E243 | Beyond Trump's “probation” red card: How US capital took firm control of global football

Summary

• US capital controls the entire European football value chain. The 11 US-controlled clubs among the Premier League’s 20 are only the visible layer—from CAA Eleven’s commercialization of UEFA national-team competitions and Relevant Sports’ commercial rights to UEFA’s 3 major club competitions, replacing Team Marketing after more than 30 years, to possible transfer-receivables factoring by institutions such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. “Americans win at every step as money circulates through this sector.” Trump’s call to Infantino that gave a US player a 1-year reprieve from a red-card suspension is simply the concrete expression of UEFA’s dependence on Americans whenever it wants to make money.
• The entry points were QE’s post-2008 asset-price spillover into Europe’s valuation gap and the 2020 pandemic bottom-fishing. Nearly 100 clubs across all tiers were being taken over by US capital each year at the time. US domestic leagues are closed franchise systems and effectively off-limits: an NFL ownership transfer requires approval from 3/4 of 32 owners. Ipswich shows that small clubs can also deliver outsized returns: bought for £30M in 2021, 40% was sold to an Ohio private-equity firm for £105M in 2024, allowing the initial investors to pocket pure profit equal to 2.5x the acquisition cost; the club then won promotion to the Premier League, with season revenue rising from £13M to £155M.
• The Glazer model is both the template and the warning. They acquired Manchester United in a £790M leveraged deal in 2005, and even the £270M of equity they put in was assembled through financial engineering; thereafter they “paid only the interest on the debt every year and never repaid principal,” extracting £1.2B through dividends, board compensation and share sales by the end of 2024. They are now taking on new debt at 5-point-something% annual interest to repay old debt, while seeking to cash out at the valuation peak following Champions League qualification before the £2B new-stadium bill arrives.
• The divide between specialists and speculators determines the outcome. Fenway bought Liverpool for £300M, won every major trophy, pushed its valuation above £4B and fit 6 world-class concerts into Anfield’s 6-week window; former owners Hicks and Gillett copied the Glazer leverage playbook and could not even service the interest after 2 or 3 years. Boehly and Clearlake bought Chelsea for £2.5B and used 8-10-year “civil-servant contracts” to amortize a binge of player purchases; “by today’s reckoning, the bet has clearly failed”—the same kind of speculation as Chinese capital buying clubs overseas 10 years ago.
• Kroenke’s philosophy puts stadium operations ahead of winning titles, while football remains a winner-take-all game. “Spending money to buy a championship is not the priority”; “if all you want is to win a championship, I would never get involved as a businessman.” SoFi is the world’s most profitable stadium. The guest admits the entire narrative hinges on results: “if Arsenal had not won this year, we might all be concluding today that Kroenke is a bad dad, a vampire dad”; the winner-take-all dynamic in turn determines the club’s valuation.
• The endgame is a distorted Super League and a valuation game of musical chairs. ECA has it both ways—working with UEFA on the Champions League and with FIFA to expand the 2029 Club World Cup to 48 teams—while the positive-feedback loop means “the strong get stronger… isn’t that effectively a Super League?” Revenue has topped out: adjusted for inflation, Premier League domestic rights are down 31% from the 2016-19 cycle. The route to returns is a valuation game: Lin Bin-style 1% stakes sold at the top to “suckers,” evergreen funds providing perpetual buyers, and the US-Canada-Mexico World Cup expanding the US soccer population.

Deep dive

1. Trump’s phone call, a 1-year red-card reprieve

• Balogun, the US player, was supposed to miss the round of 16 through suspension. Reports say Trump called FIFA president Infantino, after which the red-card punishment was “suspended for 1 year.” The Wall Street Journal’s analysis was that Infantino needed exposure from the North American World Cup to bolster his record and had “gone out of his way to accommodate Trump’s preferences for many years.”
• That phone call opens the episode’s central thesis: FIFA’s compliance is only the surface. 11 of the Premier League’s 20 clubs are controlled by US capital, while US capital has penetrated clubs in the 5 major leagues, sports-rights commercialization companies and the financing of player transfers. “If you want to make more money, you have to work closely with Americans.”

