There was a time when the summit of European football looked rather like a private members’ club for the very rich. Billionaires bought teams with the ease with which they might order a new yacht: not only out of love for the game, but for prestige, influence, sometimes vanity, and often as part of a broader calculation. In 2003 Roman Abramovich paid £140m and turned Chelsea from a local club into a global brand. For three decades Silvio Berlusconi built AC Milan as if it were another channel in his media empire. The Glazers acquired Manchester United not out of passion, but by calculation — through a leveraged buyout, as if they were buying a factory rather than a football club.

James Montague, the British journalist, called this the age of the billionaires. He described it in a book which, even eight years ago, seemed to capture the final scene of that story. In fact, the story was only just beginning.

Today football is entering the age of funds. In place of individual tycoons, there are intricate consortia. In place of private ambition, investment strategies. When, in 2022, the consortium led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital paid more than £4bn for Chelsea, one thing became clear: these were no longer vanity purchases. They were professional acquisitions on a scale only institutions could bear.

Since 2016, private-equity transactions in European football have been worth more than €10bn. RedBird Capital — now the owner of AC Milan and Toulouse — also holds a stake in the group that controls Liverpool. CVC Capital Partners has poured billions into La Liga and Ligue 1. Silver Lake has invested in City Football Group, now valued in the billions of dollars.

But the funds have not stopped at individual clubs. A new model has emerged: multi-club ownership. City Football Group now speaks openly of the “13 clubs” in its family. To meet European requirements, its stake in Girona was placed in an independent blind trust for the duration of the European campaign. This is no longer a single club. It is an ecosystem: a platform for synergies, a global factory for talent, brands and transfers.

Competitive integrity has become the new battleground. The larger these ownership networks become, the sharper the questions about conflicts of interest. UEFA explicitly prohibits the same person or entity from exercising “control” or “decisive influence” over more than one club in the same competition, with a hard deadline of March 1 for ownership structures to be put in order. The most high-profile test came this summer: Crystal Palace, linked until March 1 with John Textor’s Eagle Football, was moved from the Europa League to the Conference League. The Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the decision. The market received a clear signal: the rules are not dead letters.

A Polish footnote: multi-club ownership is still in its infancy on the Vistula. The most visible test is GKS Tychy. In 2023 the city launched a transaction under which Pacific Media Group would take a majority stake — ultimately around 70–75% — for roughly €1.5m. The ambition was to accelerate the club’s march towards the Ekstraklasa. The result remains an open question. The caution stems from PMG’s track record: in one season Barnsley, AS Nancy and Esbjerg were all relegated, while Belgium’s KV Oostende filed for bankruptcy in 2024. In Poland, then, MCO is not a silver bullet but an experiment whose outcome remains to be tested.

Funds are also moving in at league level. Spain has gone furthest. In 2021 La Liga struck a deal with CVC: a €2.7bn injection in exchange for a long-term share of future revenues. Some clubs opted out, so the final volume in practice fell to about €2.1bn. But the message was plain: modernisation now, in return for a slice of the future. In Italy, similar talks with a CVC-Advent-FSI consortium — offering €1.7bn for 10% of a new media company — became bogged down in politics and competing interests, only to re-emerge later in more limited forms. In Germany, the story took a different turn. The DFL twice tried to bring in a private investor, but after months of fan protests the plan was simply abandoned in 2024. Three markets, three different endings — and three different definitions of the price of progress.

And so football has entered the age of structured capital. On one side there is professionalisation, investment and greater stability. On the other, a widening distance between the club and its local community. That tension was felt most sharply in 2021, when protests against the Super League erupted — a brutal reminder that fans have not forgotten whom football is supposed to serve.

The transformation from the age of billionaires to the age of funds has already taken place. The question now is what comes next. Can football find a way to reconcile the scale of modern investment with emotion, locality and the soul of the stadium?