FootBiz newsletter #195: The lender that sued 777 is now financing its bankruptcy

Football has produced some strange ownership stories over the past decade but few quite like this one.

777 Partners has selected a $10 million bankruptcy loan from Leadenhall Capital Partners, the same investment manager that previously sued 777 and alleged that assets pledged to it as collateral had also been pledged elsewhere.

Goodison Park in May 2025. Everton was the Premier League club 777 tried, and failed, to acquire.

Photo: Pete from Liverpool, UK · CC BY 2.0

Leadenhall has asserted claims of as much as $1.8 billion against the Miami-based investment firm. 777 has disputed the allegations. Now one is financing the bankruptcy of the other.

The proposed debtor-in-possession financing is unusual in several respects. Leadenhall's loan carries 0% interest, provides $10 million to fund the Chapter 11 process and could provide another $3 million to finance the eventual wind-down.

777 selected it over an alternative $8.6 million proposal from a consortium led by an affiliate of A-CAP, the insurance group that had been one of its most important financial backers. A bankruptcy judge is expected to consider approval of the financing later this month.

For football, this is the extraordinary epilogue to one of the industry's most aggressive investment experiments.

At its peak, 777 had assembled interests across a sprawling collection of clubs and markets.

Genoa in Italy, Standard Liège in Belgium, Red Star in France, Hertha Berlin in Germany and Vasco da Gama in Brazil all formed part of the portfolio.

The company also spent months attempting to acquire Everton from Farhad Moshiri, a transaction which would have given the group its most valuable football asset and entry into the Premier League.

It never happened.

By then, questions surrounding the group's finances were becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

The Everton transaction became one of the longest-running takeover sagas in recent Premier League history as regulators examined 777's finances and ability to fund the club.

Everton ultimately ended up elsewhere and 777 ended up in bankruptcy.

The firm was pushed into an involuntary Chapter 7 process in July by creditors holding a $26 million judgment before subsequently entering Chapter 11 proceedings in Texas.

What makes the story particularly relevant now is that the philosophy underpinning 777's football strategy hasn't disappeared with the company, quite the opposite.

Multi-club ownership has become one of the defining investment trends in global football.

City Football Group has built the most famous version and Red Bull demonstrated the potential sporting benefits. BlueCo, Eagle Football, INEOS and numerous private investment groups have subsequently built or explored their own structures.

777 was pursuing many of the same supposed efficiencies of these groups (shared services around information, scouting, commercial deals, etc.).

Its collapse illustrates the part of the model that receives considerably less attention. If clubs are interconnected, financial problems can become interconnected too. The benefits of a network depend on the financial health, governance and capital structure of the organisation sitting above it.

The remarkable thing about the 777 story, therefore, isn't simply that a football investor collapsed as football investors have collapsed before but that a company once attempting to demonstrate the financial logic of owning clubs across several continents has instead become one of the industry's clearest warnings about the risks of doing exactly that.

And now the investment firm that accused 777 of improperly pledging its assets is helping pay for its funeral.

Wall Street is discovering the football academy

The football investment boom began with clubs and expanded into multi-club networks. Now investors are moving further upstream.

Nasdaq-listed Nomadar Corp has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Fox Soccer Academy, the youth-development organisation founded by former Leicester City defender Christian Fuchs and Raluca Gold-Fuchs.

Fox Soccer Academy co-founder Christian Fuchs playing for Austria in 2016.

Photo: Steindy · CC BY-SA 3.0

Fox Soccer Academy says its network encompasses approximately 2,100 players across the United States and Europe, with operations spanning the US, UK and Austria.

Fuchs and Gold-Fuchs will remain involved following completion of the transaction. On its own, the acquisition is relatively small but the strategy behind it is considerably more interesting.

Nomadar is attempting to build what it describes as an interconnected football platform encompassing youth development, high-performance training, tournaments, international programmes, digital education and sports tourism.

In other words, the company isn't buying a football club but is trying to own pieces of the infrastructure that eventually supplies them.

There is an obvious economic logic as youth development operates differently from a club. The capital requirements can be lower and the customer base can be broader. An academy sits at the very beginning of football's most lucrative supply chain – the production of players.