2. Glazer sells more of Manchester United: the long-awaited cash-out window

• 张冰 was not surprised by Bloomberg’s sale report: in 2023, the Glazers had already sold 27.7% to Ratcliffe of INEOS (“Sir Jim”), and the stake remaining with them “no longer means much beyond its ability to make them money.” With the new stadium expected to cost at least £2B, “the Glazers are extremely stingy” and will not put up real cash again.
• 施华伦 adds another layer: the shares directly tied to voting rights have already been bought by Ratcliffe, so the Glazers are now “dividend-type investors.” “Why wouldn’t I cash out when I can?” United had just qualified for the Champions League and its valuation was at a high—“the window is here, so I cash out quickly.” Within the family, some siblings wanted to sell, while 2 believed the value would continue to rise, so they sold only part of the stake.
• The idea that they were exiting to shed the public-relations burden was dismissed outright: “They’ve already been vilified for 20 years. If they were leaving United simply because of the abuse, they would have left long ago.”

3. The 2 entry points for US capital: QE spillover and pandemic bottom-fishing

• 张冰’s framing: US QE after 2008 was essentially an “asset-price spillover”—a huge amount of money needed assets to absorb it. US professional-sports valuations climbed for 15 years, while European clubs were a relative bargain; investors applied the US commercial-sports playbook to traditional European football clubs to lift revenue and valuations.
• 施华伦 says this was not just a Premier League phenomenon: Ligue 1’s Marseille was sold by the Louis-Dreyfus family to the family of former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt; deals of this kind came even earlier than the wave of Chinese capital buying clubs overseas.
• The second inflection point was 2020, when the pandemic shut European football down. “There was simply no money left”; Americans, “plainly, went bottom-fishing.” At the time, each year, several dozen clubs across all levels—and sometimes close to 100—were taken over or received equity, particularly from US capital, concentrated in middle- and lower-table clubs and lower divisions.

4. From the IPO wave to the delisting wave: football clubs are bad stocks

• Tottenham—the world’s 1st listed football club—plus Manchester United, Chelsea and Newcastle all went public in the 1980s and 1990s. The basic purpose was to finance stadium modernization: the owners “were not without money, but they were not rich enough to pull £100M out at any time.” Today, all except United have left the public markets.
• 施华伦’s example is Tottenham, which voluntarily downlisted from the LSE to AIM in 2001 under Levy, “the best dealmaker in all of European football.” The financing help available from public markets is far weaker than in the 1980s and 1990s, while disclosure obligations are a burden for clubs that urgently need cash; Arsenal, meanwhile, was listed only on a small, extremely illiquid exchange.
• 张冰’s blunt assessment is that a football club can be neither a dividend stock with stable cash flow nor a concept stock with an attractive story. After an IPO, delisting is “unavoidable.” Premier League competition requires greater investment every year, and institutional investors are not interested; privatization, US owners’ money and off-market borrowing are more practical.

5. Ipswich: 2.5x in 3 years; small clubs can be gold mines

• 麻花’s case: in 2021, Game Changer 20, led by Arizona’s state pension fund, bought Ipswich, then in League One, for £30M. In 2024, an Ohio private-equity firm bought 40% for £105M, allowing the initial investors to pocket pure profit equal to 2.5x the acquisition cost. In the 24-25 season, Ipswich won promotion to the Premier League; annual shirt sales rose from 10,000 to 100,000, while season revenue rose from £13M to £155M.
• Why not buy US assets? The NFL and NBA are closed franchise systems, teams are scarce and owners do not sell; an NFL ownership transfer also requires approval from 3/4 of 32 owners: “You can have the money and still be unable to enter or buy US sports assets, which is why they came to Europe.”
• 张冰’s supply-chain thesis: US owners already hold portfolios in American football, baseball and ice hockey, and bring a mature service stack for professional clubs—finance, sporting operations, medical services and venue real estate. “They can quickly replicate that skill set in Europe”; even if they cannot build the next Manchester United or Real Madrid, doubling or tripling valuation or commercial revenue should not be a problem.

6. The 2 extremes of US financial engineering: Chelsea’s loophole and Lin Bin’s 1%

• 张冰’s most startling example is Chelsea, which exploited loopholes in places no one would have imagined—using the window in which Abramovich’s debt was waived to give players 10-year contracts, extending amortization, and buy a large batch of players at once. Whether the maneuver itself succeeded is another question, but the Premier League then held several rule-change meetings specifically to close the loopholes: “At minimum, you made rougher ways of playing possible; you showed that Europe’s existing owners could not do it.”
• 泓君 gives the other extreme: earlier this year, Xiaomi’s 林斌 spent more than $100M to buy 1% of the parent company of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, “directly taking the team’s valuation above $10B.” “He must realize he’s the sucker, because 1% basically lets him do nothing”—but he bought it anyway, first to preserve wealth and second to enter “a circle of capital” through the deal.
• That points to a new model: once a club is too valuable for any single buyer to take on, “50 billionaires could each buy 1%.” 施华伦 compares US sports assets to the “Hermès and Vacheron Constantin” of the ultra-rich.

