The acquisition of 57% of the shares of Atlético de Madrid by the American company Apollo, one of the largest investment funds in the world, raises the question of how much the economic globalization of football affects the identity of the teams.
For Mariano Otamendi, CEO of the World Football Summit, what can threaten a team is not ownership, but poor management, and this does not depend on the origin or size of the owner. From you Galder Reguera, writer and strategic director of the Athletic Club Foundation, argues that the old identity of clubs, anchored to a specific territory and a way of seeing the world, is not a disadvantage for access to the world market but rather their true capital.
A good investor is a great buy
The purchase of 57% of Atlético de Madrid by the private equity fund Apollo Sports Capital had been announced, and the social network X was already on fire. For the many fans who embrace the “eternal hatred of modern football”, capital and passion are seen as incompatible, and the entry of foreign investment as synonymous with disaster. Some of these examples, such as Valencia CF, Málaga CF, Deportivo Alavés, Racing de Santander, prove them right: irregular management, accumulated debts, disappointing sporting results, disaffection towards the fans and loss of identity. But this narrative, while understandable after years of negative experiences, is incomplete. The global reality of modern football tells a very different story.
In 2010 Liverpool were on the verge of bankruptcy. Fenway Sports Group invests £300 million and fifteen years later it is a success story: Champions League (2019), two Premier Leagues (2020 and 2025) and a valuation of £4.19 billion. Arsenal suffered years without a Champions League until Stan Kroenke stepped up his investment: result, three consecutive Premier League runners-up and return to the elite. In Italy, Atalanta went from a modest provincial club to a Champions League semi-finalist under American Stephen Pagliuca. Dan Friedkin’s AS Roma regularly competes in Europe. RedBird Capital’s Milan won Shield in 2022.
What is remarkable about these cases is that none of them have lost their identity. Liverpool continues to fill Anfield and sing You will never walk aloneArsenal maintain their Hale End youth academy training local talent, Atalanta continue to rely on their youth academy and recognizable style of play. Football is already global – in the audience, in the markets, in the talents – and capital is too. The point is not to resist this reality, but to manage it so that clubs maintain their connection with their community, whilst competing at the highest international levels.
The difference between success and failure was explained beautifully by Ferran Soriano, CEO of Manchester City and former vice-president of FC Barcelona, in his book The ball doesn’t go in by chance. According to Soriano, the difference between success and failure lies in managing a football club like a modern business, combining strategy, leadership, data and organizational culture, but without forgetting that football is an emotional business.
Peter Lim’s Valencia CF illustrates these risks. Lim bought the club in 2014 with a strong entrepreneurial background: he was one of the broker most successful in Singapore, but without an institutional structure for sports management. His relationship with agent Jorge Mendes generated controversy, the constant changes of coaches and sporting directors created instability and sporting results disappointed fans accustomed to competing in Europe.
Málaga CF collapsed when its owner withdrew financing due to legal problems. Deportivo Alavés suffered with investors without sufficient resources. Racing de Santander almost disappeared with a group that never materialized its financial commitment.
The pattern of these failures: individual investors without professional structure, funds without resources or capital that disappears in the face of difficulties. The opposite of good management. And, given his career, also the opposite of what Apollo Global Management represents, which has invested more than 17 billion in sports operations. Its co-founder, Josh Harris, owns the Philadelphia 76ers (NBA), New Jersey Devils (NHL) and Washington Commanders (NFL), who recently played at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, in the high-profile NFL game, in addition to participation in the Premier League’s Crystal Palace FC.
Atlético will be the main investment of this fund – 25% of its assets – declared as a long-term objective and not as the typical five-year operation. To give stability to the club, Miguel Ángel Gil and Enrique Cerezo remain at the helm. What changes everything is not a new owner, but rather a capitalist partner who provides the resources to complete the Sports City, increase revenue and compete at the highest European levels. Apollo’s challenge is to maintain the identity and idiosyncrasy of Colchonera, the social function of the club and the happiness of its fans.
The numerous success stories cited demonstrate that with the right partner a club can make the final leap. Foreign capital is not the enemy. Bad management, yes.
The value (also market) of romantic football
There was a time when every neighborhood bakery dreamed of positioning itself in the Chinese market. These were the years of the birth of the Internet, between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of 2000, when the virtual world was shown to small businesses as a new land of opportunities, a Wild West to be conquered, a free world in which to find a patch of land and plant one’s flag. Whatever you sold, whatever your niche market, a wild ride led every SME and small local business to invest in websites, sales and marketing platforms. online. It was time to dotcom, a few years obsessed with finding one domain to rule them all.
A quarter of a century later, the landscape is very different. For small and medium-sized businesses, the Internet is not an opportunity, but rather the biggest threat. Not only are online sales controlled by a handful of mega-companies, but increasingly remote consumption is replacing in-person consumption. In some industries, the challenge is to survive Amazon and the rest of the world streaming. And let’s not fool ourselves, the prospects are not rosy at all.
This race to conquer the big W of the global market has also had its counterpart in the world of football. Those were crazy, crazy, crazy times, inhabited by managers of provincial clubs who dreamed of selling t-shirts in every Chinese airport, of opening megastore in Utah and Alabama and hire Asian players to paint the streets of Tokyo and Seoul with their colors. It happens that, in the world of football, the dream of globality is still alive and risks producing monsters.
Let’s not fool ourselves. As in many other sectors, in football the global market represents an opportunity only for a handful of large companies. For everyone else, this market globalization is somewhere between a challenge and a threat. How to compete with a Liverpool-Manchester United on television and from the comfort of the sofa? How to sell the shirt of your second division club compared to that of Bayern or PSG?
Those of us who champion the value of local football are often accused of being romantic. But in reality our focus is also market-based. Sankt Pauli or Athletic Club can be considered companies that offer a well-differentiated and positioned product and that, like small and medium-sized companies in other sectors, face the challenge of globality. How to locate yourself in that global world? The answer is to bet on your values, without losing perspective and, in this way, offering a different experience. That is, following the same strategies that a small neighborhood bookshop uses to compete in its environment with Amazon. What the megacorporation offers is immediacy, price, and an infinite catalog. What the neighborhood bookshop offers is human contact: a warm and friendly space, an unexpected recommendation, a conversation that steals ten minutes from the damned routine.
In football, megaclubs promise glittering stars, marketing pyrotechnics and matches in 4K. But they cannot remotely provide the differential feeling of belonging that approaches you in your stage, the experience of feeling part of something unique, the wonderful taste of victory shared with your loved ones.
In these times of global hypercapitalism, the old identity of the clubs, anchored to a specific territory and to a way of seeing the world, does not constitute a disadvantage for accessing the world market, as often repeated, but rather their true capital. We ask for zero kilometer football, in which the product of proximity is the stands, the colors themselves, the unique experience of the stadium, which is not just sporting, but cultural. We think of identity, community and proximity as selling points that none of the megaclubs will be able to replicate. Some will say that in this way they will never be able to compete with the financial giants of contemporary football. But let’s not fool ourselves, they never can, no way, and that’s not where their fight should be. Since Asterix and Obelix do not intend to conquer Rome, but rather protect their village and their way of life, the clubs’ goal must be to become invincible in their (sometimes small) market niche. To do this, the strategy should not only focus on the grass, but perhaps more where its greatest value lies: in the stands and the people who inhabit it, that physical and symbolic space that constitutes its identity or, if you prefer, its brand.
