Publicly Traded Football Clubs

Football is not just a sport, it is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Broadcasting and advertising contracts, a gigantic merchandise market and armies of fans ready to part with their money for the pleasure and taste of victory — all this surrounds the sports component every day. Warren Buffett advised investing in the business of which we are consumers. Isn’t it cool to become a co-owner of your favorite football team, for example, by buying Manchester United stocks?

Sport is definitely one of the pleasures in our life, accessible to everyone. Can investing in sports enhance this pleasure and bring additional profit? We want to cover this topic, and today we will talk in detail about football club stocks. Most of them are privately owned or even non-commercial ones. But shares of some of them can be bought on the stock exchange. Our task is to figure out how attractive this can be for investing.

In the USA, football is not a major sport. After all, we don’t even call it like that — we have the word ‘soccer‘ for naming. With the emergence of stars such as Luis Suarez, Hugo Lloris, Sergio Busquets and of course, Lionel Messi in Major League Soccer (MLS), interest has definitely increased. According to the research, soccer has surpassed hockey in popularity and partly even in cash flows! Let’s not forget that the 2026 World Cup will be held in cities in the USA, Mexico and Canada.

Globally, football still remains the No. 1 sport. And today we are talking about European football clubs. Because it is among them that you can find public businesses. Jumping ahead, the NBA, NFL and NHL clubs are also privately owned, and we hasten to disappoint, but you aren`t able to buy shares of Dallas Cowboys or Golden State Warriors on the stock exchange.

How do football clubs make money?

The main source of revenue is sponsorship contracts. For example, according to the financial statements of Manchester United (MANU on NYSE), the share of commercial revenue in total for 2023 was almost 50%.

Then comes the broadcasting revenue. This revenue, of course, directly depends on the popularity of the brand and the club’s status, and therefore on the success of the performances. This also affects the revenue directly from football matches: sales of tickets, merch and expenses accompanying the matchday, which are borne by fans. For example, the most visited football club in Europe, Borussia Dortmund, has a large share of its revenue from TV marketing, almost 38%. And more than 10% of its revenue is a direct investment from fans who buy tickets to the stadium.

In addition to these three points, there is also the club’s operational activities in the transfer market. Jude Bellingham rising star of modern football from England was sold by Borussia Dortmund to Real Madrid for a respectable 103 million euros! Harry Kane moved from English Tottenham Hotspur for 95 million euros to Bayern Munich.

However, Borussia bought several players with the proceeds, and, as a result, its financial results from transfers turned out to be more modest. In addition to the fact that these incomes are not always regular and recurring, clubs have been embroiled in accounting scandals related to transfers several times last decade. One of the latest and most sensational one is associated with the famous Italian football club Juventus.

Stories like this certainly don’t add to the attractiveness of investing in football stocks, because it can fall somewhere between buying AAPL stock and playing in a casino. However, we have nevertheless compiled a row of football club shares for you and calculated the rating for them here. Let’s dive into the details.

Major players

We have already mentioned each of the most famous football clubs from our selection. Of course, the first one that comes to mind is Manchester United. 20-time winner of the title of the best team in England and 3-time winner of the European Champions League, founded in 1878 and playing on magnificent Old Trafford stadium with a capacity of 74 thousand people. The club ranks fifth in the list of the highest revenue-generating football clubs in 2022/23 according to Deloitte. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, CEO and founder of INEOS, is Man Utd’s biggest majority shareholder since acquiring a 29% stake.

The club`s market cap at the time of writing is $2.3 billion. It all looks neat, but the club’s last profitable year was way back in 2019, and since then, revenue has become less likely to translate into positive financial results for shareholders. As a result, Manchester United has a negative final rating according to the Eyestock methodology, which corresponds to the status of an extremely risky investment idea. MANU share’s fall of almost 50% over the past 12 months only confirms our fears.

Juventus is another example of a very risky investment. And the point is not only that the name of this club is constantly associated with football and other scandals. Over the past 5 years, JUVE stock on the Borsa Italiana exchange dropped fivefold. Even though Juventus is the most popular and titled among Italian clubs, where football is more than just a game, the club’s financial performance does not shine. Juventus’ net profit margin is negative at -48%, debt is six times equity, and there is no positive return on equity or even on assets to speak of. The final Eyestock rating is -62%as an answer to whether it is worth investing in Juventus shares.

The third “big” club on this list, as well as the bronze medalist of our chart of the most attractive football clubs for investment, is the German Borussia Dortmund. Dortmund ends its financial year in the summer at the start of the football season. Very logical for such a business. So, at the end of the 2022/2023 season, the club’s annual revenue amounted to 418 million euros, and its net profit was EUR 9.5m. However, already in the 3rd and 4th calendar quarters of 2023, the club was able to earn a net 70 million euros, primarily due to the benefits of the transfer policy. We end up with the first financially successful football club, but note that the sustainability of growth is very weak. BVB.DE stocks are trading on the Xetra exchange.

Top Underdogs

Who is the most successful football club according to Eyestock among publicly listed? This is the Scottish club Celtic from Glasgow. Surprising our benchmark by 9% and achieving a final rating of 109%, this business surpassed even many manufacturing companies. Celtic shares are traded on the London Stock Exchange for 129 GBX as of March 21 as CCP.L ticker, and according to the stock rating they are in the top 42 stocks (with a rating of 100 or above) out of 1262 companies in our database for that market!
Along with arrivals from Glasgow Rangers, Celtic is the most popular club in Scotland, having won the league 53 times and the Scottish Cup 41 times.
Why did they get such a high final score? Classic case. Over the last 12 months, Celtic generated revenue of £112m, of which £32m was reported as net profit! High profitability is supported by the absence of debt and good return on capital. But please note that this is the first time the company has such a high rating! But just recently, assessments of the club’s financial affairs were negative, like those of Manchester United and Juventus.

Also in the top three of our chart, in addition to Borussia and Celtic, is the Danish football club Silkeborg, which has not particularly gained world fame. Shares under the ticker SIF can be purchased on the Nasdaq Copenhagen exchange. The stock price is 22.6 DKK as of March 21. I would like to note that Silkeborg’s rating is more balanced, and this is one of the few clubs whose shares are showing strong growth because SIF share prices have almost doubled since the Covid pandemic to date!

This is an interesting fact, but Silkeborg is the best representative among the Danish clubs, of which there were already 4 in our selection!

Research results

Even though we managed to find one stock among football clubs with a rating above our benchmark of 100%, we are talking about CCP.L, as well as a couple of companies that may attract investment interest, namely BVB.DE and SIF.CO. It is worth summarizing that investing in football clubs is associated with an enormous degree of uncertainty, high risks and unstable performance of the shares. This will probably appeal more to true football fans or a particular team than to investors who want reliable and positive returns year-by-year. In many ways, this may be because the goal of a football club is to win trophies, so they are happy to spend all their revenue on salaries of the best players, new transfers to strengthen the team’s performance and building the club’s infrastructure. Obtaining net profit and growth of the company’s capitalization within the interests of shareholders is a secondary goal.

In the next article on investing in sports, we will try to find alternative investment options. Maybe in other sports, the situation is different.