7. Dissecting the Glazers: 20 years of paying interest, £1.2B extracted

• The Glazers acquired United in a £790M leveraged buyout in 2005; the £270M of equity they put up may not even have come from their own pockets—it too was moved around through financial engineering. For more than 20 years, they “paid only the interest on the debt every year and never repaid principal.” 张冰 asks: given United’s cash-generating capacity, “paying down around £20M a year should not be a major problem, right?” But the family extracted value through dividends, salaries for as many as 6 family members serving as directors, and continued trading in Class A shares; by the end of 2024, it had pulled out £1.2B, excluding interest payments.
• The latest controversy is debt-on-debt financing: the debt raised in 2005 matures next year, and new debt carrying interest of as much as 5-point-something% a year is being raised to repay it. “This is starting to feel like usury”; one can imagine the financial pressure United will face. United listed on the NYSE in 2012 at $14 a share; it now trades at $22-23, putting its market cap at roughly $3.8B.
• The consequences are tangible: Old Trafford is dilapidated, its roof leaks and it has a rat problem; its Euro 2028 hosting slot went to city rival Manchester City. After Ronaldo returned, he told Piers Morgan that everything at United was “the same equipment from when he had been there 20 years earlier.” But 张冰 notes the other side: over the past 2 years, United has actually been among the clubs with the highest transfer spending in years.

8. The Ratcliffe era: mixed results, increasingly elaborate financial engineering

• Ratcliffe promised to “make Manchester United great again.” 张冰 sees 2 sides: as a Briton and United fan, he “probably understands” club building, long-term planning and dressing-room culture; but INEOS is a major industrial group with much stronger debt-engineering capabilities than the Glazers’ property-and-resort business. “United’s financial engineering will certainly get more elaborate.”
• The signs are already there: United has worked with financial institutions on a product resembling a “big-customer credit card”—roughly £500M available to draw and repay, with sponsorship money applied as soon as it arrives. Financial operations “have already become one of their main tools for managing liquidity.”
• Financing a new stadium costing more than £2B “requires real financial engineering”—another reason the Glazers cashed out early: “They also do not know what financial support the new stadium will require from United in the future.”

9. Arsenal’s 22-year title drought: working to pay down stadium debt

• In May, the year’s 5th month, Arsenal won the Premier League title again after a 22-year wait. 麻花’s firsthand account: before moving into Emirates Stadium—project launched in ‘02, construction began in ‘04 and cost £450M—Arsenal had finished at least 2nd in the Premier League for 8 seasons. After the move, for roughly 16 seasons, “the goal changed from challenging for the title to finishing in the top 4”: “When the Champions League ended, everyone else celebrated; only Arsenal had lost again.”
• The financing was asset securitization: future matchday ticket revenue for 25 years was packaged into bonds and sold to investors, raising £260M upfront. The price was years of “pinching pennies” in the transfer market—buying mid-tier players on value, selling captains, and even sending Wenger to cut the ribbon at a nearby landfill redevelopment. Only after Kroenke bought Arsenal outright and restructured the debt did the club begin serious transfer spending.

10. Why build a stadium anyway? Revenue you can build a financial story around

• 施华伦’s point is that matchday revenue was almost the only revenue stream in the classic 20th-century club model, and it was “extremely pure”: capacity is visible at a glance; suites, ticketing and suite-related sponsorship all sit within the club’s control. That “created many more ways for the club to tell a financial story”; the old stadium’s land could also be developed.
• Arsenal’s bad luck was timing: the Highbury apartment development had barely gone on sale when the ‘08 financial crisis hit, and sales missed expectations; in the same period, Abramovich’s arrival “lifted the level of Premier League club spending to an entirely new height.” Together, these factors created more than 10 years of hardship.
• For the Big Six, media rights are the largest line item—roughly a 4:4 or 5:3 split—while matchday revenue accounts for only about 20%. When Arsenal decided to build, the Premier League was only around 10 years old; no one could have imagined that rights would become its largest revenue source 10 years later. And because the bonds securitized only matchday revenue, repayment could have been much easier if media rights had been included.

11. SoFi as the template: how the world’s most profitable stadium was built

• 麻花 adds Kroenke’s American playbook: SoFi, home of the Rams, is “the world’s most profitable stadium.” Its convertible turf and stands allow rapid switching among games, concerts and conventions; it has hosted Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran, while Taylor Swift’s 6 shows in 2023 were expected to generate more than $10M in revenue. It will also host the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Because it is self-built and independent of the NFL, those revenues flow directly to Kroenke’s sports company and help anchor a mixed-use district of hotels, cinemas and malls.
• The ironic footnote: before considering a new stadium, United went specifically to study SoFi, owned by the owner of its city rival.