That doesn't mean every private academy will suddenly produce a £100 million footballer, but it does mean there is potentially valuable infrastructure around the process, which involves talent identification, coaching, performance data, tournaments, residential programmes, college pathways and relationships with professional clubs.

Increasingly, digital products that can be sold to thousands of players rather than eleven professionals at a time could come into play. This is particularly interesting in the United States.

The country combines an enormous youth sports economy with rapidly increasing interest in football and a fragmented development landscape.

The 2026 World Cup has accelerated investment throughout the American game, but the opportunity extends well beyond Major League Soccer.

Parents already spend significant amounts on coaching, travel teams, tournaments, camps and development programmes.

European clubs want earlier access to American talent, especially in certain markets and American players want clearer pathways into professional football. Investors are increasingly considering business capable of sitting between those two groups. The academy, historically treated primarily as a sporting department, is therefore becoming something else. A platform.

When an organisation can identify players, develop them, measure them and connect them to professional pathways at scale, the valuable asset is less a football club and more the pipeline supplying one.

Lazio are top. Their supporters still won't come.

There is a simple and sometimes cynical assumption underlying most professional sport. Win, and people will come. Lazio are currently testing that thesis.

The club has started the Serie A season strongly under Gennaro Gattuso and currently sits at the top of the table, yet a substantial section of the fanbase remains engaged in a boycott against owner Claudio Lotito.

Last season Lazio reportedly sold around 30,000 season tickets. This season the figure has fallen below 4,500. More than 45,000 people have also signed a petition criticising Lotito's ownership.

Those numbers are especially interesting because Lazio supporters haven't simply stopped following Lazio. They simply don't want to financially endorse the ownership by attending home games.

For anyone approaching football purely as an investment asset, this is an important distinction. Supporters are often described as football's greatest commercial advantage because of their extraordinary loyalty.

A supermarket customer can switch supermarket and an iPhone customer can buy a Samsung but a Lazio supporter doesn't wake up one morning and defect to Roma because the customer experience is better.

True, that permanence creates enormous economic value but owners can misunderstand what they're buying. The loyalty belongs to the club, not necessarily to the company or individual controlling it.

Supporters can therefore remain emotionally committed to an institution while becoming economically hostile toward its ownership.

And once that happens, conventional business logic becomes much less useful. Recommitting to the owner cannot usually be achieved through discounting tickets or offering a superior hospitality experience if winning matches isn’t working.

Lotito has controlled Lazio since 2004, making him one of Serie A's longest-serving proprietors. Over that period the club has won trophies and regularly competed in Europe.

But the relationship between ownership and significant parts of the support has deteriorated badly.

Not only do empty seats reduce matchday income, they weaken atmosphere and make the television product look worse. They diminish opportunities for hospitality and secondary spending. Perhaps most importantly, they damage the perception of momentum around the institution.

Prospective investors can be deterred if they are accustomed to valuing brands on certain metrics. A large proportion of a club’s value sits in the emotional relationship between the institution and the people who care about it.

Most fans will recognise that the relationship can survive relegation, terrible players, terrible coaches and, in most cases, decades without winning anything.

Whether it survives ownership indefinitely is another question.

Lazio might currently be winning the league, but Lotito is fighting a different battle altogether.

Edu has turned up in Bulgaria

Edu Gaspar's career has taken another unexpected turn.

Only a week after formally leaving the football organisation controlled by Evangelos Marinakis, the former Arsenal sporting director has joined the board of Levski Sofia.

Edu speaking at a football business event in 2013, during his time at Corinthians.

Photo: Edu Gaspar · CC BY 3.0

The Bulgarian club approved a restructured board that includes Edu alongside executive director Daniel Borimirov and fellow new appointments Claudio Pracownik, Felipe Berliner and Matthew Cherry.

Felipe Berliner, Co-Founder of Gemcorp Capital, featured in our previous newsletter of September 1, is part of the consortium looking to acquire Northampton Town. Could we now see Edu as part of the Northampton deal?

The speed of the move is as notable as the destination.

Edu left Arsenal in 2024 after playing a central role in rebuilding the club's football operation alongside Mikel Arteta. He subsequently joined the Marinakis organisation with a remit extending across a portfolio including Nottingham Forest, Olympiacos and Rio Ave.

