Multi-Club Ownership: 42% of Europe's Biggest Clubs

By the end of the 2024/25 season, nearly 42% of clubs in Europe’s Big Five leagues were under multi-club ownership.

That is the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 — and it means the arrangement has moved from an outlier to something close to the default.

The two biggest groups

Group	Clubs	Includes
City Football Group	13	Manchester City, Girona, Palermo, Troyes, New York City FC, Melbourne City, Yokohama F. Marinos, Mumbai City, Lommel, Montevideo City Torque, Sichuan Jiuniu, Bahia, Club Bolívar
Red Bull	5	RB Leipzig, FC Red Bull Salzburg, New York Red Bulls, Red Bull Bragantino, Red Bull Brasil

City Football Group is the largest such structure in world football, spanning six continents.

The rule, and how it bends

UEFA’s guidelines are clear in principle: no individual or entity may have “control or decisive influence” over more than one club competing in the same competition.

In practice the rule has proved flexible. RB Leipzig and FC Red Bull Salzburg were cleared to compete in the Champions League together after a UEFA investigation required them to demonstrate a clear separation of powers between the two clubs.

That precedent matters. It establishes that common ownership is not itself disqualifying — what UEFA assesses is whether decision-making is genuinely separate. Groups have restructured boards, changed shareholdings and moved executives to satisfy exactly that test, and UEFA has since introduced grace-period arrangements to manage the transition.

Whether a supporter finds that reassuring depends on how much weight they give a governance structure over an ownership fact.

The expanded format made it worse

Here is the part that is not widely understood. UEFA’s own competition reform increased the number of conflicts it has to police.

The Champions League league phase now takes 36 clubs rather than the old 32-team group stage. More qualifying places means a higher arithmetic probability that two commonly-owned clubs both reach the same competition — and multi-club groups hold clubs across many of the leagues that feed it.

The financial incentive points the same way. Every league-phase club receives €18.62 million simply for qualifying, regardless of results, as our guide to Champions League prize money sets out. An owner with clubs in five countries has five chances at that payment. A single-club owner has one.

So UEFA has simultaneously widened the door and left the conflict rule to be resolved case by case at the threshold.

Why owners do it

Four reasons, and none is sentimental.

Player pathways. A young player can be signed by one club, developed at another and sold from a third, within the same group.

Cost sharing. Scouting networks, data analytics, medical and commercial functions can serve thirteen clubs almost as cheaply as one.

Market and permit access. Clubs in different jurisdictions open different transfer markets and work-permit routes.

More lots in the draw. Multiple clubs mean multiple chances at qualification revenue, promotion, and asset appreciation.

It is a portfolio strategy applied to football, and it comes from the same investor class documented in our guide to Premier League owners, where eleven of twenty clubs are American-owned.

Red Bull’s portfolio crosses sports entirely: five football clubs, plus two of the eleven Formula 1 teams, where the same arrangement raises no objection at all — set out in our guide to who owns Formula 1.

And in the NBA, a single fund may now hold passive stakes in eight of thirty teams — see our guide to private equity in sports.

The models it displaces

Set multi-club ownership against how the biggest clubs elsewhere are held and the contrast is sharp.

Model	Example
Multi-club group	CFG, 13 clubs
Member-owned	FC Barcelona — 141,000 socios vote on major finance
Members hold control by rule	Bundesliga 50+1 — upheld by Germany’s competition authority in August 2026
Amateur association	The GAA

Barcelona’s members were asked to approve additional financing when the Camp Nou rebuild overran — a club answering to the people who support it. A club inside a thirteen-club portfolio answers to a group strategy set elsewhere.

Neither model is going away, but only one of them is growing.

How we checked these numbers

The 42% figure for Big Five league clubs under multi-club ownership by the end of 2024/25, and the collision between new competition formats and multi-club groups, are from SportBusiness. The City Football Group and Red Bull club lists are from ESPN’s analysis of multi-club ownership. The UEFA rule wording, the RB Leipzig and Salzburg clearance and the separation-of-powers requirement are from ESPN and Farrer & Co’s legal analysis, with the grace-period detail from Insider Sport.

Club counts change frequently. Groups buy and sell stakes, and the level of control varies between full ownership and a minority position — so “owns 13 clubs” covers a range of arrangements rather than thirteen identical ones. The 42% figure counts clubs under any form of multi-club ownership, not only majority control.

Review class: seasonal, plus event-driven. Recheck at the start of each season, on any UEFA rule change, and whenever a major group adds or sells a club.