12. Kroenke vs. Usmanov: a 10-year stalemate in which neither side dared spend

• Kroenke’s path: he bought 9.9% in ‘08, 29.9% in ‘09 and 67% in ‘11; in ‘18, he bought Usmanov’s 30% for £550M, triggering the mandatory offer after crossing 90% ownership and taking Arsenal private. In 2020, debt restructuring meant the club no longer had to maintain a debt-service reserve as high as the previous £36M, and only then did it have the cash to invest seriously in transfers.
• 施华伦 reconstructs the stalemate: Usmanov represented the “Abramovich-style sugar daddy” model—he once said, “We started splashing money too; as for financial health and the club’s future, I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t think it mattered.” But with ownership balanced at 40%-plus versus 30%, neither side could gain control; a major investment “could ultimately mean making a wedding dress for someone else.” That explains why, during those years, both sides only nominally said they would invest.
• Around 2017, Usmanov conceded but did not leave: through longtime partner Farhad Moshiri, an Iranian-British businessman, he entered Everton, with the stadium sponsorship converted into a Usmanov-linked interest. Everton then went through several consecutive financially unhealthy years and was forced into a painful restructuring; after the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war, Usmanov, like Abramovich, was labeled by the Premier League an “unsuitable investor.”

13. Kroenke’s philosophy: winners write history; the stadium matters more than the trophy

• Kroenke’s own words: “Spending money to buy a championship is not the priority”; “if all you want is to win a championship, I would never get involved as a businessman.” His lieutenants describe him as “a boss who has to see a project through 10 years”; operating a stadium well matters far more than delivering results with a team.
• The divide between the 2 generations: the elder Kroenke, nicknamed “Silent Stan,” rarely spoke and did not aggressively remake the club; the younger Kroenke, featured in Amazon’s All or Nothing documentary, actively involves himself in every sports team and even fired the Denver Nuggets general manager and stepped in himself—“he is more ambitious about the sports business.”
• 施华伦’s admission is the episode’s most candid moment: “If you had asked me 5 years ago or 10 years ago, I would have reached an entirely different answer.” The difference is that Arsenal won the title. “Football is precisely a winner-take-all game,” so it is not popular with institutional investors; “if Arsenal had not won this year, we might all be concluding today that Kroenke is a bad dad, a vampire dad.” And the winner-take-all dynamic feeds back into the club’s valuation: “This is already a very complicated game.”

14. Liverpool as the control case: specialists versus speculators

• Former US owners Hicks and Gillett (2007-2010) copied the Glazer leverage model: “it took only 2 or 3 years before they couldn’t even pay the interest.” 张冰’s verdict: “one was a professional at this, while the other was more of a capital speculator”—the speculator had neither operating expertise nor capital depth. The wave of Chinese capital buying clubs overseas 10 years ago “was no different from those 2 speculators.”
• Fenway took over for roughly £300M in 2010. Its portfolio includes the Boston Red Sox, Pittsburgh Penguins and NASCAR’s RFK Racing; Liverpool then won the Premier League, Champions League, Club World Cup, FA Cup and League Cup, lifting its valuation above £4B.
• Liverpool City Council allows Anfield only 6 concerts a year, yet the club fit 6 world-class shows into the roughly 6-week summer window. “Across stadium operations around the world, that efficiency is rare—let alone in Britain.”

15. Chelsea: a bet that has “clearly failed”

• Abramovich was sanctioned in 2022 and Chelsea was forced to sell; a Boehly-Clearlake Capital consortium paid £2.5B. It gave players 8-10-year contracts mocked as “civil-servant contracts” and bought 10-20 players per season; a facility designed for 20 players to train ended up with 50 training together. Results fell as low as 20th in the Premier League, reached 12th at one point and peaked at 4th.
• 施华伦 explains why experience in American sports (Dodgers, Lakers, Sparks) still led to a failure: a 10-year contract contains too many uncontrollable variables—players may lose motivation, starters and substitutes compete against one another, and players also have off-field expectations and national-team development demands. The smooth experience at Ligue 1’s Strasbourg was not transferable: “France is usually the first or second stop in the player pipeline, with considerable freedom”; at a world-class Premier League club, “5 to 10 media outlets are always ready to push your information out.” “I think Boehly and Clearlake made this bet, but today it is clear the bet has failed.”

