Who owns the beautiful game in Europe? Increasingly, American investors
Luxury assets come in all shapes and sizes, including – for a particular set of American investors – Welsh football teams. An increasing number of American executives are buying up European football clubs, which they view as undervalued by the standards of the US sports industry. Despite it being the world’s most popular sport, none of the 10 most lucrative sports franchises is a football team; all being basketball, baseball and American football teams whose support is largely confined to the US. Looking across the Atlantic at the European “soccer” industry, Americans see big money being left on the table.
It was recently announced that Snoop Dogg – one of the most recognisable names in music and a multifaceted entrepreneur – will join a US-led consortium of owners at Swansea City Association Football Club. The club has, for the most part, chugged along unglamorously in the second tier of the English Football League. “The story of the club and the area really struck a chord with me,” said Snoop in a press release. “This is a proud, working-class city and club. An underdog that bites back, just like me.” Perhaps there’s something in his assessment of Swansea City’s hardened spirit. Until now, the club has been best known for the antics of its mascot, Cyril the Swan, in the late 1990s. Cyril regularly picked fights with rival mascots and in 1999 was summoned before a disciplinary panel after a pitch-invasion incident. Cyril’s misbehaviour put Swansea – a post-industrial city of some 246,000 in south Wales that’s also my hometown – on the map. Snoop’s involvement is set to propel Swansea onto the global news agenda once again.
The majority of American owners buy the most prestigious and successful European football club that they can afford, then extract its dormant value with techniques imported from US sports. For instance, Eagle Football Holdings, headed by American John Textor, acquired a majority stake in Olympique Lyonnais in December 2022. This placed the French club within an integrated, international multi-club portfolio that recruits and develops players and moves them between different clubs – a system that was originally developed in Major League Baseball.
Other American techniques in European football management have little to do with the game itself. Football clubs are increasingly being parlayed into broader entertainment and lifestyle offerings, often through collaborations with non-footballing brands, a practice with an established history in the US. Since acquiring AC Milan in 2022, the American group RedBird Capital has used Milan’s design heritage to attract commercial partners. AC Milan’s “official style partner” is Off-White, a Milan-based luxury fashion brand that was itself founded by an American, the designer Virgil Abloh.
But entertainment is fuelled by narrative and the acquisition of little-known Welsh clubs is indicative of an ownership model that is even more peculiarly American: investing in an obscure team, then juicing it with money and celebrity, and packaging the incongruous acquisition itself as theatre. The most successful instance of this is the 2021 takeover of Wrexham AFC, a club in northeast Wales, by Hollywood actors Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds. So far, the partnership has led to three consecutive league promotions – unprecedented in English football – and a popular Disney+ series, Welcome to Wrexham, which documents the development of the club under their ownership.
Snoop Dogg and Swansea City AFC seem to be working to replicate McElhenney and Reynolds’ success. In one social-media post, Snoop Dogg, wearing a Swansea shirt, faces off against Reynolds in a Wrexham kit. Beneath them, a gnomic legend reads, “There’s Beef in Wales, But It Was Born In America.” Any emergent beef between Wrexham and Swansea will indeed have been born in America: there is no historical rivalry between the clubs, which are located about as far from one another as it is possible to get within Wales. This kind of clumsy narrative manipulation will irritate some Swansea fans. But if celebrity involvement generates the sort of financial and footballing returns that Wrexham has enjoyed, most of them will probably consider the cringe messaging a price worth paying.
Rees-Sheridan is a Monocle contributor based in New York. Want to read about what a European land war may look like? Monocle attended Operation Hedgehog, in which Nato troops joined the Estonian Defence Force to execute a series of large-scale defence drills amid rising concerns over the vulnerability of the Baltic region.
