Soccer Ownership Around the World

How Many Club Owners Are Nationals?

And Does It Matter?

With the news that the parents company of MLS team the LA Galaxy may be going through a buyout breaking today, I started thinking about ownership of soccer teams in the MLS and around the world. This lead to a discussion with some friends about how foreign investment and ownership impact these leagues and whether it is a positive or negative trend.

MLS

Starting my search with the MLS I discovered that of the 19 teams 17 of them are Owned by Americans, or Canadians in the case of the Canadian teams. The exceptions being the Red Bulls who are owned by Austrian company Red Bull GmbH, and Chivas United who are owned by Mexican businessman Jorge Vergara.

EPL (BPL)

Using a link I found on my original source I found a list of exclusively EPL teams. The split here is nowhere near as clean, with 8.5 teams being owned in the UK, 5 in the USA, 1.5 in Russia, and one each in the UAE, Egypt, Switzerland, and Malaysia/India. The half a team split between Russia and the UK is Reading.

La Liga

In Spain all but two teams are controlled by spanish owners, with the foreign owners being Indian and Qatari. Several of the larger clubs (Real Madrid, Barcelona) are member owned by a large number of members or socis.

Serie A

The Italian league follows the same trend as La Liga with the only foreign owner currently being American Thomas DiBenedetto. However it is much more comment for these clubs to be member or even municipally owned.

Beyond

Solid and structured information about other leagues around the world is much more difficult to find, however I have managed to piece together information on several other popular leagues:

The vast majority of German Bundesliga clubs are required to have at least 51% member ownership, with the few exceptions being historic teams with a company affiliation (VfL Wolfsburg & Bayer 04 Leverkusen).

Brasil's Brasileirao football clubs on the other hand are "voluntary associations of natural persons, but with external interference of investors through contract basis."1 Whatever that means.

Why it matters

Lets look at the mostpopular and influential league in the world, the English Premier League. It's no coincidence the league that has opened its arms to foreign investment is the most popular league in the world. It was also pointed out to me that in the leagues that are less receptive to foreign owners there is often a team or several teams who are significantly above and beyond the others.

As the world become more globalized foreign investment become more and more crucial to staying alive and being able to compete with the "big boys". this is true in business and as we can see is starting to become a trend in soccer.


But what do you think? What is soccer ownership like in the leagues I've missed? Is foreign investment a crucial part to the growth of soccer in the world today, or is it destroying the beautiful game?