Multi Club Ownership within football and the challenges that inevitably come with it.

 

(Credit to Jason Stephens, MCOi Consultancy for all statistics quoted)

 The most basic of multi-club ownership models can be diluted to the following:

• An individual or group that owns the majority or minority stake in more than one football club.
• An individual / group that has a stake in one club but has formed an influential partnership with another club.
• A group that is influenced by a state backed investment fund and has multiple subsidiaries operating in the same

This has become the norm for European football ownership, take INEOS at Manchester United for example who also have a stake in Nice and the City Football Group who has a portfolio of 16 clubs (including City), of which 8 finished in the top 5 of their league last year.

Why has this happened?

1. Financial pressures in football have instigated the need for football club owners to hold various assets that they can use as leverage to stay funded – for example, if a club is near to breaching PSR in the Premier League, they could negotiate with the other club that their owner has a stake in, and sell a player for a high price, to offset their debts whilst keeping that Premier League club afloat. This is slightly unethical. MCO structures permit funds to be transferred between the clubs in ways that obscure the true financial outlook.
2. A lack of regulation on this point – it is currently not perceived as being an ‘non-sustainable’ business model and whilst UEFA are clamping down as I will explain below, they have already admitted that it may need to reconsider the current regulatory framework.
3. An ease of sharing resources, talent and players – take Brighton and Union St Gilloise - Karou Mitoma & Deniz Undav moved to Brighton and Simon Aningra went to Saint-Gilloise.

The Stats

• 199 clubs across the top two tiers of the Big five leagues are directly involved with a second club
• More than half (60%) of the total overseas investments have come from the USA, with 50% of MCOs in the Premier League and EFL also coming from USA.
• 54 people have stakes of 10%+ within the 20 Premier League clubs 2024/25. 

What issues does it create and what are UEFA doing to stop it?

A clear conflict of interest arises where owners with stakes in multiple clubs end up facing dilemmas when their clubs compete against each other or ‘negotiate’ transfer deals – this arguably creates a skewed perspective on the result of the game, contravening the competition and fairness/integrity. Football could be dominated by several specific rival networks who own the biggest clubs in every country, or clubs might jeopardise their success to become a feeder club to their parent within a larger corporate structure.

UEFA dealt with this in 2017 when RB Salzburg and Leipzig, both part of Red Bull, qualified for the Champions League. UEFA said they could not both compete, but afterwards, having evaluated the situation and concluding that no entity had a decisive influence or control over the two clubs, they allowed them to continue. They wanted to see a clear separation between the two clubs with regards to power, and considered the management structure, agreements that had taken place between the two clubs, and similarity of branding and identity.

In 2023 when Aston Villa and Vitoria Sport Clube both qualified for the Europea League, UEFA inputted measures to allow the clubs to both qualify for Europe. They asked both clubs to reduce the owners’ shareholdings in one of the clubs or transfer decision making to an independent third party, imposed restrictions for one club to provide financing to the other and also barred them from transferring players to each other for the year of the competition.

As mutli-club ownership models become more convoluted, it remains to be seen whether these measures are sufficient to stop the anti-competitive nature of this beast.