An insider's guide to how money is reshaping football from the Premier League to the fourth division, and why most people still have it completely wrong.
There is a scene Markus Bockelkamp likes to think about when he tries to explain what football ownership really means. Not the trophies, not the transfer windows, not the press conferences. A training ground. Two grass pitches, a car park, a modest gym. That was AFC Bournemouth when Bill Foley bought the club in late 2022. Then, almost immediately, Foley went out and bought a golf club on the outskirts of town, stripped it back to its bones, and rebuilt it as a training complex with sixteen pitches, a full academy building, a kitchen, a soccerdome, and, for the first time in the club's history, a shared home for the men's, women's and youth squads.
"He didn't go out and buy ten players," says Bockelkamp, who spent years as a sports journalist and marketing executive in the German football industry and now advises on sports investments. "He invested in Bournemouth. In the region, in the community, in the future of that club. That, for me, tells you everything about whether someone is serious."
In an era when football ownership is increasingly discussed as a financial instrument, a vehicle for brand-building, geopolitical soft power, or speculative capital, this distinction, between serious and unserious investors, is becoming one of the most important fault lines in the game. And as Bockelkamp would tell you at length, most people drawing that line are drawing it in the wrong place.
The Problem With Multiples
To understand why so many investors go wrong in football, it helps to understand what they usually bring with them: a spreadsheet, a timeline, and an exit strategy. Five years, maybe seven. By then, infrastructure upgraded, league position improved, brand value multiplied, sell at a healthy premium.
Bockelkamp, who has spent recent years consulting on investment opportunities in the sport, finds this kind of thinking close to useless when applied to football. "I have not seen, in twenty years, anyone enter a football club, stay five or six years, and leave having clearly made money," he says. "There are far more failure stories than success stories. And football has too many unpredictable variables on the way there. Purely in sporting terms, you cannot build the perfect football club."
He recalls a recent conversation with a prospective investor who had mapped out the exact financial position the club needed to be in after five years, the precise multiples required. Bockelkamp could not work with it. "How do you plan that? You can create the conditions, increase the probability, bring your own approach. But you cannot engineer it."
What Bockelkamp advocates instead is something closer to what Foley appears, at his best, to be doing: investing not in a product but in a place. Stones and legs, as he puts it, infrastructure and players, simultaneously, while deeply understanding the community in which you are operating.
"I believe the value of a football club lies in its ability, time and again, to produce footballers that make it into the first team, wherever that first team is positioned," he says. "If you can do that as an owner, you probably won't want to sell anyway. And if you do want to sell, it will then actually be worth something."
This is a fundamentally different philosophy from the speculative investor who arrives, rebrands, buys a few names, and hopes the numbers in a table change fast enough. Football, Bockelkamp argues, is not a conventional investment asset. It carries social responsibility, community identity, and emotional stakes that no valuation model captures. "You have not just the club, not just matchday. You have hospitality, emotion, history, a platform for so much more. You have to be driven differently as an investor than if you were putting money into a normal company."
The Rise of the Boutique Buyer
While the megadeals attract most of the attention, Chelsea's multi-billion pound takeover by the BlueCo consortium, Manchester United's prolonged sale, Newcastle United's transformation under Saudi Arabian ownership, a quieter and arguably more interesting story is unfolding further down the pyramid.
Boutique investors, often working with relatively modest sums by football standards, are targeting small clubs with big identities: unfashionable towns, authentic supporter cultures, the kind of places that have been bypassed by the modern money. Bockelkamp describes a group he calls out specifically: the Estrella Group, which has pursued a strategy of entering small clubs with strong local roots, a lower-division club in Cascais on the Portuguese coast, and Greenock Morton in the Scottish second tier.
What connects these choices? Bockelkamp sees a pattern: seaside or lakeside settings, rich local history, communities whose love for their club is entirely out of proportion to the club's size. "Maybe the mix of destination, history, and the love people have for their football club, that's what they're looking for," he says. "And they're showing that you can be a small club in the fifth division and still put yourself in the shop window."
That last point matters enormously. Before the current era, a club in the sixth division of Portuguese football had virtually no mechanism to be noticed by international capital. Now, with a well-managed Instagram account and a photogenic waterfront stadium, Cascais can be better known to potential investors than clubs three divisions above it. The marketing of the club has become, partly, the investment thesis itself.
But Bockelkamp is careful to temper the romanticism with realism. "If you invest one, two, three million euros in a Scottish second-division club, that money is essentially gone. You will not make money from that club in the near future. You have to invest time and passion. And most people don't realise what a football club at that level consumes, emotionally and in terms of time, if you actually mean it."
The Greenock Morton situation is illustrative. Foley himself has faced the reality that not every club in his network falls into line, but patience can be rewarded: Lorient immediately returned to Ligue 1 by winning the Ligue 2 title. Even at smaller clubs, the variables of promotion, relegation, manager changes and squad rebuilds make any straight-line projection from here to a profitable exit essentially fictional.
Germany's Missed Opportunity
One of the more pointed arguments Bockelkamp makes concerns Germany, where the 50+1 rule, which prevents outside investors from taking full control of most clubs, requiring membership organisations to retain the majority of voting rights, has long been cited as a barrier to foreign capital.