16. They did not just buy clubs: US capital captured football’s toll booths

• 张冰 identifies 2 markers. Around 2012-13, CAA took over the commercial development of UEFA’s national-team competitions, including the Euros, and later created CAA Eleven. Following a 2025 tender, Relevant Sports will take over commercial development of UEFA’s 3 club competitions from next year, replacing Team Marketing, which had worked with UEFA for 30 years since the Champions League was revamped in 1992. “UEFA now needs Americans to make money.” The rights-distribution platforms behind these deals may also be largely US capital, and media-rights sales may cover the global market except China.
• 施华伦 adds historical depth: Klaus Hempel, one of Team Marketing’s founders, had been chairman of ISL and an agent for adidas chief Horst Dassler. So the change is “Relevant Sports, representing US capital, replacing Team Marketing, which represented German capital and even European capital.”
• The deeper layer is the financial plumbing: transfer fees are paid in installments—for example, 100M over 5 years, or 20M a year—so cash-strapped clubs discount and sell the receivable to a financial institution: “You give me a 100M receivable at a discount, and I give you 90M in cash.” Providers may include JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs; the European Super League may also have had JPMorgan and Goldman behind it. “Every time money circulates through this sector, Americans win at every step”—it seems even the lenders financing club acquisitions are US capital.

17. Endgame: a distorted Super League where every stakeholder except fans is American

• 张冰’s view is that ECA “has it both ways”: nominally representing more than 300 clubs, but with real influence concentrated among the biggest. On one side it works with UEFA on the Champions League; on the other, it is reportedly working with FIFA on the Club World Cup, with the 2nd edition expanding to 48 teams in 2029. All 3 competitions create positive feedback for clubs: “Keep the loop going and the strong get stronger… isn’t that effectively a Super League?”
• 施华伦 compares it with Team Marketing, which built the Champions League and remade the value of European football rights. “What US capital is doing is: I need a competition of my own. Once I have built the framework, it becomes easy to do things.” 张冰 concludes that the Super League will eventually emerge in a distorted form: “in the end, you will find that all the stakeholders except the fans are American.”

18. The hard return problem: revenue is a bad business; the exit is a valuation game

• Revenue has topped out: adjusted for inflation, Premier League domestic rights are down 31% from the 2016-19 cycle, while player wages and transfer fees account for a growing share of costs. 张冰’s blunt conclusion: from a revenue and margin perspective, “operating a football club is not a particularly good business.”
• Returns can be found on the valuation side: “buy assets at the bottom, hype up the price, then distribute at the top to the suckers who want to enter the industry.” The playbook is consortium ownership, dispersed 1% stakes—“buy at 1 and sell at 10; no one can take the whole thing at 10”—and an evergreen-fund-style structure with a perpetual buyer.
• 施华伦 sees another route: use the US-Canada-Mexico World Cup to expand the US soccer population over “5 to 10 years or longer,” giving soccer a better chance to compete with America’s major professional sports. The NBA should already have announced games in Europe over the next 2 or 3 years; soccer’s aggressive cross-continent partnerships should be similar. The short-term premise is that “there is no way to expect fresh capital injections from the Middle East or China.”

19. The fan’s question: football never had a pure era

• The fans’ indictment is on record: clubs have gone from community assets to “toys for the rich”; water breaks at the World Cup were accused of being inserted to sell ads and of being incompatible with football’s flow; Rooney criticized US-style capital for “driving traditional British fans out of stadiums and destroying the working class’s chance to enjoy football.”
• 施华伦’s rebuttal is that the Premier League’s model was US leagues from the outset. “The Premier League has been able to grow so fast precisely because British football became Americanized”; complaints are “something you think about in the morning, then by noon you receive a $1M order from a US-backed broadcaster and forget what you said.” The best detail: United’s globally sung anthem, Glory Glory Man United, was adapted from a marching song of the Union Army in the American Civil War—“many elements of local football culture that people take for granted had American elements from the beginning.”
• 施华伦’s closing point: the boots worn by ball boys and referees at the 1966 World Cup were sponsored by Horst Dassler; in 1970, Pelé was paid $125,000 by Puma to tie his laces; the ball was Telstar, color satellite broadcasts crossed the Atlantic, and Coca-Cola entered FIFA in 1974. Football’s transformation from a grassroots sport into a global entertainment product “was fundamentally driven by commerce”; “commerce has made the sport more watchable, and without commerce it could not have done so.” Strip out commercialization—“would the game be better? Of course not”—and, however much fans object, “it will continue in this direction.”
• Fans accuse the Glazer family of having no interest in attending matches in person, while US-style commercial sports management is criticized as ill-suited to football.