The appointment represented perfectly the senior executive whose responsibilities sit above an individual club. As discussed in this newsletter, multi-club ownership requires multi-club management and in turn creates new executive positions that barely existed a decade ago.

Edu appeared to be moving firmly into that world, with an upwardly mobile Premier League club as the group’s anchor tenant. Instead, that chapter lasted little more than a year. Now he has resurfaced in Bulgaria.

There is a temptation to view the move through the traditional hierarchy of European football. Arsenal to Nottingham Forest/Olympiacos to Levski Sofia feels like a career regression.

But football's executive labour market is changing quickly enough that the hierarchy itself may be becoming less relevant. Owners and their capital are international, recruitment methodology and players are international. Why wouldn't executives become international too?

For clubs such as Levski, that potentially creates an arbitrage opportunity. They cannot compete with Arsenal financially for players but they can potentially attract expertise developed inside Arsenal.

The competitive advantage of wealthy clubs has usually not consisted solely of better footballers. Most of those clubs also employ larger scouting departments, better analysts, more sophisticated recruitment processes and executives with experience navigating the transfer market at scale.

If some of that intellectual capital begins moving more freely into smaller leagues, the gap in organisational knowledge can narrow even if the revenue gap doesn't.

Though the Edu appointment may ultimately prove little more than an interesting career move, the underlying trend is worth watching.

Football spent decades globalising the player market and now it is globalising the people who build the teams.

DAZN has a new obsession: profit

For most of its existence, DAZN's strategy could be summarised in one word. Scale.

That strategy helped turn the company into one of the world's largest dedicated sports streaming platforms but has also required enormous amounts of capital.

Now DAZN is talking about something considerably less glamorous. Profit.

DAZN match coverage in Frankfurt in May 2022. The platform is now emphasising profitable growth.

Photo: Sven Mandel · CC BY-SA 4.0

The company has announced a significant leadership reshuffle as it enters what it describes as its next phase of "profitable growth."

Former Foxtel chief executive Patrick Delany becomes Chief Operating Officer, former Sportradar CFO Alex Gersh becomes Chief Financial Officer and Darren Waterman, previously DAZN's CFO, moves into a newly created Chief Business Officer role covering strategic partnerships, distribution and corporate transactions.

Corporate appointments rarely make compelling football stories but the reason these are relevant is what they suggest about DAZN's evolution.

The company says it reached profitability for the first time in 2025, which is an important milestone for a business that spent years testing one of the central assumptions of modern sports media, asking: Can streaming recreate the economics of pay television? The answer has never been obvious.

Traditional broadcasters benefited from enormous bundled subscriber bases and sports channels could collect money indirectly from customers who weren't necessarily watching sport.

Streaming changed the equation, consumers gained flexibility and broadcasters gained data and direct relationships.

But expensive sports rights remained expensive sports rights and suddenly subscribers could cancel.

DAZN's response has gradually become broader than streaming. It acquired Australia's Foxtel and has bought sports technology and distribution businesses including ViewLift and EverPass. It has also expanded into betting, commerce and other adjacent products, has added FIFA+ and has increased its presence in US regional sports broadcasting.

The result increasingly resembles not simply a streaming service but an attempt to build an operating system around sports consumption.

Watch the match, bet on it, buy merchandise, access highlights, consume shoulder programming, buy tickets and, CRUCIALLY, remain inside the same ecosystem.

That strategy explains why the new Chief Business Officer role is particularly interesting. Distribution and partnerships are no longer side issues but are fundamental to making expensive rights work harder.

For years, football clubs largely treated broadcasters as customers purchasing media rights. The emerging sports platforms increasingly want a direct relationship with the same supporters clubs are trying to monetise.

That creates opportunity and competition in equal measure. The battle over the next generation of football broadcasting may therefore be more about who owns the customer rather than who owns the television rights.

The new minority owner doesn't just bring money

Ipswich Town have added another unusual name to their ownership group.

American sports broadcaster Colin Cowherd has become a minority investor in the club. He joins an increasingly eclectic shareholder base that already includes musician Ed Sheeran, former NFL player Marques Colston and former NBA player Udonis Haslem.

