IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/fuobcp/978-3-032-08538-2_9.html

Investors’ Match Plan: How Private Equity Advances the Business Model of Football Clubs

In: Diversify or Die

Author

Listed:
  • Aljoscha Pagel

    (WHU—Otto Beisheim School of Management, Center for Sports and Management)

  • Sascha L. Schmidt

    (WHU—Otto Beisheim School of Management, Center for Sports and Management)

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors explore the growing role of private equity in reshaping football club ownership and advancing diversification strategies. Traditionally dominated by wealthy individuals, football ownership is now attracting professionally positioned investors who view clubs as assets with untapped potential. Focusing on European football, they argue that private equity offers a pathway to address structural challenges in the sport by promoting financial sustainability beyond the volatile broadcasting model. Drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, the chapter introduces a typology of professional football investors and outlines four strategic archetypes of value creation: Smart Recruiter, Narrative Builder, Cost Optimizer, and Growth Catalyst. Through an analysis of 16 investment mechanisms, the authors demonstrate how private equity can support club diversification while navigating public skepticism and the complexities of this emerging asset class. The findings also offer transferable insights into other sports organizations seeking to harness professional capital for sustainable growth.

Suggested Citation

Handle: RePEc:spr:fuobcp:978-3-032-08538-2_9
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-08538-2_9
as

Download full text from publisher

To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
3. Perform a
for a similarly titled item that would be available.

More about this item

Keywords

;
;
;
;

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:fuobcp:978-3-032-08538-2_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.