into football, alongside commitments relating to the club's debts.

For anyone interested in football ownership, September 25 should be fascinating.

Because football clubs rarely get anything resembling a transparent market-clearing moment, owners usually negotiate privately. Valuations leak and enterprise values are estimated. Debt assumptions complicate the headline numbers.

Vasco is different. One of the great institutions of Brazilian football is effectively inviting qualified investors to tell a court what they think control of its football business is worth.

Brazil's SAF revolution was supposed to bring sophisticated outside capital into historically indebted football clubs and Vasco became one of its highest-profile examples.

Four years later, the club is looking for another owner.

The second generation of Brazilian football investment may be about to begin.

What if Volkswagen doesn't want to own football clubs anymore?

There are multi-club groups and then there is Volkswagen.

Through Volkswagen itself and subsidiaries Audi and Porsche, the German automotive giant has accumulated an extraordinary collection of football interests.

Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg plant, photographed from the air in August 2024.

Photo: Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0

Audi owns 8.33% of Bayern Munich, Porsche owns 10.4% of VfB Stuttgart, Audi owns 19.9% of FC Ingolstadt and Volkswagen owns VfL Wolfsburg outright (one of the few exceptions to Germany’s 50+1 rule).

Now that relationship between German industry and German football could be tested.

Volkswagen is reportedly reviewing its professional-football investments as part of a wider strategic restructuring, with equity holdings in football clubs potentially considered outside the group's future core model.

Though nothing resembling a fire sale has been announced, even the possibility is significant.

Take Bayern. Audi isn't simply another logo on an advertising board. It has been a shareholder in the club for decades, and its sponsorship agreement currently runs until 2029.

The same applies in different ways elsewhere.

Wolfsburg's identity is inseparable from Volkswagen. Ingolstadt has long been associated with Audi. Porsche only recently took its position at Stuttgart.

Collectively, it represents one of the more unusual corporate football portfolios anywhere in the world and it was largely built for reasons other than financial investment returns.

Given that these holdings provide brand visibility, local identity, employee engagement, corporate prestige and the advancement of German industrial relationships, what are these stakes worth and who buys them if Volkswagen decides it no longer needs them?

Bayern would hardly struggle to find interested investors but Wolfsburg poses a rather more complicated question.

There is an entire football club sitting inside the Volkswagen empire and unwinding that relationship would be rather more difficult than cancelling a sponsorship contract.

Your next club owner might have made their money from AI

There was one particularly interesting observation in the Financial Times this week.

Ian Charles, co-founder of sports investment specialist Arctos Partners, was discussing where the next generation of sports-team owners might come from.

His answer was essentially to look at where the new money is being created.

Charles pointed to the extraordinary wealth being generated around companies including SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, alongside the major listed technology companies and the wave of AI-related liquidity events still potentially to come.

His estimate? At least $5 trillion of new wealth could ultimately be created from that universe.

And when the FT asked whether those people represented Arctos's future investment partners, Charles went further:

“These are the future control buyers.”

For much of football history, owners were local industrialists.

Then came media tycoons.

Then oligarchs.

Then sovereign wealth.

Then American private equity and institutional capital.

The next wave may be people whose fortunes were created by AI.

And there is an obvious reason football will appeal to them. While technology can create almost unlimited numbers of software companies, it cannot create another Liverpool, Real Madrid or AC Milan.

As capital becomes more abundant at the very top of the wealth pyramid, genuinely scarce cultural assets become more valuable and sports teams sit squarely in that category.

Arctos itself is evidence of how quickly institutional sport investing has developed. The firm has investments across more than 25 sports properties, spanning the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, Formula One, NASCAR and European football.

Perhaps whether football valuations have become ridiculous is less relevant than whether we're still underestimating how ridiculous they can become.

The number of elite football clubs isn't increasing but the number of people capable of paying billions for one apparently is.

Someone wants to finance a multi-club group with bonds

Just when you thought football's multi-club ownership boom couldn't become any more financialised, someone has apparently asked: What about bonds?

London-based The Football Factory is attempting to build a multi-club network combining football, real estate and technology.

The company has just completed an initial £100,000 fundraising target at an £8 million pre-money valuation and says it has already secured its first club near Porto in Portugal.

Founder Edoardo Giacone says the company plans to pursue a Series A before potentially issuing a bond in London and/or Dubai.

The Football Factory doesn't describe its model as simply buying football clubs. Its pitch is to create what it calls football-anchored ecosystems – a club and stadium surrounded by commercial, technological and educational real estate, with AI integrated into the operation.

The plan is eventually to assemble four projects and bundle them together for an exit.

If that sounds less like traditional football ownership and more like infrastructure investing, that's rather the point.

The underlying thesis is essentially that football clubs themselves are volatile assets but real estate doesn't disappear because your striker missed a penalty.

So instead of buying a football club and trying to improve its commercial operation, The Football Factory wants to use football as the anchor tenant around which a broader asset is constructed.

There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical but the financing model is arguably as interesting as the operating model.

The next logical development may be packaging football exposure into financial products that a much broader universe of investors can buy.

At which point we will have travelled quite a long way from wealthy local businessmen sitting in directors' boxes.

That’s it for this week.

FootBiz is back next week with more on the money, people and decisions reshaping the business of football.

Have a good weekend.