Colin Cowherd broadcasting The Herd at the University of Iowa in 2010.

Photo: Asolsma1988; crop by Beyond My Ken · CC0

Cowherd's investment is unlikely to transform Ipswich's balance sheet but that is unlikely to be the point.

Minority investment in football is increasingly about more than capital and a celebrity investor brings an audience as a former athlete brings credibility and relationships, a media personality brings distribution and an influential businessperson brings a network.

In isolation, none may materially change the sporting budget but collectively, they can extend the club into markets it would otherwise struggle to reach.

Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney demonstrated the extreme version at Wrexham, where their greatest contribution wasn't simply the money invested in the football club but the attention they were able to bring.

Wrexham became entertainment content, which created supporters beyond the town. They created commercial value, which created revenue which could ultimately be recycled into football.

Very few clubs can reproduce that phenomenon but the principle has travelled.

When clubs sell small stakes to strategically useful individuals, they can effectively exchange equity for distribution.

For an English club seeking American growth, someone with a large US sports audience can therefore be worth considerably more than the cash attached to their shareholding.

Could the interesting question be why Ipswich wanted Colin Cowherd rather than why Colin Cowherd wanted to own part of Ipswich?

Valencia rip it up again

A week is a long time in football.

Last Thursday, Valencia Football CEO Ron Gourlay was explaining why the club no longer needed a sporting director. By Sunday, Gourlay had been sacked.

By Monday, Valencia had a sporting director. Braulio Vázquez is back at Mestalla.

Mestalla before Valencia’s match against Barcelona in December 2023.

Photo: Anidae · CC BY-SA 4.0

The former Valencia sporting director has returned after nine years at Osasuna, where he helped establish one of La Liga's more stable football operations. His first major responsibility will be finding a permanent replacement for Carlos Corberán, who was dismissed alongside Gourlay after Valencia collected just one point from their opening five league matches.

But the change is more significant than replacing two individuals.

Gourlay had spent the past 16 months constructing a different model. Valencia strengthened its recruitment and player-development operation around him and, as recently as September 3, Gourlay said the structure had changed his mind about the need for a conventional sporting director. He argued that stability and continuity were precisely what Valencia required.

Ten days later, much of that structure was dismantled.

Gourlay departed alongside Lisandro Isei, Hans Gillhaus, Andrés Zamora and Malek Shafei as Valencia announced another overhaul of its football operation.

This one, however, appears particularly significant for Kiat Lim. Peter Lim's son replaced Layhoon Chan as president in March 2025 and initially continued the shift towards a more professionalised football structure, installing Gourlay as the senior executive responsible for the sporting operation. Under that model, Gourlay sat alongside director general Javier Solís and other departmental heads, with Kiat effectively assuming greater responsibility at the top of the organisation. Now he has changed it again.

AS reports that the decision to remove Gourlay had actually been made in Singapore before the decision to sack Corberán. Kiat personally informed Gourlay of his dismissal and spoke directly with Braulio about returning. The club is describing Braulio as the first senior football appointment carrying Kiat Lim's stamp entirely, distinguishing it from Gourlay's arrival, in which Peter Lim and people within his network also played a role.

That makes this an interesting moment in Valencia's ownership story. Kiat isn't merely inheriting his father's club anymore but is beginning to redesign it.

The CEO-led football structure has been replaced by a recognisable sporting director. Braulio will have responsibility for defining the football project and choosing the next coach, while Valencia is also considering restoring greater sporting involvement to director general Javier Solís.

There is some logic to the decision. Braulio's nine years at Osasuna offer something Valencia have desperately lacked – continuity.

There may be irony that for more than a decade under the Lim family, Valencia have repeatedly changed coaches, executives and decision-making structures in search of stability.

Gourlay arrived promising professionalisation and as recently as last week was preaching continuity. This week Valencia have torn up his structure and started again.

Braulio may prove to be an excellent appointment but much of his ability to be so will depend on whether Kiat will finally give him enough authority, and time, to build something that survives the next bad run of results.

That's all for today.

FootBiz tracks the money, people and decisions shaping the global football industry.

See you on Friday.