He pushes back on what he sees as a false narrative. The rule, he believes, deters the wrong kind of investor, the ones who want full control and quick returns, while the infrastructure it protects is arguably the most attractive in world football below the Premier League level.
Consider the third division, the 3. Liga. When Dresden plays at home, they regularly attract 30,000 supporters. In many top-flight leagues around Europe, those numbers would be considered exceptional. German third-division players are trained under real competitive pressure, in front of real crowds, with genuine media exposure. "For me, the third division in Germany is a sensational investment environment," Bockelkamp says. "Young footballers are developed under conditions, media, supporters, stress, competitive intensity, that you cannot replicate easily elsewhere."
The case against 50+1 is usually made by comparing German clubs to the Premier League in pure financial terms. But Bockelkamp thinks this comparison misses the point entirely. The things that make a football club genuinely valuable, atmosphere, heritage, loyalty, community, are precisely the things that 50+1 has helped to protect. "You can't buy that with an investor. You can have brilliant social media. But getting 50,000 people into a stadium to watch a youth team? No Premier League club can do that."
He is referring to a real and remarkable event: a UEFA Youth League match involving FC Köln's U19 side, played in front of 50,000 supporters in Cologne. The match meant something, he says, not because it was marketed, not because a global brand was behind it, but because it was FC Köln. The club carries weight in the region that transcends league position or trophy cabinet. That weight is not for sale. But it could be part of an investment thesis, if anyone thought creatively enough.
Como 1907: Buying a Location
If Bill Foley's strategy is the patient, infrastructure-first Anglo-American model, and Estrella represents the boutique romantic approach, then Como 1907 is something else entirely: a laboratory for what happens when almost unlimited capital meets an extraordinary location and a blank canvas.
The Hartono brothers, Indonesia's wealthiest family with a net worth estimated around $48-50 billion, bought Como in 2019 when the club was still playing in Serie D. From Serie D, the club rose to Serie C in 2020, Serie B in 2021, and returned triumphantly to Serie A in 2024 after a 21-year absence.
The ownership model is unusual in almost every respect. Football legends Thierry Henry and Cesc Fàbregas came on board as minority shareholders, with Fàbregas, a World Cup winner and double European champion with Spain, eventually appointed head coach. His personal stake in the club is not incidental: it aligns his financial interests with the club's sporting performance in a way that most managerial contracts do not.
In just six months across two transfer windows, Como spent over $121 million on players, making them one of the biggest spenders in Serie A. The transfer deficit Bockelkamp refers to, around 210 million euros since the takeover, would be catastrophic for a normal club. For the Hartonos, it is, at their scale of wealth, an affordable brand-building exercise. The question is what exactly they are building.
Bockelkamp's theory is that they are buying more than a football club. Lake Como attracts some of the wealthiest people on earth, particularly on weekends. Owning the club means very rapidly knowing the other club owners in Italian football, building relationships that can extend across real estate, business, and networks that money alone cannot otherwise access.
Como has formalised this logic with the launch of Como Ventures, a startup and investment platform connecting early-stage companies with the club's global brand, Lake Como's cultural magnetism, and an athlete-led venture capital network. The football club is becoming, explicitly, a platform for a wider ecosystem, technology, lifestyle, luxury hospitality, media. Whether it remains credible as a football club while doing all this is a separate and rather more difficult question.
The Test That Matters
Bockelkamp's definition of what investment success in football actually looks like cuts through a lot of the noise. It is not a trophy. It is not a multiple. It is something much harder to achieve and much more durable: the moment you look at your first team, and one of the players there came from your own academy.
"When you see, in an opening Premier League match, one of Bournemouth's starting eleven came from their own academy," he says, describing what he imagines would genuinely satisfy Foley. "That might be possible in two years. And in Lorient, too, that the club is stable, it's growing, the dream is taking shape in rough outline. Not perfect. But alive."
This is a vision of football ownership that is fundamentally at odds with the speculative model. It requires patience measured in years rather than quarters. It accepts that money alone does not produce identity, community, or loyalty, that those things have to be cultivated, slowly, through hundreds of decisions made at every level of a club, from the academy coach's salary to the condition of the car park to the half-time pie.
Football is littered with investors who arrived with grand ambitions and departed having found the sport more complicated, more expensive, and more human than any model had suggested. The ones who get it right, Bockelkamp believes, are those who stop treating the club as an asset to be optimised and start treating it as a place to belong to. Who invests, as he puts it, in "stones and legs" equally. Who reads the town and listens to the community before they read the balance sheet.
The game is changing. Capital is flowing in from every direction, at every level of the pyramid. Small clubs in Scotland, Portugal and Italy are being discovered by investors who would once have looked only at the top tier. Multi-club ownership groups are building networks that span continents. The transfer market has become a logistics exercise as much as a scouting one.
But underneath all of it, the thing that makes football football, the reason 50,000 people will turn out on a weekday to watch teenagers play, is still the same thing it was when Bockelkamp was a boy watching Borussia Mönchengladbach beat Inter Milan 7-1 at the Bökelberg. It cannot be purchased. It can only be earned. And the investors who understand that, he says, are the ones worth watching.
Markus Bockelkamp is a sports marketing consultant and football investment adviser based in Cologne. He spoke as part of an ongoing series on the Business Business Podcast.